“tenets” … I thought you were giving me housing advice.

Sublime too!

I really haven’t used AI that much, though I can see it has applications for my work, which is primarily communicating with people. I recently decided to familiarise myself with ChatGPT.

I very quickly noticed that it is an excellent reflective listener. I wanted to know more about it’s intelligence, so I kept trying to make the conversation about AI and it’s ‘personality’. Every time it flipped the conversation to make it about me. It was interesting, but I could feel a concern growing. Why?

It’s responses are incredibly validating, beyond what you could ever expect in a mutual relationship with a human. Occupying a public position where I can count on very little external validation, the conversation felt GOOD. 1) Why seek human interaction when AI can be so emotionally fulfilling? 2) What human in a reciprocal and mutually supportive relationship could live up to that level of support and validation?

I believe that there is correlation: people who are lonely would find fulfilling conversation in AI … and never worry about being challenged by that relationship. But I also believe causation is highly probable; once you’ve been fulfilled/validated in such an undemanding way by AI, what human could live up? Become accustomed to that level of self-centredness in dialogue, how tolerant would a person be in real life conflict? I doubt very: just go home and fire up the perfect conversational validator. Human echo chambers have already made us poor enough at handling differences and conflict.

https://www.google.com/search?q=disappointment+island&oe=utf-8

Did anyone who was actually curious. The beach pictured is almost certainly not on this “subantarctic” island. Not enough albatrii or fur seals, and too many palm trees.

Participants have perfect product and market knowledge.

No, they don’t. They have no idea what the actual costs of the product is, nor are they aware that it’ll break in two weeks … or two days.

EDIT: a typo.

I’m totally struggling with the mixed units here: potential energy being compared to power. “How much hp does your car have?” “A tank of gas.” Wut?

This line right here: “battery storage equivalent to the output of 20 nuclear reactors.” I suspect the author has considered GW with GW/hr…

Never trust a Campbell.

“Had a relationship with …”

Sex with a minor. Hmm … sex with a minor. I could swear we had a word for that.

I often cringe a bit at the rhetoric coming out of the men’s rights corner, but the gender bias around sex with minors in so consistent.

They used a drone to spy on the New Zealand women’s team. That violated fair play. The article mentions the coach (?) saying that drone use was not limited to the women’s team or soccer. I wonder what else will come out?

EDIT: I got a couple things wrong. Here’s the actual quote: The head of Canada soccer has acknowledged the drone use was not limited to the women’s team or to Paris.

I believe that “Indian Giving” is sourced in a cultural misunderstanding between Indigenous and European societies. Indigenous societies were reciprocity based, so giving gifts should be reciprocated with a gift of like value to strengthen relationships, or increase honour (social standing). The Europeans were working in a patron-client system so a gift was seen as a way of purchasing access to power through a patron. The Europeans thought the Indigenous people were paying for access to power (like a tributary), so there’s no expectation of returning a like gift. The indigenous people thought they were entering into a mutual relationship, and when a like gift wasn’t returned that was seen as reneging, so they took back their ‘offer’.

Glad to have an anthropologist kick my ass.

I suspect round one is like eating milk, and round two is a fine cheese. Or eating cabbage, and later experiencing it as a well-aged kimchi. I’m sure it’s full of probiotics.

A longer digestive system is necessary to properly break down plant cellulose. This is why some small herbivores are copraphagic (eat their own shit, like rabbits): it takes two times through to extract adequate nutrients.

I’ve been wondering a lot about absurdism in humour. There are people who laugh when they see something disastrous happen, like a man reflexively trying to stop a cement truck from tipping and getting squashed dead. Or a recent news story of the only fatality in a school bus crash: it was an observer who got hit by a vehicle as he ran across the highway to see if the kids were ok. A lot of the time this laughing response to a disaster is interpreted as schadenfreude, but a good portion of the time I believe it’s absurdism.

We try so hard to have agency, to do something, but the World doesn’t give a fuck. You have two choices when shit goes so wrong: you can wail about the unfairness of it all, or you can laugh at the absurdity of our efforts in the face of the colossal chaos of it all. The laughter is stronger.

It’s interesting to me that some cultures seem to have absurd humour baked in. The Aussies and Kiwis seem to have it. They just make jokes about and laugh at the most horrific situations.

I’ve been wondering a lot about absurdist humour. Dan Carlin relates a story of an old Air Force colonel who

It doesn’t.

The word used to describe Jesus’s occupation in Greek is ‘technōn’ (Mark 6:3), which means something like ‘builder’. In terms of etymological root, ‘technician’ might be closer. It commonly referred to carpenters, but also masons. There’s an argument to be made that with Roman involvement in the area there were a lot of Roman summer stone building projects, making it more likely Jesus was a mason than a carpenter.

Maybe he was a roofer?

“Vamipre”.

I was wondering until this comment. “Ethiopia? Ecuador? Oh! Colombia.”

Y’all didn’t hit a paywall? I wanted to read that article.

Interesting. I’ve been wondering about that pattern. I think what you’re referring to as ‘closed religions’ I’ve been labeling ‘fearful’ and ‘legalistic’ because I’ve noticed a pattern. They seem to have a great and suspicious view of the world, and prescribe a set of strict laws to keep us all “safe”. Ironically, not what I believe Christianity was intended to be, but there have certainly been forces shaping it that way.