ignirtoq

The author hits on exactly what’s happening with the comparison to carcinisation: crustacean evolution converges to a crab like form because that’s the optimization for the environmental stresses.

As tiramichu said in their comment, digital platforms are converging to the same form because they’re optimizing for the same metric. But the reason they’re all optimizing that metric is because their monetization is advertising.

In the golden days of digital platforms, i.e. the 2010s, everything was venture capital funded. A quality product was the first goal, and monetization would come “eventually.” All of the platforms operated this way. Advertising was discussed as one potential monetization, but others were on the table, too, like the “freemium” model that seemed to work well for Google: provide a basic tier for free that was great in its own right, and then have premium features that power users had to pay for. No one had detailed data for what worked and what didn’t, and how well each model works for a given market, because everything was so new. There were a few one-off success stories, many wild failures from the dotcom crash, but no clear paths to reliable, successful revenue streams.

Lots of products now do operate with the freemium model, but more and more platforms had moved and are still moving to advertising ultimately because of the venture capital firms that initially funded them have strong control over them and have more long term interest in money than a good product. The data is now out there that the advertising model makes so, so much more money than a freemium model ever could in basically any market. So VCs want advertising, so everything is TikTok.

We’re importing too much of our lumber from a foreign country (Canada), which is a national security risk to the lumber-consuming parts of our economy. I wish I were joking.

The open availability of cutting-edge models creates a multiplier effect, enabling startups, researchers, and developers to build upon sophisticated AI technology without massive capital expenditure. This has accelerated China’s AI capabilities at a pace that has shocked Western observers.

Didn’t a Google engineer put out a white paper about this around the time Facebook’s original LLM weights leaked? They compared the rate of development of corporate AI groups to the open source community and found there was no possible way the corporate model could keep up if there were even a small investment in the open development model. The open source community was solving in weeks open problems the big companies couldn’t solve in years. I guess China was paying attention.

Fascists are always selfish. The claims about caring about the nation or anything else are always a front. They are the marketing, not the product. The product is always self-enrichment, which is exactly the goal of the Trump regime. They are archetypal fascists.

Given she’s freaking out about a driver’s license, I’m guessing he was driving without a license and got arrested for it.

That matches the hue, but the added dimension is the saturation. Counties in brighter colors are more impacted by retaliatory tariffs, while duller colors are less impacted. The point is to illustrate that a higher proportion of impacted counties voted for Trump than if the impact were spread evenly, though the effect is not that pronounced. Statistically, people working in different industries tend to vote one direction or the other compared to average, but there are still both Harris and Trump voters in every industry.

You’re right on all counts. The last 4 years they’ve finally perfected the propaganda bubble they started after the impeachment of Nixon, so they don’t have to hide anything anymore. They don’t have use loopholes, or hidden time bombs, or anything. They can straight up say the quiet part out loud, and put on paper exactly what they want, and their media will just bald-face lie about it to the public, and there are no consequences.

Hell, they released their whole plan (Project 2025) with nothing redacted or disguised in euphemism or anything, a full year before the election, so everyone had plenty of time to see the full, real picture, and they still won quite handily. I don’t know how we recover from this.

Why would I pronounce something with rules of English that’s not an English word? When I say the word jalapeno, I pronounce the tilde on the n even though in English it’s neither written with the tilde nor written with a letter combination that would produce that sound through standard English spelling.

In relation to English, it’s the “ng” sound in the common “-ing” ending or suffix.

Wikipedia has an entire article on it (of course): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_velar_nasal

I don’t want to go through another pandemic either. COVID has ravaged my body, so I don’t know if I could handle H5N1 anywhere near as well as I could 5 years ago. But does bitching at me about how I may be not exactly correct help that in any way? There’s tons of people all over social media spouting full on wrong or outright deceitful information over and over again, and I’m trying to push the narrative towards experts’ messages as well as I can. People don’t remember information because it’s correct, they remember what they hear the most. We can’t just sit back and hope the experts are loud enough on their own to combat misinformation.

I apologize for sounding more definitive than the reality. This is probability and statistics, so it’s not a sure thing until it actually happens. What I was trying to point out was that as long as we’re complacent and allow an “acceptable level” of cases, the probabilities will keep getting worse. I have to simplify something, and I guess I went too far this time. Do you have a better way to phrase it that doesn’t get so mired in the details people’s eyes will glaze over?

A lot of stuff going on in the world for me to keep up with, so no, I hadn’t dived that deep into the virology of bird flu. Are we gatekeeping trusting experts now? Am I not allowed to repeat what they say at a high level about mutations and statistics until I pass some threshold of detailed understanding of mechanism?

The woman was exposed to poultry in a backyard flock that tested positive for H5N1, the CDC report said, adding that she remained hospitalized at the time of the report.

A man in Mercer county, Ohio, was infected while depopulating, or killing, H5N1-positive poultry at a commercial facility, according to a statement from the Ohio department of health.

So both very likely caught it from poultry, as opposed to other people. As we see more cases, though, it’s only a matter of time before it mutates and becomes capable of human-to-human transmission.

Also:

“I am very worried about H5N1 in patients that are being treated in hospitals where there are also many seasonal flu patients because this creates opportunities for reassortment, which could potentially produce a pandemic-capable H5N1,” Rasmussen said.

I hadn’t even considered reassortment with the seasonal flu. Yet another thing to keep me up at night.

It’s not disingenuous. There’s multiple definitions of “offline” being used here, and just because some people aren’t using yours doesn’t mean they’re ignorant or arguing in bad faith.

Your definition of “offline” is encompassing just the executable code. So under that definition, sure, it’s offline. But I wouldn’t call an application “offline” if it requires an internet connection for any core feature of the application. And I call saving my document a core feature of a word processor. Since I wouldn’t call it “offline” I’m not sure what I would call it, but something closer to “local” or “native” to distinguish it from a cloud based application with a browser or other frontend.

This president, more than any of his modern predecessors, has more national opponents than supporters, and given the recent trajectories, his support isn’t likely to recover any time soon.

But what kind of power do his opponents wield, are they willing to use it, and are they willing to work with each other? Many authoritarian regimes have lasted for many years, some decades, with minority support. As long as Trump keeps the billionaires on his side, I don’t see this changing for a very long time.

I think you’ve already answered your own question. Trump’s first presidency was very different from his second. And the key difference is his advisors. No one knew how to deal with Trump in his first presidency, and the overarching pattern above the chaos was his close advisors constantly working against him to protect the system.

In the break between his terms, he found people who would follow any of his directives, no matter how stupid or damaging. Or I should say, they found him. Trump is now being manipulated himself by a group of “loyalists” who stand to gain from the exact chaos Trump was thwarted from doing the first time around. These people know enough about how the systems work to be actually dangerous. And now that his advisors are philosophically aligned with him, he’s actually doing what he says he’s going to do. I would argue the 4 years of a Trump reprieve may have been the worst of all possibilities, because it gave Trump and his new in-group time to find each other and prepare.

But most people weren’t paying attention. Many saw Trump in 2024 just like they saw him in 2016; the counterweight, spoiler, outsider set to upset Washington and get real changes happening. They thought Democrats weren’t helping them enough, and so wanted to upset the apple cart and get someone different in the high seat. They weren’t paying close enough attention to see that this time was actually radically different to all elections before, and I saw many, many people dismissing the warnings as “oh everyone claims their opponents are fascists, or are going to destroy the country.”

So it’s a combination of people not paying attention, as usual, and Trump actually changing how he’s doing things this time in the worst way possible.

Ah, I think I misread your statement of “followers by nature” as “followers of nature.” I’m not really willing to ascribe personality traits like “follower” or “leader” or “independent” or “critical thinker” to humanity as a whole based on the discussion I’ve laid out here. Again, the possibility space of cognition is bounded, but unimaginatively large. What we can think may be limited to a reflection of nature, but the possible permutations that can be made of that reflection are more than we could explore in the lifetime of the universe. I wouldn’t really use this as justification for or against any particular moral framework.

I think that’s overly reductionist, but ultimately yes. The human brain is amazingly complex, and evolution isn’t directed but keeps going with whatever works well enough, so there’s going to be incredible breadth in human experience and cognition across everyone in the world and throughout history. You’ll never get two people thinking exactly the same way because of the shear size of that possibility space, despite there having been over 100 billion people to have lived in history and today.

That being said, “what works” does set constraints on what is possible with the brain, and evolution went with the brain because it solves a bunch of practical problems that enhanced the survivability of the creatures that possessed it. So there are bounds to cognition, and there are common patterns and structures that shape cognition because of the aforementioned problems they solved.

Thoughts that initially reflect reality but that can be expanded in unrealistic ways to explore the space of possibilities that an individual can effect in the world around them has clear survival benefits. Thoughts that spring from nothing and that relate in no way to anything real strike me as not useful at best and at worst disruptive to what the brain is otherwise doing. Thinking in that perspective more, given the powerful levels of pattern recognition in the brain, I wonder if creation of “100% original thoughts” would result in something like schizophrenia, where the brain’s pattern recognition systems are reinterpreting (and misinterpreting) internal signals as sensory signals of external stimuli.

The problem with that reasoning is it’s assuming a clear boundary to what a “thought” is. Just like there wasn’t a “first” human (because genetics are constantly changing), there wasn’t a “first” thought.

Ancient animals had nervous systems that could not come close to producing anything we would consider a thought, and through gradual, incremental changes we get to humanity, which is capable of thought. Where do you draw the line? Any specific moment in that evolution would be arbitrary, so we have to accept a continuum of neurological phenomena that span from “not thoughts” to “thoughts.” And again we get back to thoughts being reflections of a shared environment, so they build on a shared context, and none are original.

If you do want to draw an arbitrary line at what a thought is, then that first thought was an evolution of non-/proto-thought neurological phenomena, and itself wasn’t 100% “original” under the definition you’re using here.

From your responses to others’ comments, you’re looking for a “thought” that has absolutely zero relationship with any existing concepts or ideas. If there is overlap with anything that anyone has ever written about or expressed in any way before, then it’s not “100% original,” and so either it’s impossible or it’s useless.

I would argue it’s impossible because the very way human cognition is structured is based on prediction, pattern recognition, and error correction. The various layers of processing in the brain are built around modeling the world around us in a way to generate a prediction, and then higher layers compare the predictions with the actual sensory input to identify mismatches, and then the layers above that reconcile the mismatches and adjust the prediction layers. That’s a long winded way to say our thoughts are inspired by the world around us, and so are a reflection of the world around us. We all share our part of this world with at least one other person, so we’re all going to share commonalities in our thoughts with others.

But for the sake of argument, assume that’s all wrong, and someone out there does have a truly original, 100% no overlap with anything that has come before, thought. How could they possibly express that thought to someone else? Communication between people relies on some kind of shared context, but any shared context for this thought means it’s dependent on another idea, or “prior art,” so it couldn’t be 100% original. If you can’t share the thought with anyone, nor express it in any way to record it (because that again is communication), it dies with you. And you can’t even prove it without communicating, so how would someone with such an original thought convince you they’ve had it?

More infections mean more chances to mutate into being able to spread human-human. I would expect a greater chance from the strain that’s already spreading mammal to mammal, but human infections with any strain have a chance.

We have the technology and logistical infrastructure to stop this, but the incentive structure in this country is completely backwards for protecting health and safety. And that’s very unlikely to chance any time soon. Get your masks ready.