The world as we know it is in Extreme Peril is an equivalent headline. It won’t mean just a gradual sea level rise, global warming, extreme weather, and the basis of our present civilization will be disrupted, and get deeper into negative trends. This will affect every place, even the far away from coasts.
Readit Newsgmuslera commented on Antarctica Is in Extreme Peril grist.org/climate/antarct... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar
gmuslera commented on Ballot Hand Counts Lead to Inaccuracy votingrightslab.org/2024/... · Posted by u/bediger4000
Are we talking about intentional or unintentional inaccuracies?
Unintentional ones should be distributed more or less evenly, if everyone have 10 less votes it should not change the end result.
But intentional ones, with the objective of trying to rig the result in one particular direction, and deep enough into whoever is doing the count/election. But in the end, it goes to how big the conspiracy should be? You may need just a few to rig all the voting machines (do you have the source code? of what was actually running in production everywhere?), but with human counters to get to the right scale you may need to involve really a lot of people.
It had never stopped accelerating. This shithole planet have plenty of positive feedback loops, so you warm up, then you have less reflective ice, less albedo and more heat absorption, permafrost thaws and that is more greenhouse gases emissions, increase forest fires so more greenhouse emissions and so on. And the we keep getting surprised at new positive feedback loops.
And, over that, we kept increasing each year how much greenhouse gases we emit. And not only we emit more, but also the main greenhouse gas (CO2) stays in the atmosphere for 100-200 years. So it is practically been accumulating since the industrial revolution, in increasing amounts each year.
What happened is that part of that latent warming was masked by pollution, and cleaning that pollution (that had its own problems) took out that mask.
What could have been if instead of crypto trillions were invested in something actually useful? What about the housing bubble of which we learned nothing as we are falling into it again?
There is a lot of stinky garbage in AI, but at least you can rescue some value from it, in fact it could be most of the activity out there, but you only notice what stinks.
gmuslera commented on Robots.txt is a suicide note (2011) wiki.archiveteam.org/inde... · Posted by u/rafram
robots.txt takes as assumptions that are well-meant, and respectful to the site intentions, major players, that try to index/mirror sites while avoiding overwhelming it and accessing only what is supposed to be freely accessed. Using a visible user-agent, having a clearly defined IP block for doing those scans, and a method of scanning goes in the same direction of cooperating with the site owner to both get visibility while not affecting (a lot) functionality.
But that doesn't mean that there aren't bad players, that ignore the robots.txt, give random user agent strings, or connects from IPs from all the world to avoid being blocked.
LLMs has changed a bit the landscape, mostly because far more players want to get everything or have automated tools to search your information on specific requests. But that doesn't rule out that still exist well-behaved players.
gmuslera commented on The Drone and AI Delusion secretaryrofdefenserock.s... · Posted by u/eagleislandsong
Drones and autonomous systems probably won't be the end of mankind as Terminator and Black Mirror's Metalhead pictured, but civilians will end being their targets, by mistake or design, and it won't be any accountability for them.
In the long run I fear it does not matter.
The fossil fuel "won" by prioritizing profits over the environment. IMO, the world is heading straight to +3C and no way to stop it.
We could probably prevent 3.5C, but by then the world will probably be in a massive "war" footing due the 1 billion+ people migration north. Assuming civilization did not collapse.
We are about to not be the main drivers of change. I won’t be so optimistic about it stopping at 3, 3.5 °C or whatever near enough. What may change is how fast we will get there, but we already are reaching the limit set for the end of the century 10 years ago.
"Figure 1: Fantasy sci-fi imagery of terraforming. Chatgpt 4.0’s hallucination of early Earth with seeded biomaterial, jump starting Darwinian evolution."
Not a good sign in a scientific paper.
A more interesting result is that intelligence on Earth has evolved at least three times - mammals, corvids [1], and octopuses.[2] Those all evolved intelligence after branching off in evolutionary history. And they all have different "hardware" for intelligence.
That's significant. All the mammals have roughly the same brain architecture, with the major components present but in different sizes. Corvids have a different architecture, which is a relatively recent and surprising result.[1] Octopuses are even more different. Yet all three have good vision and manipulation systems, and can learn.
So we now really know that there's more than one way to do it. Once complex life emerges, intelligence probably follows. In the Drake equation, that's fᵢ, the fraction of life bearing planets on which intelligent life emerges. Now that we've seen intelligence evolve three times on our planet, we can be reasonably confident that fᵢ is reasonably large, not close to 0.
Our planet only seems to have one evolutionary form of life. Not sure what that tells us. Is it an unlikely event? Or did our kind of life chemistry eat or crowd out the competition? This paper addresses the issue but is not close to resolving it. Unlike the intelligence issue, which is now settled.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cne.25392
[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mind-of-an-oc...
One _surviving_ evolutionary form of life. And it barely survived through mass extinctions that ended the majority of the existing life during those events. For all we know the great oxigenation event could had ended any of the alternative life by then.
In any case, the existence of life, or the emergence of intelligence should not be considered a necessity. Intelligence was the way of surviving and keeping on the race for the particular conditions we had a few millions of years ago. And about life, it could be more rare than what we think, just that we are doing the question where it managed to succeed.
"Mars will be different" only means that in the middle term it will kill you in other ways.
gmuslera commented on How to increase your surface area for luck usefulfictions.substack.c... · Posted by u/jger15
It may very opinionated towards exactly what/where/etc you are looking for. Increasing the number of interactions may also increase the odds of bad outcomes. The rest of the owl should be put in the picture too.