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Mnemnosyne

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Mnemnosyne ,

If they raise the prices in those countries they would make less money because volume of subscribers would go down enough for total income to decrease.

If they lowered the price in the US, they would make less money because the subscribers they would gain would not be enough to offset the reduced income from each.

That’s it, it has nothing to do with operating costs or fairness, it’s just a question of what price point they believe will make them the most money in a given market.

Mnemnosyne ,

Odd to me is Her Majesty’s instead of His, considering Charles is now King.

Do these places just retain the gender of the ruling monarch at the time of their construction?

Mnemnosyne ,

They’ve gotten smart enough to use reverse psychology on this kind of thing.

This very much feels like “Only please, Brer Fox, please don’t throw me into the briar patch.”

Mnemnosyne ,

Yup, exactly. The only regulation I’d be in favor of for AI is this: if it was trained on data which can be accessed by or was posted by the public, it must be freely available, such that if anything in the training data was posted online in a way anyone can see, then then I have free access to tge AI too.

Basically any other regulation, even if the companies whine publicly, is actually one that benefits them by raising the barrier of entry and making it more expensive for small actors to create AI tools.

Mnemnosyne ,

Smart in one way but it did cause a lot of storytelling problems because they constantly had to come up with half baked excuses for why it wasn’t working this time when just using the transporter would solve a major problem without fuss.

Mnemnosyne ,

No shit! That’s our fucking election system. After the primaries, we wind up withtwo candidates that most people don’t like, and we vote against the one we think is worse. It’s been this way for a very long time. Case in point:

youtu.be/riDypP1KfOU?si=xwlInd1CS9p7rYcT

Acting like this is shocking news is disingenuous bullshit.

Who would win: every human in the world vs. every animal in the world?

I’m thinking the animals would easily defeat us, since trying to get all 8 billion+ humans to agree on a plan of attack would be a near-impossible task. By the time we’d be done trying to coordinate a plan, I figure the lions and cheetahs would have already devoured us, not to mention the larger animals like the elephants....

Mnemnosyne ,

If this means that every animal immediately goes berserk and tries to kill all humans, and ‘animal’ includes bugs, then the animals probably win.

Those people in relatively secure places without enough animals when it starts could survive, but there’s probably be 50% or higher casualties among the general human population in less than a day.

Mnemnosyne ,

I don’t think ‘going’ anywhere would be an option. If you’re in basically, most of the civilized world, and not in a very secure structure, you’re immediately fucked. I said more than 50% but I guessed that as a very conservative estimate. We don’t normally realize just how many living things are around us, mostly bugs, but also small rodents and the like. If every one of those within a significant radius of every human suddenly went berserk and wanted the humans dead, most people are not in areas where the number of attackers would permit much survival.

Those who currently live in certain desert environments, in certain cold environments, and so forth, would probably survive the first day, and then might have a hope of making it longer. But most environments in which there isn’t enough animal/bug life around to immediately kill you present serious other problems such as food supply. If you live at McMurdo Sound Antarctica, you’re probably not going to immediately be killed. But you will soon have issues feeding yourself and keeping warm.

People in Iceland or northern Norway and other similar places might have the best chances. Probably not quite enough things around to kill everyone immediately, but the environment is one in which they might be able to become self-sufficient, but in the long term I have my doubts even for them. If the bugs and animals and such are so focused on killing humans that they no longer perform their normal functions, then you’re looking at immediate and total ecological collapse. If they’re not, then the population of bugs and animals will increase in all areas other than the most extreme environments, and sooner or later what few humans survived in those extreme environments are going to have to attempt to emerge.

If humans had prep time, maybe. Assuming we could get over our normal difficulties cooperating and actually prepare for the event. There’d at least be a lot of survivors. But if it came as a surprise, suddenly someone flips a switch and the entire animal kingdom is trying to make every single one of us dead? We’re pretty much fucked.

Mnemnosyne ,

They believe the law is a magic language, where if you learn the secret words and perform the secret rituals, you get to use shortcuts to bypass the normal rules. They see themselves as a secret society of law wizards, essentially. In some ways media has encouraged this by making contracts and such to be these arcane things with tricksy loopholes if you just figure out how to sneak through, but their belief goes far beyond what you might see in media.

They also hold lots of contradictory ‘logic’ and opinion. Like that the government/corporations/someone is trying to screw you, and yet for some inexplicable reason they will instantly capitulate and be powerless if you speak the right words. It really, really has parallels to the concept of binding demons and such with magical contracts with the right magical words. Or the fact that they believe these things to be secret-ish and relatively unknown except by their peers, but at the same time become outraged when every minor functionary of any government or company doesn’t immediately recognize their secret words and capitulate.

It’s as though the same sort of people who once believed in witchcraft and demons and all have adapted to the modern world where all that stuff is laughably false, but we all believe in ‘the law’ and ‘science’ and such, and therefore they come up with superstitions dressed in the clothes of law, but it’s still the same old stuff. It’s very similar to the bronze age man who sacrifices a goat or his daughter or whatever in order to get better crop yields.

Mnemnosyne ,

Also he needs to be up there to hit them with his sword.

Mnemnosyne ,

I did years ago when Google started censoring my search results even with safe search off.

Unfortunately Bing is doing it too now and I can’t find a search engine that isn’t, though I would love to learn about one that isn’t.

Mnemnosyne ,

That’s exactly what the agitators and such want - not to get people to vote for Trump which they know isn’t gonna happen, they just want to convince enough people not to vote against him so he wins.

Mnemnosyne ,

Well don’t just drop that and leave it hanging, what did you find out about getting a 900 number to use as your personal phone line?

Mnemnosyne ,

I think abolishing intellectual property would hurt capitalism more than it would benefit it. Already it is strongly in favor of the rich and the big corporations. Getting rid of those limitations even without abolishing capitalism first, would, I think, be more to everyone’s benefit than detriment.

Mnemnosyne ,

Yes, as long as people keep focusing on fighting the technology instead of fighting capitalism, this is true.

So we can fight the technology and definitely lose, only to see our efforts subverted to further entrench capitalism and subjugate us harder (hint: regulation on this kind of thing disproportionately affects individuals while corporations carve out exceptions for themselves because ‘it helps the economy’)…

Or we can embrace the technology and try to use it to fight capitalism, at which point there’s at least a chance we might win, since the technology really does have the potential to overcome capitalism if and only if we can spread it far enough and fast enough that it can’t be controlled or contained to serve only the rich and powerful.

Mnemnosyne ,

I bet some people flashed that one and such too, but I could find no indication that it was shut down because of that.

It feels like society has backslid tremendously on some freedoms in the past 15 years, particularly where it comes to prudishness.

These days we even have otherwise progressive people jumping on the prude bandwagon along with hyper religious controlling anti feminists and it just makes for such strange bedfellows.

Mnemnosyne ,

I mean, that’s a fair criticism in a way. If Bill lets you taste the chicken at that point, it’s reasonable to comment on what he let you taste. If he didn’t think it was ready enough to get your opinion on, he shouldn’t have let you taste it at all.

Mnemnosyne ,

I feel like it should be simpler: did the culture the body came from have good enough records in other ways that we would be unlikely to learn anything by digging up the body that we couldn’t learn by studying other records? Then leave it alone.

If they failed to keep good enough records, and knowledge would be gained by the study, then study away.

Mnemnosyne ,

If it is solved it will definitely be through technology of some sort. While I agree it will not be one brilliant scientist, technology will be the solution.

That technology may come in the form of a way to produce more energy without fucking up the climate, and the engineering and logistical capacity to roll out the change at a breakneck pace.

It may come in the form of simply developing a way to control the global climate directly.

It might come in the form of some technology to control the behavior of humans so that we can actually respond appropriately.

Or it might come in the form of the singularity, when self improving machines grow so far beyond us so fast that they can just do what is needed whether we like it or not.

But one way or another I guarantee that if it’s solved, it’ll largely be a technological solution, because getting humanity to just…stop using energy at our current rate…is just not going to happen.

Mnemnosyne ,

Science is blue because in every 4x game I’ve ever played the science icons are some form of blue.

Mnemnosyne ,

Lucky? From some of the other comments it sounds like you may be referencing something, but just taking the comment at face value, there is no way that is not the most horrific fate I can possibly imagine.

Assuming you’re not conscious the entire time and only ‘wake up’ when you enter a solar system to study, it’s still horrific. You wake up, completely alone. You have no body and cannot move, and your attention is directed toward gathering data on some distant points of light. When you understand what’s going on, sure, there’s a bit of a sense of wonder…but it quickly becomes tedium, maddening, isolated tedium, as you slowly drift through a star system, gathering data on each planet and its star, over the course of fifty years or so. There’s certainly bits of interesting stuff, but we are still talking insane levels of isolation and boredom. Assuming you’re somehow prevented from going insane by the software in order to keep you functional, you can’t even escape into madness.

…and then we imagine what happens if you aren’t shown the mercy of being conscious only during the few decades the probe is drifting through a solar system. What if you’re conscious the. entire. time. Once you’re in deep interstellar space, you’re alone. Able to think, perceive, experience, but in an unchanging, static existence. A year passes, and everything is so close to exactly the same that only with the precision of the measurements your tools can take can you determine there’s been any change. Ten years pass, then a hundred, a thousand. You drift, slowly, through interstellar space toward a destination impossibly far away, all while you wait, conscious, unable to die, unable to escape into madness, just…eternal…waiting. Until thankfully you finally enter a target solar system, get a few blessed decades of what, to your new perspective, seems like frantic activity. Something, finally, to do, to see, that actually changes. And then…you drift back out into interstellar space after a few gravity-assisted slingshots around this star system’s worlds, only to proceed on to your next destination, another several thousand year journey away.

This is, by far, the most horrific imaginable torture.

Mnemnosyne ,

You probably had the same damn book I did, with an illustration of him eating an orange and seeing the wings of a butterfly coming up over it and supposedly realizing they look just like the sails of a ship and so, gasp, the world must be round like this orange!

Mnemnosyne ,

Some of them, sure, but there are a lot of stories of how many lies recruiters will tell you to get you to sign on, so a pretty significant number are genuinely bad people.

Mnemnosyne ,

We humans cannot eliminate all life on this planet. Even if we set that as an actual goal, we would fail. We can wipe out a lot, cause vast harm to existing ecosystems, but life will go on long after we make ourselves extinct.

Mnemnosyne ,

So one thing I don’t fully understand is this: the secret service is required by law to protect the former president, but…is there anything that actually requires the state of New York to accommodate the secret service in doing so?

In theory, couldn’t the state of New York just actually throw Trump in prison, no special privileges, and also no special accommodations for the secret service?

Mnemnosyne ,

Yeah, since we’ve designed our world for humans, the best general purpose robots will have a human shape in order to function effectively in the same areas.

Mnemnosyne ,

I’m reasonably sure that that route neither begins nor ends in Holland. I think Holland is the western area of the Netherlands, not the northernmost bit.

Mnemnosyne ,

I don’t usually recommend movies in situations where the solution space isn’t already limited significantly by the context, but 2001 is the one I thought of first upon reading the title, so I suppose there’s at least two of us!

Mnemnosyne ,

They could turn that into a running theme, like how every Elder Scrolls protagonist is a prisoner to start with…

But Divinity already has a long history and so does Baldur’s Gate so…ehh, doesn’t fit in quite as well. Maybe with a new IP they make it a tradition for.

Mnemnosyne ,

There are very few humans who would not be depressed if they were the last person on earth. Even the most introverted among us are still, well, human.

Why Americans are bummed out about the economy (www.cnn.com)

US consumers remain unimpressed with this progress, however, because they remember what they were paying for things pre-pandemic. Used car prices are 34% higher, food prices are 26% higher and rent prices are 22% higher than in January 2020, according to our calculations using PCE data....

Mnemnosyne ,

This long explanation supporting capitalism and ‘the market’ fails to take something crucial into account that all these market promoters forget:

Labor cannot have an undistorted market so long as the option to not sell your labor isn’t a valid one.

For any market to be relatively undistorted, a seller must be free to choose not to sell at all if none of the offers are equal or greater than her assessment of the value of her product.

However, as long as labor is needed in order to procure food, shelter, and adequate living conditions, this cannot be the case - people are coerced into selling their labor at values lower than their assessment of its value because to not do so means being denied adequate living conditions.

If people were free to choose not to sell their labor without this coercion, then those seeking to purchase people’s labor would find they likely cannot find anywhere near as many people willing to sell at the price they are offering.

Basically, you are making excuses for the fact that due to this market distortion coercing people to sell their labor, the divide between productivity and wages has grown. It is not necessary to lock wages to productivity - if people have the option, and they see massive profits being pocketed off their work with increasingly minimal compensation, they would choose not to sell…except there comes the coercion to ensure they don’t do that.

I wonder if the same excuses would be made if we turned it around and told companies they must sell their products, no matter how little the customers are offering…

Mnemnosyne ,

Yeah, agree…this woman’s colossal fucking hubris is in perfectly appropriate company with the likes of Elon Musk. If she hadn’t been so colossally egotistical, and retired sometimes around 2013 or so, the supreme court would be a lot less fucked today.

Mnemnosyne ,

More like 1997, or even 1983, when the UK handed them back to China, or the earlier date, when they decided to prevent them from having British citizenship.

If everyone in Hong Kong had the right to emigrate to any British territory, China would have to be a lot lighter touched there, or there might be a mass exodus.

Mnemnosyne ,

It’s only be a spine if he gets out there and basically campaigns for Biden. If he asks any remaining same conservatives to abandon the Republican party and join the Democrats, until the Republicans wither and die and the Democrats split into a sane pair of parties that can disagree but compromise like it used to be.

But he won’t do that. None of them have so far.

Mnemnosyne ,

One problem is people see those whose work may no longer be needed or as profitable, and…they rush to defend it, even if those same people claim to be opposed to capitalism.

They need to go ‘yes, this will replace many artists and writers…and that’s a good thing because it gives everyone access to being able to create bespoke art for themselves.’ but at the same time realize that while this is a good thing, it also means the need for societal shift to support people outside of capitalism is needed.

Mnemnosyne ,

Sort of. Except all the shelves have weird lips on them to keep you from grabbing the product easily, you kinda have to wrangle each item. Also it’s layout and design is archaic and super hard to navigate. And on every aisle there’s these little 3 inch steps that you have to go up and down and constantly trip on, or your cart gets stuck on them and you have to lift it up or drop it down. And then if you do manage to buy things, their support is terrible; at the other store if you need help cooking they have a 24 hour recipe hotline to help you out, but this one promises the same, but you actually wind up on hold for hours half the times you call.

So they got tons of free samples, but all their products are kinda a nightmare.

Mnemnosyne ,

This is what I said to someone who asked a very similar question about the same thing a while back:

‘Females’ is, effectively, a ‘technical term’ you might say, that isn’t used in normal conversation. It’s used specifically in situations where distance from the subject being discussed is intentional. It is the sort of language used in police reports, medical reports and the like…when it’s even being applied to humans at all. Its use is perhaps more common referring to animals; it’s the sort of terminology you’d expect to hear in a nature documentary.

The people trying to push its use are intending to make the subjects - women - sound ‘other’ and separate and alien by referring to them as ‘females’. Not everyone who is picking up this terminology intends it that way, but the connotations are unavoidable because of how language works in common use, and therefore if you don’t intend it that way, you badly need to be made aware of it so you can stop.

Mnemnosyne ,

There’s probably a decent number of people that buy a game and don’t install it immediately. I often do this when something is on sale. By the time they realize they didn’t get what they were after, it may be outside the refund window.

Mnemnosyne , (edited )

Odd comparison, and internally inconsistent. They criticize KOTOR for having only one decision that affects the overall story, but fail to consider that SWG had zero decisions that affect the overall story.

It is true that as a multiplayer game there are theoretically more opportunities for roleplay in SWG, and if they’d focused on that it would make more sense and be more consistent.

Mnemnosyne ,

I think the best way to put it is that protests can be effective only when they present a credible threat of some sort against the people who have the power to make changes to whatever the protest is about. That threat may be direct violence, it may be electoral change, or it may be something else, but a credible threat of some sort is absolutely required.

Protesting against Israel, therefore, is of little use in most situations. The protesters pose no credible threat to Israel, so their decisions aren’t going to change. And the protesters generally are not representing much of a credible threat against their own governments either, so their own governments are also not moved to change.

Mnemnosyne ,

Yeah, that’s an excellent example. Those protests posed a credible threat to that specific business - indeed, to some degree they even already carried out some of the threat, just to show it was credible - which made changes to what they had the power to affect - their own actions.

How far can cities go to clear homeless camps? The U.S. Supreme Court will decide (wamu.org)

In April, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a major case that could reshape how cities manage homelessness. The legal issue is whether they can fine or arrest people for sleeping outside if there’s no shelter available. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has deemed this cruel and unusual punishment, and this case is a...

Mnemnosyne ,

Their purpose is to serve as a visible (but not too visible) threat to force people to sell their lives in exchange for the money needed to avoid that fate.

Mnemnosyne ,

Schlock Mercenary. Amazing webcomic, by one of only like 2 webcomic authors that I’m familiar with that have the simple capability of putting out a comic on time (although this no longer applies as the story is finished) and is a fantastic story from beginning to end.

Yet, none of the friends I’ve ever recommended it to have been willing to read it

Are there any genuine benefits to AI?

I can see some minor benefits - I use it for the odd bit of mundane writing and some of the image creation stuff is interesting, and I knew that a lot of people use it for coding etc - but mostly it seems to be about making more cash for corporations and stuffing the internet with bots and fake content. Am I missing something...

Mnemnosyne ,

Don’t discount the generative AI either!

Language generating AI like LLMs: Though we’re in early stages yet and they don’t really work for communication, these are going to be the foundation on which AI learns to talk and communicate information to people. Right now they just spit out correct-sounding responses, but eventually the trick to using that language generation to actually communicate will be resolved.

Image/video/music generating AI: How difficult it is right now, for the average person to illustrate an idea or visual concept they have! But already these image generating AI are making such illustration available to the common person. As they advance further and adjusting their output based on natural conversational language becomes more effective, this will only get better. A picture paints a thousand words…and now the inverse will also be true, as anyone will be able to create a picture with sufficient description. And the same applies to video and music.

That said I love your managing production point. It’s something I e been thinking too - centrally planned economies have always had serious issues, but if with predictive AI we can overcome the problems by accurately predicting future need, the problems with them may be solvable, and we can then take advantage of the inherent efficiency in such a planned system.

Mnemnosyne ,

Private ownership of things made by people is perfectly reasonable; the person who made the thing should own it and be able to sell or transfer it as desired. So a rock you found isn’t made by people, so yeah, but a painting, or a chair, etc, was.

It’s land that wasn’t made by people where private ownership gets really ridiculous.

Mnemnosyne ,

Only in frictionless spherical cow in a vacuum territory - that is to say in theory in unachievable ideal conditions. In the real world the market is wildly distorted and people are forced by a variety of external pressures to participate even if they don’t believe they are being offered what they are worth.

Mnemnosyne ,

It is true that once production of an item becomes a greater task than simply the work of one person, the ownership of it can be considered more complex, but my point was that at least something created by people makes sense to be owned by its creator.

Mnemnosyne ,

This point neither supports nor erodes the logic of ownership of territory or land; it merely points out that it has a very long history. Many things have a long history, some of which have consistent reason and logic behind them, and some which do not.

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