Signtist

Damn, that sucks. But yeah, legal battles are so exhausting that even when you win you just feel tired.

It’s still very important for genetic testing. If someone has a genetic mutation, it can be difficult to know whether that mutation is going to cause its associated protein to stop working or not. Even if we know all of the “normal” proteins in the body, there are countless variants based on people’s specific genetic differences that may or may not have major effects on how those proteins fold, which in turn can have major effects on those individuals’ health.

To be clear, I wasn’t necessarily disagreeing about AI’s utility, just about how protein fold AI isn’t the same as LLM AI; we’ve used computer models for predictions of protein structure and genetic mutation severity for a while, though they have always been taken with a grain of salt that I fear is no longer being done - a prediction is still a prediction, after all. Doctors were already incorrectly confusing computer model predictions of genetic mutation severity for positive test results back when I was working as a genetic counselor in the 2010’s - my concern is that the widespread trust of “AI” is only going to exacerbate that.

I’m a bit confused, though. The AI doing it was AlphaFold, which is shutting down. Shouldn’t your statement be AI was already doing it? Gemini is an LLM - not the same type of thing as AlphaFold, despite the fact that they’re both called “AI,” which was the cause of my original argument. The AI that was doing the protein fold prediction is being replaced with an “AI” that can’t. It looks like there’s still RoseTTAFold, but losing the frontrunner is still not great when it’s shutting down to focus more on LLM’s.

Funny, one of the first arguments I had about AI was with someone who insisted it would be incredibly helpful at predicting protein folds.

The wealthy have a huge incentive to want unskilled teachers. They’d probably rather go back to the days when only the wealthy were educated at all, but creating a bigger gap between the quality of education of the rich and the poor is a passable short term goal for now.

Remember, the point of a company isn’t to make a product, it’s to make a profit. It’s more profitable to have a dumb population that unquestioningly buys whatever you advertise to them, and if you sell a few crappy AI teaching robots along the way, that’s just a cherry on top.

Note that this happened in 2019 and is only finally seeing justice now. My own legal battle cost around $25,000 per year. That’s not something most people would be able to afford for 7 years straight.

People naturally want to make things as easy as they can for themselves; if you introduce a tool that can make things better when used in moderation, but worse if overused, it will inevitably be overused so long as that’s the easier thing to do. Convenience is one of the biggest factors in making the global population dumber and more complacent, and it’s often introduced as a useful tool in moderation.

Unless they’re going to see real repercussions for doing so, get definitely can do whatever they want. Rules and laws only matter if people care enough to follow them and enforce them. All they have to do is pretend the person didn’t comply, and now they’ve got all the authority in the world to anything they want, regardless of what it says in the law books. Just look at what ICE is doing to US citizens; border patrol knows they can do all of that, too.

You can’t have a progressive space on a non-progressive platform. At best it gets removed, at worst it gets to stick around specifically so that it can be censored like this, tricking the people who rely on that community for their info into thinking they’re fully informed when they’re really only getting what information the platform deems benign enough to allow them to see.

Nintendo had long since realized that their customers are kids who see Pokemon and Mario and scream at their parents until they buy it for them. They can charge whatever they want and those kids will still bug their parents until they get it.

Everyone else that buys their products is just a bonus if they still keep buying even after the prices get jacked up. Nintendo made their decision about who to prioritize, and the only boycott that would work to turn things around would have to be orchestrated by all the parents of all the 6 year olds in the world, and I doubt that’ll happen.

This is it. For-profit companies exist to make a profit, not a product. Any time you ask “why did they do this thing that makes the product worse?” remember that the product doesn’t matter to them, only the money it makes. If a change makes more money, they’ll do it.

Some might think a worse product means worse sales and less profit, but they’d be wrong. Enough people buy products regardless of their quality that it’s often more profitable to simply make the product as cheap as possible while maintaining just barely enough of the most basic functionality to meet the definition of what they’re trying to sell.

Makes sense. It’s not uncommon for people who aren’t paying attention to accidentally slam on the gas instead of the brake when they see they’re about to crash. Almost certainly what happened here.

From what I understand, the water would spray out if it could, but there’s not enough room, so the force instead pushes the ball up to give more room, but the engineer tailored the forces just right so that once the ball is lifted, the force that would have made the water spray out is already used up, so it doesn’t spray. There’s only enough force to spray or lift, not both.

Ah, gotcha. Still, looks like a fun read - I’ll check it out. Thanks for taking the time to explain it!

So it’s just theoretical mathematics based on a given amount of assumed possible choices? Is there even a way to truly apply it to a real-world scenario as complicated as large-group human behavior?

I honestly know nothing about game theory, so I don’t doubt that there are aspects that account for irrational behavior like meaningless self sabotage, but I don’t recall the prisoner’s dilemma having allowing one of the prisoners to specifically choose to be imprisoned for the maximum sentence in exchange for the other prisoner to also be imprisoned that same amount. Is there a version that has that option, or something similar? Every version I’ve seen assumes they would never do something so completely against their own self-interest.

One of the most common reasons for people not coming together I’ve seen is the classic “Sure, this makes it harder for everyone, but we can weather it so long as we know it’s harder for those damn (insert innocent group here)!” which of course only makes things unnecessarily harder for both groups, and only benefits their shared enemies. If that’s not something that game theory would cover, then I don’t know how well it would be able to be applied to our inability to organize effective resistance to an oppressive government.

If it is something that’s covered, I’d love an example! I could use a bit of hope that we’ll rise up eventually.

Absolutely! It won’t be the police, it’ll be Antifa hackers taking over the drones!

Lawmakers must act? Nah - the only way to act now to prevent armed police drones is for us to form a revolution. There are significantly too few lawmakers currently in power who would even think to vote against something like this, and far too little time before this kind of thing is available to vote in new lawmakers who might actually fight it.

I’ve never applied for a job on linkedin, but when I’m looking for work I’ll get all my experience and education info in there for recruiters to see turn the “Open to contact” banner on. I usually get a bunch of people contacting me, and secure a position from there. My job does work with a very specific program, though, so I might just get a lot of people contacting me because it’s easy to search for that one keyword.

Tech is a tool. Those who want power over you will use it against you, and you can in turn use it to defend against them. Ultimately it’s whoever puts the most effort in who gets the upper hand, and the wealthy can always motivate people with money to get a lot of effort in on their side, so, like with most things in life, it’s an uphill battle to fight against them.