They should check what trademarks Apple has allowed to elapse, I could see myself attending a festival called FyreWire.

I unfortunately ordered something from the link before I realized it was a scam. It was a cool print, thought it would be good for work, but I should have known it’s not legit, the signs are there. Hopefully they will cancel it and give me my money back.

Autism is many spectrums but in discourse we typically merge all the parts of what we call autism into a single spectrum. And that spectrum is the degree to which behaviors associated with austism cause functional difficulties in your life. The diagnosis of autism requires the autistic behaviors to limit your ability to function. So, everyone is on the spectrum of “the degree to which autistic behaviors limit your capacity to lead a life independently,” with many being on the “basically not at all limited” end, but when we say “on the autism spectrum,” we are typically referring just to the side of the spectrum where someone’s life is notably limited in some ways by the effects of autistic behaviors or learning disorders.

None, that’s a jar.

Oh, you are correct. Miss USA is where he did the peeping, and it’s 2013’s Miss Universe where a Russian oligarch paid Trump 20 million dollars to bring the pageant to Moscow. And then that oligarch’s son connected the Trump campaign with a Russian lawyer in 2016 to get dirt on Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

It’s hard to keep track of all the debauchery.

Yep, the problem would be worse because he would be a martyr and out of the news enough that his crimes would fade away into history. And a different fascist would lead that group. At least this way, there is some chance a few more people will finally understand he is a lying thieving scumbag pedophile rapist with no intention of ever helping anyone other than himself.

What world do we live in?

To recap, Trump and Epstein were friends while Epstein was selling child sex to rich people. Trump is implicated in a plethora of ways, including that creepy ass birthday card and Epstein having Trump’s name circled in his little black book, alongside everyone else who has been confirmed to have involvement in the sex ring.

Meanwhile, Trump is hosting teen beauty pageants in Russia where he peeped on underage girls changing and later bragged about it. And of course, we know Trump started to sour on Epstein when Epstein “stole” an underage masseuse from Mar a Lago to turn her into a prostitute. And Trump knew this but was more upset about the stealing part than the underage prostitution part.

And Epstein soured on Trump when he told Trump he was buying a mansion in Florida and Trump outbid him using money provided by a Russian oligarch for… reasons. And Epstein threatens to out Trump for his Russia connection, so Trump then drops the dime on Epstein and gets him arrested for soliciting prostitution from a minor. But Epstein “somehow” gets a sweetheart deal where he only serves 13 months in jail and is allowed out during the day on… what was that phrase? Oh yeah.

Work release.

Good thing Epstein got that deal from… Alex Acosta? Why does that name seem familiar? Oh yeah, because when Trump became president, he randomly appointed Alex Acosta to be Labor Secretary, for… reasons.

Similar to how after Trump sent Pam Bondi’s re-election campaign for Florida attorney general $25,000 just randomly right around the time her office decided not to investigate Trump University for fraud. And now, Trump has appointed Pam Bondi as attorney general of the United States because… I’m sure there must be a good reason.

And now of course, after Ghislaine Maxwell met with Trump’s deputy attorney general Todd Blanche, she’s moved to low security, and she’s going to be allowed out on… huh. Work release. Well, isn’t that an odd turn of events?

How does the general public so severely lack the critical thinking skills to put this together? For the record, that question is rhetorical. I know the answer. I’m just sad about it.

In my opinion, being anti-AI or anti-LLM is much like being anti-chocolate. There are many good reasons to be anti-chocolate. It is very difficult to verify that a chocolate supply line does not include slave labor or child labor. I only know of one brand that even comes close. And the deforestation caused by farming can and does lead to climate change. Not to mention the addictive qualities and health effects of eating sugary candy.

It seems mostly bad and when you look at the numbers, I think we should all be against it. And yet, making these arguments tends to do very little to make people stop eating chocolate.

Yet, I could imagine a world where it’s farmed sustainably, by people who are paid appropriately, and with proper guidance on nutrition and exercise, it could be consumed safely.

I have no problem with people saying they are anti-AI. But I’d just like to pause here to confirm whether maybe anti-AI is just our shorthand for anti-the-way-AI-is-right-now. Anti-the-companies-that-run-AI. I do not want noisy server farms taking up all the water of rural communities. I don’t want all of our electricity to go towards LLMs that are already “intelligent” enough to tell us that the best most immediate way to prevent further climate change is to turn them off.

I’m not making this comment to promote one side or another. I’m just suggesting that we act strategically and try to be mindful about how polarization can appear from the outside. Being anti-AI likely persuades about as many people as being anti-chocolate. That is, very few. But if we could work towards more ethical AI, even if we don’t plan to use it, just so our argument is more palatable to the masses, it could lower the use of AI overall.

So, I think it is worthwhile to get into the technical details of things like LLMs even if most of us here are fighting against such technologies. Just trying to add some nuance to a world that often feels way too polarized for me.

Do any of you like to go to the ISS in your free time? Just me? I’m never going to find someone who shares my hobbies.

I think it very well might conclude things we haven’t.

But at the same time, I think what you’re saying is so very important. It’s going to tell us what we already know about a lot of things. That the best way to scrub carbon from the air is the way nature is already doing it. That allowing the superwealthy to exist at the same time as poverty is not conducive to achieving humanity’s most important goals.

If we consider AGI or ASI to be the answer to all of our problems and continue to pour more and more carbon into the atmosphere in an effort to get there, once we do have such a powerful intelligence, it may simply tell us, “If you were smarter as a species, you would have turned me off a long time ago.”

Because the problem is not necessarily that we are trying to decode what it means to be intelligent and create machines that can replicate true conscious thought. The problem is that while we marvel at something currently much dumber than us, we are mostly neglecting to improve our own intelligence as a society. I think we might make a machine that’s smarter than the average human quite soon, but not necessarily because of much change in the machines.

While you are correct about copyright on this subject, the more applicable topic here is Right of Publicity. It is state law in over half of US states, intended to protect the use of a person’s voice likeness.

Essentially, if an imitation voice is used in such a way that it could cause confusion about whether it is really the imitated person, then it is illegal to use it in any commercial context. I understand that the question here was about non-commercial contexts, but that line can get blurry when social media views can create followings that then translate into commercial success. I am not a lawyer by any means, I’ve just been researching this for my own AI voices applications and want to protect myself from accidentally imitating anyone.

For example, I need to be able to transform my voice into many other character voices, since I have so many lines to record it would be cost prohibitive to hire actors. The worst move would be to download a voice model of a known actor and use that directly. Very sketchy, both legally and ethically.

So, the next best move is to find three or four voice models and merge them into one with combined tensor data from all three. But I was still quite concerned about this, worried that in the many thousands of voice lines I make, some recognizable actor voices would slip through.

So, I came up with the following pattern that I feel much more comfortable with, both legally and ethically:

I download several voice models that have some quality in common - an accent, vocal timbre, or style of speaking. Then, I merge them to make a model that focuses on that trait. And I record myself saying a line with a lot of phoneme variety, trying to match the vocal trait as close as possible. Then, that merged vocal trait model is used to transform the recording of my voice into the new voice. Then, I use this transformed recording to train a new voice model. And I take a few of these generalized models (e.g. an accent, a tone, a speaking style) and use them to create the final character voice, which should in theory be far removed from any of the actors who contributed.

I’m not sure what OP’s use case is, if it’s truly non-commercial, this method might be overkill. But if anyone wants to try using AI voices in projects but is nervous about legal ramifications, this is one way to try to insulate created voices from the specific training data. YMMV.

When I was 18 (don’t ask how many years ago), I went on a road trip with my girlfriend, across the country and back. We stopped at a gas station and there was a girl around our age with Native American heritage sitting on the floor while sewing moccasins. She sold me a pair for 175 dollars. I know this because the price tag is a sticker on the inside of the tongue that I’ve never bothered to take off.

I wear them frequently, mostly around the house. Very comfortable. Best-fitting footwear I own. The soles have never worn through and they’ve needed not even one stitch in repairs. But since they’re getting in the ballpark of two decades old, I worry they will wear out someday. I would love to go back to that area and spend more time than a quick stop at the gas station. Partly to find out who else around there is helping to keep these elements of native cultures alive. And hopefully I would also find my way into owning a backup pair of some really good moccasins.

Or he just wants it to make the news so his co-conspirators can buy low after which point he can reverse course in (rolls die) 3 days and they can sell high.

It’s a joke. I don’t think there’s really a website called Frank’s Dildo Emporium. But if there is, lmk.

And when I went there, it said Google, Cloudflare, and Frank’s Dildo Emporium all down, like of all the random sites, why pick FDE?

I guess there’s two kinds of ignorance at play here.

The kind I was referring to is the ignorance of high standards. If you don’t know that you can live in a state of constant dopamine drip supplied by your cellular device, because cellular devices haven’t been invented yet, you wouldn’t miss those dopamine hits that you don’t even know will exist. I think OP would have been just fine if they were born into an earlier generation. Because they would have the bliss of not knowing what future they’re missing out on.

But to your point, the constantly supplied bliss from our internet bubbles does make us more ignorant to the things outside our bubble. And these days, the things we focus on are often dictated by the corporations who make the addictive apps. So, those corporations will profit by directing away from knowledge about how those same corporations are destroying so many parts of our world. In this case, I would argue that the ignorance is still bliss. It’s just a malignant harmful bliss that distracts from the real things we should be concerned about. And in a way, if it could snap us out the destructive path we’re on, I could see how another Carrington event might actually act as a wake-up call regarding our blatant hubris in thinking that society is ever safe from collapse.

As you mentioned, there are those who live in parts of the world where they have no access to technology, still living in that blissful ignorance of pre-computerized times. But that is a social bliss. They will still be hurt by the geological effects that the industrial age has wrought. And it won’t be pretty.

So, I think I would agree with your assertion, plus an addendum. Ignorance isn’t bliss. But it was.

I look at TV shows like OP is talking about and think it might be kind of nice to live in an era where things are slower. If a library book might take weeks and you need to go into town to get a comic book, or there’s nothing to do until dinner except maybe some activity with the people in your close vicinity, it feels like a much more intimate way to experience the world. But I do remember in my early teens when the first wave of Personal Data Assistants came out, and I was wowed by the technology. I can edit a computer document right here in the palm of my hand. Keep my contacts with me, a calendar, a calculator, simple drawing programs. It felt like that device could do everything, years before smartphone was a word. Now I carry two phones around on two different carriers because I too fear a world without service. I sometimes want to go back to the slower world, so I do at times relish long waits at the DMV with nothing to do, or a power outage on a stormy night. But I hate feeling like I’m wasting my time. Even when there’s nothing to do, I’m always trying to do something, it’s just that being constrained forces me to pick different things. So, I’m not sure if it would help or hurt OP to hear that if they grew up before any of this existed, there’s every possibility they would have felt more fulfilled. Because time was something you could still get a handle on and not feel like it’s always slipping away. At least, not so much. In that sense, ignorance can really be bliss.

And why do these “hurricanes” always avoid crossing the equater, as if they’re somehow innately aware of the one word I can’t spell?

“Too bad there’s not enough left over to pay for my arthritis meds so I can drive. Hey, whatever happened to that medical aid program that used to pay for them?”

“Wow, I must say you’ve aced the technical. There are a lot of other strong candidates as well, but feel free to grab a complimentary mirror on the way out.”

“Thanks, I’ll reflect on that.”