Again, I’m not debating the problems with surveillance for non traffic related issues. However these examples in your video are very clearly traffic cameras. It does not help the issue to carry water for aggressive car driver culture in the guise of being anti-surveillance.

Most of these cameras are traffic cameras. Personally I’m finding it a little gross that people against traffic cameras are putting on an anti-surveillance state image to take them down when in reality curbing aggressive driving is a pretty important part of pedestrianizing and democratizing urban centres. I’ve always had the vague feeling that this Flock camera debate has been hijacked by people who don’t actually care for improving communities.

I disagree with your assessment that he understands the first question. His answer is just your typical responsibility deflection (“He wanted to do it”) combined with vague praise (“He is a good touch”). It’s akin to Maurice’s generic answers about football in IT Crowd (“Did you see that ludicrous display last night”). The only thing Trump DOES understand is using the military for his problems, which is why his answers ultimately land there.

“You think the Rockstar marketing team is trying to scam people with a shitcoin?”

Absolutely. Did you forget how predatory GTA Online is? Seems absolutely on brand for them to monetize their guerrilla advertising tactics.

Well first the money needed to go to a new business branch composed of 500 workers designed to assess possible locations, then the money had to go to the operational risk management branch to assess the risk of the operation, then the money had to go to the financial branch to allocate a dedicated team of accountants ready to file the salaries and funding pipelines for the new teams and acquisitions, then the money then had to go to the managers’ and directors’ bonuses who were responsible for these new teams, then the money had to go to the scouting agencies to look for potential henchmen to hire, then the money had to go to travel agencies to allow the henchmen to fly to these locations, then the money had to pay for the henchmen salaries, and of course the money had to buy these henchmen some guns and fishnet outfits.

Just typical big business stuff.

There’s something extra sinister about advertising these days. Can’t decide if it’s the context of the greater world or something different about the ads themselves.

Goddamn I love the First Nations. I appreciate how hard they fight for this beautiful country.

All religion is fanfiction.

AI can’t make anything new, it can only copy what’s existing. Essentially serving slop every time. Best it can ever do is make a meme game that’s fun to play as a joke for an hour or two.

Long overdue and much needed across the country to stop the destruction of our ecosystem. Ecuador, Bolivia, India, and Panama did something similar a few years back by giving nature wide sweeping legal rights. It sets a a good legal framework to push back on corporate exploitation. That said, it’s still a long way away from actively being able to stop the force of our economic objectives and definitely needs a society that’s ready to uphold them in order to succeed.

This is a good article around Bolivia’s laws that offered some apt observations on how this won’t be enough (even though I fully support it): https://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/bolivias-mother-earth-laws-is-the-ecocentric-legislation-misleading/

“The Mother Earth laws sadly have become statutory devices to legalize the exploitation of natural resources in Bolivia, instead of protecting Mother Earth. By promoting extractive activities in order to achieve the Living Well objective, on one side, and the defense of Mother Earth, on the other, these laws end up being highly contradictory, making environmental protection a secondary objective, which is contingent to the government’s prevailing economic interests. In reality these laws did not translate into any improvement in environmental policies in Bolivia and they only served to bolster the deceptive image of the Bolivian government as an international pioneer in environmental protection.

It is not enough to pass laws with abstract Indigenous visions and apparent non-capitalistic concepts if they are not coupled with concrete practices, real actions and enforceability mechanisms. These laws will never be effective if there are no new public policies to change the current non-sustainable production pattern, shifting away from extractive practices that go against Mother Earth’s survival. As long as there is this fundamental dissonance between these laws’ provisions, other legal provisions and specially the Bolivian government’s practices, there is little hope for any improvements in future environmental and animal protection efforts based on there Mother Earth Laws.”

Intelligence helps you understand how certain choices affect you in the long-term, and morality tends to align with long-term self interest. It makes sense people with low intelligence tend to appeal to an authority to derive their morality.

That “company” is the key part of the scam here. Your father will be asked to invest money in it for various reasons. Whether they’ll go for the “it’s a great deal” or “help me Obi Wan” angle is dependent on the mark.

Remember - censoring words also makes something harder to search for in the future, allowing future propagandists to skew their own metrics.

Nothing wrong with the methods. If anything they are not harsh enough.

There is a severe lack of attractive coworkers these days. Terrible for morale.

It’s always funny seeing how stories like this get the gun nuts out of the woodwork to start complaining about local gun control. The problem will always be twofold. Local guns need to be controlled, and the traffic of contraband needs to be controlled. The end result we want is to avoid becoming a gun infested shithole like the US. NRA talking points can go take a hike off a cliff.

I don’t even know why they bother pretending they have laws anymore. No one on the outside buys their bullshit and their loyal zombie hordes will bend over for any reason. It’s just a silly larp now.

Intentionality is the key difference. You can eventually tell a Chinese room’s nature by giving it new variables that it hasn’t encountered before. New problems lead to algorithmic breakdown.

That said, there’s deeper conversations you can have about what consciousness truly is, of course. My personal view is that it requires a level of complexity that we are still very far away from architecturally, and a level of scalability that we may not even be able to support ecologically. This thought experiment is mainly to show you what the inner workings of a computerized process can look like, and works to provide a demystified perspective.

A concept that I think is really helpful for interpreting what an LLM does is the concept of a “Chinese room”. The idea is someone slips a piece of paper containing a message in Chinese under the door and inside that room is someone that doesn’t know Chinese following a set of rules for converting characters and numerals into a response based off their syntax. Afterwards the person in the room creates a response and slips it back out under the door. At no point does the person in the room understand the Chinese in the input or in the output, but the person standing outside of the room might believe there is a Chinese speaker inside of the room. This is the same idea with computerized outputs like LLMs. They only provide the illusion of intentionality and don’t actually have an understanding of inputs or their outputs.

And the added economic benefits of having in-house services are basically a return on investment that balance out any higher initial costs. It’s a no brainer.