Game writer. Galactic backpacker. Kaiju whisperer. My other ride is a TARDIS.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • 1bluepixel@lemmy.mltoReddit@lemmy.worldr/place atm.
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    1 year ago

    My impression is that a large part of the user base knows about the controversy and likes to complain about it, but leaving is never, ever crossing their minds. The controversy is part of the flavor and texture of Reddit.

    See also: people complaining about Facebook on Facebook.









  • I loved it too. It got me out of a really long reading funk.

    Sure, it’s kind of hand-wavey in parts, and the science doesn’t always make sense, but it’s just so damn fun. I thought the character of Rocky never fell into tropes, and it was great how much personality and humor we get out of him.

    Weir is definitely hit or miss from novel to novel, but when he hits he knocks it out of the park.






  • He’s not warning of AI controlling nuclear weapons. He’s speaking of the development of nuclear weapons as a cautionary tale that applies to the current development of AI: that, like the scientists who built the bomb, current AI researchers might one day wake up terrified of what they have created.

    Whether current so-called AI is intelligent (I agree with you it isn’t by most definitions of the world) doesn’t preclude the possibility that the technology might cause irreparable harm. I mean, looking at how Facebook algorithms have zeroed in on outrage as a driving factor of engagement, it’s easy to argue that the algorithmic approach to content delivery has already caused serious societal damage.






  • I mean, it’s a bold idea, but I don’t find it so shocking.

    It’s well possible that what we call a “fundamental” constant is a variable that depends on other deeper variables. For instance, an earth-bound observer might consider acceleration in freefall to be a constant, but knowledge of universal gravitation tells us it’s a variable that depends on the masses of the objects involved and distance between them.

    It makes sense that other ostensible “fundamental constants” are also dependent on the structure of the universe at any given point in space and time, but the limited window of our observations makes them appear as constants.