“No, maybe that wasn’t it. Words precede and surpass me, they tempt and alter me, and if I am not careful it will be too late: things will be said without my having said them. Or, at the very least, that wasn’t the only thing. My entanglement comes from how a carpet is made of so many threads that I can’t resign myself to following just one; my ensnarement comes from how one story is made of many stories. And I can’t even tell them all— a more truthful word could from echo to echo cause my highest glaciers to crumble down the precipice.” - Clarice Lispector
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4·1 month agoAn umbrella built to be a defensive baton, no I am not kidding.
If you aren’t in an enclosed narrow space and having an umbrella/parasol this is by far your best option besides pepper spray type options.
Something like this (not recommending this site specifically just using as an example).
Because it is a massive financial scam built on a lame cult.
3·2 months agoI knew it was aliens!
What relevant “AIs” can you point to that are not LLMs or the equivalent design approach in mediums other than text?
No one cares what your vibe opinions about AI are especially if you will not give even a shred of evidence to back up your assertations.
Incredible claims require incredible evidence… do you really not know that basic aspect about rational discussion?
I expect people not to spread disinformation about technology that sells a scifi fantasy as an inevitability just around the corner without providing any proof that it will happen.
You are bullshitting, stop bullshitting.
You are pointing at a remote potential you consider inevitable and saying condescendingly “Well of course this will happen!?”.
The burden of proof is on you.
I don’t know if it exists.
You are speculating about something with no evidence.
That is really fun!
With that many people what is the point?
I am not a professional programmer but it seems to me that the idea that AI is needed to increase the firehose of code being written to “improve” programming and how well computers work is as absurd as the idea that the point of a university degree in a language is to increase the raw amount of words being written in that language.
The point is to convey ideas with language not produce more language, same thing with code, the point is to solve problems not produce ever larger and larger amounts of code with automation.
Something I know without a doubt is that for many people who love language, they desire a great deal less of the fake, hurtful, useless words that drown out the good ones. People who love words and work in crafting and shaping them tend to think it is inherently good to shape useful words not just mindlessly produce combinations of words in as great a volume possible.
To put it in a more abstracted fashion, relying on AI to produce more and more code faster and faster feels like a Jazz musician saying they rely on AI to fill in all the empty spaces they leave between notes with complementary embelleshing notes. The point of a jazz musician is clearly not to produce the most notes possible, it is to convey meaning with notes.
To bring it back to a concrete example, how many times has Google built a new chat program/app from scratch and then abandoned it? Sure there is lots of code there of very high quality, an intimidating amount to be sure, but isn’t the primary job of the programmer here to say “hey, why don’t we stop writing new code from the ground up for every chat app a different part of the company wants and standardize it to a much smaller codebase with a set of customizations different parts of the company can apply to the same core chat program”?
It seems to me a good programmer would be good at framing problems from a perspective that requires as simple implementation in code as possible within reason, not be best at producing the program with the most lines of code fastest that still solves the problem.
The most important part is to take more time than you think to speak, everyone always thinks they need to rush as if they are an inconvenience with their words, trust me your words are worth the time it takes to say them slowly, no matter what words you choose.
extends spy glass
11·5 months agoI mean sure, whether it is a truth or a lie it will be used as justification for our new war in Iran, that is kinda my point but yeah I don’t trust anything they say either to be clear.
Though it must be emphasized that these actions consume a huge amount of planning, logistics and focus from the people doing it, it is easy to react and think attacks like this can come from any direction… and they could theoretically but they also by their very nature take an insane amount of careful planning and execution to work, so there is a very high cost associated with these kinds of attacks that naturally limits their potential frequency.
Geographically, I think the US military and allies pretty much have the Atlantic buttoned up (the Arctic aside) compared to the vastness of the Pacific along with its many potentially opposing powers with long reaches on the other side of it.
Politically, Big Tech is in California.
No, I am talking about a “happy coincidence” for rightwing religious extremism on both sides.
The attack would very likely be Iranian though maybe as an extra middle finger they might build it out of western components for the political symbolism, but no I don’t think the current US regime is competent enough to do such an act of treason behind the backs of all of the different surveillance agencies and branches of military in the US.
It would stink of very bad shit from miles away in the US, thankfully I don’t see that as likely for many different reasons. Everybody worth a damn in the periphery or that was leaned on to do the grunt work by dumb fascists for the actual implementation of the plan would leak the shit out of the details of such a heinous thing.
No it is not baseless fear mongering, a small unmanned sea vehicle can easily transit an entire ocean given enough time especially if it sits low in the water like a “narco sub” type design, we aren’t talking about hard limits on missile ranges here.
Further see designs such as the Sail Drone or Australian Blue Bottle that can easily wander across much of the world on low to almost no power use while employing sensors and potentially even weapons (as in the case of the Sail Drone).
Japan was able to lob weather balloons over the US during WW2, floating a simple long endurance drone launch vehicle across the Pacific Gyre into range of a western US city is absolutely feasible.
Now… if it was the Ukranians we were fighting, they would have already figured out how to do it on mass and would be hitting US littoral infrastructure everywhere, but thankfully we aren’t facing such a competent maritime military, yet even still the possibility is absolutely within the realm of reason and for political objectives it may very well be worth the risk and cost for an actor like Iran to do.
As I have pointed out elsewhere in this thread, it is not something to fear as some kind of apocalyptic mass destruction and shahed attacks, the distance as you have pointed out is far too great for that.
However, a handful targetted to create maximum media panic and influence US politics? That is an entirely different calculation, your attack will work even if the execution is utterly bungled so long as somebody discovers the wreck of your unmanned vessel wrecked on the shore of the West Coast and reports it to the police.
As a final note, your self assured smugness that the US could not come under attack is well inline with historical US naivety around the imperviousness of the US from attack because “that stuff is happening over there far away”. It is well documented how the US failed to properly convoy commercial shipping along the East Coast of the US during WW2 for an egregious length of time even as German U-boats were sinking ships left and right off the US coast. The British in particular got really pissed off that they would convoy a shipping fleet across the Atlantic and then the US would take over in US waters and then leave the door wide open to a U-boat sinking the ship 50 miles from its destination US port after it made it all the way across the Atlantic.
The fact that the U.S. Navy was so unprepared to deal with the arrival of U-boats on the U.S. East Coast has been roundly criticized by many historians, especially since the U.S. Navy had been engaged in an undeclared war with U-boats for many months before Pearl Harbor. Much of the blame has been heaped on King, some deserved, most not. The unlikeable King makes for an easy target, but there were many factors that resulted in what was effectively a disaster as great as Pearl Harbor in terms of ships sunk and lives lost. British naval Intelligence provided timely warning to the U.S. that the first U-boats were on the way, but little was done with it. The Commander of the U.S. Eastern Sea Frontier, Rear Admiral Adolphus Andrews, had very little to work with, at least initially, with only 100 or so aircraft along the entire coast, and a number of U.S. Coast Guard cutters that were brought under Navy command. Given the lessons learned from World War I, the U.S. failure to immediately implement a convoy system along the U.S. East Coast has attracted a lot of historical “analysis.” There were certainly cases in which U.S. destroyers were inappropriately apportioned, and some were occasionally idle in port while merchant ships were being sunk almost within sight. Nevertheless, the destroyer force was actually heavily tasked and generally in very short supply. Most were committed to escorting transatlantic convoys providing troops and critical war materials to the British war effort, and others to escorting U.S. Navy ships operating in the Atlantic to guard against forays by the German surface navy, as the battleship Bismarck had done earlier in 1941.
What the U.S. sorely lacked was the large number of small anti-submarine craft (“sub-chasers”) like the hundreds that had been hastily built in World War I, but no longer existed. With insufficient escorts, King, Ingersoll, and Andrews reasoned that congregating coastal merchant ships into inadequately protected convoys would only make the U-boats’ job of sinking large numbers of ships even easier and more efficient. This was not because King was anti-British or anti-convoy, but a matter of scarce resource allocation. It was, however, arguably arrogant on King’s part to initially refuse the British offer to send smaller escort ships to the U.S. east coast. By this point in the war, the British had those types of small escorts in comparative abundance, which is how they had ended the U-boats’ first “Happy Time” in 1940. Eventually, the U.S. relented, and in March 1942, the British deployed 24 anti-submarine trawlers and 10 corvettes to the U.S. East Coast to assist, and 53 Squadron of the Royal Air Force Coastal Command (flying U.S.-made Lockheed Hudson aircraft) operated out of Quonset Point, Rhode Island
Never EVER listen to journalists when they tell you war is new, only listen to people who actually have studied war because the lazy narratives people repeat are ahistorical, very misleading and totally turn you around from understanding things as they truly are and how they fit into the context of military history.
That is something to be deeply proud of!