Daniel Dvorkin @medigoth@qoto.org
Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran medic and infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, vaccinated liberal patriot.
Joined Oct 2022
"So what do we have here, Sergeant?"
"Looks like a eucalyptus deal gone bad, Detective."
"All right. Round up the usual suspects."
Says it all, really. #evolution #creationism #transitional #fossil
The usual disclaimers: not posted for agreement (although I did get a chuckle out of the first image), if you share from my post please leave my commentary intact, originally posted by a friend I won't name unless they want me to because I'm not looking for a fight ... etc.
I really hope it's possible to have a middle-ground discussion about this.
On one hand, the idea that #AI-generated #text and #images are purely #plagiarism strikes me as fundamentally untrue. If you prompt #ChatGPT to write you a story, it will give you a combination of words which has never existed before. With a little back-and-forth, those words will be at least a reasonable approximation of the #story you had in your head when you started. Same with #Midjourney and pictures. That is a #creative act.
On the other, it's not just a tool like pen and paper, or word processors, or even add-ons like suggested text. You can plagiarize with all of those—but they don't *push* you toward plagiarism the way ChatGPT does, and although I'm not a visual artist I understand Midjourney is even worse. (I'm using those as the two best-known examples; I know there are lots of others.) My #writing contains turns of phrase from favorite books, and so does everyone else's. But not whole paragraphs or pages with the names changed ... if there's even that much editing.
So it seems to me that neither "nothing generated by AI can ever be true art" nor "stop whining, it's just another way to tell stories" is quite right. One thing for sure is that it's not going away, and things like the open letters urging a halt to AI development strike me as more attention-seeking stunts than serious attempts to solve the very real problems involved. We need to find a way to deal with it that respects *everyone's* rights.
Please tell me I'm not the only human, typing on my keyboard with my normal human hands, who sees it this way?
"ToughVet." Okay, sweetie. I think I covered that here:
It would be kind of amazing how many #racist #asshats are still celebrating this pathetic attempt at a country that only existed for fourteen years and ceased to exist before many of them were born, until you consider that many of them are also still celebrating a pathetic attempt at a country that only existed for four years and ceased to exist before many of their *great-grandparents* were born.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure the "#Rhodesians" did, in fact, fucking die.
This one has been flying around my #Facebook friends list. In and of itself, it's true. I have no argument with what it *says*. But there's a lot it's not saying, and I can't help but feel like it's designed to disparage the #15minuteCity concept by that omission.
First, the concept itself. The idea of the 15-minute city ("#15mC") is pretty simple: everything you need for your daily life should be within 15 minutes' #walk. Some definitions have "walk or #bicycle ride," but I think that drastically weakens the concept.
In other words, a healthy, able-bodied adult should be able to get to all the usual destinations in no more than a quarter of an hour, on foot. I would add to this that #children, the #elderly, and people of all ages with #disabilities should also be able to get where they're going via accessible #public #transit, in the same amount of time.
*All* the usual destinations. Which yes, means #grocery #stores, #restaurants, #movie #theaters, etc.—for people who #work there as well as the patrons. And every other kind of #workplace too. Of course you don't *have* to work or eat or shop close to home. But the option needs to be there, and the work has to be able to pay for all the rest.
That's *always* been part of the concept. If the work criterion is not met, you don't have a 15mC; you have a theme park, like the post says. Fair enough.
Yes, and? If you have a #house without a roof, you don't have a house, you have a collection of walls. If you have a plate without #food on it, you don't have a meal, you have #hunger. If you have a #legislature that can arbitrarily kick out its members for voicing their opinions, you don't have #liberty, you have #tyranny. Everyone understands this.
So if we agree that the 15mC is a good idea—I certainly think it is—then let's try to make it happen. This kind of sniping strikes me as less a valid critique and more an attempt to make the whole idea sound impossible.
Maybe that's not the intent, but it's sure how it comes across. Yeah ... don't do that.
Via an old #USAF #medic friend: a picture from my much younger days. My head looks weirdly small. Perhaps I was hoping the jolt would blow it back up to normal size.
I can date this one pretty precisely. It's at the #RAF #Upwood #clinic, where I arrived in June 1990, and shaved off the mustache within a few months. Also, I'm wearing whites, which I only did at the Primary Care Clinic, where I was first assigned. In the Acute Care Clinic, where I was from October of that year on, we wore BDUs. So it has to be somewhere in that time frame.
That kid, he's not me. Better in some ways: energy, optimism, idealism, openness to new experiences. Worse in others: temper, stubbornness, a certainty of his own rightness taken to absurd extremes. It takes some growing up to learn the difference between opinion and truth. Uncle Sam was not always pleased with the process.
But I remember him fondly, and wish him well. Given the number of people who were close to him then and are still here now, I guess they do too. I'm glad.
I think about this a lot, as my own #online record grows ever longer.
The #internet is full of ghosts of *myself*, and friends—some still in my life, most not, an alarming number who can never be again—caught at points of our lives when we were utterly different people. Hell, sometimes spambots still comment on my #LiveJournal posts, and I have to go see what they said, which brings the memories flooding back. Decades of #Usenet and #Slashdot floating around in the ether.
And yeah, it gets exponentially weirder when it's *everybody* who's left similar traces—which is probably close to half the world's population by now, if it hasn't already passed that point. I've been online for forty years or so, continuously for about thirty. Another such span of time, and a solid majority of people on the planet will have most or all of their lives self-documented in a detail that has never before been possible in human history.
My fiancée is a social #historian, focusing on a little over a century ago. There's lots of material, but never enough. So much is irretrievably lost. Her counterparts a century hence will have the opposite probem.
Probably a good thing those teenage #BBS posts are lost forever. Er, I think: maybe they're still on a stack of cassette tapes in someone's basement. If so, I hope they stay in their graves.
Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran medic and infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, vaccinated liberal patriot.
Joined Oct 2022
