Imagine the timeline, Elon never became an asshole, the ultimate pyrotechnic show, fireworks going off, this strange happy man has flamethrowers and a jetpack, behind him a dozen synchronized Falcon 9 rockets take off and engage in a choreographed aerial ballet.
People post videos of it online, because Twitter still exists as a functional platform.
Yeah, next thing you know they’ll be sliding offers to the most liked people’s profiles offering the chance to become compensated daters if they go out with VIP profiles, no pressure to do anything sexual though, because that’d be illegal.
Honestly, this 500$ a month thing is just sad, because it’ll definitely work (financially), and Tinder will do some shenanigans with the algorithm to make it seem a little worth it, and it’ll just definitely not be worth it to the people paying 500$ a month.
The really annoying part of this is the author says:
“The crucial finding is that the number of violent video games you’re exposed to has an influence on your verbal aggression and hostility,”
Only to go on and say:
“It’s very important to stress that our findings are not causal,”
More than that, the study doesn’t even measure their “exposure” to violent games, it requests their three favorite games and then checks their PEGI rating.
Whew. Okay, so reading the actual research article here, and, this article is kind of trash. First off, the study group was recruited from ads posted on Reddit and Discord, notably from r/samplesize, r/narcissism and r/truegaming and Cluster B Circus, r/NPD Official and NPD Recovery 2.0 respectively. One is a place for polls, one is a gaming subreddit, and the rest are all communities for people with narcissism. So they’re skewing their sample population explicitly towards how people with narcissism that play violent games respond. Which, I think was the original intent of the study, and they bolted on the additional conclusions for a spicier publication, since the only way these numbers are meaningful is with a control group of people with NPD (narcissistic personality disorder) that do not play violent games, and even then, it only provides a correlation between people with NPD who play violent video games and increased verbal aggression (one of which was arguing if people disagree with you).
I’m beginning to feel regret for putting way too much effort into a comment, because this is a long ass article, but further in, the study states that respondents had “healthy” levels of narcissism, which goes unremarked despite their primary sample sourcing being targeted at narcissism instead of a population of gamers. I’m calling it a wrap here, but essentially this is a remarkably unreliable study to write that headline off of.
Yeah, although I think part of the missing nuance is that people already did that, the difference being that now anyone can, in theory, create what’s inside their head, regardless of their actual artistic talent. Now that creation is accessible though, everyone’s having another moral panic over what should be acceptable for people to create.
If anything, moving the more disturbing stuff from the real world to the digital seems like an absolute win. But I suppose there will always be the argument, much like video games making people violent, that digital content will become real.
You mean, waiting for news when it gets isekai’d after someone pushes it in front of a train lol.
I think you mean a nice golden parachute to reward them for taking the heat, so they can swap in a new expensive face to implement slightly less unpopular fees.
*cries a lot in capitalism*
Yeah, I agree with all of their points except for SpaceX, which has been an unequivocal success that doesn’t deserve to be painted with the same brush Elon is. They revolutionized space flight, broke into the national security launch industry that was entirely captured by the United Launch alliance, and stand to obsolete the (93 billion dollar!) Space Launch System the moment the Starship is approved for commercial launches.
Dozens of Falcon 9’s exploded while testing them and especially while attempting to land and reuse boosters, so the Starship failure was all but expected. I hate Elon Musk too, but SpaceX is arguably the most successful aerospace company at the moment. Were NASA allowed full control of their money, I think it’d be better, but as it is the viability of many of their future projects hinges on SpaceX.
US military bases usually count as US territory subject to our laws, the difference between UCMJ charges for K2 possession/trafficking and South Korea’s is enormous. Normally this would have been handled in house.
I mean, sure, but raiding two military bases and facing 5 years to life for having some vape juice and a couple ounces of synthetic marijuana spread across twenty some people is absurd. Especially when places are steadily legalizing marijuana.
Yeah, in academia getting approval for primate research projects is a huge process where you need to clarify every aspect of the protocol, housing, care, and experimental operations to submit before the project can start. I’m less sure if it’s voluntary or required, but we had funding allocated for their retirement from the start. They’re smart enough and strong enough that I’d be terrified to work with unhappy and unwell primates.
Not that all research projects are have happy endings, but I don’t think corporate research has the same restrictions and oversight that academic research does, given that this even happened. I’m pretty accepting of the necessity of primate research models, but we should be doing everything we can to treat them as best we can. Withdrawing a subject from the experimental protocol should be preferred over letting an infection fester just because the implant is in the way. Just seems really poorly done on their part.
That lady’s a lifesaver.
119,000 dollars worth of drugs in a single drone though? And I thought inflation was bad at the grocery store.
Well, it has been a while since we’ve had a good Red Scare, and we even have a prominent McCarthy for this next round.
That said, it always throws me for a loop when the news just casually reports about the location of a spy station.
Yeah, I mean we’ve been working on brain implants of various stripes for a couple decades now, and they’re not the first to attempt motor cortex implants for paralyzed patients as a method to begin human trials, but the current state of the art for brain implants is honestly pretty… primitive. There’s no good way to avoid damaging neurons, so it’s mainly a focus on not causing too much damage while fine mapping and targeting has to be done on an individual basis.
Implants are hugely useful, and arguably the current state of the art treatment for several conditions (epilepsy and parkinsons), but we’re so far out from computer brain interfaces being useful for anything outside of dire medical needs that it’s kinda surprising they’re pushing ahead when they had so much trouble with their experimental subjects.
I worked in a brain imaging lab in college, and we had a couple of chimpanzees with brain implants that did daily research protocols. Bastards were better than me at the testing regimen, and other than some minor discomfort (water intake is restricted prior to the tests so that the gatorade reward was more attractive), they were large children that could tear your face off if they got angry. Once they got older, they would have surgery to remove the implants and retire to a primate ranch where they just got to live out the rest of their life. All of the grad students there had been working with the same chimps for years, so it’s a little alarming Neuralink had so many issues.
It doesn’t exactly engender confidence.
For real, I knew a guy that kept an ounce as his daily supply. As in, he’d set aside an ounce each day for casual smoking with friends. This whole four month raid was over three days of heavy college smoking. The demonization of marijuana is such a ridiculous waste, and leads to weird stuff like selling K2, which is a shittier version of weed, with actual risks as you can overdose on K2.
Yeah, and a lot hinges on the definition of cyberbullying. If they mean a sustained and targeted campaign of bullying, that’s one thing, but if it’s just being the target of toxic behavior on the internet that’s pretty easy to trip over on social media.
Man, I remember back when it was women’s studies getting bullied, then they added gender studies, now we’ve got African Americans, Germans (I assume because of Marx?), the study of the development of society, and the study of society. They’re becoming so inclusive in their discrimination 🤗
There’s some argument over adopting the term GSM (Gender and Sexual Minorities) as an inoffensive general term.
We aren’t, we just have a massively complex biological computing network that has a number of dedicated processing nodes refined by evolution to create a “smart” system. Part of why it’s so hard to make true AI is because the way brains process data is far messier than how computers function, and while we can simulate simple brains (nematodes and the like), it’s incredibly inefficient compared to how neurons actually handle processing.
Essentially, we’re at the cave painting stage of creating intelligence, where you can kinda see what’s going on but they really aren’t that close to reality. To hit the point where an AI is self-aware is going to be 1) an ethical disaster, and 2) either an advancement in neuromorphic chips (adapting neural architecture to computer architecture) or abstracting neural computation via machine learning (ChatGPT - not actually copying how our minds work, but creating something that appears to function like our minds).
There’s a whole lot of myths tied up around human consciousness, but ultimately every thought in our heads is the process of tens of billions of cells all doing their job. That said, I’m hoping AI is based off of human neural architecture, which produces sociopaths and monsters sure, but machine learning creating something that appears to think like a human but actually operates on arcane and eldritch logic before presenting a flawless replica of human thought unsettles me.
Yeah, or if it’s at all targeted, or affects the entire mouth. If they can get a missing tooth or two to regrow, that would help a lot of people. If you start getting teeth sprouting up everywhere that need to be surgically removed, that would be a lot less universally applicable.
Same for whether it only works once, or if it develops new buds. Gotta say, it would be nice to make it to grave with a full set of teeth, since people losing their teeth has a huge impact on their quality of life.