Oh, man - the comments…

At a minimum, he’s certainly increased the chances of us being tortured significantly.

No, no he did not. 🤦🏼

There’s an ancient Greek story about a city where young women were killing themselves at an alarming rate, and the city eventually enacted a law where if a woman killed herself the body would be paraded through the streets naked before burial. After that law, the suicides dramatically went down.

The misogynistic interpretation of the author recording the story was that women were ashamed at the thought of being seen naked, even after death, and so this curbed the suicides.

My own interpretation is that it’s hard to hide bruises on a naked body.

No one should be trapped in a situation where they feel the only option out is suicide.

expulsed by the filistine sea people invaders first at the end of bronze age

This is not correct.

There were no Israelites in the LBA, they emerge distinct from the Canaanites in the early Iron Age in parallel to the forced resettlement of the sea peoples into the area by Ramses III.

The very first historical mention of Israel recognized by the majority of scholars is in an Egyptian inscription talking about battling the sea peoples and Libyans with Israel mentioned in what’s effectively a footnote.

In fact, it’s likely a lot of the pre-10th century stories in Judaism are actually stories from the sea peoples and Libyans, and in just the past decade or so there’s been discoveries of cohabitation with the Philistines contrary to the stories of conflict, and of Aegean style pottery made with local clay in early Israelite areas like Tel Dan.

The Bible literally has a story about how the birthright and inheritance of a guy is taken from him by the guy named ‘Israel’ (which to be fair, was probably added in by later Judahite propaganda trying to insert themselves into the history as one of the twelve tribes, when they don’t seem to really exist in a meaningful way until more like the 10th century BCE).

There’s more to the story than what’s in the book.

Most of the F2P games.

Dave the diver. Very much enjoying so far.

And as someone whose pandemic hobby involved a deep dive into the history of the sea peoples, I’ve been enjoying a secondary layer to the game as well.

The flip side of this is something I’ve noticed in academia that I’ve started calling the “crackpot fallacy” where early on crackpots pushing a perspective end up biasing the entire field against that perspective to the point they end up very slow to engage with quality efforts in a similar direction.

So in cosmology you had a guy who dedicated himself to essentially defining a “new physics” back in the 80s around the concept of a mirror universe. It was pretty much total nonsense and he really had rewrite everything to get it to work, which is never a good sign.

But recently the head of theoretical physics at the Perimeter Institute and a fairly well respected cosmologist who shares the name of a thing with Hawking ended up making a ton of headway across several papers based on the idea of a CPT symmetric universe which explains a number of unanswered phenomena, avoided falsification with CERN searching for particle that never showed up which would have invalidated it, and has testable confirmatory predictions likely to be evaluated in the next few years.

And yet most physicists outside of a small network of theoretical cosmologists have no idea about it and if introduced to it evaluate it with great skepticism because it ‘sounds’ like something they’ve learned to associate with crackpots.

We see the same thing in ML right now, where the Google engineer who thought the LLM was sentient ended up making anthropomorphizing LLMs a career jeopardizing move. So we have transformers modeling fluid dynamics accurately with Sora video generation and no one bats an eye at the claim the transformer replicated something complex it wasn’t explicitly trained on, but most balk at the idea that a LLM trained on anthropomorphic data is accurately modeling tangential aspects which feed into that data (in spite of an increasing number of replicated research efforts that show there’s quite a lot more going on than meets the eye).

In pretty much every academic field I’ve looked at, this pattern emerges.

A single crackpot can seed landmines along the path they tread for legitimate researchers who come anywhere near that ground later on.

It’s especially bad for fields where there’s less room for testable predictions or experimental results, as those can somewhat mitigate inherent research biases.

So while it’s probably quite annoying to deal with crackpots, academics would be wise to also be aware of the inherent bias they pick up via those engagements and better distinguish between identifying crackpots by methodology rather than topic - leaving a better chance to avoid dismissing a false negative when good methodology shows up in a topic previously represented only by crackpots.

Hahaha, yeah, that one was great.

Also the one where they paid parents to name their baby ‘Turok.’

I sometimes wonder what those little Turoks are up to today (at least a half dozen parents took them up on it IIRC).

The shock advertising campaigns around games really were something. They worked - got a ton of free media coverage. But this was also at the time that video games were the Boogeyman like rock n’ roll had been to a generation before. The media loved nothing more than a “look how terrible video games are” story and PR firms were playing into that environment.

So campaigns like this were basically the equivalent of Ozzy Osbourne biting the head off a bat.

As games became more normalized, the campaigns shifted accordingly and - like Ozzy - tamed quite a bit out.

Yeah. Even just around a decade ago I’d explain the demographics shift to more women gamers to clients and they’d not believe it.

Stereotypes stick around for a long time, even when (or maybe especially when) untrue.

It’s a shame that “girl gamers” were considered such a rarity when it really seemed like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“Oh, a game with only male protagonists with activities only primarily associated with boys doesn’t have many girls playing it? I guess girls aren’t that into games and we should double down on the focus on dudes.”

As a result, the market effectively abandoned around half of two generations of a potential continued audience and had a significantly reduced pool of interested labor to make games.

It’s a bit frustrating given my love for games that they could likely have advanced even further had it not been an exclusionary industry for as long as it was (though that can be said about pretty much every business vertical in existence too given our generalized collective history of exclusion).

WhatsApp had 500 million MAU when it was bought up.

That’s 250x the fediverse.

They really don’t care.

Yeah, it’s been hilarious watching the fediverse think Meta gives a rat’s ass about either reaching them with content or getting access to their horde of memes.

This is about preempting regulation.

Meta would love nothing less than having their interoperability push still end up as a walled garden, and if I didn’t know better regarding their total disinterest about Lemmy or even Mastodon existing, would even suspect that the degree to which they’d be meddling in the conversion would be creating posts about how people should be irrationally upset and defederate from Threads.

Though they don’t care enough to be involved in the conversation at all, and know full well that the fediverse will hit scaling issues should it ever miraculously gain traction long before it is actually a threat in any way to their market dominance.

All that said, it’s still pretty hilarious to watch the inflated self-importance and slight paranoia that goes with it leading to bitter debates like this though.

In theory not infinite ones though

I was disappointed to see that this thread had an end…

Users.

Hilarious.

Only five years ago no one in the computer science industry would have taken a bet that AI would be able to explain why a joke was funny or perform creative tasks.

Today that’s become so normalized that people are calling things thought to be literally impossible a speculative bubble because advancement that surprised everyone in the industry initially and then again with the next model a year later hasn’t moved fast enough?

The industry is still learning how to even use the tech.

This is like TV being invented in 1927 and then people in 1930 saying that it’s a bubble because it hasn’t grown as fast as they expected it to.

Did OP consider the work going on at literally every single tech college’s VC groups in optoelectronic neural networks and how that’s going to impact decoupling AI training and operation from Moore’s Law? I’m guessing no.

Near-perfect analysis, eh? By someone who read and regurgitated analysis by a journalist who writes for a living and may just have an inherent bias towards evaluating information on the future prospects of a technology positioned to replace writers?

We haven’t even had a public release of multimodal models yet.

This is about as near perfect of an analysis as smearing paint on oneself and rolling down a canvas on a hill.

It’s generally easy to crap on what’s ‘bad’ about big players, while underestimating or undervaluing what they are doing right for product market fit.

A company like Meta puts hundreds of people in foreign nations through PTSD causing hell in order to moderate and keep clean their own networks.

While I hope that’s not the solution that a community driven effort ends up with, it shows the breadth of the problems that can crop up with the product as it grows.

I think the community will overcome these issues and grow beyond it, but jerks trying to ruin things for everyone will always exist, and will always need to be protected against.

To say nothing for the far worse sorts behind the production and more typical distribution of such material, whom Lemmy will also likely eventually need to deal with more and more as the platform grows.

It’s going to take time, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the only way a federated social network eventually can exist is within onion routing or something, as at a certain point the difference in resources to protect against content litigation between a Meta and someone hosting a Lemmy server is impossible to equalize, and the privacy of hosts may need to be front and center.