If it’s weird, we can be weird together.

True, but it’s gone in spikes largely driven by new strains since the original.

Obligatory

We’re putting in place a 24/7 monitoring team

Spurious reports, anyone?

It’s a little bit like Satan telling someone he’s a big fan of their work.

Like someone else in this thread mentioned, Elon. I hated him well before he started doing really assholeish stuff publicly. I had plenty of liberal friends who thought he was cool and edgy and bought not-a-flamethrowers and Tesla cars. When the soccer team got trapped in a cave in Thailand and Elon called the rescue team pedophiles, I was like “I knew that guy had to be a total asshole”. Of course, now I know that was not even the tip of the iceberg.

I think I was ahead of the curve hating on “generative AI”.

Bill Gates. I hated him for being a big part of the rise of proprietary software as an institution long before the right wing conspiracy theorists started making up bullshit about him. Which is annoying because now I have to tell people I hate Gates but not because I think he’s putting 5G microchips in vaccines or whatever bullshit.

Facebook is probably a pretty good example. I quit Facebook in like 2008. Not that nobody was talking about how evil Facebook was at the time, but their evil wasn’t really as well known at the time, I don’t think.

I’m realizing a lot of these are technology-related.

Yeah, it’s pretty weird. My employer is a traditionally brick-and-mortor sort of business that’s only recently starting to learn that the internet isn’t a “fad”. My employer’s policy has always been that we don’t use “the cloud” specifically so we can keep our trade secrets secret. They’re only now starting to approach the idea of running our code on off-premisis hardware our company doesn’t own. They’re using Google Cloud rather than AWS, though, because “Amazon is a competitor” and they’re paranoid that Amazon is going to steal our trade secrets. Which… doesn’t make sense because so is Google. (Of course, that doesn’t really give away what industry my employer is in because both Google and Amazon do basically everything.) Google pinky swears they’ll never steal/use/share our data. And of course that might be true right up until the moment they decide to change that and meanwhile we’re screwed because we’re all vendor-lockin’d with them.

Anyway, yeah. My employer is nincompoops. Lol.

The new CTO at my workplace just the other day announced they’d partnered with Google to get Gemini Code Complete and they’d be piloting its use on a particular project. They had someone from Google present all the “benefits” of using AI for writing code and everything.

Most of my team is facepalming so hard. Except the one guy who’s an AI enthusiast. (That guy is also a massive conspiracy theorist.) I’m not sure about everyone’s sentiment, though. I’m kindof sortof “in charge” on my team, and apparently the company’s stance is now that AI use is acceptable. If I told folks not to use AI, I don’t think the business would back me, so I’m having to be “diplomatic” about it.

So, I’ve told the team “just… don’t push any code to the central repo without understanding it at least as well as if you’d written it yourself.”

But yeah. I’m pretty pissed. Hopefully the CTO isn’t high enough on the smell of his own farts to decide that “pilot” project is an unmitigated success despite all evidence to the contrary.

If you want to watch it

Pass, thanks.

They don’t make a Clozapine big enough.

zen meditation… trying to illicit vivid imagery in the mind… it sounded like a whole lot of junk mind flailing.

See, but, this is exactly the kind of attitude I’m trying to address in my comment. People judging other people’s meditation practices. You didn’t specifically go so far (at least not explicitly) as to call it “not meditation”, but you’re still judging the practice without really understanding it. (Not that I think you should be judging it even if you did understand it.)

The practice you’re describing might have been something called “kasiṇa”. And it’s known to “illicit vivid imagery.” There are multiple kinds of kasina practices, but they originate from the Pali Canon itself in works such as the Visuddhimagga and Vimuttimagga^[1][2].

That’s as meditation as meditation gets. If you’re going to call that “junk mind flailing”, the Buddha would like a word.

Now, I don’t know for sure kasina was what you’re describing. But it’s also beside the point. I don’t think meditators really have a leg to stand on to claim that even something like sitting quietly, eyes closed, and playing the whole original Star Wars trilogy in their head from memory is “bad meditation” or “not meditation” just because they judgmentally can’t imagine it “exercising” a “muscle”/“mental skill”/etc. (Daniel Ingram, one of the co-authors of the fire kasina site I cited earlier and a huge advocate for fire kasina as a practice, talks about using fire kasina to conjure vivid images of dragons from Lord of the Rings, kinda just because he’s a geek (and I mean that endearingly) and it’s fun. Though he’s also strongly of the opinion that kasina can lead to insight.) “Meditation” is not the sort of term that a lot of people tend to try to gatekeep, and I think that’s basically never a good thing.

No, meditation is not like drugs.

You’ve been doing the wrong meditation. ;)

Seriously, though, I kindof bristle any time I hear anyone say that “meditation is” some particular thing. What meditation is is extremely broad and varied to the point that it nearly defies definition.

Sure many buddhist jhana practitioners will say that the purpose of jhanas is insight, but what if I develop my jhana skills and never seek insight? Is that really not meditation?

Or, if I sit quietly and learn to contact my subconscious and/or Jungian archetypes. Or if I make up my own idiosyncratic form of practice specifically in order to try to become a hungry ghost in the next life, is that really not meditation?

(Mind you, it’s valid to accept a particular strict definition of meditation within a specific context. If I was at a vipassana retreat doing white skeleton meditation, that’d probably be kindof assholeish. And if the teacher was like “no, correct meditation is such-and-such,” I wouldn’t be like “nuh-uh my ass is meditation, man”. This situation is pretty different. If OP has found a way to “meditate” that’s “better than drugs” rather than “training the mind to be calm, patient, observant and focused”, that hardly makes it invalid or “not meditation.” Any more so than if they say “nice to meet you” rather than “hey, what’s up”, that makes it “not a greeting.”)

Whew. My 586 is safe.

Birds.

The god damned fucking birds outside my window scream their god-damned beaks off at 6:00 fucking AM just to get some tail-feather.

This shit always starts in the spring, every year. Where I am, it’s been going on for a bit more than “a week ago”, but that’s what’s been waking me up in the mornings.

I keep earplugs next to my bed. I don’t want to wear them all night because my superpower is overproducing earwax and I’d have to imagine wearing plugs all night would exacerbate that. So I put in the plugs when the birds wake me, roll over, and then sleep another couple of hours until my alarm goes off. (And, yes, my alarm reliably wakes me even with the ear plugs.)

With some of the reports of cultish behavior at OpenAI, a piece of me wonders whether this may be – if not directly intentional – at least somewhat influenced by gentle nudges in a weird spiritual direction from execs, maybe by subtle influences on the choice of training materials or some such.

I don’t think there’s anything untoward going on with the OP here. I’m not using a VPN and the metadata is in German for me.

Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.

I could definitely be misunderstanding something, though. I for sure haven’t watched the whole linked video. What little I’ve seen seems legit as far as I’ve been able to tell so far.

The only thing more subversive than silly hats is signing your Lemmy posts.

TootSweet

There’s no more today, there’s only now.

ChatGPT

Arm yourself with knowledge

Bruh