Usual words on the usual street

also

when someone tags your post "#unreality" and you screenshot the tags and say "what are you talking about? this is real" because you consider the post easy to discern as not real and find this joke funny you're actually just causing paranoia for people who now feel like they can't trust the unreality tag. not everyone has the same reality discernment skills as you. what's "obviously" a fictional story to you may not be obvious to other people.

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

see him sing

now see him thrushin

14 years ago when I had recently moved to Alaska, I went hiking with an Aleut friend, and she pointed to a feather lying on the ground and said "hey that's a bald eagle tail feather, you should grab it!" and I was like "uhh I'm very white and that's very illegal" and she went "they're fuckin everywhere up here man. I have 20." so she grabs it off the ground and hands it to me and says "there, now it's a ceremonial gift from an indigenous person."

and I'm like, okay, cool, I guess this is how we do things in Alaska. nice.

so I keep this bald eagle tail feather around for years. display it in my home among other cherished memorabilia from places I've lived and visited, etc.

on a whim, I have just now looked it up. there is no exemption to that law for a ceremonial gift from an indigenous person. the last 7 years I lived in the US, I was technically a bald eagle poacher.

the law against 'picking feathers up off the ground' means that you can't go shoot an eagle then sell the feathers on etsy by saying you 'just found them'. you can't own them no matter where they came from, which makes sure that they're not going to come from any birds killed and then secretly disposed of.

As far as I know, Indigenous folks also do have to apply for a permit still on an individual level. A random person can't roll up, claim to be from whatever tribe (even if it's true), and keep feathers and stuff from the birds protected by the treaty with no proof or permits.

This is also true of exceptions made for breeding, hunting/depopulation, falconry, and scientific/educational purposes! Educational facilities can apply for permits to keep parts or whole animals (alive and taxidermy). While I was in grade school, my mom found a great horned owl on the side of the road that had clearly been a victim of car-strike. She was able to call around and get permission to take it to a taxidermist, to be mounted for my elementary school. That owl is still on display there! My college had a taxidermy class, and I've transported several window- or car-strike birds I've found to them to be used for classes/archiving the pelts.

Falconry is, at least in my state, a 2+ year apprenticeship before they are allowed to have their first bird. They can keep a certain number of certain kinds of feathers for the purposes of imping (wing/tail repair), but are not allowed to keep "keepsake" feathers once the bird is no longer in their care. It's really strict and kind of hard to get into.

And for falconry, some of the birds are bred, and some are wild caught. So there are exceptions there for breeding for this, and presumably for zoos and other conservation/education facilities that do breeding.

Some species, like the Canada goose and some other water fowl, ARE protected, BUT also have a hunting season and regulated take. This requires a hunting license to do. Taxidermists who work on legally taken MBTA-protected species I believe also have to have a permit to do so. Some places, like airports, have permits to clear hazardous birds from the runways/airways; most places are not allowed to mess with, for example, a nesting Canada goose. Shutting down air traffic for a month over a Canada goose nest would be extremely disruptive to many many many people. Getting a Canada goose or several Canada geese sucked into a jet engine is probably not ideal. So, they have permits to chase off or even sometimes depopulate birds causing issues at the airport.