Watermelon Central

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.

and in the one hand, did i enjoy spending hours researching housing regulations in my state? not especially. drafting this email was stressful. but on the other hand, did i learn a lot by doing that research? yeah, i did. i’m more prepared for my current and future leases. i used some of that info to make decisions about a new renter’s insurance policy. i already told three different people about things i learned that are relevant to their leases that they didn’t know yet. (pro tip: see if you’re supposed to be getting annual interest payments on your security deposit! also look up what specific appliances your landlords must legally provide as of 2026.) i also got to reconnect with my cousin for a bit because her job gave her specific insight on part of the situation, and i’d much rather do that than have a chatbot make shit up for me.

also, i drafted that email with the power of friendship (friends angry on our behalf) and spite (from landlords telling me not to do my research). chatgpt could never.

“More than fifty research and development facilities across thirty-one states. Gone. Consolidated into a single location in Fort Collins, Colorado. And ‘consolidated’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, because what it actually means is that decades of place-based, long-term ecological research—the kind that literally cannot exist anywhere else because it depends on specific forests, specific watersheds, specific ecosystems studied over generations—will be snuffed out.

If your senator is a Republican, the question is simple: you voted for a law that requires USDA to get committee approval before reorganizing or relocating any office. USDA didn’t get that approval. Their own lawyers declared your law unconstitutional. What are you going to do about it?

If your senator is a Democrat, the question is just as simple: the legal basis for stopping this already exists. Where are the subpoenas? Where are the hearings? Why is USDA’s general counsel allowed to declare a duly enacted law unconstitutional by internal memo and face no consequences?

Make them answer. Make their staff write it down. Call back next week and ask what happened.

(source)

More info from GLAAD:

https://glaad.org/fcc/

They have some good tips about writing a comment and protecting your privacy which, fuck it, I'll just paste here:

Providing an email address is optional. If you have concerns about privacy, you may use your initials or public address in your local area, such as City Hall. Do not use a joke name. It diminishes the comment’s credibility.

Your submission does not need to be long. A single, well-reasoned paragraph is sufficient.

Do not copy/paste a template comment. The FCC values unique perspectives, and an original comment carries significantly more weight in the public record. You can explain why this matters to you without revealing private or sensitive personal information.

Here's what I said:

“Free speech is a fundamental American freedom. I do not need a warning about seeing queer people, much like I do not need a warning about women, veterans, or any other group of people.”

Here's the link to submit your comment by May 22:

Anyways finishing thoughts

The homophobia and transphobia is. Not good. There's the basic "gags" towards the gay and trans bit characters, and unfortunately that was way too common in Jump to even comment on. I remember Himekawa having a fiance that was raised as a man, and if that were it, then like yeah it sucks being raised a gender that does not align with who you are. But I did not remember that his fiance actually enjoyed being a man "despite" """loving him as a woman""" and they still had the message of "if you love Himekawa like a woman, come to him as a woman." Like come on dude you couldn't have just let him love you as a man and give a different reason to reject him? He has a very small cameo in a dress in the final chapter with Himekawa and like come on man.

I can't tell whether it was cause I read weekly, because I was younger, or because it was a Prince of Tennis type deal where they put way more character interactions and screen time in the anime, but I remember them trying to push Kanzaki/Paako and Furuichi/Nene more, but nah it was literally only brought up during and after the Christmas arc. I think I only watched the anime original episodes way back when so like I don't even remember what went on with that anymore. I remember a big Ogafuru shipper actually got to work on the anime, and that a lightly Ogafuru fanart they had became official anime art so good for them. I don't know if they nuked themselves off the internet as these JP artists tend to do but I don't think I can find the original anymore

Speaking of Ogafuru, as much as I love the ship, I love it in a very specific way even more. That being "Oga loves Furuichi but only has the capacity to recognize one emotion at a time. One day he will have an epiphany but it will be quickly overriden by how much more he loves his fist in his face. Furuichi is homophobic*." Like, it was a joke but Beel's second word was friggin Furuchin. How much did Oga talk about him while they were apart??? They're going to be single together until they're dead.

I kind of miss Tamura putting an Ogaface and a Furuichiface into his manga, but it would be harder to get away with since he's in a different magazine now. Glad Cosmos is doing well. Amazing what you could do without Jump's influences. I get like, lightly conservative vibes from Tamura's manga but not really outright so I'm not going to accuse it of anything more than your typical shounen/seinen conservativism. Cosmos is going towards a more battle heavy route now which like I'm concerned about but they aren't in Jump so hopefully they don't go too far