oops! all cats

So, backing up, many people say that they suddenly "feel their age" around 30 because their body, if they keep using it like they're 20, will stop healing faster than they can hurt it. Many chronically ill folks deal with this slowed recovery starting at a much earlier age, and more dramatically. When we die of 'old age' that's in large part due to your healing factor being slowed down so much, the act of being alive wears you down faster than your body can heal.

Robots can not heal.

Sure, they can have parts replaced, but all mechanical parts are installed with an expected number of uses and hours of operation, not even accounting for any traumatic damage.

These legs are rated for three years of use, or 20,000 miles of walking. I'm one year and 3,000 miles over, and can no longer hit my top speed, and tend to veer left if I'm not careful.

These eyes were supposed to be good for 5 years, but the bright lights of the desert and the frequent sand storm mean that after two years in, some of the sensors are burnt out, and the lenses are scratched and difficult to replace, and the same thing is just going to happen to the next pair, so is it really worth it?

My oil tank is cracked, and until I get a new one, I need to drink a new bottle every morning instead of every two months, and I can't bend over forward without spilling some.

This heart has 3 million beats in it. At 60 bpm, that will last me over 11 years. At 120 bpm, it won't last six, until I need a new one.

My CPU was made to last for 5 years with average use. At 3 years, I can think at 65% of the speed I started with. How slow do I have to be before it's worth it to replace that? Every robot is built dying in a way that a healthy able bodied person cannot fully understand. The idea that every part of your body is ticking down, that taking a rest day only delays the inevitable, that once something is broken, it stays that way until you can get it fixed.

Sure, some cars are brand new, owned by someone with a garage and nearly infinite money to pour into upkeep. Some of them are old beaters that are just trying their best to get their 20-something owners to class and back, desperately hoping that it can hold its timing belt together until they can afford to replace it, but please drive slow until then?

Do you think that old beater car might also be worried about the day it becomes cheaper to replace than maintain? That "being bale to afford it" might refer to a new car, not a new belt?

The documentary includes a brief clip of a 1954 televised newscast about the rise of homosexuality. The host of the program interviewed psychologists, a police officer, and one “known homosexual”. The “known homosexual” is 22 years old. He identifies himself as Curtis White, which is a pseudonym; his name is actually Dale Olson.

So I tracked down the newscast. According to what I can find, Dale Olson may have been the first gay man to appear openly on television and defend his sexual orientation. He explains that there’s nothing wrong with him mentally and he’s never been arrested. When asked whether he’d take a cure if it existed, he says no. When asked whether his family knows he’s gay, he says that they didn’t up until tonight, but he guesses they’re going to find out, and he’ll probably be fired from his job as well. So of course the host is like …why are you doing this interview then? and Dale Olson, cool as cucumber pie, says “I think that this way I can be a little useful to someone besides myself.”

1954. 22 years old. Balls of pure titanium.

Despite the pseudonym, Dale’s boss did indeed recognize him from the TV program, and he was promptly fired the next day. He wrote into ONE magazine six months later to reassure readers that he had gotten a new job at a higher salary.

Curious about what became of him, I looked into his life a little further. It turns out that he ultimately became a very successful publicity agent. He promoted the Rocky movies and Superman. Not only that, but get this: Dale represented Rock Hudson, and he was the person who convinced him to disclose that he had AIDS! He wrote the statement Rock read. And as we know, Rock Hudson’s disclosure had a very significant effect on the national conversation about AIDS in the U.S.

randomly stumbled upon this post by a theater in omaha, nebraska about their production of frozen & may have wept a little. they actuallyyy stood up for her! they did not let racist comments go ignored. they did not try to ""be nice"" by offering excuses to court the racists. they even called out potential complaints of inaccuracy as the racist tool they are. like! the bar is in hell so it just felt nice to see this & i wanted to share. the actress is named monica weber!

I KNOW THAT'S RIGHT!!! you would be astonished at how hard doing something like this- at standing up for what's right and not cowering in the face of racism and pressure- is for regular degular people, let alone businesses! I appreciate this!

And it's wild because she's like, light af. So it's not even like it's a "oh her skin color doesn't match" no they just deadass didn't want a Black woman playing that character. Doesn't matter that Anna's actress is in a whole wig, nope, that's proper! Goofies. Thank you for sharing this with me.

TLDR: In ten days last month, the Wikimedia Foundation fired the longtime lead developer of MediaWiki and disbanded the team whose entire job was to listen to volunteers. Most of the people they fired were union organizers. Wikipedia’s editors are now threatening to strike in solidarity. The Foundation is sitting on $296 million in reserves and a freshly profitable AI revenue stream. This is a confrontation with global implications.

I have been unable to really write out a proper response here without erasing and rewriting a few times.

This might be a bit long, so the tldr I can summarize here is: ambiguity ruins integrity.

MLAI isn't going away. In terms of the models that come to mind when you think about A I right now, those companies have been developing everyday consumer-level platforms since 2012. It only became really visible in 2021 with the first public consumer release, but it has been in development and privately used for years now. And by years, I mean decades. MLAI has been in active development since the 1950s.

The outrage, animosity, and pushback comes from the lack of respect to the everyday people. The use of these models by corporations is not there to help anyone. It's to cut spending and increase turnaround time. It sacrifices quality, cheapens the payoff, and removes the human element. Which, in any creative field, is devastating. Not to mention that these models were built by ingesting millions of items made by others without their consent.

Yes. A human was involved, but to what extent? The disclaimer doesn't say. It could be 99% written by AI and 1% reviewed by human - to which all that would be is the human then taking a look at the model-of-choice's report and findings, slamming text through a spell checker, and making sure it didn't break the game. Because if it looks "good enough" it's "good to ship".

But we don't know that. And that's the problem. LocQA usually has strict requirements of being fluent or native proficiency in the target language. It's a position where you know the person in the role is able to understand both the native tongue and language to be transferred to.

An MLAI model doesn't know language. It doesn't know the slang or the cultural tones and differences. What it has is a matrix of all the possible things it could be, and runs an if-then formulaic expression to decide what words it should put in the response. It's guessing what you want to see based on the prompt you ask. Sometimes it will get things right, but probability is always like that. You have more success with it being correct the first time when you spend time to have something translated and localized properly by someone that actually knows and doesn't have to guess.

When corporations remove the human from that role and replace them with a logic guesser, they're not just hurting the person now out of a job! They're also harming yours and others' experience by allowing subpar meaning half-assedly extrapolated from the original text to pass.

So. Sure, a human looked at it. But is it actually right, or does it just "sound right"? How do you know the whole game and everything else about it aren't generated wholesale at that point with someone merely glancing at it? Ambiguity risks the integrity of the overall product.

Are you really that okay with the lack of transparency? The complacency at the expense of others? The cost increase of continuously degrading quality?