A useful sample of society's views are represented in the comments here. It certainly resolves the Fermi paradox: All the technological species we know of are ultimately self-destructive.
Why? Because new technology carries unforeseeable consequences. We do not know what we do not know. We didn't need grey goo - we only needed to suck on Gaia's toxic teat of fossil fuels. The energy packaged into fossil carbon is so useful in the short term that nations will continue to play brinksmanship with each other due to the edge such fuels give in economic competition. Nobody wants to give up fossil fuels. Here I sit drinking my Kenya coffee with madagascan chocolate on my memory foam cushioned teak chair, while I criticise the politicians for burying their head in the sand about the end of our civilisation, our species, having given rise to the holocene extinction event built into our species' future ever since the discovery of fire. We are waking up, at last, to the inevitability of our actions - and the prognosis is ... not good.

Counter-argument: you don't like the idea that people have the ability to speak more freely on a platform

Given that that's an outright lie: mu.

"people" don't have the right to speak more freely. Musk has been incredibly liberal with his use of the banhammer. Only people who's views Musk approves of in some way (agrees with, thinks are funny when high, trolls someone who he dislikes) are free to speak. People who disagree aren't.

It's his right to spend $50 billion running his personal platform with its own editorial policy, but don't simply make shit up about it merely because you like how that shit smells.

When I was a grad student I used to collect the stickers and put them on the lab trash cans.

You're preaching to the choir, but what I'm saying is that no one has devised a reliable way to do it at large organisations.

Scientists can repeat the target again and again, but until they

It's a scientist's job tell you how the universe works. It's not their job to tell you what to do with that information.

It's pointless them banning it anyway, because there are already plenty of other AI tools to generate porn.

I doubt they were banning it out of a sense of morals, whether they're willing to do it depends on whether they think the extra cash outweighs the negative press/perception.

It's not impossible. I've worked many places where it would be trivial to identify who is contributing and who isn't and I would have been glad to provide a list if asked.

lol of course, but you aren't the Oracle. Look I've worked there too, and could have provided a list. Their managers would have vociferously disagreed of course. In fact some of them would have been substantially better for contributing merely nothing.

But why do you think the company was keeping them employed? It wasn't for the lulz. How could they know you were right, as I'm sure those people thought I was doing nothing. But they're incompetent so their opinion is worthless.

Yeah, spot on. But that's typical of journalism - especially of scientific journalism. It just feels that nobody cares any more (if they ever did). Reminds me of those papers who aren't even subtle: "Number 37 Bus found on moon", for example. The cetacean research is interesting though - being able to recognise what the potential variables of non-human speech might be is still an awesome task, and one very suitable to AI. Far more suitable than trying to use it to assist with your programming:

"Hey chatbot, how many '1' characters are in the string '1101101' ?"
"There are 3".

Oh I'll also add that at least in his favour Starmer has ruthlessly cracked down on the antisemitism which has infested certain parts of the Labour party.

Given his lack of opinions on anything I have no idea if he's done it because it's the right thing to do or because it's electoral poison and a route to reducing the competition from the further left wing of the party. But either way, it needed doing.

Texas for example has a wide variety of voter suppression laws that make it difficult for young people to vote

They did this in the UK: it was completely transparent so old person ID (such as over 65 bus passes) are valid voter ID but young person's ones (under 25) are not. Fortunately in the UK it backfired because it turns out a lot of old people are not very on the ball when it comes to getting voter ID.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-...

Also because they are utterly shit at their jobs, the Tories never bothered to update the law and so the veterans ID (another demographic likely to vote Tory) were never added after they were created.

So thankfully the worst effects of their attempt at election fixing were undone by their own incompetence. This time. Voter fraud is a problem made up by the right wing in order to justify introducing laws to skew elections in their favour.

Sadly Starmer is such a snivelling shitheel that he's unlikely to undo it.

Still a snivelling shitheel is infinitely preferable to the parade of incompetents, corrupt pocket-liners and wreckers that make up the current government.

Well, that's the thing. Humans killed millions of whales, and there is no evidence that they adapted or communicated in any way to deal with the problem.

Is there not?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Not saying language had anything to do with it, but in this case Orcas certainly adapted to whaling by helping the monkeys do it for payment in meat.

I remember going to a presentation by John Lilly when he was visiting London back in the '70s. He was an interesting guy - though at the time was talking a lot about how much he enjoyed ketamine. He spent much of his career attempting to establish complex communication with dolphins – his reasoning for not attempting to do so with whales was based upon the neural mass (brain size and neural density) of dolphins and humans being approximately the same - whereas the neural mass of whales is so much greater that we would not stand a chance of being able to understand the depth of their thoughts. His work was inspirational - one creative output was LeGuin's short story "The Author of the Acacia Seeds. And Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics" One of the important insights Lilly brought to the table was the SETI comparison with cetaceans and extra terrestrial intelligence. The point has been made before, but a counter-argument is that cetaceans have not developed writing, which itself is an important step in advancing mathematics (both of which are considered fundamental tools in SETI communications).

People suck as a general rule and you can't tell me that some "peers" have deliberately trying to bork someone else's career in the process of reviewing a paper.

Definitely that. But also there's a broader phenomenon. In any given field some sub areas are incredibly protective, combative and outright nasty and others are full of fluffy bunnies and unicorns. The latter tend to be much more pleasant and give each other nice, well written, thoughtful reviews rather than performatively piling on heaps of invective.

You can see it in action. I often work in computer vision and at the last conference I was at (ECCV), there were some outrageous number of podium talks (like 4) on event cameras. They are pretty niche devices that few research groups even have and are awkward enough to work with that very few people do. It's a small friendly field (I know a few of the major players and they're just nice people) and as a result it's overrepresented. Because you won't get a podium presentation if you have a bad review, and in the bigger fields, there's always an asshat who loves cutting others down to size.

And that's with double blind reviews. I did some work in object detection once a while back. Let me tell you that was one crazy bunch of motherfuckers if ever there was one.

Seems to me that an AI, assuming that it was trained honestly which is another matter entirely, would review the paper without bias.

So? A dice roll will also review the paper without bias.

I think he means "managing a Rasberry Pi {with a graphical desktop}" but you read it as "managing a {Rasberry Pi with a graphical desktop}".

As in he's decrying the remote management being GUI based not that managing a machine with a GUI is bad.

My 3D printer runs a GUI on top of OctoPi,

Isn't the point of octopi that it presents a web interface? I've not fired mine up in years, though.

I'd temper that slightly: it's fine if it has no knobs and switches but a standard or documented protocol you can control e.g. with an app.