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Comment Give fish to them (Score 4, Insightful) 69

The point at which some environmentalism reveals itself as misanthropy is where "don't feed the animals" is commanded because it's "unnatural." This stance overlooks that humans are a part of nature, not separate from it. Barring legitimate safety concerns, like habituating bears to human sites, there is nothing inherently wrong with developing relationships, even co-dependencies and forms of partial domestication, with wild animals. Such interactions can represent a form of interspecies mutualism, a concept well-documented in biology, where different species form beneficial partnerships. History, too, offers examples of co-evolution, such as the relationship between humans and the ancestors of domestic dogs. The argument that animals "don't understand what humans are like" is paternalistic. They understand what they like and, as the orca study suggests, are capable of initiating interaction based on their own complex social logics. To deny them this agency is to deny their intelligence and autonomy. They can choose to interact or not, to the limits of their abilities; let them make that choice. This aligns with philosophical arguments for animal autonomy, which posit that sentient beings with preferences should have those preferences respected. The appeal to "naturalness" is a flawed premise in the Anthropocene, an epoch defined by human alteration of all ecosystems. There is no longer a "pure" nature to which we can defer. The insistence on a hands-off policy often stems from a puritanical, almost religious, reverence for a "Sacred" nature that must remain untouched by humanity. This view secretly frames humans as a blight, a contamination from which the world must be cordoned off. It is a philosophy of alienation, not of responsible cohabitation. The fear that a friendly whale, offering fish as a gesture of friendship, might suddenly attack boats is not just unfounded; it actively dismisses the animal's observed intent. It is a projection of human fears onto a situation that the animals themselves are defining as peaceful. This is not to ignore all risks, but to challenge a risk-averse dogma that precludes the possibility of positive, unprecedented relationships. The real debate should be about fostering a more nuanced ethic of interaction, one that respects animal agency and acknowledges our shared and entangled future on this planet, rather than one that capitulates to a deep-seated misanthropy that ultimately desires a world with fewer people in it.

Comment Re:Erm... (Score 1, Flamebait) 163

>What am I missing?

Musk's hype and overambitious promises, people who hate his politics and are therefore looking for any reason to call anything he does a failure, the fact that most of the early Super Heavies so far went boom (this is not a surprise, but some people don't remember how many Falcons went boom before they developed into one of the most reliable rockets available) and possibly a few launch and moon landing failures.

Comment Re: Welcome to the new reality (Score 1) 33

>I see a future where we end up like the humans in WALL-E... just fat blobs who can't walk

You say that like it's a bad thing. The entire history of human innovation has been a relentless drive to eliminate toil.We replaced farmhands with tractors and are now replacing tedious coding with AI. This is the endgame we've been building toward. The WALL-E scenario shouldn't be seen as a warning about technology. It's a critique of what humans might choose to do with an existence free from mandatory work. The problem isn't the chair, it's the person sitting in it. A future where survival is automated could just as easily unlock a renaissance of human creativity, philosophy, and exploration as it could lead to mass lethargy.

Comment Re:Welcome to the new reality (Score 3, Interesting) 33

>Artists will always

The argument that artists will "always" retain an edge by fixing artifacts or choosing lighting mistakes a temporary bug for a permanent feature. The "human touch" tasks like fixing artifacts or choosing lighting are a temporary patch on an improving technology. You assume human qualities like taste, and originality are insurmountable moats but AI is already not just an apprentice executing an order. AIs are collaborators in discovery. Their "misunderstandings" and unexpected outputs can introduce novel pathways that a human, constrained by habit and bias, might never have found. The artist's intent may evolve from dictating a final image to curating the surprising results of a creative dialogue with the machine.

The more interesting question is not whether AI can learn our taste, but whether it can develop its own. By training on the entirety of art history, AI could identify and generate entirely new aesthetic systems, alien to our own, which we may come to appreciate. Originality, then, is not about a divine spark but about the capacity for novel synthesis. A parrot can say "I love you" without feeling love, but the words still evoke emotion in the person who hears them. Similarly, AI can generate an image of profound sadness or joy without feeling anything. If the work evokes a genuine emotional and intellectual response in the viewer, the "emptiness" of its origin may not matter. The meaning is co-created in the mind of the human observer. The future of art, therefore, is not about humans retaining a monopoly on craft. That battle is already lost. It is about a shift in the artist's role: from a maker of objects to an explorer of concepts. Enduring human value will lie in the framing of the idea, the curation of the AI's output, and the construction of the narrative that gives the final piece its meaning. And of course the "purely human" piece will always be valued for that alone regardless of technical skill.

Comment Re:Scummy (Score 1) 92

The illegality of downloading for personal use hinges on me making a copy on my personal device. The original intent of these laws was to forbid reproduction, as reproduction for the purposes of selling was the expected outcome of that. Making a copy for my personal device does not violate the spirit of those laws, and saying it's copyright violation is a weasely abuse of the intent of copyright law. Which in itself is just an outright theft from public domain and a violation of the intents of the constitution.

Comment Re:It's a good start (Score 2) 80

Bureaucracy in general is hardest on the people least able to cope with it. Whether it's welfare applications, requesting intervention, or for example trying to start a business the poorest people are least able to even start the right paperwork and also the least able to fill out the reams of red tape, or know how to fill it out. A properly designed system would be finding those people and helping them instead of presenting a faceless bureaucracy and if you can't afford a solicitor, tough.

Comment Re:smells like greenwashing (Score 1) 44

It's pure symbolism. You can build solar panels and the land will still be poisoned, if it was poisoned before. It's not like we have a shortage of deserts with a lot of sun. The best thing to do with the coal mines if we're not going to clean them up is to cordon them off and let nature grow over them for 200 years or so.

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