quicklime

I almost decided to mention that earlier/above. I’m not convinced yet that Russ Baker isn’t a little off the deep end overall, but that whole story certainly is a fascinating and disturbing read, as is much of the material on his site.

When reminding or teaching the younger community about George H.W. Bush, let us not forget to mention that when the US elected him, it elected the former CIA director to the presidency.

A supposedly democratic Republic elected its own chief of secret police to lead the executive branch of government. Somehow even at that time most Americans didn’t seem to be aware of that glaring fact, and far fewer have seemed to realize it ever since.

And then the country went on to elect that guy’s completely unqualified son to the same office less than a generation later. /facepalm

Have we already forgotten Kimbra?!

“No puppet. No puppet. You’re the puppet!”

2016 debate clip

… or Rudy’s hair gravy.

Thanks for this. I’m glad you didn’t have to deal with searing pain since panic is already more than enough.

I don’t mean this to invalidate your experience in any way; I’ll just state sources to make clear where I got that idea.

https://medilexinc.com/a-spoonful-of-medicine-blog/the-process-of-drowning

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8928428

Yes, drowning is known to be quite painful but only for a very brief time before unconsciousness sets in.

Pratt in the audio clips also claimed that Trump asked his wife and former first lady Melania to parade around Mar-a-Lago in a bikini “so all the other guys could get a look at what they were missing,” adding that Melania ultimately retorted “I’ll do that when you walk around with me in your bikini.”

🤣🫣😳

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I spent a long time living in places that had saved their one last ‘classic’ movie theater by turning it into a rerun palace for ‘art films’, cult classics and other specialty cinema.

Also, I bought the DVD of Baraka that came out in the late 90s or so, and I was so disappointed in how visually awful the digital transfer was at that time, the disc was honestly not even worth watching. Not just because of small screens, the problem was that whoever did the digital transfer had completely fucked up the frame rate conversion in a way that caused every one of the many time-lapse sequences to move with a really annoying jitter. There was no possible playback setting or processing to fix it either, the process had removed information making it impossible to smooth or recover, at least back then.

So that junk DVD motivated me to just keep grabbing anyone I could, or no one if no one was around, and going out of my way to see the movie every time it came to a big screen within an hour of me. Now it’s been years since my last watch… I’m not sure how much more I could take of it now that it’s so clear the human race already sold out its long term survival for short term gain.

I could go with that.

Still having a hard time with the idea that a thing could be even “some level of intelligent” without being sentient. But we don’t need to continue from there, there’s any number of people ready to pile on at that point and say that it’s “all semantics anyway” or start deconstructing sentience.

Sure, we could say that the popular usage of the term AI no longer actually stands for “artificial intelligence”. Or we could say that the term “artificial intelligence” is no longer understood to refer to something that can do a large part of what actual intelligence can do.

But then we would need a new word for actual, real intelligence and that seems like a lot of wasted effort. We could just have the words mean what they’ve always meant. There is a lot of good in spreading public awareness of the vast gap between machines that seem as if they understand a language (when actually they just deeply model its patterns) and imaginary machines that are equipped to actually think.

Some newer Lemmy users thru some third-party reader apps may need to click HD to get enough pixels to make the image readable before zooming.

I’m here via Boost, for example, and unless I were to set it to always pre-request HD images (and thereby consume far more bandwidth, unwanted) I have to manually click HD.

I mean… it’s not artificial intelligence no matter how many people continue the trend of inaccurately calling it that. It’s a large language model. It has the ability to write things that look disturbingly close, even sometimes indistinguishable, to actual human writing. There’s no good reason to mistake that for actual intelligence or rationality.

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Baraka – I’ve seen it at least a dozen times, most of them in movie theaters.

I haven’t been on FB for several years, but ugh there was a while in the late 2010s when so many people over there were referring to FB groups as sites and just arghh arrghh aaarrgghhh.