I agree, the current biggest driving force for anger and negativity is social media. But the news media is a major contributor.Quote:
Originally Posted by Niya
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I agree, the current biggest driving force for anger and negativity is social media. But the news media is a major contributor.Quote:
Originally Posted by Niya
You don't want to seem to believe there is more than a one to one of a Fox viewer to a Twitter user. One Fox personality, the now fired Tucker Carlson, had close to 7,000,000 Twitter followers, they then twitter other people.Quote:
Originally Posted by Niya
And I NEVER once said Fox has a bigger media footprint then Twitter. I said you cannot dismiss Fox news influence on the Bud Lite fiasco as meaningless.
To get back on topic. Don Jr. released an AI doctored clip showing DeSantis on the Office wearing a women suit. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-b2346581.html
This was an obvious hoax. Does make me wonder how much of a weapon AI will become in politics. If legislation will try and control it, and how timely that could possibly be.
Did you see the Twitter spaces one? It was a fake Twitter spaces session with AI generated voices of DeSantis, the devil, Trump and a couple others. I've been seeing it floating around Twitter since yesterday. It was hilarious.
Hell, I don't even know what Twitter spaces is. lolQuote:
Originally Posted by Niya
I expect we're going to see a flood of this type of stuff. It sounds pretty easy to produce.
I can't seem to find a video of the parody in full on YouTube or Rumble. All I can find on it are pieces of it along with a bunch of garbage commentary I don't care to listen to or subject anyone else to. I guess I'll have to wait till someone retweets it and it shows up in my Twitter feed again.
OMG are you serious? You guys need to get with the times man. Twitter spaces is all the rage these days and a lot of important conversations will be happening there.Quote:
Originally Posted by wes4dbt
Basically it's like an online panel where people can get together and discuss things and the public can listen in. It's kinda like what the Lapeef network does on YouTube where they have panels of people come up to discuss whatever interesting things are happening.
Oh yes, this has already been happening. The Twitter Spaces one I mentioned was actually an attack on DeSantis by Trump according to the rumors. I can't confirm if this is true though. It may have been commissioned by Trump or perhaps a random person made it for fun and he just found it. I don't really know yet.Quote:
Originally Posted by wes4dbt
Ok I found it on Twitter in full:-
https://twitter.com/MarioNawfal/stat...42033884958723
That's a fake Twitter Spaces session created with the aid of AI. It's meant to be satirical and funny though Trump has weaponized it against DeSantis.
Yeah, people are yukking it up over that all over the place. I think the biggest missed opportunity there was in making so little use of the faceless FBI drone character. While not way down there with the Devil, Schwab, Hitler, that undisclosed apparatchik ought to be ranked with Cheney at the least. Come to think of it, Cheney could have been used more too. That good pal of Joe and Hillary could be used by Trump to distance himself from the globalist wing of the GOP.
But did I watch the wrong video there? Nothing smells very "AI" about that to me. Sounded like something one could make from a bank of clips and a program that can filter them to remove background sounds and splice pops and even out levels. Or maybe just two or three guys doing impressions.
No, it's AI 100%Quote:
Originally Posted by dilettante
Since AI made a big splash onto the scene with release of ChatGPT, this form of entertainment has been on the rise. There are a few YouTube channels that started making funny content like this for the gaming community. They would take a clip of a video game session and put voice-overs of famous people generated by AI to make it seem as if it was them actually playing the game.
Here's one of my favorites from a month ago:-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-d7y4h4t9U
League of Legends is one of my time-wasters so I'm familiar with the culture of that community enough to understand the humor. But that isn't the only game I've seen people do this kind of thing for.
That Twitter Spaces parody is just a natural progression of that type of content. Somebody was eventually going to take it outside of just video games.
And yea, when I first started seeing those YouTube videos, I thought the same thing, that it was made from a bank of clips. I didn't want to believe that AI was that good at faking voices. But as I listened, being familiar with the game myself, they were using a lot of terms specific to the culture of that game. Terms like "ganking" or "ff 15" are things ONLY League players would ever say so they definitely didn't find a clip somewhere of Biden, Trump or Andrew Tate using those terms.
I also later saw in the description of another video by another YouTuber doing the same thing where he said the voices were AI generated.
I'd say we have major differences in what we consider important.Quote:
Originally Posted by Niya
But, I don't think that comes as a big surprised to either of us. lol
So, do you think AI is involved in this issue? "Robot voice" script reading videos have been a bane for a while now.
https://youtu.be/McM3CfDjGs0
Errr...Perhaps that is true or it's probably just the generational gap between us. My generation was partially raised on social media so it's only natural we'd know about things like Twitter Spaces. We live on social media in a way that the older generation cannot understand. You remind me of my father in that way. He is into tech and programming like us so it's not like he is completely out of touch with technological advancements but some of the social changes brought about by these advancements, like social media, still go over his head. He barely acknowledges the existence of social media despite how central it is to life now. I doubt he knows what Twitter spaces is either.Quote:
Originally Posted by wes4dbt
I know of these. I'm subscribed to a few science channels like Veratasium and the various offshoots of the PBS Studios brand so I get recommended these low effort videos a lot. This content style has been around a long time and is far less sophisticated than AI voice content we see now. I believe those "robot voice" channels are just using really good text-to-speech software whereas AI generated speech in the post-ChatGPT era, such as in the Twitter Spaces parody, uses actual AI which is why they are so difficult to tell apart from real human speech.Quote:
Originally Posted by dilettante
No, your really off base. What's important to me has nothing to do with technology. Nothing to do with politics or social media. Those are things I pass some time with. I often wonder how these people spent so much time online. I sure didn't have that kind of free time until I retired. Work, wife, kids, family, friends and an occasional vacation filled up my free time. But instead of accepting the fact that we have different views of what's important. You want to frame it as I'm ignorant of what's going on in the world, or what effect social media has today. Oh well, it's not important.Quote:
Originally Posted by Niya
No. What I'm saying is knowing about things like Twitter Spaces is as natural for my generation as someone from the 1980s knowing what a rotary dial is. It's just the world we grew up in. That's what I'm saying. No need to get so defensive.Quote:
Originally Posted by wes4dbt
Now to be fair, when I got married in 1980 we never had a rotary phone. Somewhere around 1978 or so there was no cost savings any more.
But yeah, we'd both grown up with them.
That was about the time when you began taking ownership of your phones. There was even a phone company "store" where you picked them out.
Before that an installer brought them to you. That seems to have persisted until modular jacks were considered ubiquitous after many years of transition from hard wiring.
Wow really? Well that had to be a thing long before I was born because I know nothing about this.Quote:
Originally Posted by dilettante
I was lucky enough to actually have used one in my lifetime. When I was a child we had one, however by that time push button phones were the standard. My best guess is that the rotary phone was an old "hand-me-down" that managed to stick around and end up in our household. I have never seen anybody else with one. Don't know what became of it though. I haven't seen it in like 30 years or any other for that matter.Quote:
Originally Posted by dilettante
I think you have an inflated view of Twitter Spaces. Only 11.9% of Americans know what Twitter Spaces is. I think a lot more than 11.9% of Americans in the 80's knew what a rotary dial was.Quote:
Originally Posted by Niya
https://thesmallbusinessblog.net/twi...es-statistics/
We had lots of rotary phones, when we had a phone. When we lived in the country we had a "party line". Which is not as much fun as it sounds. lolQuote:
Originally Posted by dilettante
Yeah, when I was in 4th grade we moved to the sticks and had a party line phone too. I had lots of farmers in my family, so they were not a rare thing for us.
For a long time the monthly rates were less for using pulse-dialed phones instead of touchtone.
I don't remember there being different rates here in Ca. Maybe there was, I've forgotten a lot of things. ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by dilettante
Twitter Spaces is still relatively new so I'm not surprised about that. However, I expect people who actively participate in political conversations to know about it which is why I was surprised you didn't. We pretty much only talk about politics these days in Chit-Chat. I mean right now there is a big fuss over Ron DeSantis crashing Twitter servers due to Twitter Spaces not being able to handle the capacity of his audience. It seems to be one of the biggest stories on the internet right now so it just seemed odd to me that you didn't know what it was as someone who actively participates in political discussions.Quote:
Originally Posted by wes4dbt
My comments about the generation gap came from observing how my father and I differ in the way consume information. He still uses traditional channels like CNN while I would be on social media with the younger folk. He might be around your age so I assumed this was a generational thing since he typically doesn't know about these new channels of information either. He is also generally not hip to the constant changes of the social media landscape.
Anyway, my comments were not meant as an attack on you or an insult or anything of that nature. It's just an observation I made.
When I was young we had a "Party Line" too.Quote:
Originally Posted by Niya
There was an individual ring but when you picked it up someone may be already on. It was open to eavesdropping and things like that.Quote:
A party line was a telephone line shared by more than one user and came at a reduced cost. It was not uncommon to pick up a telephone receiver and hear a conversation already occurring. The town's news often traveled this way despite party line etiquette which dictated never listening in on another's conversation.
Talk about dating yourself :)
For my first university year I lived in a dormitory building on campus. Each room came with a rotary dial wall phone and service as part of the room fee, though long distance calls got billed to you separately. I placed my first pizza delivery order on that phone. For me at least, pizza had always been made at home or very rarely by visiting a deli. Pizzerias did exist but catered to those with the money for sit down dining. Working class families with 7 kids rarely even hit a hot dog stand, much less a sit down restaurant. Even in my dorm year ordering pizza was a rare luxury. It wasn't really in my budget to do it at all.
I remember a relative being shocked at the idea of a dormitory room phone. No such comfort in his day, just payphone banks in the lobbies of dorms. That really was fancy though. Only two students per room and two rooms shared one bathroom. Some of my friends were in barracks-style dorm buildings with communal bathrooms and payphone banks down the hall on each floor.
Soon after they added cable TV service, desk phones on cords, and later ethernet that soon got connected to the Internet as well. A while later WiFi replaced wired networks. But such luxuries came well after I had left.
I liked the rotary phone. It was good tech for it's time.Quote:
Originally Posted by wes4dbt
The internet is amazing, though, because I was still able to find this:
https://www.google.com/search?q=brea...id:NJN5_0hUmaA
Niya won't know this one, but those who lived through the AT&T breakup will remember this.
There was a bomber that got lost on a training mission back during WW II. The crew thought they were about to run out of gas, so they bailed out, at night, over central Idaho. They got exceedingly lucky (except for one guy, who definitely did not). They bailed out over what is now the largest wilderness area in the lower 48, at night, in the winter. They ended up landing in a line down the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. A couple of them found a Forest Service cabin and broke into it. It had a party line. They picked up and heard a couple of the ranch wives chatting, and were able to break in and tell them who they were and where (roughly) they were. In other words, they managed to land in the one place where they could contact somebody. Had they landed anywhere else, they would have been in the mountains, in the winter, with no supplies, and as much as 50 miles from civilization. It wouldn't have been good.
The one guy who was very unlucky probably landed in the river itself. No sign of him was ever discovered, but since the rest of the crew landed in a line on either side of the river...well, that's a big river.
Another fun point is that the bomber wasn't quite so out of gas. It continued flying for quite some time, including circling over the town of Challis for a while, before crashing. They could have made it to a town.
Less fun, while the one crew member vanished, a Forest Service ranger named Charley Langer and the pilot he was flying with, crashed into a mountain and died while searching for the crew.
What's behind the link? It doesn't work for me. It just brings up a blank page.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker
That's a funny song. Don't remember ever hearing it. I'd forgot about going from renting to buying phones. I took a summer class in economics at San Jose sate (3hr economics class, yuk). We had a guest speaker, some VP from ATT talking about the breakup. Had to be @ '82.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker
I still remember I had an unlisted phone number for years and I had to pay extra for them NOT to put my number in the phone book. lol
I've watched younger people react to "The Terminator" and practically freak out that phone books normally listed your address.
I suppose in many ways there just isn't any community any more. Too many rats in the cage, too much mobility, too much polyculturalism. Everyone becomes "the other" very quickly.
Funny you should say that, I re-watched all the Terminator films(except the woke ones, they are trash) earlier this year and found myself startled by this fact despite the fact that phone-books were a thing in my youth. It seems I didn't realize I had forgotten that.Quote:
Originally Posted by dilettante
We can thank liberalism for that. Liberalism dehumanizes people by reducing a person to nothing more than superficial markers of identity like skin colour, sex or who they voted for. It is one of the greatest evils of our time.Quote:
Originally Posted by dilettante
A for Anything
I'm surprised that nobody has updated the story as a script and made a movie to help expose the masses to these ideas.Quote:
A for Anything is a science fiction novel by American writer Damon Knight. The author postulates the discovery, in the near future, of the "Gismo", a device that can duplicate anything—even another Gismo. Since all material objects have become essentially free, the only commodity of value is human labor, and the author suggests that a slave economy would be the inevitable result.
Gismo + AI could produce a truly remorseless economy.
By rights, the Star Trek franchise should have tackled this once they had matter replicators and AIs on the scale of Commander Data and holographic Doctors. But of course the mythology underlying the Federation (perhaps unconsciously) worships extreme income inequality as the definition of utopia. Andorians and even the Ferengi can see how monstrous the Federation is. In many ways it's just a twin of the Klingon Empire with better table manners.
Everyone needs to see this:-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8GUH0_htRM
I haven't finished watching it as of this post but what I've seen so far is mind blowing. This is going to be released to GPT-4 subscribers soon.
Well it could be we are going to need this stuff.
American IQ Scores Have Rapidly Dropped, Proving the 'Reverse Flynn Effect'
Perhaps the fate of the world is in the hands of other countries.Quote:
“If you’re thinking about what society cares about and what it’s emphasizing and reinforcing every day,” she says, “there’s a possibility of that being reflected in performance on an ability test.”
A few other hypotheses have been put forth to try and explain the reverse Flynn Effect, such as falling nutritional standards, the worsening of school systems, social media, increased air pollution, or the idea that people just be less interested in portions of the SPAP Project personality survey.
Falling IQs have become yet another mystery for scientists to solve.
In that context, AI could be bad. Because as we grow more and more slothful and apathetic, we are going to let AI pick up more and more of the slack until AI has near complete control of our lives because we don't want to put any actual effort into doing anything so we can continue sedating ourselves with porn, drugs and liberal propaganda.
I keep thinking of the far future seen by the Time Traveler in H. G. Wells' The Time Machine and its... weird screen adaptations, each made with a jaundiced contemporary eye.
Eloi and Morlocks were two faces of the coin even though some versions of the story paint those descendent groups quite differently. The unseen faction above them isn't covered so much, and might well be some AI overlord except that most versions have them consuming Eloi as much or more than the Morlocks do.
Sounds like a story worth re-exploring from scratch, but it might be more depressing than the original was in its day.
Good God, these AIs and their liberal leanings. When will the engineers get rid of this ridiculous leftist bias.
I wanted to make a post on Twitter but it was too long. So I took the lazy approach and asked Google's bard to shorted it for me. This is what happened:-
https://www.vbforums.com/images/ieimages/2023/06/3.png
Why in the bowels of Christ would this thing assume I cared even 1 iota about that? That is not how I evaluate the words I choose when I write. This is revealing of a possible concern about the rise of AI. These AI will slowly replace our own individuality with their own brand of corporate approved soullessness. If we're not careful, we might all eventually end up being represented by AI avatars that are as bland and lifeless as a corporate memo.
On a forum packed to the gills (which have been repurposed into inner ear bones) with pedantic types, you object to a re-wording that will give pedants less to trip over?
The purpose of written words should be to communicate. The more clear you communicate the message you intend, the better the written words suits your purpose.
Hmmm...let me give it a shot to see if I can make you understand what my objections are.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker
I don't object to the change. I object to the reason for the change. I look at writing like a fingerprint or signature. It echoes what makes each of us unique. Every piece of writing contains the essence of the individual that wrote it. I am no different. Part of what makes me who I am is that I will never choose a word using such a criteria. I asked the AI to shorten my text, yet it took it upon itself to also remove that word based on a criteria I would never use. It's telling me that the unique parts of me that would choose that word isn't approved and needed to be replaced with something better. In other words, this AI passed judgement on me. I find that deeply offensive.
The people creating these AIs are injecting their own biases and values into it which manifests as judgement of the people using these AIs and I find that very concerning.
I'm assuming you have IntelliSense and Option Explicit turned off then :pQuote:
Originally Posted by Niya
The Visual Studio IDE doesn't insult me by trying to impose cultural values that are foreign to me, like political correctness.Quote:
Originally Posted by TysonLPrice
https://www.etymonline.com/word/huma...online_v_16039
It looks like the attempt fails in its goals anyway.Quote:
human (adj.)
mid-15c., humain, humaigne, "human," from Old French humain, umain (adj.) "of or belonging to man" (12c.), from Latin humanus "of man, human," also "humane, philanthropic, kind, gentle, polite; learned, refined, civilized." This is in part from PIE *(dh)ghomon-, literally "earthling, earthly being," as opposed to the gods (from root *dhghem- "earth"), but there is no settled explanation of the sound changes involved. Compare Hebrew adam "man," from adamah "ground." Cognate with Old Lithuanian žmuo (accusative žmuni) "man, male person."
You didn't need to explain that, I already understood you. Because of your particular biases, you are hypersensitive to any correction in certain areas. You don't care about corrections in areas that you aren't so sensitized to. For example, there are certain simple words that I consistently spell incorrectly. I don't know why, I just trip over them. They are quite meaningless, such as restaurant (which I am learning, as I now get it right). I'm never quite sure where the U goes, probably because of the similarity in how I pronounce both that word and "aunt". Spell checkers correct me when I get it wrong, and I think nothing of it. You probably feel the same way about words that carry so little baggage. My typos are still part of that 'signature' that you mention, and yet I don't care at all when a spell checker corrects me. You only care because you're hypersensitive to certain things. Being hypersensitive, you can't quite imagine what it's like NOT to be hypersensitive.
Communication is still better than miscommunication. That's what pedants are all about. If your goal was to show a passive-aggressive misogynism, then I'd agree that you used the right word. If that wasn't your goal, then the change should be no more consequential to you than spell checkers correcting my typos of restaurant. The fact that you turned to 'signature' as your reason for objecting kind of supports that view. You might hate liberalism, but I hate passive-aggressiveness.
Ye only it comes from Greek.Quote:
Originally Posted by dilettante
Word Homa (χώμα) means soil-dirt . The one that comes from earth.
I'm amazed it says Latin in every site explanation. It's clearly Greek.
It probably comes to English from Greek via Latin. English is already a mutt of a language, but it wasn't the first.Quote:
Originally Posted by sapator
No arguing, I just commented on the fact that the internet seems to ignore it's origin.
Admittedly I haven't looked on every possible results but googled or ducked (quack!) on the first page seems to have no idea of the original word.
That's funny, I've always had problems with that word, also Temporary. Also have a bad habit of writing "except" when I mean "accept".Quote:
I don't know why, I just trip over them. They are quite meaningless, such as restaurant (which I am learning, as I now get it right). I'm never quite sure where the U goes,
In my highly subjective opinion, Latin seems to be as far back as anyone goes on word origin. Maybe not just on word origin, either, after all, it's Jupiter, not Zeus.Quote:
Originally Posted by sapator
By the time I got to high school they no longer offered Classical Greek or Hebrew. Only Latin was left.
We'd been told that this was part of "democratization" of the public school system. When the post-Sputnik push for math, science, and engineering education (drafting, machine shop) ramped up there was a demand to balance this with more access to sports and vocational programs (like shoe repair and "hospitality" hotel/restaurant work). Many former diploma requirements like languages became nothing but elective subjects.
I can remember one of my grandmothers being shocked by the changes. She remembered commuting 15 miles to become the first person in our family to have graduated high hchool (sometime around 1923 or 1924). Both sides of my family came from rural farming and gradually moved into railroading and factory work even though the dairy farm on one side operated until being bought out around 1968. High school had still been a big thing for many people born before WW II for whom schooling normally ended with the 8th grade.
A high school diploma was probably socially closer to a 4-year college degree today, or perhaps even a graduate degree now.
Bummer on not teaching Greek.
It's like not really knowing the origin of words. It's like not knowing assembly :lol:
Wha? No it's Zeus not Jupiter. Those are Roman BS since they used to steal everything Greek to make it their own....Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker
THERE IS NO JUPITER ON ZUU, ERRR, ZEUS.
I guess we had a choice: teach Classical Greek or help dumb kids nail soles back onto shoes.
Sounds like a reasonable choice. Not much of a job market that requires Greek here in the US.Quote:
Originally Posted by dilettante
I'm not so sure. If education was about churning out workers we'd probably still live under feudal systems like plantation slavery with severe limits on urbanization. Much of the world might well still be kneeling to the despotic monarchs of Europe.
The "Liberal Arts" in education used to mean something entirely different than it does today.
Greek is just a member of the family, hardly the origin.Quote:
Originally Posted by sapator
Ancient Greek is worth reading and I don't mean learning ancient Greek but get translated texts and broad your mind.
Unfortunately school has done a terrible job on teaching ancient Greek. We where learning them like robots. I'm trying to close the gap now but thing is I have not a lot of time and to be fair sometimes I will prefer excursions or goofing around and now I have another thorn with rehearsals . But is always on my todo list .
Right.Quote:
Originally Posted by TysonLPrice
Wrong. That is funny tho, what they are trying to pass. I guess if it wasn't for me you would also think that human is Latin, right?
I've constantly proven words origin to be Greek so posting a map in my face means nothing.
You can say it is just a map and believe what you want. The fact is the Indo-European family of languages is an established discipline regardless of what you know :rolleyes:Quote:
Originally Posted by sapator
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languagesQuote:
All Indo-European languages are descended from a single prehistoric language, linguistically reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European, spoken sometime in the Neolithic to Early Bronze Age. The geographical location where it was spoken, the Proto-Indo-European homeland, has been the object of many competing hypotheses; the academic consensus supports the Kurgan hypothesis, which posits the homeland to be the Pontic–Caspian steppe in what is now Ukraine and southern Russia, associated with the Yamnaya culture and other related archaeological cultures during the 4th millennium BC to early 3rd millennium BC. By the time the first written records appeared, Indo-European had already evolved into numerous languages spoken across much of Europe, South Asia, and part of Western Asia. Written evidence of Indo-European appeared during the Bronze Age in the form of Mycenaean Greek and the Anatolian languages of Hittite and Luwian.