RE:NStrahl

#google #google gemini #ai #neurodivergent #xmen #school

“Anne Kim’s book Poverty For Profit: How Corporations Get Rich Off America’s Poor gives a partial answer to an enduring question: how come we spend so much trying to solve poverty but poverty persists? One major reason, Kim argues, is that parasitic for-profit industries suck a lot of the money out of antipoverty programs. The privatization of government functions has meant that plenty of money that should be going to the least well-off ends up padding the pockets of the already wealthy. Kim’s book helps us understand why, for example, cities can spend so much trying to combat homelessness and not seem to actually do much to alleviate it. Kim shows us how our tax dollars get siphoned away, and lays out a blueprint for how we might use government far more effectively, if we abandon the mindset that privatization means “efficiency.””

— How Corporations Profit Off Poverty

I have had a lengthy chat with Google's AI, Gemini Ultra. However, it did most of the talking.

I started the chat with a simple prompt:

"If there existed for neurodivergent people something like "Xavier's School For Gifted Youngsters" from X-men, what aspects would it have?"

I then had it elaborate as much as possible on what it would be like and how to start and build it.

Overall, it's not worth that much, but there is a great deal of potential. Here is a link to the chat:

Created with Gemini Advanced

#glassdoor #ai #google #google gemini #antithesis #skynet

“Marxism is known for socialism, and socialism is often described as the exploitation of the working class. Capitalism has a tendency to increase technologies and promote innovations because of market competition. But Marx thought that once the workers take over power and kick out the capitalists, they can utilize the development of productive forces for the sake of themselves — more wealth, more well-being. But there is one problem: Sustainability. Because as Marx started to study natural sciences later in the 1850s and 1860s, he came to realize the development of technologies in capitalism actually don’t create a condition for emancipation of the working class. Because not only do those technologies control the workers more efficiently, they destabilize the old system of jobs and make more precarious, low skilled jobs. At the same time those technologies exploit from nature more efficiently and create various problems such as exhaustion of the soil, massive deforestation, and the exhaustion of the fuels, and so on.”

— Kohei Saito

So, I was looking through my subscribed bowls on Glassdoor and came across this funny reply in one of the posts about AI.

It didn't surprise me that someone joked about their company building an AI called Skynet.

What surprised me is the number of comments from people implying that they've somewhat considered building Skynet or wouldn't care if something like it came into being.

Regardless, the only reason I am posting a link to this reply and the comments is that one of the comments contains a link to a #chat someone had with Google's Gemini Ultra about what the antithesis to Skynet would be like and how it would be built.

I admit that I am impressed by the thoroughness of Gemini's responses.

We’re building out an internal AI tool called Skynet

Tumblr: Only neurotypical people do X. Neurodivergent people never do X. It's literally never necessary to do X, and if you do, you are by definition acting out of malice.

Neurodivergent person whose neurodivergence primarily expresses itself as X:

Example –

Person A: Why don't people just tell you when they want you to do something?

Person B: Well, very direct requests are likely to be misinterpreted as orders, and it's often not appropriate to give a person orders, so couching the request in indirect language avoids that possibility.

Person A: Why would anyone interpret a request as an order? Only neurotypical people do that. That's crazy. Neurotypical people are crazy.

Every single autistic person who needs the phrasing of requests to thread the needle like Luke Skywalker blowing up the fucking Death Star because if it's too indirect they'll take it as an observational statement, but if it's too direct their brain immediately goes into "fuck you, don't order me around" mode and refuses to do anything at all:

Example 2 –

Person A: Why do people who don't like you pretend to be cool with you, then make up excuses not to hang out with you?

Person B: Well, people often experience being told they're not liked or not welcome as a form of harm, and react to "defend" themselves from that harm, so a person might make excuses either because they want to avoid hurting you, or because they want to avoid a confrontation.

Person A: Why would anyone be hurt by being told to go away? Only neurotypical people do that. That's crazy. Neurotypical people are crazy.

Every single person whose ADHD is comorbid with rejection-sensitive dysphoria:

I'm not sure what's more predictable – the people seeing this post and coming to me like "okay, but I'm the exception, my communication style really IS objectively correct and everybody else is either crazy or evil", or the people who are clearly going up the thread to reblog a version without the RSD example.

raimi

if i can add on as a person with psychosis, the "neurotypical people are crazy" sentiment is also ableist in and of itself, because it's once again equating psychosis with incomprehensibility and contributing to our dehumanization. but hey, sane people love to toss the "crazy" label at anything they don't understand so they don't have to acknowledge that everyone has a reason for their behavior.

(which, fun fact, includes "crazy people.")

nkjemisin

"I think that in one way or another we will do ourselves in. Sooner or later the generation that says, 'We're living our last days,' really will be. But not because somebody strikes us from heaven. We'll do it to ourselves. And, to the future."

The Right Wing total adoption of fascism is here.

#VoteBlue

tzifron

Thinktank report says ‘resounding evidence’ shows companies continue to keep prices high even as their inflationary costs drop

“For many, the pandemic is not over. People need to continue to wear masks and get vaccinated if they can, in addition to pushing for better air quality and other mitigation efforts, instead of worshiping the individualistic “you do you” philosophy. Even now, with health care facilities in Los Angeles County and other cities reinstating mask mandates, it seems like business as usual with leaders continuing to downplay the pandemic or ignore it altogether.”

— COVID Isn’t Going Anywhere. Masking Up Could Save My Life.

Authoritarian Republicans, ineffectual Democrats, and a clueless media

This is the infernal triangle that structures American politics.

In one corner, a party consistently ratcheting toward authoritarianism, refusing as a matter of bedrock principle—otherwise they are “Republicans in Name Only”—to compromise with adversaries they frame as ineluctably evil and seek literally to destroy.

In the second corner, a party that says that, in a political culture where there is not enough compromise, the self-evident solution is to offer more compromise—because those guys’ extremist fever, surely, is soon to break …

And in the third corner, those agenda-setting elite political journalists, who frame the Democrats as one of the “sides” in a tragic folie à deux destroying a nation otherwise united and at peace with itself because both sides stubbornly … refuse to compromise.

Not all educated people are liberal, but most conservative rhetoric and failed economic/tax policies depend on highly unserious thinkers.

We have a tax revenue problem created and made worse by Republican tax cuts.

We have a deficit built almost entirely on Republican borrowing.

Trump's four years alone added $8 TRILLION.

Keep in mind, Trump claimed he would eliminate the deficit.

Several months before the 2016 election, Trump pledged he would be able to eliminate the national debt – then around $19 trillion – “over a period of eight years.” Oct 27, 2020

We have a tax revenue problem created and made worse by Republican tax cuts.

We have a deficit built almost entirely on Republican borrowing.

Trump's four years alone added $8 TRILLION.

Keep in mind, Trump claimed he would eliminate the deficit.

Several months before the 2016 election, Trump pledged he would be able to eliminate the national debt – then around $19 trillion – “over a period of eight years.” Oct 27, 2020

“The fundamental reality of American politics is that the last transfer of power was not peaceful, because the guy who was voted out of office engaged in a multi-level campaign to nullify the election result that culminated in a violent assault of his supporters on the Capitol – an attempted auto-coup that, had it been successful, would have ended constitutional government in the United States. If that doesn’t have any legal, constitutional consequences for the man at the center of it all, it would not only prove that the president is above the law, that a powerful politician is beyond reproach if they have enough of a radical following that is willing to threaten violence; it would demonstrate to everyone in America that you don’t have to accept election results you don’t like. If the system doesn’t find a way to penalize this, these attempts to undermine elections and the transfer of power by an array of pseudo-legal tricks, flat-out illegal tactics, and a hefty dose of violent intimidation would be established as a permanent temptation. They would become a fixture in American politics.”

— Militant Democracy vs Donald Trump

amnhnyc

Rockin’ around… the uh… what? Meet the Christmas tree worm (Spirobranchus giganteus). This “festive” marine worm lives on tropical coral reefs around the planet. Its name is derived from the spiny fir trees that are emblems of the holiday season. But at just 1.5 inches (3.8 cm) in size, you won’t find any decorations hanging from this species’ “branches.” While part of the worm is buried in the coral, its colorful appendages are used for breathing and for snatching plankton to eat. In ideal conditions, Christmas tree worms can live for up to 40 years!

Photo: John Turnbull, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0, flickr