blackstampede 2w ago • 100%
The man has a type, and that type is either 17 or 6402373705728000 years old.
blackstampede 3w ago • 100%
My patron saint
blackstampede 3w ago • 100%
I attended a federal contracting conference a few months ago, and they had one of these things (or a variant) walking around the lobby.
From talking to the guy who was babysitting it, they can operate autonomously in units or be controlled in a general way (think higher level unit deployment and firing policies rather than individual remote control) given a satellite connection. In a panel at the same conference, they were discussing AI safety, and I asked:
Given that AI seems to be developing from less complex tasks like chess (which is still complicated, obviously, but a constrained problem) to more complex and ill-defined tasks like image generation, it seems that it's inevitable that we will develop AI capable of providing strategic or tactical plans, if we haven't already. If two otherwise-equally-matched military units are fighting, it seems reasonable to believe that the one using an AI to make decisions within seconds would win over the one with human leadership, simply because they would react more quickly to changing battlefield conditions. This would place an enormous incentive on the US military to adopt AI assisted strategic control, which would likely lead to units of autonomous weapons which are also controlled by an autonomous system. Do any of you have any concerns about this, and if so, do you have any ideas about how we can mitigate the problem.
(Paraphrasing, obviously, but this is close)
The panel members looked at each other, looked at me, smiled, shrugged, and didn't say anything. The moderator asked them explicitly if they would like to respond, and they all declined.
I think we're at the point where an AI could be used to create strategies, and I would be very surprised if no one were trying to do this. We already have autonomous weapons, and it's only a matter of time before someone starts putting them together. Yeah, they will generally act reasonably, because they'll be trained on human tactics in a variety of scenarios, but that will be cold comfort to dead civilians who happened to get in the way of a hallucinating strategic model.
EDIT: I know I'm not actually addressing anything you said, but you seem to have thought about this a bit, and I was curious about what you thought of this scenario.
blackstampede 4w ago • 100%
I was home schooled from childhood through highschool. I got a GED before I joined the military, then used the GI bill to go to university and took placement tests for everything, which put me at the same level as everyone else except for trigonometry, which I had to take a remedial class in.
blackstampede 4w ago • 100%
Yeah, the US grade system up to highschool. I haven't done those grades at all.
blackstampede 4w ago • 75%
Never have I ever gone to school in grades K-12.
blackstampede 4w ago • 100%
Thanks for the PTSD flashback. It was delightful.
blackstampede 1mo ago • 100%
Bonus fucked
blackstampede 1mo ago • 93%
Just wait until they start serving ads for things that don't exist and then throwing manufacturing together to make them on demand.
blackstampede 1mo ago • 50%
No one I fought with was helping kill brown kids either. You could argue that we were indirectly helping, since we were fighting for a country that was also sometimes bombing areas with civilians. If that's how you would like to approach this, then everyone helped.
If you've worked in retail then you've sold goods to soldiers, if you work in agriculture then you've fed them, and if you're a teacher then you educated them. Some small fraction of those soldiers went on to bomb kids somewhere.
If you want to criticize the US policy of invading other countries on a pretext and then propping up governments that do what we want, go ahead. I'm right there with you. If you want to live in a fantasy where all soldiers are merciless baby-killers, I guess you can do that, but that's where we part ways.
Soldiers are individuals, and they sign up for all sorts of reasons. A very common reason is an education that gives them a better shot at a high paying job so that they can care for their family or start one. Is it fucked that people feel the need to do that? Sure. Would it be great if there was a straight forward way for a person with no resources to get an education and a better job? Yes.
But currently, we're in an environment where risking your life to fight for your country in an unjust war is the best option some people have. And pretending that the reason they do it is because they're Bad People doesn't help solve the problem.
blackstampede 1mo ago • 50%
None of the veterans I know killed any brown kids. The people we shot were generally either shooting at us, or had just set off an IED with a car battery. Most of our interactions with kids involved someone getting in trouble for giving away MREs to the kids that would walk up to the vehicle.
blackstampede 1mo ago • 100%
Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice
blackstampede 2mo ago • 100%
Going meta is always allowed. Just say you're dumbing it down, that you don't mean to be condescending, and invite them to interrupt if they already understand.
blackstampede 2mo ago • 100%
I'm imagining the mob standing around the guy scratching their heads, with the noose pulled all the way up to the branch.
blackstampede 2mo ago • 100%
Women are you doing the same thing for me
blackstampede 2mo ago • 100%
If you're the smartest person in the room, then you're in the wrong room.
blackstampede 2mo ago • 100%
Why not?
blackstampede 2mo ago • 100%
My planes had groups, but I don't think they were grouped by seat.
blackstampede 2mo ago • 100%
I'm not going to lie, I'd probably pay money to be in the room. I can only imagine how awkward and hilarious it would be to see a silent and fuming Trump get edged up by a middle aged black man who's busy having a conversation with the next barber over.
blackstampede 2mo ago • 100%
Burn the heretic.
I've been thinking about enshitification recently, and I'm also working on a startup with a friend that just received funding. I've been wondering how one might arrange a business such that it won't gradually trend towards shittier products in search of higher profit margins. Obviously, it would be nice to redesign all of society so that this isn't a thing, but barring that, does anyone have any ideas for setting up a business in such a way that motivations are aligned with producing a good product? Currently, we're trying to retain as much control as possible, but at some point we may go public, and if we do, I'm not sure how to keep us aimed at accomplishing our goals. We're building a platform that should solve or at least improve the replication crisis in scientific research, and we could lose control to investors that want board seats, or sell to someone like Google. If we do either, I doubt the company will do what we want it to do in the long term. Going public is the route that seems less likely to lead to this change in direction, but it seems like it could end in the same place over a long enough timeline.
I recently acquired two used blade servers and a short rack to put them in. I'm planning to use one or the other as the replacement for a media server that died on me a bit ago. The old media server was just a little refurb dell workstation, with a single SSD in it, but the servers have 6 and 8 bays, respectively. I would like to RAID them so that one drive dying doesn't lose any of my media, and I was leaning towards Ubuntu server as an OS. I'm not sure how to do that, and I'm kind of poking around for info and advice. Hit me with it.
I'm working on a parsing library for [mil-std-1553](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIL-STD-1553) messages. It's a fun, minimal project that doesn't currently exist as far as I can tell.
Wish me luck ladies and gentlemen Edit: it went great. Thanks for the good wishes.