If I wanted an autistically over-literal answer, I’d either ask myself (or come to Lemmy)

Stochastic parrots is an excellent phrase.

I respect your approach. I bet you’re the kind of parent who apologises to their kids when you make mistakes

It’s frustrating how common IQ based things are still. For example, I’m autistic, and getting any kind of support as an autistic adult has been a nightmare. In my particular area, some of the services I’ve been referred to will immediately bounce my referral because they’re services for people with “Learning Disabilities”, and they often have an IQ limit of 70, i.e. if your IQ is greater than 70, they won’t help you.

My problem here isn’t that there exists specific services for people with Learning disabilities, because I recognise that someone with Down syndrome is going to have pretty different support needs to me. What does ick me out is the way that IQ is used as a boundary condition as if it hasn’t been thoroughly debunked for years now.

I recently read “The Tyranny of Metrics” and whilst I don’t recall of it specifically delves into IQ, it’s definitely the same shape problem: people like to pin things down and quantify them, especially complex variables like intelligence. Then we are so desperate to quantify things that we succumb to Goodhart’s law (whenever a metric is used as a target, it will cease to be a good metric), condemning what was already an imperfect metric to become utterly useless and divorced from the system it was originally attempting to model or measure. When IQ was created, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it was. It has been made worse by years of bigots seeking validation, because it turns out that science is far from objective and is fairly easy to commandeer to do the work of bigots (and I say this as a scientist.)

It’s one reason why I like Lemmy so much — conversations around here are so small scale that I can be confident I’m talking to a human.

To be fair, AlphaFold is pretty incredible. I remember when it was first revealed (but before they open sourced parts of it) that the scientific community were shocked by how effective it was and assumed that it was going to be technologically way more complex than it ended up being. Systems Biologist Mohammed AlQuraishi captures this quite well in this blog post

I’m a biochemist who has more interest in the computery side of structural biology than many of my peers, so I often have people asking me stuff like “is AlphaFold actually as impressive as they say, or is it just more overhyped AI nonsense?”. My answer is “Yes.”

Something about potential wide scale fraud came out recently about a prominent Alzheimer’s researcher. This article covers it quite well: https://www.science.org/content/article/research-misconduct-finding-neuroscientist-eliezer-masliah-papers-under-suspicion

It’s grim, especially when considering the real human cost that fraud in biomedical research has. Despite this, like you, I am also optimistic. This article outlines some of how the initial concerns about this researcher was raised, and how the analysis of his work was done. A lot of it seems pretty unorthodox. For example, one of the people who contributed to this work was a “non-scientist” forensic image expert, who goes by the username Cheshire on the forum PubPeer (his real name is known and mentioned in the article, but I can’t remember it).

I agree. Whenever I get into an argument online, it’s usually with the understanding that it exists for the benefit of the people who may spectate the argument — I’m rarely aiming to change the mind of the person I’m conversing with. Especially when it’s not even a discussion, but a more straightforward calling someone out for something, that’s for the benefit of other people in the comments, because some sentiments cannot go unchanged.

You’re right, that is pretty funny. I didn’t notice until you pointed it out in this comment

You’ve bamboozled my attempt to make the same joke at your expense by only mentioning one number in your comment, giving me nothing to add to it. From this point on, I conclude we should only ever mention one number in each comment, for clarity.

Thanks for sharing that post, it was super interesting.

I wish I could see behind the scenes in the Windows UI discussions, to see how we get to what we have today

It reminds me of the recent Crowdstrike fiasco: apparently kernel level access was needed for their anti-malware to be able to properly work (because that way their net can cover the entire OS basically), but that high level of access meant that when CrowdStrike fucked up with an update, people’s computers were useless. (Disclaimer, I am not a cybersecurity person and am not offering judgement either way on whether Crowdstrike’s claim about kernel level access was bullshit or not)

In a similar way, in order for identity theft monitoring services to work, they surely will need to hold a heckton of data about you. This is fine if they can be trusted to hold that data securely, but otherwise… ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

I share your unease, though I don’t feel able to comment on the correctness of your mindset. Though I will say that on an individual level, keeping an eye on your credit reports in general (from the major credit agencies) will go a long way to helping there (rather than paying for serviced that give you a score and other fancy “features”, you can request either free or v. low cost report which just has the important stuff you need to know.)

I also know that if you want to be extra cautious, you can manually freeze your credit so basically no new lines of credit can be opened in your name. This is most useful for people who have already been a victim of fraud, or they expect to be at risk (such as by shitty family, or a data breach). I don’t know how one sets this up, but I know that if you did want to set up a new line of credit, you can call to unfreeze your credit, and then freeze it again when your application for the new credit is all done. I have a friend who has had this as their default for years now because of shitty family.

I agree that there’s a strong incentive for even entirely self-interested people to cooperate. I was listing altruism as one of many pro-social behaviours, not as a subset or requirement for cooperation

I’d argue that capitalism is unnatural because even if we work from the assumption that resource hoarding is natural, it’s also necessary to take into account the fact that evolutionarily, humans got to where we are via traits like altruism, cooperation and forming communities. Capitalism is far from natural — it’s an insidious subversion of human nature

Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I never thought of this before, the parody song practically writes itself

Yeah, I agree with you. I should have elaborated in my comment. I’m not too opposed to Cloudflare (I even use them myself), but I sympathise with people who are concerned about how widely used Cloudflare is and that this risks making them a gatekeeper to the internet. My beef is more of an “all eggs in one basket” one, which feels especially relevant given that the recent (and in many cases, ongoing) Crowdstrike debacle was able to affect so many because of how the way enterprise level software often involves many eggs across not many baskets.

"Members of the Recording Industry Association of Japan had taken legal action in the U.S. to demand information on Hikari No Akari’s operator from California-based Cloudflare, whose content delivery network the site had used. […>

“We’ll use information that Cloudflare will disclose to hold the website operator responsible and take other legal action,” an RIAJ spokesperson said."

Obligatory “Fuck Cloudflare”.

It genuinely makes my skin crawl — reminds me of being nagged for sex from someone who hears “not now” when you mean “no.”

See, that’s what I thought too, but according to the Captchas, I don’t know what a motorcycle is ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

What really stresses me out is the question of whether a human on a motorcycle becomes part of the motorcycle.