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merc ,

Also, most people are nearly athiests.

Christians deny the existence of Zeus, Ra, Mars, Shiva, Odin, Thor, Kali, Horus, Tew, Huitzilopochtli, Pele, Erra... Of all the gods and goddesses that people have ever said exist, Christians don't believe in any of them other than their one god. Even Hindus, who have a pantheon with multiple gods, generally don't believe in the gods of other religions.

merc ,

Piracy has never been stealing. It's copyright infringement. The two are completely different.

merc ,

Humans are descended from apes, humans are apes, and humans are cousins of the other modern apes.

We're not descended from chimpanzees, but both we and chimpanzees descend from another ape.

merc ,

Most people don't live in Northern Ontario.

Most Ontarians live in cities.

merc ,

Their are other misteaks people make aswell, alot of people don't know english good.

merc ,

One woman can deliver a baby in an hour, if she's a doctor or a midwife.

merc ,

Yep. Because stealing is a crime that goes back thousands of years. It was an old crime by the time the 10 commandments were written down. Meanwhile, copyright infringement is a new thing that's maybe a few centuries old at most, and it's a lot more morally ambiguous. Is it wrong to infringe on a monopoly that the government has given a corporation over the sharing of a tangible expression of an idea? Maybe sometimes? Maybe not other times?

merc ,

a blue collar boss buying it for his employees

I assume this means for his business, to be used by employees? I can't imagine a boss buying his employees a truck.

merc ,

I don't know what their motivation is, but I definitely hope they protect the identity of the voice actress. If her name gets out, it's basically guaranteed her life would suck for a while.

If she's like 99% of actors, she's someone just struggling to get work, who's lucky if she can afford to rent an apartment without roommates. If her name got out, she's almost certainly have to deal with death threats, stalkers, etc. Rich celebrities can deal with that kind of attention because they have the money to hire security people, PR people, lawyers, etc. Some random voice actor is not going to have those resources.

merc ,

Can you imagine how happy this makes China?

merc ,

I actually considered a non-governmental, community regulated currency as a pretty good idea.

That goes against the entire history of currencies. Every successful currency in history has been controlled by either the state or a religion (which was effectively state-like).

merc ,

Interestingly, for a currency to actually be useful, there needs to be a demand for it, something that you can only pay for in that currency. For real currencies that is normally taxes. England only accepts taxes paid in pounds, so there's a demand for pounds from every person who has to pay taxes in England. For crypto, extortion is basically the only source of demand.

Sure, occasionally there are places that accept both real currencies and crypto currencies, but for legit businesses almost none of the revenue comes from the crypto side. But, for ransomware, etc. the hackers only accept crypto. That means there's a demand for crypto, which means that it has some value.

merc ,

The difference is that medicine, as a concept, is useful.

Stack Overflow and OpenAI Partner ( files.mastodon.online )

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/15315562...

From the official stackoverflow account: We’re thrilled to announce we’re partnering with @OpenAI to bring best in class technical knowledge and the world’s most popular LLM models for AI development together! This groundbreaking partnership with OpenAI will drive our mission to empower the world to develop technology through collective knowledge.
ALT
merc ,

Chat GPT generates plausible auto-complete text. If it has been trained on saying "this case was reported to your local law enforcement agency", those are the kinds of words it might spit out.

merc ,

Attribution — You must give appropriate credit

So, if Stack Overflow generates text based on any answer (or question) in Stack Overflow's DB, it must credit the person whose text it adapted.

Good luck with that...

merc ,

Also, some of what happens in the brain is just storytelling. Like, when the doctor hits your patellar tendon, just under your knee, with a reflex hammer. Your knee jerks, but the signals telling it to do that don't even make it to the brain. Instead the signal gets to your spinal cord and it "instructs" your knee muscles.

But, they've studied similar things and have found out that in many cases where the brain isn't involved in making a decision, the brain does make up a story that explains why you did something, to make it seem like it was a decision, not merely a reaction to stimulus.

merc ,

Yeah. This is related to supernatural beliefs. If the grass moves it might just be a gust of wind, or it might be a snake. Even if snakes are rare, it's better to be safe than sorry. But, that eventually leads to assuming that the drought is the result of an angry god, and not just some random natural phenomenon.

So, brains are hard-wired to look for causes, even inventing supernatural causes, because it helps avoid snakes.

merc ,

There was a listener question on a science podcast recently that asked about how the temperature changed on the moon during the recent solar eclipse.

They almost got what a solar eclipse was, but not quite. During a solar eclipse, the moon gets between the sun and the earth, blocking the light getting to the earth and casting a shadow on the earth. The side of the moon facing the earth is completely dark because the thing that normally lights it up (the sun) is completely behind it. But, the back side of the moon is getting full sun and just as hot as normal.

I think part of the problem with understanding all this is that the sun is just so insanely bright. Like, it's a bit hard to believe that the full moon is so bright just because it's reflecting sunlight. It's also amazing that the "wandering stars" (planets) look like stars when they're just blobs of rocks or gases that are reflecting the insanely bright light of the sun.

It's amazing if you think about it. Light comes out of the sun in every possible direction. A tiny fraction of it hits the surface of Mercury, and only some of that light is reflected back out. The light reflected from Mercury goes in almost every direction. A tiny fraction of it hits the earth. But, even with that indirect bounce, it's bright enough to see with the naked eye.

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