Frankly, the answer should be for every site to just cut the UK off entirely. Let them have their own little North Korean style micronet. Maybe when the people of the UK can’t visit anything but a bunch of miserable English websites, they will get off their asses and elect competent leaders. If not, well maybe they’re just not the sort of people we should allow access to the global communications network. Let the barbarians stew in their own barbarism.

Unfortunately now Google is ChatGPT. It provides its own shitty AI answers, and its search results have been corrupted by an ocean of slop.

I encourage everyone to engage in literal cyberbullying!

It also gives “content removed” if you tell the AI it’s an abomination.

Tried a similar prompt.

To me, the hardest part seems to be - how do you keep your small web from being infected by AI slop? Currently the slop spammers aren’t focusing on these small web rings and web 1.0 communities. But if they did start to become popular, the AI slop would inevitably follow.

Perhaps such sites need to run on a 100% no-advertising model. Individual hobby sites or those supported by subscriptions and donations only. That would cut out most of the vast, vast majority of the slop. AI slop currently can’t produce content that people are actually willing to pay to subscribe to. If sloppers can’t bring in revenue via ad impressions, they won’t have any incentive to create slop AI 1.0 sites.

If you give up the idea of minds themselves being digital, then one interesting possibility is that the world is a training simulation/form of education.

Imagine a far future where humanity has solved most all its problems. A post-scarcity utopia where abundance is the default, no one wants for anything material, and even aging has been cured. Sounds like a great place, right? But utopia has a problem. How do you raise children in an environment where they never need want for anything? How do you raise a child to not be a narcissistic monster when they have access to what amounts to a replicator and an army of servant droids? How do you effectively raise children in a society of immortals, where only a very small number of children are born each year as very few births are required to maintain the population?

One possibility is that you don’t even try to raise children in paradise. Instead, you stick them in a simulation. Just raise them in an era before utopia came about. A simulation based on the 21st century wouldn’t be a bad choice. Early enough in history that people still have material struggles. But late enough that people are experienced with the idea of technological progress. Most ancient societies thought that technology declined with time, rather than advancing. And raising someone through a grinding virtual life as a Medieval peasant or Roman slave is probably far more hardship than the simulators have in mind. The 21st century isn’t a bad choice for a time to set a training simulation. Plus, there’s the whole overarching themes of environmental stewardship and the potential consequences therein.

That would be a pretty strong motivation to create simulations. A society of godlike immortals may simply not be capable of raising sane children. So you don’t even try. You just raise the next generation, few as they may be at any one time, in a virtual recreation of a historical era.

Maybe when you die in this world, you just wake up in the real world. Your education is complete when you’ve demonstrated some level of moral responsibility, to whatever standards the simulators value. Spent your life as a ruthless greedy billionaire? Back in the tank, you’re taking another few simulated lifetimes to work that mess out of you.

The simulation wouldn’t actually include all those billions of stars and galaxies. In this kind of simulation, it’s all just a skybox. If you point a telescope at a distant star, then the simulation spins up a sub-simulation to produce what output a real star would experience in that situation. You include the stars and galaxies because the real universe contains them, and you want your simulation to be realistic.

It actually does make sense that the simulation would be created for us. Compare the level of computing power required to create a limited human-centric simulation to trying to simulate an entire universe. The whole-universe simulation would be some absurd power of ten times more difficult to simulate. If it is possible to simulate a world convincingly, then it’s reasonable to assume that there are many, many more low-res human-scale simulations than giant full universe simulations.

With the whole universe simulation, you also have the problem of scale. It’s hard to imagine that an entire universe can be simulated at the atomic level with anything less complex than the universe itself. Unless you have a universe-sized computer, you probably aren’t simulating an entire universe with atomic accuracy. A human-scale simulation could be performed in a universe no more complex or different from the one we observe. An atomic-scale universe-spanning simulation would have to be run from a higher level that has completely different physical laws than the one we inhabit. Occams’ razor applies. If you want to assume a simulation, it makes sense to assume a type that requires the least exotic higher-order “real” universe possible.

This really seems to miss the point of the simulation hypothesis. The simulators wouldn’t need to simulate every atom on the planet. They argue that the whole planet would need to be simulated at a certain resolution in order to be compatible with the body of existing subatomic experiments that have been done.

But this misses the point and the true abilities of the simulators of a virtual world. The whole world could be simulated at the macroscopic level, only what is needed for human perception. Then, any time some experiment probed the microscopic or subatomic world, a local fine grid simulation could be spun up in that local area to simulate what results that world would look like. Bacteria don’t actively exist everywhere - just the effects they generate on humans, plants, and animals. But if you take some pond water and look at it under a microscope, the minigame for visual microscopy is pulled up, revealing various microscopic organisms.

And the system doesn’t even need to be perfect. Has the simulation-scaling code screwed up, and the simulated humans received erroneous results, proving they live in a simulation? No problem. Just pause the simulation, adjust the code to prevent the error, and restore the simulation to an older backup.

This paper was written by physicists. So, understandably, they look at it through a physics lens. But really they should be looking at it more from a computer game designer’s perspective.

Don’t copy that floppy!

I assume it’s because it’s run entirely off of a single old zip disk drive manufactured in 1998.

The only good king is a dead king. Being a monarch of any kind is a crime against humanity. Anyone who claims that they deserve any kind of political power by right of birth deserves to have their head in a basket. The French and the Soviets had the right idea on how to deal with these vermin.

In the US, we should make it a capital offense for a monarch of any kind to step foot on US territory. Any monarch who dares should be summarily executed for polluting our land with their filth. Every civilized country should adopt such laws. Monarchs have no place in the 21st century. And yes, this applies to “constitutional” monarchs as well. All are an abomination upon this Earth. They should be forced to give up their crowns or give up their heads. I’m not even kidding. I would personally and gleefully operate the guillotine. I despise monarchs in my very bones.

Death to all kings. Let their crowns roll in the gutter.

Welcome to ze hydraulic prezz channel. Today we are crushing ze Optimus Prime.

How do I safely drill holes in 1/4" acrylic paneling without cracking it?

Anyone still on X is a Nazi collaborator. Let them get whatever is coming to them.

And no, I do not give a shit if people have some whining excuse for why they just have to be on it for one reason or another. The historical Nazi collaborators had their perfectly reasonable and practical reasons for collaborating with the Nazis as well.

Anyone on X is willingly sitting themselves down in front of a constant stream of Nazi propaganda. If you keep choosing to show up at Nazi rallies, eventually you’re not just someone adjacent to Nazis. You are a Nazi yourself.

Can I say Luigi

https://lemmy.world/c/luigimangione

*No! No! AI is just for our bullshit we keep shoving down everyone’s throats! You’re not supposed to use it against us!"

Hopefully they’ll all be sold and eventually shipped off to Russia and sold for pennies on the dollar there.

And here’s what they plan to do with Social Security:

1. Close all the field offices.
2. Replace fired workers with buggy chatbots. Require days-long waits to get a hold of an actual human by phone.
3. Create an AI “fraud detection” bot that falsely labels millions of legitimate beneficiaries as dead or fraudulent and cancels their benefits.
4. Prevent people from getting their benefits back by making it impossible to get a hold of an actual human.

Things need to be paid for, but why does that mechanism need to be baked into the platform?

Imagine I’m the best, most engaging poster and commenter on Lemmy. Everyone loves my posts and comments, shares them, quotes them, and responds to them endlessly. (Maybe in this scenario everyone has brain damage for some reason, and this allowed me to become the top Lemmy user.)

If I’m in that position, what’s stopping me from just putting a little blurb at the bottom of each comment saying, “this post is brought to you by Carls Jr.” or whoever wants to sponsor my comments. If people for some reason loved my posts and comments enough, I could find sponsors and just put those sponsorships right in whatever comment or post I make. Lemmy doesn’t need to be involved. They don’t need to go out of their way to recommend my posts either. If they’re good enough, then they can be spread naturally by people sharing and engaging with them.

It makes sense for platforms to provider revenue to creators, but only if the platform has substantial ad revenue. YouTube pays its creators, but it also brings in billions of ad revenue. I don’t think most Lemmy servers even have ads.