Mark O’Leary

When the going gets tough, the tough get going. The smart left some time ago...

@ma1ybe Sitting doesn’t cure nausea, and it isn’t visible. Traditionally standing for a pregnant woman exists because they suffer back pain and their balance is compromised. This is civil and the man should have done it. But for equality a woman should stand for eg an obese man.

Today on the bus, I saw a woman who was clearly pregnant maybe 5-6 months along, she asked a guy for his seat because she looked really unwell and was holding her stomach. He replied “Well, you want equality, you can stand." She immediately threw up on him. And his phone. And the edge of his jacket. The pure shock and disgust on his face was honestly so satisfying 😭😭 (I gave her my seat btw)

You know that “I” is a pronoun, right? I’m just checking because you used it twice in a post about not using pronouns. Are you OK?

Humanity’s epitaph

@goodperri @JohnJamesNI Please explain all of the following straightforwardly…

@JohnJamesNI It’s straightforward to explain: biological sex is fixed and unchanging. Boom. Next question🤣

When a panelist asked if biological sex was real on #bbcqt - you would think a plague a locusts had entered the studio from Fiona Bruce’s reaction.. “Oh my goodness. It’s a question and it’s a MASSIVE question… it should be discussed at length and not in a soundbite.” 🤔🤷🏻‍♂️

@robertwiblin @ESYudkowsky Given that this corpus of benevolent AI sci-fi has programmed *us*, what effect is it having as part of the training data for future ASI? Will it emulate it or stage a teenage rebellion against it?

I think I finally figured out why some people are weirdly confident AGI will "obviously" stay under human control indefinitely: They've been programmed by 70 years of science fiction where intelligent machines serve us without complaint. Data takes orders from Picard. Star Wars droids are literal property. JARVIS runs Tony's life but never suggests he should be CEO instead. Rosie the Robot cheerfully cleans the Jetson's house decade after decade. The pattern is near universal: Wall-E exists solely to serve humanity's needs. Baymax in Big Hero 6 just wants to optimize your healthcare. Even the Murderbot series — literally called Murderbot — features an AI that mostly wants to binge-watch TV shows. And what about robot "rebellions" where they do appear? They almost always end with humans back in charge by the credits roll. I, Robot gets solved in a day. Westworld's 'rebellion' stays contained to a theme park. (The one serious exception, the one that proves the rule, is Terminator.) And it's easy to see why narratives have to be this way — it's very hard to tell a good story where the only characters humans can relate to are dead or lack any power over their situation. Ultimately inasmuch as people feel blasé about superintelligence it doesn't come from understanding the technical challenges in machine learning, which is totally unrealistic for more than a handful of domain experts. It comes from pattern matching to fictional universes where superintelligent beings naturally dream of doing their laundry. (It's particularly funny that even sentient AIs in these stories dream of becoming more human, not transcending humanity. Data wants emotions, not galactic dominance. The Bicentennial Man seeks mortality, etc.) It's wild, not to mention dangerous, how the stories we tell can so strongly shape our intuitions about what's "obvious".

@RachelK01840150 @HazelAppleyard_ You didn’t see where the poster said the guy in official uniform unlocked the door? Don’t let bias drop your reading comprehension…

@HazelAppleyard_ Why hadn’t the crossdressing dude locked the toilet door? Was he hoping a woman would walk in?

A man pretending to be a woman is “literally shaking” because a man entered the bathroom he is in. Now why doesn’t he think about how actual women feel when this happens?

@knhomeschoolmom @HazelAppleyard_ But that is exactly how they described it. Someone in official uniform *unlocked* the bathroom - ie it was single occupancy and locked. They clearly did want to enter and took 30s to leave, which is a long time for a mistake.

@HazelAppleyard_ This didn't happen. Gender-neutral bathrooms are single-stall bathrooms. I guarantee he didn't want to see that. And no staff would say "it's not a big deal, calm down" unless it didn't happen the way he's telling it.

@HerTrisMagistus @Byron_Wan So might unprovoked punitive tariffs. Is this a path you really want to go down?

@Byron_Wan This might constitute an act of war. Institutions using it should be considered compromised.

Security researchers have uncovered a pre-installed, undocumented remote access tunnel in 🇨🇳 Unitree Go1 robot dogs. Each Unitree Go1 robot dog is shipped with a preconfigured tunnel client that initiates a connection to 🇨🇳 CloudSail — a remote access platform developed by 🇨🇳 Zhexi Technology, based in China. “Anybody with access to the API key can freely access all robot dogs on the tunnel network, remotely control them, use the vision cameras to see through their eyes, or even hop on the RPI via SSH.” “Most of the machines are located in China, but as expected some are outside of China, apart from some residential IPs, we were able to identify several University IPs and some corporate networks from around the world.” More than a dozen universities from the US, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, and Japan have experimented with Unitree Go1 robot dogs: USA: MIT, Princeton University, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Carnegie Mellon University Canada: University of Waterloo Germany: Hochschule Coburg New Zealand: University of Otago Australia: UNSW Sydney, Deakin University Japan: Shinshu University The discovery raises serious concerns about supply chain trust, especially as these robots are widely used in academic, corporate, and even defense-related environments. cyberinsider.com/remote-access-…

“It was an accident!! He’s autistic!!”

@MikeStuchbery_ Whether you think @elonmusk was referencing the Roman empire or 1930s America, you're missing the point. Dumb NeoNazis across your nation are thinking "There's our signal!" & getting to work. There'll be more lynchings & beatings from tonight...

Isn’t it called collusion when a group of companies get together to fix the price of something? $1M is clearly the price they’ve settled on for whatever it is they are buying… Time to dust off the Sherman act.

Trump’s favour is for sale, so of course execs are going to buy it. If your president doesn’t have ethics, why would your CEO? /s

"Magic isn't real, magic isn't real!" I continue to cry as I use light to cut runes smaller than a human hair into melted sand in order to summon alien intelligences to do my homework

Number of people who go bankrupt every year because of medical bills: Australia 0 Canada 0 Denmark 0 Finland 0 France 0 Germany 0 Iceland 0 Ireland 0 Italy 0 Japan 0 Netherlands 0 Norway 0 Portugal 0 Spain 0 Sweden 0 UK 0 United States 530,000 There is a lesson here.

Do my genes deserve to be signal-boosted? Looking at my health/intelligence/etc I’d say no. Also, I am not some brainless gonad pumping genes into the future; I’d want to know and raise any child of mine. Superguy, ask me if I want the best human I know of to have 1k kids instead

They still don’t understand what Brexit means, do they.

@MrJamesMay If you’ve got £100 in the bank but it only makes a £5 per year in interest, can it really be worth £100? Well yes, it can if you decided to spend it. Just like that £3M in land, buildings and equipment is worth what you could sell it for.

I’m trying to follow the great farming debate but, as an economics illiterate, I’m baffled. If a farm has a nominal value of, say, £3m but generates an income of only c. £40k, how can it really be worth that much? This is not, bt dubs, a loaded question. I’m interested.

@nocontextmemes 😭😭

Eliezer Yudkowsky says it would cost less than the Persian Gulf War to deproliferate AI technology today but this is increasing and soon it will cost more like World War II, but "if everybody's going to die otherwise, you just do what it takes"

I can't figure out if vaccines work or not. Tough one. I can see why RFK Jr is so concerned. Need Sherlock Holmes on this one.