I read the study. The "problem" with it is that it only examines biodiversity before and after abandonment, but without the abandoned areas being rewilded in any way.
Some areas are so destroyed by human activities that they need some help in rewilding, which is definitely possible. Of course, this study does point out that some management of the land that resembles previous human activities could help biodiversity. And of course, as the study mentions, they did not include "Mosses, lichens, mammals and invertebrates—including soil organisms such as nematodes and molluscs".
Keep in mind also that biodiversity is difficult to measure can be counterintuitive. Farmland and managed land creates edge habitats, or a confluence of habitats, where measured biodiversity is higher. Of course, when that edge habitat disappears the measurements can go down. But that does not imply that merging a huge number of farmland back ot a more contiguous wild are won't support biodiversity better in the long run.
> Here I disagree. The fatso corporations 100% pursue evilness. I mean, Google removing its old motto "don't do evil" says it all.
I think that's right, but I also think the OP had a point as well: in some ways, the negative effects of technology, in addition to being pushed by fat corporations, are also an emergent effect of the technology itself that goes beyond intention. Examples:
* Google probably didn't have a master plan to push SEO slop, but it came about anyway because it's in human nature to game the system.
* If someone creates one product to become more efficient, it's likely that another person will also do so, even if the net result is negative due to the prisoner's dilemma. (Bug finding vs Bug exploitation).
Etc. You can think of many examples, but how much in tech creates arms race scenarios that we MUST play out to stay afloat? How many people use LLMs just to keep up with their peers who use them?
That creates an emergent phenomena of creating problems not necessarily planned, even though a lot of the impetus to create the arms-race scenarios WERE intented by the rich.
AI in science is a lot different than AI in progamming in some ways. It seems pretty harmless in programming a lot of the times because it's used to speed up rote tasks like writing boilerplate. But in science, if it does give scientists a boost in discovery, I think it's likely to lead to an even more cavalier attitude about the power that such discoveries can have, and thus lead to much more abuse of power by the wealthy and malicious actors.
One thing I've observed is that people who use AI rarely want to hide that they're using it. With text or even images, it's sort of like a dialect. AI-generated/assisted stuff is becoming somewhat like a fashion trend where people tend to use it and it becomes part of them, rather than something they want to pass off as entirely human-made.
So I think there's very little incentive for an arms race to occur in this case.
I dunno. Personally I like it to boost my self confidence in the text I write by doing a pass, but I really hate the overly verbose and unopinioned generic ai voice it always reflavours into.
I don't think that quite makes sense. Sometimes it's useful to point out/shame unsettling things that happen in society, even if it doesn't directly cause harm.
I think it's rather poor taste to code something like this. Usually when buildings or other things are destroyed in movies or even a game, it's to tell some kind of story. In a way telling the story brings the justification because the destruction in the story is usually counterbalanced by someone trying to stop it, which brings the story to the level of good being done.
This is just wanton destruction and has nothing good in it.
I mean, technically, Blast Corps had a story (you needed to pave the way for a runaway nuclear missle to not crash and explode or something), but then you'd get medals for thoroughly destroying everything anyway, because really it was about knocking down buildings and the "story" was a silly pretense. And it was great.
Rampage and its sequels were pretty much also just "destroy buildings, the game," and also great.
My kids enjoy building with tiles and then knocking it down.
If you've ever shot a gun or detonated some explosives in real life, you'll know that's fun too despite these things being used to hurt people also.
Red Faction: Guerilla had physics based modeling of damage to structures and an auxiliary game mode where the objective was to collapse as many buildings as possible within a time limit using demolition charges and other weapons. (Of course, the player is a noble revolutionary fighting an oppressive government so there's a fig-leaf of social acceptability.) Precise and quick placement of demolition charges on structural supports was key to getting a good score. If they'd had some sort of procedural map generation for it, I'd probably still be playing it today.
Counterpoint - the whole point of the arcade game Rampage was to have a big monster punch lumps out of buildings and helicopters, and just destroy as much stuff as possible, and everyone played the absolute shit out of that.
I wish there was a filter in the app store to filter and only show apps that having nothing to do with AI. It's become increasingly hard to find a decent, non-AI app these days.
Ah yes, I remember those times.
"bird anger"
"super pdf toolbox"
"mega vpn gold"
"speedy and very angry"
"six nights at Frankie's"
"minercfrafts"
. . .
The one bottleneck in this new AI era of math is still human understanding. No matter how much new stuff you can prove, to understand something you still have to basically do stuff the old fashioned way. Maybe AI can help a little, but without working through problems and proofs, you still won't get much farther. Ultimately our minds are limited that way.
I tend to think that the progress of mathematics before AI was roughly suited to the way humans assimilated understanding, but now with AI, the progress in mathematics is going to go much faster, oustripping our ability to understand it.
It is true that more mathematicians could theoretically eventually go through it, but the process of progress itself is discouraging and thus paradoxically renders this new AI era of math much less interesting to many.
I guarantee that after the intial "look at all the stuff we can prove", the benefits of using AI will dwindle rapidly.
I found a few lists that I found genuinely useful, like self-hosted. But I also think the problem with them is they were gamed for some reason, maybe because of Github stars and the fact that Github attention is useful for other things. I think it would have been much more useful to have them almost on a different platform. IMBD lists for example seem to work better because there's not much reward in making them except a love of movies.
Also I think another problem is that they were given high recognition on Github, and thus became a formulaic pattern rather that some individual who is really passionate about trying the stuff on the list, which also made most of the later ones generic and much less interesting...
Curation is also really hard to go as a group activity, there are so many different views on value and rules just don't work for taste in any way that works.
> Curation is also really hard to go as a group activity
It really isn't. You establish a process, a review system and the guidelines, then make people write and share notes. It'll be a bit varied initially, but it solidifies and converges a lot quicker than you think.
There are hundreds of examples out in the world of all of these things working properly, everything from galleries to second-hand stores have things like this "implemented" already, take inspiration from them :)
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