Because it lead directly to feudalism and other forms of autocracy?

Batteries could have been standard for a bit longer, but it seems to me that eventually the need to go faster for longer would have forced combustion engines to be a thing. All they had were lead-acid batteries (or primary cells, but that would be dumb) and new more energy-dense chemistries didn’t show up for a long time after. Maybe they could have found one if they really needed, but it’s a tricky science even today, so I’m skeptical.

It’s possible, I suppose, that infrastructure could have been rolled out for both en mass, but I don’t see an even mix lasting through the whole 20th century. Probably not even past WWII.

In addition to mixing up the man and the place, I got that wrong. Fixed.

Tanks aren’t about to go out of style, though. The goal is to not let anti-tank weapons in range of your tanks - as it has been since WWII, just moreso as time goes on. Maybe ditto for ships that aren’t Soviet rustbuckets crewed with drunks, although I think even that is in question these days.

Also, funny enough, the average weapon is getting more complicated and expensive as time goes on. At least for the West, a skilled soldier continues to cost more than whatever they operate, so survivability is worth it even if it means less volume.

Human history, as a whole, is so depressing and meandering it’s a weird question to try and answer. Were the great empires a success, or a failure? It depends on if you’re measuring monuments built or social justice enacted, and if you’re comparing against modern polities or whatever shitty local warlord they replaced. History doesn’t really have an end goal, as much as we’d like it to.

Maybe you just meant a personal failure:

Thomas Midgley is one of my favourites, because he’s famous for three things: Inventing leaded gasoline, inventing ozone-destroying PCBs, and inventing the accessibility contraption that strangled Thomas Midgley. He did nothing else of note; he’s like the real Bloody Stupid Johnson.

Marathon is famous for running a long way just to deliver some news first, and then dying from exhaustion. People regularly make the same trip and are fine. He was regarded as a hero, and the races were originally in his honour, but I wouldn’t want to be him.

Muhammad II of Khwarazm received an envoy from Ghengis Khan, who wasn’t bent on invading at all but wanted trade, and decided to take their shit instead. Then he killed the people sent next to ask for a nice apology. You can guess where that went.

The Soviets once tried to sextort Indonesian quasi-communist leader Sukarno with a sex tape. It did not work, because he was shamelessly proud of his “virility”. In at least some tellings he misinterprets the KGB’s presentation as a gift, although I doubt he could have been that dumb.

Any jet is not the same as, like, an F-35. And even then you need to equip a lot more jets than western Donbas would usually see.

Producers are rich, and don’t find poor people problems sexy, but rather inconveniently guilt-inducing. When they do show poverty it has a way of being pretty theme-park, too.

I’m not a big rom-com consumer, but there’s probably exceptions to the rule, of course.

Sure, but I assume in some places parents (plural) will raise a stink about a kid that’s not theirs being allowed to not say it in the same room as their own spawn. Dangerous ideas, right? I encourage you to start shit if they make you, though.

I should clarify I’m Canadian, so this specific issue hasn’t come up, but I’ve seen similar things. For example, my local division has a policy, on paper, that pride flags should be flown in schools, but they often aren’t because the staff don’t like angry mobs.

Honestly, I worry that it’s conscious enough it’s cruel to train it. How would we know? That’s a lot of parameters and they’re almost all mysterious.

I often feel like that too, but there were things like haggis and sausage before them. It’s good to remember that turning inedible mush into something appealing actually has a long and noble history.

Scientists revealed that Neanderthals cared for their disabled children out of compassion

I mean it’s the obvious guess, but compassion doesn’t leave a direct fossil record. In the paper the thing they emphasise is that it was an obviously permanent disability, so there couldn’t have been a practical survival motivation.

Also, yeah, not good writing.

I forget, did she keep the whole 4.5 billion?

TIL there’s a length limit for Lemmy posts.

If so, it’s still probably deliberate, because corporate knows full well a bigger box would work too. Eshittification is coming for our nuggies.

I was using the term pretty loosely there. It’s not psychopathic in the medical sense because it’s not human.

As I see it it’s an alien semi-intelligence with no interest in pretty much any human construct, except as it can help it predict the next token. So, no empathy or guilt, but that’s not unusual or surprising.

“Pulling methane out of the ground reduces greenhouse gases, actually” really seems to be what oil and gas is going with next. I kind of think it will work worse than just flat denialism did, because you don’t even need science to notice that’s fishy.

It really should be a slam-dunk. The constitution isn’t unclear about separation of state and religion. At all.

I’m guessing the state knows this, but figured they’d get credit with the Gilead crowd for even trying.

High, high chance they wouldn’t have been encouraging. Reasons include their personal political beliefs and the fact they tend to care more about parent reactions than students, because guess which group they’re on equal footing with?

I mean, the Luddites were right, mechanical looms were bad for them personally.

Treat it like a psychopathic boiler plate.

That’s a perfect description, actually. People debate how smart it is - and I’m in the “plenty” camp - but it is psychopathic. It doesn’t care about truth, morality or basic sanity; it craves only to generate standard, human-looking text. Because that’s all it was trained for.

Nobody really knows how to train it to care about the things we do, even approximately. If somebody makes GAI soon, it will be by solving that problem.