There is a difference between what I was talking about and what these studies are talking about. They are studying the actual effects on users. Because electric toothbrushes are able to clean teeth more quickly and with less effort people generally have better outcomes with them overall. What I was pointing out is that this is not the same thing as a “better brush”. Clean teeth are clean teeth. Doesn’t matter how you get there, and a manual brush is perfectly capable of cleaning your teeth. It’s just that your supposed to actually brush for 2 whole minutes and use the proper technique which most people don’t do. An electric brush compensates for this which is what the improvements seen in those studies is showing. This is what I meant by the common misconception. People see that generally electric toothbrushes cause better outcomes and assume the overall ability to clean must be better, but if used properly a manual toothbrush gets the job done too.

It’s actually a common misconception that vibrating toothbrushes clean your mouth better than manual ones. Just takes a bit of extra effort and time to do it manually. Brushing twice daily for two minutes, covering all tooth surfaces with gentle, short strokes or a proper scrub/polish motion, and reaching along the gumline, is what matters most. Most people fall short on time and technique so that’s why dentists will reccomend the electric ones. They do make it easier to get the job done, but there’s nothing inherently worse about a manual brush.

Does your washing machine vibrate???

I wonder if it would help to make a few communities that were just like “Post whatever fun random shit you want.” like a catch all for stuff outside the main things. A lot of it is just that while a lot of us have other interests we might post about they aren’t the same interests. But if we could all get in a single community made for like ‘casual posting’ it might take off. Or just slightly more vague things. Like “Peanuts” is so fucking specific. Same with “windows11” like why not just “microsoft” for all microsoft products? Specificity can be the enemy of a communities success sometimes.

Bit outdated map. Those NATO bases in the Persion Gulf should be erased. Somebody blew them up lol. Also the US pulled out of Afghanistan so that one too. Man the US not doing too hot these last few years is it? ☺️

Why would anyone ever spend more than a few bucks on a toothbrush? Just go to the store and find the cheapest ones. There’s only one thing in my house that can vibrate and it certainly doesn’t go in my mouth. . . . . . . . . . What did you think I was talking about? I meant my phone you pervert.

I’m actually a big fan of the Gnome workflow on laptops. When using a mouse i HATE Gnome but when using a trackpad? It has no peers. It’s entirely designed around gestures. three fingers up to switch apps, side to side to switch desktops, up a 2nd time to get the apps page, etc. I do wish it was more customizable like KDE but it’s my go to on a laptop simply because I can’t stand using a trackpad with anything else.

I don’t know that I’d call them happy. More like coping. A substitute will always be just that. I don’t see it as their fault so much as the fault of capitalism. Most people replace human connection with materialism to some degree. Those people just take it to the extreme.

I am also just concerned that it’s being used a substitute for human connection. With the way capitalism tends to isolate people and get them feeling all lonely. It’s easy to see how someone could get drawn in and use an LLM as a replacement for a person to talk to.

That’s not really what I was getting at.

What I am saying is that LLMs are extremely good at making things sound plausible. That is the issue I was bringing up. LLMs are much better at making things that are incorrect seem correct than many people realize, and people are not infallible.

If you have a human just entirely make something up you can usually tell it is entirely made up if you read it. A human has to put a lot of effort in to make bullshit sound convincing. LLMs do this effortlessly. So when using them it’s easy to make a mistake and let some of the extremely plausible bullshit slip through.

I don’t disagree at all that humans can create bullshit too. My concern is just that LLMs are so good at it that many people get convinced. Just look at all these cases of people using them for normal mundane things who get drawn in and fall into “AI Psychosis”.

I think it is a result of human brains just not being wired to deal with a machine that talks like a person. Psychologically it’s an issue. Even if we logically know it’s just a machine our brains do not. So people end up falling into this trap where they treat it like a person. Then it tells them insane things and they just start believing it.

Even if say 90% of people never had this issue it’s still a problem. If a new drink gave 10% of people who drank it a psychotic break we’d regulate it to hell and back. Put warning labels on everything. Make it prescription only. etc. LLMs are just out there for anyone to pick up and use like there’s no tomorrow. It’s a serious problem.

I think the very design of LLMs makes them not very useful even when used “correctly”. They are basically machines that are very good at sounding plausible. But they have absolutely 0 way of checking if info is correct or not. It’s just whatever is reinforced the most in their model is treated as correct.

I think the underlying technology likely has uses. But the way it is currently being produced into products is something that, even if you tried to use it correctly, would simply end up tricking you with some plausible bullshit. Maybe you tell it to edit a paper and it decides to “fix” one of your opinions to be the most common one. Maybe you tell it to tell you the nuance behind a historical fact and it makes up a very likely sounding story that is entirely bullshit which you then repeat to someone else without realizing.

The ability it has to sound plausible is its biggest flaw. Because an LLM will VERY rarely if ever say the words, “I don’t know.” You’d basically have to have gone in and coded it to respond to that specific question to respond with “I don’t know”. Otherwise it’ll just make something up.

I don’t see it so much as pollution as a smokescreen being put in place on purpose. It is my belief that these companies plan to so heavily flood the internet with AI generated nonsense that they can then begin to charge a premium for access to verified information.

That is why I have made an effort to collect actual physical books all printed before AI became a thing that have lots of info I can use to verify things. I have books on medical info, various crafts, construction, agriculture, copies of works from Lenin, Marx, Mao, Stalin, Marcus Aurelius, Plutarch, Voltaire, Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, etc. Math textbooks, science textbooks. I’ve got around 80 or so right now. A lot of them I got for free and the rest I got for very cheap (anywhere from 1$ to 9$) because I go after used books. Many are from the 70s and 80s.

The idea is that say in like 2035 if I need to know something random I have a bunch of 100% human made and verified information. Even if some is a bit outdated it’s better than AI slop.

Ironically American Revolutionary Thomas Paine in his Common Sense said something that explains this quite well, “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right,[…] Time makes more converts than reason.”

Well it is actually true that an integral part of Christianity itself is the imperative to spread or proselytizing. It is baked into the religion itself. Originally this was an idea to convert all Jews to the new religion, but it was Saul of Tarsus, or the Apostle Paul, who introduced the idea that this should apply to all peoples, not just Jews.

In the words of the Bible itself: Matthew 28:19–20: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them… teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” Mark 16:15: “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation.”

So while you may be correct that there is a psychologal aspect to it as well, it is also true that it is simply a part of their religion. They are taught that they should do this. It is generally seen as a holy duty to convert others and save their souls.

How bold of you to claim atheists do not have a national holiday a mere TEN DAYS prior to National Donut Day!

I would push back on the idea that humans inherently want to push their religions on people. In actuality that behavior is an effect of the memetic construction of more modern religions. Memetics being the concept “viral ideas” or contagious ideas. Where an idea becomes a thing of its own and spreads without outside interference. (yes like memes). The polytheistic religions were generally not so inclined to spread their religion to others. They’d show up in a forgein land and see other peoples worshipping gods and either think those were the names for their own gods here or think that these are just the gods of this land. The Greeks for example would make offerings to Isis while in Egypt.

The more recent idea of “An imperative to spread” is an invention of christianity that was picked up by Islam as well. Over time much like our societies evolve the ideas we have evolve too. It’s natural selection. Given enough time any idea that has baked into it the imperative to spread will overtake ideas that do not. Hence the death of paganism in Europe and the dominance of Islam, and Christianity in that region by comparison over the last few centuries.

Eventually (As is already happening to some extent with political ideologies imo) a new memetic construct will come along that outcompetes christianity. Just as the christians before it absorbed paganism (Arch Angels and Demons are literally just pagan gods given new names) this new one will absorb christianity and outcompete it and the other religions into near extinction. This may be a new religion of its own, it may be a political movement, it may be something else. Whatever it is it will better fit the material conditions of the current world than the now quite outdated christianity which was more suited to a medeival time period. Giving it an advantage and leading to inevitable spread.

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