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[zompist]

In 1800 people could only move at the speed of a horse, 20 mph.
In 1900, they could move at the speed of a locomotive, 80 mph.
In 1950, they could move at the speed of a jet plane, 600 mph.
A few years later they could move at the speed of the Apollo spacecraft, 24000 mph.
Obviously, then, today you can move at 250,000 mph.
By 2050, you will be able to move at the speed of light.

But suppose someone in 1950 declared that travel technology had reached its limits and that humanity would never reach hypersonic speeds.

INDUCTION IS A FALLACY. That line of argument means nothing; it is worse than a guess. Give it up.

BTW, "induction works sometimes in limited cases, therefore it must work in this case where I need to worship AI" is ALSO INDUCTION. Still a fallacy.

[malloc]

INDUCTION IS A FALLACY. That line of argument means nothing; it is worse than a guess. Give it up.

BTW, "induction works sometimes in limited cases, therefore it must work in this case where I need to worship AI" is ALSO INDUCTION. Still a fallacy.

Let me stress that I am not making definitive claims about what will happen in the future, only explaining why I take the prospects of AI more seriously than many here. Judging by past trends, it just seems more likely to me that AI will continue to improve rather than hitting a wall. I don't feel comfortable letting my guard down by hypothesizing that it will stall without some good evidence in that direction. There is quite a difference between caution and certainty.

[WeepingElf]

Judging by past trends, it just seems more likely to me that AI will continue to improve rather than hitting a wall.

Judging by past trends, it seems more likely to me that AI will hit a wall soon rather than continuing to improve. Happened several times in the past. Eliza, Cyc & Co. did not grow to take over the world; "AI winters" (i.e., periods of disappointment in AI research) have happened several times, and the next AI winter is sure to come - and then the current AI bubble will burst, if it doesn't burst before that.

[alice]

On the subject of AI-generated popular music, does anyone remember the "versificator" from a book called Nineteen Eighty-Four?

[WeepingElf]

On the subject of AI-generated popular music, does anyone remember the "versificator" from a book called Nineteen Eighty-Four?

Now that you mention it, I remember. (It was long ago that I read it.) And meanwhile, Napster has decided to go that way.

[Man in Space]

On the subject of AI-generated popular music, does anyone remember the "versificator" from a book called Nineteen Eighty-Four?

Now that you mention it, I remember. (It was long ago that I read it.) And meanwhile, Napster has decided to go that way.

Full circle. Originally a vehicle for mass copyright infringement, now peddling material that is entirely ineligible for copyright in the United States.

[malloc]

On the subject of AI-generated popular music, does anyone remember the "versificator" from a book called Nineteen Eighty-Four?

Yes. The fact that it has become a reality is proof that we are living in a dystopia.

[WeepingElf]

On the subject of AI-generated popular music, does anyone remember the "versificator" from a book called Nineteen Eighty-Four?

Now that you mention it, I remember. (It was long ago that I read it.) And meanwhile, Napster has decided to go that way.

Full circle. Originally a vehicle for mass copyright infringement, now peddling material that is entirely ineligible for copyright in the United States.

Yes. Those nerds wanted music without paying royalties to artists, now they get what they deserve - music for which they don't have to pay royalties to artists because there are no artists involved. Justice has been done

[Travis B.]

I have a question...

I had relatives in Europe, specifically Ukraine, who were most likely murdered by Nazi collaborators (I do not know this for a fact -- what I do know is that my great-grandfather who was most closely related to them lost contact with them in the course of WW2, and my parents discovered decades later that the village where they lived was razed and all the people in it murdered by Nazi collaborators because the Nazis thought they were too sympathetic to the Soviets).

Thing is, it feels very weird saying that they were most likely 'murdered in the Holocaust', since they weren't Jews, or Roma, or Sinti, or homosexuals, or disabled people, or like. They were ethnic Poles, and they weren't murdered because of their ethnicity per se.

So what is your guys' thoughts on this? Should the term 'Holocaust' be limited to just Jews, or just Jews, Roma, and Sinti, or Jews, Roma, Sinti, homosexuals, and disabled people, or like who were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators, as it commonly is, or should a broader meaning referring to everyone murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators regardless of what category they may have fallen into be adopted (and when more specific meanings are desired one should use terms such as the 'Shoah' or the 'Porajmos')?

[Torco]

"the holocaust" in english feels to me like it mostly means jews exterminated as part of the final solution. the nazis killed a lot more people than just jews, and i'm not sure the distinction matters ethically very much, so if it were me I'd go with "killed by the fascists".

[Richard W]

"the holocaust" in english feels to me like it mostly means jews exterminated as part of the final solution. the nazis killed a lot more people than just jews, and i'm not sure the distinction matters ethically very much, so if it were me I'd go with "killed by the fascists".

And then you'd be considered a liar because you confounded Fascists and Nazis.

[WeepingElf]

"the holocaust" in english feels to me like it mostly means jews exterminated as part of the final solution. the nazis killed a lot more people than just jews, and i'm not sure the distinction matters ethically very much, so if it were me I'd go with "killed by the fascists".

And then you'd be considered a liar because you confounded Fascists and Nazis.

Fair. The Italian Fascists were nowhere near as murderous as the German Nazis (though they were bad enough). The main difference between them was that the Nazis tried to conquer the whole world and eradicate certain ethnic groups, while the Fascists merely aspired to establish Italy as a Great Power on a par with Britain and France and dominance in the Mediterranean. When Hitler attacked Poland in 1939, Mussolini declared neutrality because he had no interests in eastern Europe; only later, he joined the bandwagon when he thought that such an alliance would help his cause. There is also a difference between capital-F Fascists (the original Italian Fascists) and lowercase-f fascists (a generic term for similar far-right movements). The latter is perhaps avoided generally, instead speak of right-wing extremists or something like that. And please don't call generic far-rightists "Nazis"! That is doing injustice to the victims of the Nazi genocide.

[Starbeam]

"the holocaust" in english feels to me like it mostly means jews exterminated as part of the final solution. the nazis killed a lot more people than just jews, and i'm not sure the distinction matters ethically very much, so if it were me I'd go with "killed by the fascists".

the shoa is the jewish thing, holocaust is the broader one. there's other individualized terms, like porajmos. personally, i prefer "the nazi genocide", but that might be sort of a neologism

[WeepingElf]

"the holocaust" in english feels to me like it mostly means jews exterminated as part of the final solution. the nazis killed a lot more people than just jews, and i'm not sure the distinction matters ethically very much, so if it were me I'd go with "killed by the fascists".

the shoa is the jewish thing, holocaust is the broader one. there's other individualized terms, like porajmos. personally, i prefer "the nazi genocide", but that might be sort of a neologism

Yes.

[Travis B.]

"the holocaust" in english feels to me like it mostly means jews exterminated as part of the final solution. the nazis killed a lot more people than just jews, and i'm not sure the distinction matters ethically very much, so if it were me I'd go with "killed by the fascists".

And then you'd be considered a liar because you confounded Fascists and Nazis.

Fair. The Italian Fascists were nowhere near as murderous as the German Nazis (though they were bad enough). The main difference between them was that the Nazis tried to conquer the whole world and eradicate certain ethnic groups, while the Fascists merely aspired to establish Italy as a Great Power on a par with Britain and France and dominance in the Mediterranean. When Hitler attacked Poland in 1939, Mussolini declared neutrality because he had no interests in eastern Europe; only later, he joined the bandwagon when he thought that such an alliance would help his cause. There is also a difference between capital-F Fascists (the original Italian Fascists) and lowercase-f fascists (a generic term for similar far-right movements). The latter is perhaps avoided generally, instead speak of right-wing extremists or something like that. And please don't call generic far-rightists "Nazis"! That is doing injustice to the victims of the Nazi genocide.

Agreed. The term 'Nazi', unqualified, should refer to the original Nazis, and the capitalized term 'Fascist', unqualified, should refer to the original Italian Fascists. The lowercase term 'fascist' is a common term for generic far-rightists, but we should probably avoid referring to the original Nazis as 'fascists', because it implicitly negates the significance of the Nazis' crimes by diluting them, just as much as we should probably avoid referring to people other than the original Nazis as 'Nazis' for similar reasons (if one is referring to the direct lineal ideological descendants of the original Nazis one may use the term 'Neo-Nazis', and only in that case).

[Travis B.]

"the holocaust" in english feels to me like it mostly means jews exterminated as part of the final solution. the nazis killed a lot more people than just jews, and i'm not sure the distinction matters ethically very much, so if it were me I'd go with "killed by the fascists".

the shoa is the jewish thing, holocaust is the broader one. there's other individualized terms, like porajmos. personally, i prefer "the nazi genocide", but that might be sort of a neologism

The problem with referring to this as the 'Nazi genocide', though, is that some of the victims weren't genocide victims -- they were not murdered for their race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, or like. In this case the victims were victims of politicide not genocide.

[Torco]

"the holocaust" in english feels to me like it mostly means jews exterminated as part of the final solution. the nazis killed a lot more people than just jews, and i'm not sure the distinction matters ethically very much, so if it were me I'd go with "killed by the fascists".

And then you'd be considered a liar because you confounded Fascists and Nazis.

nazis are fascists. nazi is a category of fascist, innit ?
i don't buy that either nazi or fascist should only be reserved for the 1930s and 40s. even without knowing history, most of the times i hear "no he's not a fascist cause he's not italian and this isn't the 1930s" it comes from, well, fascists, so that's what *they* want us to think, but also knowing history it's easy to see that doing so legimitizes a bunch of fascists, and robs us of a useful term to analize and understand reality. the ustase are fascists, franquistas are fascists, the estado novo are fascists, petain was a fascist, the silver league was fascist, carlos keller was a fascist, garda de fier was fascist, the kkk is fascist, ezra pound was a fascist... i could go on. it's good and proper to understand these things as manifestations of a broader phenomenon, as opposed to isolated aberrations which are all sui generis and definitely have no relationship of any kind to anything that's going on in the here and now.

of course one mustn't be too broad either: fascist doesn't mean bad: fujimori was bad, but he wasn't a fascist [though he had some fascistoid tendencies]. neither was, i don't know, leopold the second or the slavers of the ivory coast. fascism is, as many things are, a spectrum, but the spectrum is more broad than 1927 italy to 1944 italy or whatever.

[Travis B.]

"the holocaust" in english feels to me like it mostly means jews exterminated as part of the final solution. the nazis killed a lot more people than just jews, and i'm not sure the distinction matters ethically very much, so if it were me I'd go with "killed by the fascists".

And then you'd be considered a liar because you confounded Fascists and Nazis.

nazis are fascists. nazi is a category of fascist, innit ?
i don't buy that either nazi or fascist should only be reserved for the 1930s and 40s. even without knowing history, most of the times i hear "no he's not a fascist cause he's not italian and this isn't the 1930s" it comes from, well, fascists, so that's what *they* want us to think, but also knowing history it's easy to see that doing so legimitizes a bunch of fascists, and robs us of a useful term to analize and understand reality. the ustase are fascists, franquistas are fascists, the estado novo are fascists, petain was a fascist, the silver league was fascist, carlos keller was a fascist, garda de fier was fascist, the kkk is fascist, ezra pound was a fascist... i could go on. it's good and proper to understand these things as manifestations of a broader phenomenon, as opposed to isolated aberrations which are all sui generis.

of course one mustn't be too broad either: fascist doesn't mean bad: fujimori was bad, but he wasn't a fascist [though he had some fascistoid tendencies]. neither was, i don't know, leopold the second. fascism is, as many things are, a spectrum, but the spectrum is more broad than 1927 italy to 1944 italy or whatever.

The issue is with referring to the original Nazis as 'fascists' rather than 'Nazis'; the term 'fascist', lowercase, is much broader and milder term than the term 'Nazi', and by referring to the original Nazis as 'fascists' one dilutes how bad they really were.

[Starbeam]

"the holocaust" in english feels to me like it mostly means jews exterminated as part of the final solution. the nazis killed a lot more people than just jews, and i'm not sure the distinction matters ethically very much, so if it were me I'd go with "killed by the fascists".

the shoa is the jewish thing, holocaust is the broader one. there's other individualized terms, like porajmos. personally, i prefer "the nazi genocide", but that might be sort of a neologism

The problem with referring to this as the 'Nazi genocide', though, is that some of the victims weren't genocide victims -- they were not murdered for their race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, or like. In this case the victims were victims of politicide not genocide.

I'm comfortable with the term "trans genocide" that's getting my group killed even tho we technically aren't a "geno"

[Travis B.]

the shoa is the jewish thing, holocaust is the broader one. there's other individualized terms, like porajmos. personally, i prefer "the nazi genocide", but that might be sort of a neologism

The problem with referring to this as the 'Nazi genocide', though, is that some of the victims weren't genocide victims -- they were not murdered for their race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, or like. In this case the victims were victims of politicide not genocide.

I'm comfortable with the term "trans genocide" that's getting my group killed even tho we technically aren't a "geno"

That's still closer, because that is for membership in a group one hasn't really chosen (as it has been demonstrated that trans-ness is innate in the way that gay-ness is), rather than for one's suspected political sympathies.