Cellular

Insufficient Credit

The title of this post refers to my fairly lacklustre attempts to blog here.

I’ve unable to post consistenly, instead just coming up with an occasional wordspout assembled into a kind of loose collage.

Kuki—previously known as Mitsuku—has won the Loebner Prize Turing Test competition 5 times up to and including 2019. As as a paper by Ragnar Fjelland points out, however, this just goes to show how lacking general AI is at this point.

While Kuki’s conversation is certainly humanlike, it doesn’t display the knowledge or serious insight you’d expect from advanced AI.

My conversation with Kuki took place on 6 February 2021. While entertaining, it nevertheless bears out Ragnar’s claim.

You, too, can chat with Kuki at this link.

Learning to be a Dutiful Carnivore

Dogs and cats and goats and cows,

Ducks and chickens, sheep and sows

Woven into tales for tots,

Pictured on their walls and pots.

Mumbo Jumbo

In 2015, i posted in the Facebook group Vegans in Australia about the Afterlife Explorer’s Conference, providing a link to the conference web page, explaining how it was relevant and also mentioning the group i set up to sound out any vegans that were going.

Big Sur

If you have an older mac, but recently decided to update your OS to Big Sur—providing your mac was compatible—you might want to read this post.

The takeaway is that Big Sur may take some time to settle in before it really starts working smoothly.

Moral Responsibility IV

Democracy of philosophy

The activists also don’t hold any consistent philosophy about animal use.

Some are members of a group called Animal Liberation, named after Peter Singer’s book of the same name, which, when it came out, advocated improving animal use, but not necessarily eliminating it.

Moral Responsibility III

Bitterness and hatred

In the Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin explains that he was caught in the middle of two opposing forces: one being “do-nothingism,” the other “bitterness and hatred” towards whites, veering towards violence.

Yet he presented a third way he regarded as superior, a:

way of love and nonviolent protest.

Moral Responsibility II

Self-purification

While the April Day of Action wasn’t direct action, the activists nevertheless regarded it as such (saying it would be “biggest animal rights direct action the world has ever seen”).

In the Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin describes four steps leading to the direct action he took part in:

collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self-purification; and direct action.

Moral Responsibility I

Note: To mark my most recent return from the wilderness, i’ve divided this article into a few parts, as it was originally fairly long, and made a few slight changes.

The photo above shows animal activists in Queensland, Australia, wearing black shirts that read:

One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

This is an extract from Martin Luther King’s, Letter from Birmingham Jail.

Therapy, Done Dirt Cheap

I recently read about a petition on Change.org started by an 18 year old named Curtis, saying that while he found therapy helpful, he couldn’t afford the cost of it.