Yay Science

ShagGPT

We learned more about the effects of Long COVID on the brain. Alabama's supreme court made the dumbest possible choice. ChatGPT is soooooo randumb lol, so lets bring it to Tinder.

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Feb 26, 2024 — 5 min read

Science Folk See Your Foggy Brain

So Long COVID sucks. This is understood. Contracting COVID gives you an ever-increasing chance of being hit with the LONG variety, which can carry years-long symptoms ranging from brain fog to stomach issues to fatigue and beyond. But hey, science folks are very smart, and they have found evidence of what causes the "brain fog" feeling brought on by COVID/Long COVID: yer brain's leakin' juice.

Well, sorta. MRI scans show that patients with Long COVID experiencing brain fog show a decrease in blood vessel integrity, causing them to be "leaky" in your noggin.

To use a medical term, that ain't great.

But it's also not like, brain bleed bad. This is actually a solid discovery, and may set the stage for further research to discover targeted treatments for this otherwise enigmatic disease.

So thanks, science folks. Keep doing science.

Weird: Policy Driven by Religion Makes No Fucking Sense

Alabama's supreme court has ruled that embryos fertilized in IVF are considered children. Expert analysis of this ruling says that its fuckin' dumb as shit.

This ruling means that fertility clinics have no clue if they can continue to legally operate. Fertility clinics—who are trying to help people make babies—now have to stop operation because of the absurd religious right's blind swings at anything reproductive health related.

With this ruling, the destruction of any fertilized embryo could be considered murder. Embryos (which, to be extremely clear, are a handful of cells here) are terminated during the IVF process for all sorts of reasons, because they're trying to get a viable fetus to grow. Most are nonviable. It's a process. THAT'S THE POINT. But so far, at least three Alabama facilities have whole-ass stopped IVF work, fearing charges.

A cornucopia of wrinkled old white men have sounded support for this ruling, presumably due to their inability to bring a woman to climax. Notably, Alabama Senator and sentient raisin Tommy Tuberville stated his support for the bill, saying "We need more kids. We need people to have an opportunity to have kids." When informed that IVF literally gives people the opportunity to have kids, he followed up his glowing endorsement of the ruling with "Well, I haven't studied the issue."

That is a direct quote, yes.

Anyway, have your religion. I am not going to sit here and tell you that your religion is unacceptable. But what is unacceptable is the thought that it is morally acceptable to use the cudgel of the state to enforce your religion's world view onto the lives of others. Please, fuck all the way off with that shit.

ChatGPT Lost Its Damn Mind…

Last week, ChatGPT started to have a bit of a crisis. No, it didn't gain sentience and start questioning reality. It just broke like any software breaks, but made more hilarious since its been wedged into every corner of everything.

Specifically, GPT-4 started to spit out absolute nonsense responses to prompts. Repeated words, complete gibberish, absolutely unrelated tangents, the whole nine yards. It was a stark reminder: this thing is not smart. It's what any tech person outside of the AI bro-sphere has been saying: this generation of "AI" is literally just fancy autocomplete.

It's the functional equivalent of tapping the center suggested word on your phone's keyboard, but trained on everyone's texts instead of just yours. And then it shit the bed, and suddenly it was saying things such as "Lift off the gether and vindicate the things to be seen as centermosts for the meet."

Solid plan.

…So Lets Add it to Our Dating Lives

Dating conglomerate "Match Group" is a tech conglomerate that owns Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, Match.com and a whole bunch of other apps. lol, what, you thought there were choices? In this economy?

So Match Group basically has a strangehold on the online dating world, and they've just signed a deal with OpenAI to get 1,000 enterprise licenses for employees, with the intent to weave AI into basically everything. But they promise you don't need to worry! In fact, here's a quote:

But don't worry, we're not letting all this excitement get to our heads. Our love story with AI comes with a promise of responsibility – think of it as a prenup with technology. We're keeping things safe and secure, ensuring our team knows how to use these tools wisely, with all the privacy bells and whistles in place.

Love it when a company tells me they're making a "prenup with technology." Very normal stuff.

Now, AI has been in use in dating apps for quite some time, mind you. In fact, AI has been powering a ton of stuff you use every day for the better part of the last decade. It's just that it was a different kind of AI. Y'know, the kind that we train to do a task and it does the task without generating spam and deepfake pornography. By contrast, generative AI—the stuff we're seeing now—is designed to try and be general purpose content vomit rather than a specialized problem solver.

Will you soon have your hookups managed by ChatGPT? I dunno. Probably. But it's okay, they signed a prenup.