• 3 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • This argument is conflating the bad boss with the misattribution of the tool. You could do that for any tool throughout history. But I still fail to see how you go from “bad boss is bad because they make us misattribute tool” to “good boss is bad because he’s not wallowing with me about how bad boss is bad”.

    As anyone who has known about him for more than a couple of years knows, Linus has a pretty solid track record of calling out stupidity. It’s just virtually always stupidity that affects the kernel. If he had to stop and tell bosses at other companies how to operate, Linux never would have made it out of the 90s.




  • Worth noting that this is also an ongoing issue with windows. Only apple has actually solved this, and they do so by owning the whole stack. Each apple product has a specific OS, CPU, and motherboard that were all specifically designed with the end-product user-experience in mind.

    But for PCs, the OS, CPU, and motherboard are all designed and built by different companies, each only designed to be generically compatible with the other components. None of them are designed for a specific end-product, so features that require all of the components to play perfectly together for a specific end-user experience (like sleep state) often end up not quite aligning.

    None of this helps you, but I think it’s worth understanding why the problem exists and why it may just always exist. The best bet is that companies like System76 or Valve solve sleep states for specific linux-based products, and then the rest of us maybe hopefully see some benefit from that.

    But IMO this is just a trade-off. It’s like a pick 2 situation between Customization, Stability, and Privacy (where a reliabile sleep state is Stability). You can have stability and customization, but you’ll probably pay a lot, and the company who sold it will want telemetry data to improve the experience for others. You can have stability and privacy, but the product will be very locked down to a specific use case to ensure a stable experience.


  • Area code 613 is eastern Ontario. Apple likely just lists all 613 numbers as Ottawa. But also, your experience might be different calling between two iPhones, because similar to iMessage, the call may be relayed the through an apple-specific route using data.

    But if the carrier has finer location info than that (and they do) you don’t want it to be leaked to the receiver. It’s not like when you go on vacation and call someone from your same SIM, they can determine where you’re calling from.



  • To be clear, OP didn’t say “porn” on Lemmy, they said “adult art”. There are contexts in which nudity is not pornographic, but I assume it’s easier to just ban it all and not take any risks, than to judge the artistic merit of each upload before deciding whether it’s too over the top.

    The inverse problem exists for creators on yt who make animations that are not kid friendly. Google’s bots love to tag them as for children, and thus demonitize them.



  • It does have a steep learning curve, and I do think it is more enjoyable the more you get familiar with the systems. Yeah, sending caravans out can be very risky early on for many reasons.

    For a first run, maybe choose a slightly easier difficulty (Community Builder), use the Phoebe Chillax storyteller, and pick a location on the planet that has a year-round growing season. And when choosing your starting colonists, I recommend someone with shooting, someone with construction, and maybe someone with cooking or plants. This way you can be relatively self-sufficient without needing to caravan.

    Once you can caravan, I recommend trading/gifting to other factions to build goodwill. This will keep them from attacking you, and once you have a comms station, you can call them in to help with defense in a pinch. Note that some factions are always hostile, though.

    When you do get raided, make sure your colonists are always firing from behind cover. When possible, try to gang up on isolated enemies and melee them down to increase the chance they are incapacitated (not killed), so you can capture them. Prisoners can either be slowly converted and recruited, or released for goodwill with their faction (or used for other fucked up stuff).

    Good luck!




  • Do they know about algorithmic pricing? Most people don’t like the idea of a company charging them more based on how desperate they are.

    Do they know about DHS’ new Predictive Policing.

    Do they know that scammers can use info they gather about them to run scams on their loved ones pretending to be them?

    Do they know that there are legitimate reasons to want privacy? Ex. a journalist investigating a politician or corporation, or a single mom trying to keep themselves and their kids away from a crazy ex.

    Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.





  • Fear isn’t the right tool to avoid it, though.

    To be clear, I’m saying the opposite. Fear is the necessary ingredient that causes fascism. Everyone is seeing wealth inequality, and jobs going away, and cost of living rising, and (depending on the country) healthcare costs rising and quality getting worse. There is a lot of fear going around all over the world, and that’s the classic environment for a demagogue to step in, point at a scapegoat, and stoke populism. As we’ve learned in the US in the last decade, it’s a short jump from there to fascism, and Germany and Italy weren’t the only countries to learn the same lesson back during the great depression. Canada was about to elect their own version of Trump, but instead elected Carney in direct response to Trump’s aggression. So I’m confident if it wasn’t Germany back in the 30s, it would have been someone else, possibly even the US. We did our own internment camp stuff towards the japanese, and there was famously a pro-nazi rally that was held at Madison Square Garden in NYC in 1939. The fear was everywhere, it just came to a head with Germany first.

    You kinda want to avoid it.

    Hah, understatement. And yet democracies still reliably fall for it. And the reason is they have fears that make them prone to exploitation.

    I still don’t see any reason to completely sell out to some specific big companies…they’re trying to manipulate you.

    Absolutely not what I’m suggesting. The opposite. As I mentioned before, I tend to believe that any models trained on stolen public data should be made public domain, and to whatever extent possible, the companies using them should need to license the resulting models from us.

    Edit: but I’m specifically against any govts taking a stake in these companies, because that’s effectively a bailout for them. They would love to unload their risk on the people.


  • I’m really unsure about how to compare timeframes.

    Totally fair. I think the relevant difference is that we’re still in the middle of the advent of this technology, we still have a hardware shortage that limits access to it, and it began as we were already entering a crisis era and economic downturn. From our vantage point, we only see the damage caused by the tech, not the potential long term impact, and we are (rationally) assuming the worst.

    But if a new scientific revolution could happen as a result of AI for the betterment of humanity, do we want to accidentally prevent that by throwing it out with fascism?

    (And if that is in our future, the next question historians 500y from now will ask is, could it have even been avoided? Much like we could ask now, was there a timeline where the original printing presses were destroyed out of fear of corrupting the masses? And realistically, how long would that have lasted before a new one was built?)

    3 years ago is an arbitrary point in time. Neural networks were invented 70 years ago.

    But we both know that when people say “fuck AI” they’re not talking about anything other than generative AI made in the last few years.

    I don’t really get what you mean by fear…I think it’s natural to feel a lot of rejection towards all of that.

    Fear has defined the Trump era for the last 10+ years. It is why countries all over the world are tilting to the right. It is the necessary ingredient for fascism to gain traction. It happened during the great depression all over the world, even in the US, and it’s happening now.

    I’m not saying it’s an unnatural or unreasonable reaction, I’m saying it’s causing democracies to be prone to rash decisions. If you recall, this thread is about the use of AI in FOSS projects. The most prominent sentiment by 99% of people in this thread is “fuck AI, burn it down and anyone who uses it”. And if that fear-based reaction is what prevents well-meaning, intelligent open source maintainers from being allowed to leverage an objectively powerful phenomenon to responsibly and ethically usher in a new scientific/FOSS revolution, we would be remiss to stifle that opportunity out of fear.

    Edit: and to be completely honest, I don’t know who is upvoting me, because it’s very uncharacteristic of randos to follow a thread this dense between two people. I get the sense that there are bots in this thread voting for/against their favorite ideologies.



  • I think they were assuming that people would use linux to dodge these restrictions. Ex. a teen who can’t use a site on windows/ios might boot linux in an attempt to make it work. But as others have pointed out, it’s more likely that sites will just blanket-flag a linux useragent as being used by a child to be safe. And then a linux user changing their useragent to get around this will then be hw attestation challenged like any other OS. So yeah, it’s just going to make it more inconvenient to use an open system.


  • Consider that you’re comparing hundreds of years of the printing press without much lived-context, vs about 3 years of LLMs in the context of the country you live in. It’s not the case that when the printing press was invented, that suddenly everyone had access to a bunch of free, unbiased information. It was a complex piece of machinery, it took decades to be adopted widely, and when it did, it wasn’t in the hands of the proletariat at first. The people wielding it most effectively were kings. And in the present day, if you live in China today, odds are you are not nearly as pessimistic about the advent of AI as people in the west, primarily because your government has actively taken steps to make you feel safe. Most recently, China made it outright illegal to replace workers with AI. Say what you will about China, but I think americans would like to see something even 1/10th this effective right now.

    I otherwise can’t disagree with your summary of the current sad state of AI. The only part I would contend with is that, while it can be misused to “make people more stupid”, when wielded correctly it is also a great tool for education. It is able to point you in the right direction of the information you’re looking for faster than any other algorithm. Like with any new information, you have to be trained in the ways of skepticism. You have to know how to vet the output for yourself. But it’s so much faster at finding that relevant information for vetting than combing through reams of irrelevant text, or renting time from a domain expert, if you’re privileged enough to have access to one. Used correctly, LLMs are an incredible accelerator for learning.

    And while not all open models are full open-training, there are many viable open-weight models that you can both fine-tune on your own content, and run locally so that no one is MITMing your prompts; and they do rival the best that openai/anthropic/etc. have to offer. There is currently a whole ecosystem of normal people iterating on various open models outside of the purview of the oligarchs. Yes, we’re in a hardware shortage right now, which super sucks, but we’re still talking on the order of thousands to 10s of thousands to have your own model running, not hundreds of thousands to millions.

    Outside of LLMs, we are seeing breakthroughs in healthcare. A year ago, doctors were leveraging AI to significantly speed up chemo treatment schedules, leading to a measurable number of lives saved. And just last week we saw Moderna announce a personalized cancer vaccine pass phase 3 testing! The ability to create a personalized vaccine that teaches your immune system how to fight your cancer cells in spite of them constantly mutating was thought to be impossible even 5y ago. Meanwhile, the work is still ongoing, but AI seems promising in its ability to approximate solutions to previously intractable problems in fusion power generation.

    Issue isn’t the maths… It’s the fascists being in control of it. We need to get rid of those.

    Yep, that’s all I’m claiming. To me, the active ingredient for fascism is fear. The internet could be full of all the slop propaganda that grok can cook up, but if people aren’t afraid of their neighbors or afraid of losing their livelihood, it’s all rendered powerless. We can take 100 specific steps to combat fascism, but to quote one of my favorite metal albums, “the fear is what keeps us here”.