FriendOfDeSoto

joined 2 years ago

Normally, when somebody on the internet starts a question with "Am I the only one ...?" my first reaction is to say no, of course not. This is the first time that I really need to question that conviction. I think you just might be the only one!

[–] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 13 points 12 hours ago

Like the river finds the sea, people will find a way around it. Satellite connections, just as an idea.

Anything a chip does can be backwards engineered to fool it. People will break your proposed surveillance chip eventually.

Most of these companies are maybe US-owned to varying degrees but they don't produce everything in the US. Also, they would put a very high price on these government mandated chips for two reasons: 1) government has deep pockets and 2) it would keep them away from very profitable so-called AI biz opportunities.

The pandy has shown us that with a few disruptions in the supply chain, any system that requires a cryptographic chip check to function can be sent to hell in a handbasket. I forgot if it was HP or Canon or some printer company had to teach its customers to bypass, i.e. hack their own cryptogtaphic chip checks because they couldn't get more chips and otherwise the printers wouldn't print. A few disruptions could also affect the censorship chip supply chain.

The great firewall of China has also shown how creative people get to get their message across. If it's not just human censors but also so-called AI censors it will just take creativity to a new level. Necessity is the mother of invention.

So there are some reasons why you might be worrying too much. I think another one is much broader. The majority of Americans did not vote for the current president. If he started censoring the internet now there would be Civil War II - Now It's Digital. The reason why Russia or North Korea can censor their people much easier is because they have never had or only on paper a brief period of liberty and rule of law. It will be much harder to control the US population. There isn't just the one media outlet, the one ISP, the one judiciary to dominate. It's splintered. And populated by feisty people, some of them armed. You couldn't pull off what you suggested without much more support for 47. And he seems to be losing it more than gaining these days.

Of course, I didn't think far enough. Thanks for setting that straight.

[–] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 19 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

The founders and other info can be found here.

And wouldn't you know it? Both men, and both on Xwitter and LinkedIn.

[–] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 11 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

I think there is data on it. Back in school I remember looking at the population pyramid. It's a visualization of the number of men and women (x-axis, going both left and right) per birthyear (y-axis). In ye olden days, that formed a triangle. Many babies at the bottom, fewer olds at the top. You could tell a lot from the shape this took. You'd get dents on the male side that will correspond with armed conflicts, like the world wars. And then in the 1960s the pyramid with war chips in it massively narrows. At least in countries where the pill became readily available. It turned the pyramid into a tree with a big head at the top and a wide but thinner stem growing under it. I suspect now 80 years later we're at a much narrower elongated triangle shape again. So you can probably count the shift in numbers there and put a number on "prevented accidents." But you would have to account for other factors as well, improvements in medicine, vaccinations, etc.

Were all births accidental? That's a question you could only ask in hindsight. Humans have always looked for ways you prevent conception because we like to party but without reliable success. It's only in the second half of the last century that we have come up with measures that the Catholic church really doesn't approve of. Before that, children weren't really planned in today's sense. They just happened. They were expected to happen. And with most women being relegated to raising them and running the household, there wasn't much else they could do. The concept that a wife could be raped by her husband is sadly fairly new. The patriarchy was strong. Abortion was a gamble and many women died from bad jobs of them. Most of the time, if she got pregnant, the decision was made, end of story. If you weren't married yet, shotgun wedding. That's how it went until we developed contraception that actually works. I wouldn't call any kids before that accidental.

Sure, you could remain abstinent. But we like to party.

[–] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 2 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

I can agree with a lot here but I also have to admit that I fell at the first hurdle.

I think that depends how convincing and what words the AI uses

Hard disagree here. If you're using so-called AI today, the responsibility to scrutinize everything it throws at you is yours. No matter how neatly packaged or convincingly worded it is. There is a failure rate - the news is full of stories. You're setting off to climb a mountain. You cannot trust the 1s and 0s.

As for the sat nav culpability, Google gives elevation information when they have it. I would not be surprised when we found out that was the case for these dumdums. It's a bit like reading an old paper map though. If you don't know more saturated colors mean higher elevation you might have set off 30 years ago to climb this 12k ft mountain in flip-flops as well. I don't think we should blame sat navs for the ignorance here either. Unless they hide that info maliciously.

[–] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 3 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

To a certain degree, copyright holder decries possible limitations on copyright as foul, that's not really news, is it?

Elton John garnered success in a time when you could earn a pretty penny by selling records. As a result, he has a lot of well paying dogs in this fight. It's nice that he wants to protect the younglings. I just wonder if he knows that that ship has already sailed for them. Most contemporary artists don't earn shit on streams, selling records is not sustainable income, and you can only make money on concerts really. Branding is almost more important than content. What is he looking to protect then for the younger artists? An industry in decline anyway?

I think we may have to come to terms with the possibility that everything that can be made available as training data will be used as training data. A shit Murphy's Law if you will. Facebook torrenting their training data is just the first sign of it. In the end, it will be indistinguishable and unremovable. This sort of thinking may be going alongside the incessant lobbying of tech bros at Westminster.

What we need is to extract money from the companies who do this and spread it among artists. A percentage of their revenues from two years sgo and all fundrausing goes into a fund. Musicians, artists, film makers, writers etc. join the fund and get a cut. Money is the only thing that would make these companies think twice. Right now the price for running roughshod over everything including the law is relatively cheap for them. We have to raise the price. That would be more productive than calling politicians idiots in my opinion.

[–] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 6 points 19 hours ago (4 children)

AI isn't putting people's lives in danger here. It's the people's ignorance that puts their lives in danger. This is the same as when car navigation apps became available and people turned and sank their cars into creeks and harbors because they trusted their navi provider's faulty map data more than their own eyes and common sense. The problem is "cluesless people." If you are just trusting all the info chatGPT finds for you, you are the problem. We can't just outsource the attribution of blame for all idiotic actions to so-called AI.

Depends on your definition of common. When the movable type printing press came to the British Isles, the available characters didn't include the thorn so printers used the y as a stand-in. It was the beginning of the end and all "ye olde shoppe" signs are just a snapshot of a particular time in history.

You read the story. They said he died of exhaustion. It's the Daily Mail. It doesn't have to be true what they say.

I think if your mind is sufficiently obsessive you can override all the natural countermeasures your body uses to get you to r&r. You pass a point of no return and you fall asleep but that's the end. Not allowing people to sleep is a form of torture that can kill. Much like starving someone.

This guy allegedly also smoked and drank like an idiot. That couldn't have been helpful under the circumstances.

Did he really do them though? The reason why this is within the scope of belief is the fact that there's no conclusive evidence that removes reasonable doubt by contemporary standards.

Let's say it's all exactly as it says in the four different versions that are somehow considered canon and none of it is a millennia old game of telephone: did he choose to do them? Did his dad force him? Could he maybe not have had free will in this regard? Do we know about all the miracles? Maybe there were more! Would it be fair for us today to judge him based on incomplete records?

[–] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 28 points 2 days ago (3 children)

I think the sound you're hearing is a bunch of people creating throwaway accounts for this one. Not me though. I'm a saint.

 
 

I don't have the foggiest idea where I could've gotten the idea from.

view more: next ›