I like me some tech discussion and freedom.

Thank the sky above for the 1st and 2nd amendments.

Reality is best seen as absurd.

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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • Overall a good idea. Yeah, there are potential legal issues that could potentially come up if court cases go against the AI gen companies, but that’s the bridge that will get crossed if (not necessarily when) it comes to it.

    One thing I don’t get though is the whole “guardrail” thing on live-gens. There is no system that is 100% preventable from someone getting it to say problematic stuff.

    If Anthropic and OpenAI can’t screw it down all the way, how can some game company do it? In practice, this’ll mean that basically no game will come with a live service AI. This is like tying people saying stuff in voice chat to the company running the multiplayer servers.

    Well-intentioned idea, but not gonna actually work.



  • Elon Musk finally learns the real truth that no one really wants to say: There is no such thing as free speech in the United States.

    If saying an opinion gets you fired from your job, or gets advertisers pulled from your site: guess what, that opinion might as well be banned from being posted.

    Being held at virtual gunpoint from corporations is no different from being held at actual gunpoint from governments. This is why right-wingers complain about bannings, because, well, they have a point. Even left-wingers get hit with this too, as certain Palestine supporters that aren’t careful enough with their wording are finding out.

    I’d rather at least have the government say “To promote social cohesion and understanding, saying X opinion about Y groups of people, and stating Z false information will no longer be allowed”. Don’t get me wrong, that’s still invasive as hell and a horrifying precedent to set, but having to walk on eggshells for fear of virtual lynch mobs that can pop up at will and say “He said X he said X fire him and uproot his life or we will drag you through the mud and make you lose precious consumer money!!!” with little rhyme or reason, never stopping until their existence in society is ruined is not something that a society should support either.

    That is simply vigilante justice via keyboard instead of handgun.


  • You can’t sell EV’s because:

    1: too expensive to buy new 2: if you live anywhere that’s not a big city, or you have a garage, there is basically no electric chargers for you.

    The city I live in (~30k people) has 6 chargers total. None of them are superchargers. Wait times are already a sticking point in the best case, nevermind what the wait times would be if everyone where I’m at had an electric car tomorrow. The whole downtown would maybe gridlock just because of people waiting.

    For comparison, there are probably 2-300 gas pumps around the city. 5 gas stations within 5 minutes of where I am, all with at least 8 pumps, all well used. People are not going to get EV’s unless there is an infrastructure that is equivalent to gas around where they live.

    And that infrastructure is not gonna be fun to get going.

    The average person living in the city can’t really use them with street parking, can’t always guarantee a spot after all, and installing a personal one for yourself all but requires a personal garage, which locks out the people who live in poorer housing.

    Lots of people in my city and I suspect many others live in trailer parks with low/fixed incomes, having just a simple driveway. Where are they gonna get the thousand or two to install a Level 2 charging station? My mom and dad certainly don’t have the money.

    Expecting the EV companies to make the infrastructure with the money they get just from selling EV’s is gonna turn into one gigantic chicken-and-egg problem. The government is going to have to do it, and anyone who’s not living along an interstate can see just how much benefit they are personally getting from it so far… (hint: none)




  • No duh, because not a single country has made any real attempt to lower their citizens’ emissions.

    It will take sacrifice from all of us to stop warming.

    Forget 1.5°C, honestly, forget 2°C as well, keeping it under 3°C is likely the best that we can hope for right now. You’re needing to throw out our gas-based car infrastructure, reduce our reliance on jets as much as possible, lower not just meat consumption but also almonds/alfalfa/etc., and that is just to get started.

    Really, I don’t see the average voter letting that happen. What’s going to happen is eventually, sometime 30-40 years from now, a heat wave is gonna thrash the Middle East, consistent 130°F days for a solid month, 100,000 people dead, and the very next year planes will be in the air, making clouds to block the sun.

    We are not ready to give up the things that the developed world will have to give up to truly back away from this coming apocalypse.




  • I don’t have any trust whatsoever for any company, or the government, to be the decider of what counts as “mis/disinformation”.

    Sometimes there are easy layups, like “the Holocaust did not happen” and “Vaccines have 5G chips inside them” which are obviously just wrong and I think most of us would agree not to have…

    But what about “The Holocaust was overblown and the jews should stop whining about it”? I and probably 99% of people would say that’s a stupid opinion, but is that “misinformation”? Should a company be allowed to ban you for saying it?

    How about things like the 13/52 statistic? Should that be removed? What about “42% of all transgenders commit suicide”? That’s used to attack that group a lot, should that be banned as well?

    And, to be honest with you, the Democratic Party is absolutely obsessed with using clinical terms like those mentioned to stifle all discussion and act like they are the only voice on the issue you’re allowed to believe. Republicans freak out about this for good reason.

    It’s always the Democratic side that gets conservative opinions that they think are bad (whether lies or otherwise), boot them off the platform, and then decide to trample all over their new platforms and get them killed off too. It’s never just “pRiVaTe CoMpAnY tHeY cAn dO WhAt ThEy WaNt MaKe YoUr oWn WeBsiTE”, it’s “you are not allowed to have a place to speak this idea that I think is bad for society anywhere on the internet”. I really, really do not want to embolden that sect more than they already are.


  • This would be scary except for the part where I think many of these young activists would honestly rather have their whole search history read in court than vote for Trump.

    If it’s those two guys again, the election will go exactly the same way as last time, because 99.9% of Americans will have already decided before the first presidental debate even happens.

    I know I’ve already decided that I’m not gonna bother come 2024 if those two are back. But I’m more apathetic about politics than the average Tlaib listener. They will almost certainly fall in line the instant the primaries are clinched.





  • Copyright has always traditionally required there to be some sort of direct linkage to the source material, like “This has X character that I own in it” or “This is like X story I made, except Y and Z were changed”.

    Generative AI for the most part doesn’t do that. There is no line to draw from their pictures to the AI’s pictures. The lawsuit that maybe stabs these programs in the back would be a big artist claiming that they used the research LAION training set, knowingly, to create a product that copies their style exactly via their labeling of works with their name, and thus reducing their way to make money. Whether that has enough basis in law to work… debatable.

    But “This work it generated violated my copyright” is for sure not the way to get them.



  • Open Source as a concept is kinda similar to fanfiction. They are both technically just statements of fact, either they are or aren’t, but both of them are very much intertwined with political “The big man can’t control me” kind of zealotry. Which, at least for the anti-corporation parts of it all, I can respect.

    But… OSS has a problem that fanfiction doesn’t have: maintenance. With a fanfiction, it either gets finished, standing on it’s own as a self-contained cake to be consumed and praised over, or the writer gets bored and the cake is unfinished. Either way, no person or business ever relies on that cake for their own goals, other than small personal satisfaction. It sucks when a writer leaves it hanging, but that’s just how the cookie crumbles, and the consumer moves on to another work.

    Open Source has to constantly update and expand to keep up with the technologies that it’s connected to. And guess what, most all of the major OSS success stories rely on paid workers to keep things up with the times, and make those crucial integrations that keep the software usable.

    Linux has many developers paid by their Big Tech employers to make stuff that they can use for their products without hassle somewhere down the line. Same with OpenStreetMap. Even worse with Android.

    Does anyone here really think there would be enough maintainment on these projects to keep it at the stability and feature-improvement they are now if all paid work vanished tomorrow? I certainly don’t. And unlike fanfiction, you can’t truly just say “well, we’re not updating it anymore”, at least, unless you don’t care about your whole use case and functional existence being replaced within a year, likely with a more-supported corporate alternative.

    There are two and only two ways to keep Open Source supported well enough:

    1. The governments of the world forcibly support them much the same way China invests in their companies, as a social good, replacing the corporate workers and funds with government ones.
    2. Luxury gay space communism somehow comes to fruition and these developers get all the free time in the world free from any other worry, ever, and the whole community forms so well that they all pick up each other’s slack with their newfound infinite free time.

    The first option violates the spirit of true open source much the same way as now, and the second one, actually, that’ll happen… the day after the perpetual motion machine is invented, that is.

    Reality hurts.


  • How the fuck can people use these BS detectors when it has been proven probably a thousand times that it can’t differentiate anything?

    The Constitution, Bible, probably Mein Kampf and Uncle Tom too would all be “made by AI” if we treated these programs as gospel.

    And these text AI’s are never going away, the instant one actually can hold a character for an entire book-length, romance novels are in real trouble at bare minimum, soon almost everyone will be having to compete with a thousand fake authors just to make it somewhere. It’ll be interesting to see…


  • Honestly, I have no real clue.

    Twitch isn’t quite completely impervious to adblockers, with proxy extensions allowing us to skip ads still for now, but YouTube could do the exact same thing tomorrow if they wished. uBlock Origin wouldn’t save you, SponsorBlock wouldn’t save you, the only thing that could be done would be a black screen whenever an ad pops up.

    Maybe YouTube doesn’t want to fall into the hole Twitch is in, with the proxy loophole, and they view fighting adblockers as a better choice than having to spend a massive amount of encoding expense to have the silver bullet in every country.