• 2 Posts
  • 39 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Exactly. I’m tired of more and more of my life being decided by boardroom execs instead of elected officials. Why are we trying to privatize ethical decision making? Government officials may be only barely accountable, but at least that’s more than a private company. And don’t even get me started on ‘voting with your wallet’. I feel like that phrase is going to be as ridiculed by later generations as we ridicule ‘trickle down economics’.

    To me, going after oblique methods (like shutting off basic utilities) just to deal with criminal behavior represents a failure of the system. And the response to that failure shouldn’t be to make these hacky workarounds more accessible, but rather should be addressing the core problems in the first place. We shouldn’t be lobbying to shut off rapists power and water anymore than we should be trying to self sabotage our Internet infrastructure to deal with our rampant hate speech issues. Instead we should focus on actually addressing these issues by proper enforcement of laws we already have (which is often the sole issue), clarifying and updating where appropriate and developing responsive and auditable methods of problematic speech. In a way that isn’t totally up how one CEO feels that day.

    Why are we so quick to relinquish control of our digital lives to the very corporations we claim to hate?


  • I very much appreciate the self publishing that’s been possible, but I do know that the way they enable this is pretty exploitive and I think we still have massive room for improvement. My understanding is that it relies heavily on exclusivity agreements to force the majority of players onto their platform. I think we would’ve seen the Amazon self publishing business smacked down by anti trust lawsuits ages ago if we lived in a more sane timeline.

    Despite the exploitation going on now, it’s still better than the old monopolies the traditional publishers held, but I hope we can eventually see self publishing flourish outside of the Amazon ecosystem













  • People are also waaay overestimating how close we are to the classical AI shown in media. They see ChatGPT and understand that it has problems, but also know we went from dumb phones to super fast smartphones really quickly, so apply the same logic to AI, when it’s closer to the ‘bird in the picture’ xkcd comic. (Ironically that problem can now be solved by ‘AI’, but the point still stands). End users are bad at estimating the complexity of a given task and taking something like our current AI models to something like Cortana from Halo is a completely unknown amount of time away. Most likely decades if not centuries from now. The current approach to AI will most likely never work like that, because it has no true ability to learn and grow. At least not in the human sense.


  • Wife got caught with a similar phishing attempt, except this was a text. She had legitimately had a missing package and was in the middle of dealing with it and was waiting on a communication for a fix when the fake text came in. Just incredibly unlucky timing that made it all feel ‘right’. Realized it like 30 minutes later when the real communication came and cancelled the cards, but at the scale and frequency of spam these days they’re bound to find people in plausible situations where their scam doesn’t feel quite so out of place.