AmbitiousProcess (they/them)

While true to a degree, I think the fact is that AI is just much more complex than a knife, and clearly has perverse incentives, which cause people to use it “wrong” more often than not.

Sure, you can use a knife to cook just as you can use a knife to kill, but just as society encourages cooking and legally & morally discourages murder, then in the inverse, society encourages any shortcut that can get you to an end goal for the sake of profit, while not caring about personal growth, or the overall state of the world if everyone takes that same shortcut, and the AI technology is designed with the intent to be a shortcut rather than just a tool.

The reason people use AI in so many damaging ways is not just because it is possible for the tool to be used that way, and some people don’t care about others, it’s that the tool is made with the intention of offloading your cognitive burden, doing things for you, and creating what can be used as a final product.

It’s like if generative AI models for image generation could only fill in colors on line art, nothing more. The scope of the harm they could cause is very limited, because you’d always require line art of the final product, which would require human labor, and thus prevent a lot of slop content from people not even willing to do that, and it would be tailored as an assistance tool for artists, rather than an entire creation tool for anyone.

Contrast that with GenAI models that can generate entire images, or even videos, and they come with the explicit premise and design of creating the final content, with all line art, colors, shading, etc, with just a prompt. This directly encourages slop content, because to have it only do something like coloring in lines will require a much more complex setup to prevent it from simply creating the end product all at once on its own.

We can even see how the cultural shifts around AI happened in line with how UX changed for AI tools. The original design for OpenAI’s models was on “OpenAI Playground,” where you’d have this large box with a bunch of sliders you could tweak, and the model would just continue the previous sentence you typed if you didn’t word it like a conversation. It was designed to look like a tool, a research demo, and a mindless machine.

Then, they released ChatGPT, and made it look more like a chat, and almost immediately, people began to humanize it, treating it as its own entity, a sort of semi-conscious figure, because it was “chatting” with them in an interface similar to how they might text with a friend.

And now, ChatGPT’s homepage is presented as just a simple search box, and lo and behold, suddenly the marketing has shifted to using ChatGPT not as a companion, but as a research tool (e.g. “deep research”) and people have begun treating it more like a source of truth rather than just a thing talking to them.

And even in models where there is extreme complexity to how you could manipulate them, and the many use cases they could be used for, interfaces are made as sleek and minimalistic as possible, to hide away any ability you might have to influence the result with real, human creativity.

The tools might not be “evil” on their own, but when interfaces are designed the way they are, marketing speak is used how it is, and the profit motive incentivizes using them in the laziest way possible, bad outcomes are not just a side effect, they are a result by design.

100 million is still a lot though.

To be fair, the article does mention that he’s considering using that as a way to fund his current startup if it ever needs a cash injection, rather than turning straight to more VCs, which is probably good in the long run in terms of reducing how much the company could have to cater toward predatory investors over customers, so I’d consider at least part of his remaining wealth just a means to fund a separate venture from his private life, but still, he probably does have more than enough even after that.

Also, I’d never heard of the Russian Nobleman paradox before, but I looked it up and it seems interesting. Thanks for sharing it.

The fuel rates are currently about $0.22/gallon, and are going up to $1.06/gallon over 5 years, but even that wouldn’t put them on par with commercial flights (they pay 0.6% of the fees, but use 7% of resources, $1.06 divided by $0.22 gets you 4.81x the current 0.6%, which is still 2.9% of the fees, while using 7% of FAA resources.)

So even with the current fuel rate increases, private jets would still be paying less than half of what they end up using.

• Tickets for flights are taxed at 7.5% to pay for the FAA
• Average flight with many passengers pays over $2,300 per flight
• Private jets don’t have tickets to be taxed, are only taxed on fuel
• Private jets pay an average of about $60 in FAA fees
• Private jets take up about 7% of the FAA’s resources, but only make up a fraction of a percent of the revenue
• Thus when you pay the FAA fees on your economy class ticket, you’re subsidizing operating the FAA for private jet flights, that don’t pay enough to cover their costs.

https://github.com/linkwarden/linkwarden

Linkwarden works quite well with its archiving features. Highly recommend.

I know. I also know not everyone likes installing extensions in their browser because they can be a security risk, and they can even change your browser fingerprint (which makes your browser more trackable), compared to bookmarklets, which do not.

I do the same thing here. I even use a bookmarklet that converts a current tab in reddit.com to an old.reddit.com link.

(code if anyone’s interested) javascript:(function() { var currentUrl = window.location.href; var newUrl = currentUrl.replace(/^https:\/\/www\.reddit\.com/, 'https://old.reddit.com/'); window.location.href = newUrl; })();

Even ICE’s own website states this. They quite literally define themselves as terrorists if you compare their actions to their words.

You mean it’s skipping some of the entries in the actual playlist, or it’s just only getting the first x entries and then stopping?

I haven’t personally found a solution to random skipping to that other than allowing yt-dlp to use your account credentials/cookie to act as though it’s a signed-in user. YouTube is randomly deciding to block either some or all download attempts from non-signed-in clients, like yt-dlp.

If it’s just stopping after x number of videos, I have absolutely no clue.

And it wasn’t even Signal, an actually encrypted platform this time.

It was SMS & MMS. As in, the known to be very low security, non-encrypted protocols used for basic texting.

Obligatory deflock mention! (If you see a camera in your city that’s not on the map, add it!)

Seconded. A lot of harms we see from surveillance cameras (and all kinds of other tech) come from how and to whom the data is made accessible to, rather than the cameras themselves.

It’s fine if my neighbor has a doorbell with a camera on it so they can see when a package is delivered, when their kid comes home, or have video of something happening on the sidewalk that could possibly be needed as evidence in a court case, where they can manually export a video and give it to whoever would require it. But it’s not fine if that video is being always uploaded to a corporation’s servers, and they’re handing it off to the police, for example.

Surprisingly, Ring actually stopped doing this given enough backlash, but the risk still remains of future changes to that policy, any breach or software vulnerability, etc.

(make sure audio is on)

It’s always so funny to me when I see people on the right act like we wouldn’t care if someone on “our side” was on the list.

Like dude, I don’t know if you know this, but unlike you all, we don’t blindly treat politicians as gods that can do no wrong. If they’re a pedophile, fuck 'em. We don’t give a shit 😆

My father often bikes up to Canada, which means crossing the border. (obviously)

Normally, there’s a long line of cars, and a bit of a wait.

There wasn’t a single person in front of him when he got there, and just 2 cars waiting when he came back.

Maybe it’s just me, but seeing regular ass people who were previously entirely disinterested in politics start marching in the street, actively educating themselves about the political landscape, and even seeing some break off into actual blockades of ICE facilities gives me a lot more hope than seeing people do nothing in the first place.

You have to remember, the average person mostly just cares about their family and personal financial circumstances, doesn’t take risks, and just reposts platitudes on facebook from time to time.

This is an improvement from the status quo, and any progress toward a better direction is good. I guarantee you, you will see many more people engaging in concrete actions as time goes on, because these sorts of protests help spur people into further action. Hell, we’ve already seen that happening.

These protests are gateways to concrete actions, not something that replaces them.

That’s why there needs to be a clear line that people know exists between performative protest and concrete protest.

For anyone confused:

Performative protests, like the No Kings protests, serve to:

• Get people energized to either take concrete action or donate/join organizations that can
• Reduce feelings of hopelessness/despair
• Make people more aware who were previously not following the news much if all

Concrete protests actually delay or stop the bad thing in question (e.g. blocking exits to ICE facilities)

A lot of people are hoping No Kings and similar protests will stop Trump. They won’t. Of course they won’t. But you can bet there’s a lot more people donating to charities that either legally fight the administration’s actions, or disrupt fascist policies on the ground, and a lot of people end up breaking off from these more liberal protests to later go to more concrete ones.

They’re not worthless, but nothing beats direct, concrete action.

https://beautifultrouble.org/toolbox/tool/dont-expect-a-concrete-outcome-from-a-symbolic-action

Flock’s cameras actually do detect that kind of thing. Quoting from this article:

“Instantly searchable data, including plate numbers or missing/covered plates, as well as vehicle make, model, color, alterations, and other unique identifying information.”

The problem is that randomly deploying cops to given areas to track down cars that are already long gone because their plates are obscured isn’t terribly effective or worthwhile. It’s more often used as part of a wider investigation, where someone stopped later could also be identified for having previously covered their plates, and fined accordingly on top of the fine for, say, speeding.

Depends on how exactly the person approaches the house. If they go up and just start screaming in their face, they could probably be trespassed, but there’s this legal principle known as “implied license,” which essentially just means that if you have a way to enter your property, you’ve sort of implied that you’re allowing people to go there for legitimate purposes, such as getting your attention, delivering mail, soliciting (unless a sign specifies otherwise), etc.

So even if they had a sign saying “no tresspassing,” if their neighbor were to walk over and knock on their door to let them know their back gate was left open, that wouldn’t be tresspassing, because it’s implied that they still are allowing people to walk on the footpath to their door, to get their attention for any purpose deemed reasonable or legitimate.

As a public servant, someone coming up to your door and trying to tell you something, or a journalist coming up to ask you some questions, could very well be considered covered by implied license, and thus not tresspassing, though I’m sure the courts would have to debate that a lot to actually determine if that’s the case given the situation.

Because the assumption is that the president won’t be a fucking dumbass, and will need to utilize the emergency powers immediately, because of an actual imminent threat they can’t wait around for approval for.