• 4 Posts
  • 169 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Valve could easily enter the OS space. They have hardware and a dedicated user-base. They’ve built some good will with the Linux community. They’re already doing the work to make other stuff work well with Linux. I’m not always a fan of walking too close to the corporate edge with paid software and DRM and proprietary blobs and whatever, but at this point we have to figure out how to get everyone out of Windows, even 100 year old Grandma Geraldine who plays bejeweled on Facebook all day. I probably won’t run SteamOS as a primary OS, but if I could dual boot it instead of Win10 on my gaming PC that would lesson the pain of MS’s betrayal and the loss of some Windows-only games a little bit.



  • I’ve been seeing exactly that. Reading through these job descriptions is a bit depressing. I can’t virtue signal my lack of morality and unthinking subservience to my potential employer hard enough to make cutoff to become “Director of AI Shilling” or a “Dark Pattern Consent Violation Engineer”.

    I know the kind of environments that won’t work for me. This will always limit the jobs I can and can’t work and I’m generally okay with that. I would love some of that bountiful defence contractor money, but I can’t ethically justify doing work that harms others or limits their freedom. Advertising tech would have been a good fit for me… if I had no sense of ethics.

    It’s a tough realization that my gaming consoles, GPS Smart Watch, and fancy modern over-engineered car only became possible because tons of money was poured into building out related tech for defence and surveillance.

    I imagine the cognitive dissonance must be really strong in someone working for some of these companies that have monetized governmentally sanctioned or corporately opportunistic civil rights abuses. Then again, we’re often kept apart, working in our own little areas where we’re safe from having to see the whole horrifying machine.



  • " the pro-Putin posters known as CopyCop, aka Storm-1516, use self-hosted, uncensored LLMs based on Meta’s Llama 3 open-source models to generate at least some of these fictional news stories" - the Article

    So what? This quote is written in a way that makes it seem like that is the problem and the solution is that we need censored LLM’s hosted by massive corps (who definitely have our best interest at heart) using closed-source models and that’s how we end up with Real News™

    The issue is that we’d surrounded by morons who never learned critical thinking. To be fair, we all have our own blind spots. How about instead of trying to top-down legislate truth, we focus on teaching research skills, vetting processes, and learn to better identify and label misinformation and common misinformation sources.

    Maybe in 2025 all news articles should be voluntarily citing public and detailed source material so that people can better substantiate what is real?

    The enemy of my enemy is not my friend.



  • The wildest part of this to me is the politicians exempting themselves. It may be different in Europe, but in the US, the politicians are often the child predators this legislation claims to protect against.

    The politicians claim “professional secrecy”, but shouldn’t you be increasingly auditable the more power you are given. Private individuals should have an expectation of privacy. Politicians, and those with power and influence should live in the open to protect from abuses of that power.



  • I had a base model around that time frame. Good safety ratings for its time but the car isn’t integrated with the touchscreen so while it’s already a dumb-car, I could make it even more simple by tearing out the radio and installing one without a screen. Makes me happy to know I’m not obligated to fix it if the radio breaks because I drive maybe 30-40 miles a week and would rather keep my money than shell out for all the gimmicks.



  • They’re just making a market for someone to compile a 1TB “Best of the Best Cumpilation”, copy it to a handful of cheap terrabyte drives and resell them (to legal adults) in a verification state.

    • This comment should not be read as condoning copyright infringement, but rather as a commentary pointing out that prohibition instantly creates very easy to serve and lucrative black markets that will be filled by someone.

  • To me this sounds like a fundamental problem with their business model. Private vehicles used for public transportation by people who aren’t well-trained commercial drivers.

    I have always thought it was sketchy that we let random people in the US be commercial drivers for Uber without forcing them to get a new type of license or earn some kind of state certificate because most people are absolutely shit drivers and beyond that, there are rules for dealing with people (in this case disability stuff) that you should know if you drive the public.

    Would you get in a car with that dude “Chad” who hangs out behind the bowling ally, or that chick “Tammy” who learned to drive from her highschool boyfriend who was a year or two older than her and basically got a rubber-stamped license because the US doesn’t actually take driver safety seriously?


  • Lame, Colorado is usually one of the most reasonable states. Polis is a decent Governor too. I never saw any of the bad stuff that was allegedly supposed to happen after we forced employers to post pay ranges with jobs, so I don’t really expect anything bad to come from regulating AI.

    If we put strict guardrails and penalties with teeth around AI companies, they may go elsewhere, where they can act more unethically. That’s fine with me because Colorado already has water issues and I feel like we manage to be progressive without trampling all over personal liberties. I also feel like a good portion of people in this state are real people who haven’t had the idealism trampled out if them completely and still give/get good intentions.

    Shit, I’m getting the itch to submit a citizens initiative to make the whole state an AI free zone right now. As for the AI decision-making, how about real, concrete, enumerable criteria. Vibes are not a suitable way to make big decisions. Fuck-off with your AI datacenters and opaque algorithms. Coloradans deserve to know how they’re being treated. Anything that complicates that or makes it harder to understand is a tool of tyranny.

    Yes, that’s going a bit overboard, but so is hammering me with AI propaganda from the moment I wake up until after I go to sleep every day.



  • Vote to build better infrastructure and provide better transit service. Even if it sucks. A train that goes 65mph next to a 75mph freeway isn’t a failure. It’s a gateway to better transit. I myself have fallen into the trap of viewing these projects as unworthy or not good enough when they are a step in the right direction.

    I will now almost always hold my nose and vote for things that fund trails, busses, trains, bike infrastructure, etc. Then I’ll go and complain online about how they didn’t go far enough :-)