vacuumflower

@vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Creating apps like Signal or WhatsApp could be 'hostile activity,' claims UK watchdog⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I believe if someone in a position of authority who understands how vital E2EE is in order for the internet to work, this suggestion wouldn’t even be on the table.

  That might be an illusion. You might be perceiving the world without normalized E2EE as something too horrible to consider. But it would be a stable system, functional for the taste of those people.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Creating apps like Signal or WhatsApp could be 'hostile activity,' claims UK watchdog⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  That they can is what has changed. They didn’t have sufficient information to put pressure.

  They still had microphones and inquiry drugs, including those causing memory loss. So they knew plenty of what people were saying to each other.

  Anyway. Everything has changed a lot, not just technology, and one can’t really make a chain of causation to all this. There are plenty of feedback loops.

  The rules now are “we are stronger, so we are forbidding everything we don’t want”. Losing leverage does that.

  Until you learn of some way to hit them back, such questions are no good, because not answering them doesn’t cost anything.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After viral interview, Palantir launches neurodivergent fellowship⁩ ⁨⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Right, there was legal pressure upon inputs of decision-making to make it more egalitarian or whatever. And by other criteria too.

  So what happens is full obfuscation of inputs. In the form of LLMs.

  Philosophically this is correct in my opinion, trees should be judged by their fruit.

  A simplified comparison is British vs Prussian army philosophy, in Prussia, when evaluating officer’s performance, they’d judge his decision-making process and its inputs, even if the result was catastrophic, while in British army and navy they’d only judge the result, no matter how correct the decision-making. That has been often called unjust and not nuanced enough, but one way lost historically and the other won. For a reason. Judgement of inputs has more failure points. It causes degeneracy long-term.

  A bit like every metric used as a KPI ceasing to be a useful metric, there’s such a commonly quoted MBA rule, except MBAs are not smart enough to remember that rule, generally.

  The alternative to this is responsibility for all that happens downstream. No matter which inputs you get. In exchange for that you are allowed to have any decision-making process at all, just pay for it in full if something wrong happens.

  We are being pressed by evolution (including technical progress) to adopt that approach, and it’s good, but it’ll take probably lots of wars and revolutions. People who hide malice behind formally correct inputs do resist. And they do hold power.

  Instead of inputs you should treat any social mechanism as a black box, and both limit and judge its outputs. If they are outside limits, discard and punish. If they are inside limits, then evaluate and bill - in prison years or in fines or both. Or reward.

  You never know all the inputs anyway and can’t tell if they are correct.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After viral interview, Palantir launches neurodivergent fellowship⁩ ⁨⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  You forgot to say that the paper in this story can be anything. It can be a short letter you spend hours perfecting just because. Or one paragraph on a subject that somehow seems more magical than the rest of life in this specific moment. It’s not even necessarily something big. You can hyperfocus on drawing and redrawing one icon again and again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After viral interview, Palantir launches neurodivergent fellowship⁩ ⁨⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  That honestly started around 60s and by the time of tech bros even receded.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After viral interview, Palantir launches neurodivergent fellowship⁩ ⁨⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, they are making this up.

  From the point of view of a person without ADHD, an ADHD person is almost retarded. Can’t concentrate, achieve goals.

  Or BAD - jumping from a depression to a psychosis, sometimes they are like a wounded deer hiding in their room, sometimes they are running around planning to blitzkrieg the planet, what is this if not a defect. (There’s one woman, I wonder if I should reach her or if I’m having my own BAD psychosis even thinking about that. She’s also not the only woman who can be affected strongly by that decision. In other words, I’m inadequate and unable to control myself and clearly see the reality behind impulses.)

  Or, well, an autistic person struggling with hints and cues and aesopean language and unable to deduct reality from superficial signs, - from the point of view of those who can they are pretty much defective. (Also me.)

  They are just bunching together a few of Ds as “just different” and the rest as defects. “Disorder” is not a word meaning “just different”. It does mean a defect.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK to “encourage” Apple and Google to put nudity-blocking systems on phones⁩ ⁨⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  They don’t get to decide if you refuse, otherwise they do get to decide.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No AI* Here - A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter - Waterfox Blog⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I think this is just panic from the higher ups at Mozilla who have no idea what in the fuck the company should be doing

  It’s not panic, it’s consequence of networking and a very specific culture having formed for CEOs and such.

  A bit like Silicon Valley tech bros, they think they are the chosen ones leading the charge and able to make decisions for all of us, sort of aristocracy.

  So in their circles it’s fashion now to play this “AI” thing.

  And mechanisms to remove those fools from places they don’t belong to and make them clean streets have rotten.

  Usable and decentralized - well, you’ll need some beyond-the-horizon planning for how the development of that will go on. Because 90s Web was kinda normal too, except there were future stages.

  You need something that’s usable almost from the beginning, but that is also usable for everything you haven’t yet thought about. Something that allows any use, but doesn’t limit any, even needed only by a handful of people, task.

  You need universal open infrastructure. Something allowing to pool public service trackers, storage services, relay services, notification services, key services, search services, but tying them into specific applications on the client. Different applications, over the common high-level medium (of authors and messages and groups, for example ; perhaps subscriptions). And you need that to be untrusted and backed up by DHT and sneakernet as perfectly functional alternative ways for the same system. You need them all.

  And you need means of development with higher common, basic level. You need something like Hypercard on the clients, so that development in this “alternative Web” were accessible in its full power. With “cards” shared like messages. That’d be similar to how we fetch different websites.

  Messages and people and groups would have global identifiers, tied to cryptography. One could have sort of “permission rule” messages to be interpreted by clients to decide, during “replaying” a group with its messages, which action was valid and which wasn’t, and what can this specific user do to the group at this specific moment.

  There could be different types of messages, perhaps with references to “interpreter” messages containing scripts.

  OK. That’s just a pet dream of mine, but I don’t yet have a full picture in my mind.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨HDD prices spike as AI infrastructure and China's PC push collide — hard drives record biggest price increase in eight quarters, suppliers warn pressure will continue⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  More formal layers. Similar amount of real ones.

  Slaves also could own their own things, which were not owned by their own owner (oof). So they could buy their freedom. It’s complicated.

  Free people could carry weapons, participate in politics.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨HDD prices spike as AI infrastructure and China's PC push collide — hard drives record biggest price increase in eight quarters, suppliers warn pressure will continue⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Unless they use IP to prevent new producers from entering the market, there should be a response eventually.

  HDDs are precision machinery, of course, but not lost alien technology only old big companies can make.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨HDD prices spike as AI infrastructure and China's PC push collide — hard drives record biggest price increase in eight quarters, suppliers warn pressure will continue⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  A function of popularity. There are common tides that raise all boats - roles of things in the economy.

  We’ve had a wonderful period where home computers were the place where many things happened.

  Now it’s supposed to be ending (supposed by people who hope to have the awesome power), but I don’t think it’ll end.

  A home computer is a wide term. One can remember the times and places where those didn’t even necessarily have HDDs, and people were joggling floppies with two drives attached. Perhaps a bit of ascese and small mobile media, like floppies (not floppies, of course, just something cheap to produce), as the alternative to big immobile media, like HDDs and SSDs and so on, would be good to reinvigorate home computing. Some kind of very cheap memory cards tossed around like paper sheets. The whole operating system loaded once and not requiring permanent media while running. As it happens in Star Wars EU, I think UX is an important part of any technology, and the world moves after Star Trek UX, while Star Wars UX seems smarter for me. Perhaps when SW is as old as ST, we’ll see improvement.

  OK, this was incomprehensible. I meant that the limitations on components’ prices coming now are also an opportunity for development. Everything non-corporate in culture is being pressed out from the ecosystem. That’s good, reduces the incentives to play along with that ecosystem.

  I’ve read a few articles on optical base for computers and companies working on that. That’s a thing that allows lesser degree of miniaturization, but far bigger frequencies (due to latency in optics) and more distributed production (gigantic foundries like TSMC make less sense).

  So we might eventually (100 years perhaps) have two very different computing cultures, one for those people owning huge DCs and pushing “content” from their centralized systems to terminals carried by suckers, and the other for what I’d want. Including production, standards and everything.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨HDD prices spike as AI infrastructure and China's PC push collide — hard drives record biggest price increase in eight quarters, suppliers warn pressure will continue⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  In Antique Mediterranean it was pretty common to pay slaves. They needed money to feed themselves, after all, buy clothes and tools, do other stuff. Would be a bother to manage centrally for the owner, and you didn’t have to fear social condemnation of slavery, it was normal. So slaves were just like lifelong employees, except they were slaves. Slave teachers, slave scientists, slave engineers, slave artists.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨HDD prices spike as AI infrastructure and China's PC push collide — hard drives record biggest price increase in eight quarters, suppliers warn pressure will continue⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  They are trying and they are succeeding. But the bright side is - it’s about resources. Storage, computation. You can run most useful things on an RPi. I suppose home PC market will become more similar to 80s again. Less power, more dreaming.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Oracle made a $300 billion bet on OpenAI. It's paying the price.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s why OLE from ORACLE is becoming Rer and not gets its A torn?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Oracle made a $300 billion bet on OpenAI. It's paying the price.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Surely they have some explanation how that doesn’t happen, otherwise they are making strange plans.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Oracle made a $300 billion bet on OpenAI. It's paying the price.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  1. Artists need to eat.

  2. Art needs to be a commercial success to defend itself from commercial successes it hurts.

  3. Computing industry notably positions itself as replacing art (I don’t mean digital art like tracker music or 3d modeling), in many things where, say, car industry doesn’t. But the suggested replacements are not that. Similarly to how journalism can only be adversarial and offensive to most points of view, otherwise it’s just public relations, because it doesn’t improve anything. Improvement is always adversarial.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bit flips: How cosmic rays grounded a fleet of aircraft⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  And eventually “we” might come to the thought that for many things analog computing is enough. Symbolic calculation, cryptography and such, of course, need digital. But when we are talking about airplanes and satellites, perhaps not.

  One thing I somewhat like about the general idea of all those LLMs is that in theory they are closer to something that can work on non-deterministic technology.

  I wonder if some sort of FPGA but for analog circuits is possible. To have the advantages of re-configuration that programmable things have, but also advantages of continuous signals.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Oracle made a $300 billion bet on OpenAI. It's paying the price.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Steve jobs knew something about forces not for good.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Oracle made a $300 billion bet on OpenAI. It's paying the price.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The industry is not that bad, but it’s just one of them.

  People need art. And art doesn’t survive in environments where there should be a winner and winner takes all.

  Art is the social alternative of recessive genes. It allows to preserve more than needed “right now in this particular situation”. Without art there’s degeneracy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Oracle made a $300 billion bet on OpenAI. It's paying the price.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s how every successful fraud works. If it’s not attractive to people who see it’s a fraud, it won’t have their support. If it’s hard to discover as a fraud, it’s also hard to maintain and always has the risk of discovery.

  So the best frauds are those where everyone knows it’s a fraud, and plenty think it’s a fraud they can profit from.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Oracle made a $300 billion bet on OpenAI. It's paying the price.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not that. Nobody really expects to achieve firm satisfactory result in something never done before, to justify the risk.

  It’s a bubble. That they found money to make such an input into inflating it just means the outcome of said bubble bursting is this good for them.

  I’m interested what exactly will happen when it bursts. A dictatorship, or a blitzkrieg against half of the world, or what else.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Marco Rubio bans Calibri font at State Department for being too DEI⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  About me? Well, I don’t object, as I’ve just said. Perhaps I’m just tired of computers. I like them as tools. But I don’t worship wooden planks or vinyl panels or concrete from which houses are built.

  That rudeness was in self-critique anyway.

  If that helps, Tolkien’s “Leaf by Niggle” I prefer much to “Citadel”. But it’s not matter of preference, I can’t hide from what that book says.

  Or if that’s about Rubio, I don’t think anyone doubted.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Marco Rubio bans Calibri font at State Department for being too DEI⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  At the same time it’s reminiscent of “caliber”, which one would expect to appeal to good Christians.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Marco Rubio bans Calibri font at State Department for being too DEI⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Garamond does look somewhat Apple-ishly pretentious, and Lucida does evoke associations with Sun and some corporate spirit, and Arial\TNR\CN trio does feel like “Windows font classic” combination.

  But banning a more readable font to show you have “decorum” … there’s a word “чмошник” in Russian, I’ve recently realized I’m that, and also a whole crowd of adults and peers around me 13 years ago. Actually there’s just one girl who wasn’t that, and one adult. Who got the shortest straws in that story.

  That word means someone miserable and envious enough to look for confirmations and signs of coolness in all things they use and do.

  I’ve also recently realized that I don’t like computer people, and of other professions dealing with calculation and materiel. They are glorified bookkeepers and managers. The reason tech workers dislike management so much is because the whole industry is much like machine-assisted management. Paradox of small differences.

  Yeah, I know you lot like being perceived as magicians and the industry as having something to do with intelligence. Read de Saint-Exupery’s Citadel, there’s a passage on “a special book for generals”, and you will recognize that whole industry, from its lowly brick layers to its prophets.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Everything is awful because the people who went to business school figured out how to fuck us over as hard as possible.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  You get that when deregulating one area at the expense of even further strangling others with regulations (a regulation keeping an oligopoly or a protectionist one is still regulation).

  BTW, the most common visible problem of libertarian models. They get the absolutes right, but ignore the relative. This means that those following them ignore transient processes, and the model breaks halfway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Judge hands Lambo.com to Lamborghini after ruling owner acted in bad faith⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  so long as I was very clear in all advertising that I’m only building houses and not in any way related to the cars - but if I start putting Lamborghini cars in my advertising I could get into trouble for creating confusion

  That’s fine. But suppose your brand is Lambozucchini and you have cars kinda similar to Lamborghini, but with the brand clearly different, just with homage, a bit like Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola, where in the world is the problem with that? That should be legal, from common sense.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US demands access to tourists' social media histories⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This is a shame honestly. I’ve just remembered about Lucas’ narrative art museum.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US demands access to tourists' social media histories⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Current contents of the shell don’t say much about past contents of it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Judge hands Lambo.com to Lamborghini after ruling owner acted in bad faith⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t get it. Since when are similar words and cultural references and nicknames too owned by the trademark owner?

  It was pretty normal for most of the age of trademarks’ existence to use such derived references, including commercial use.

  "He tried to claim … a word play on “lamb” and not … " - why would he have to?

  I’m (ok, not really identifying as a fan of anything, but it’s good) a Star Wars fan and I can point out plenty of such references there to other authors’ creations, and George Lucas notably doesn’t hide or deny that, actually the opposite.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US health department unveils strategy to expand its adoption of AI technology⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think we should let them invent that. It won’t be too long. Perhaps “capitalism” won’t be the word they’ll use.