chicken

@chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago⁩:

  Are there any equivalent quarantine subs that would have a similar effect on the threadiverse? Right-wing people in particular seem to be convinced it is not what they are looking for, fortunately, judging from comments I saw when I browsed r/RedditAlternatives.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK: The CIA proposed a 9/11 style false flag attack on US citizens to justify invading Cuba⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Can that be realistically achieved though? Any representative government is going to be vulnerable to the selection effects of people who want to be in charge ending up in charge, and those of them most willing to do whatever it takes having a competitive advantage. The formation of an elite class colluding at the expense of the rest of us seems like a natural result.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Firefighting drones head to Aspen—can they suppress a blaze before humans arrive?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Colorado needs all the help it can get, there was hardly any snow at all this year, probably going to be a lot of fires this summer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Theoretically speaking, if one wanted to sail the seas while being not very tech savvy – is using a VPN (Mullvad) enough? I would never, of course… but theoretically?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  If you are in the US, and the risk you’re concerned about is getting in trouble, yes it is enough, provided you use it correctly. The only real risk is that copyright trolls will scrape your IP while you are torrenting along with the rest of a big list and then automatically send complaints to your ISP, which may then send you a threatening email, or shut off your internet if it happens enough times. The fact that this is the only action they are taking against consumer level pirates means that if your home IP is not itself available to torrent peers, you are entirely immune from anything happening.

  Just make sure to bind your torrent client to your VPN, this is the accepted way of safely ensuring your IP cannot leak due to your VPN losing connection.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it actually healthy for people to have a place to confess things anonymously?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Afaik it is anonymous (to other users if not to the devs), though not entirely public as there’s some opaque mechanism determining what you see or don’t see, and content isn’t visible to people who don’t have the game. Have you thought about strategies for sibyl resistance? This is a big thing I think it gets right, there is a built in filter, and simultaneously little incentive to maliciously bypass it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it actually healthy for people to have a place to confess things anonymously?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Check out the “game” Kind Words, kind of a similar concept.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Probably want to stop using Booklore...⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Both incidentally categories where I will never be happy with slopcode.

  The point here isn’t necessarily that any particular use of LLMs is a good tradeoff (I can accept that many will not be especially when security and correct operation is very important), just that quantity clearly matters, to contradict the point you were making earlier that it doesn’t.

  We are actively building a history of cases where LLM usage correlates heavily with that slope you mentioned, but hey that’s OK, we aren’t allowed to call things out before they happen, judgement may only be passed once the damage is done right?

  Out of curiosity, we know that LLM usage increases cognitive deficit and in some cases leads to psychosis. How many fatalities would you say is an acceptable number before governments act? How degraded do we let our societies get before we reign it in?

  I think it’s a mistake to consider all LLM usage as one thing, and that thing as some kind of sin to be denounced as a whole rather than in part, and not considered beyond thinking of ways to get rid of it (which is effectively impossible). There were people who had this attitude towards for example electricity, which is actually very dangerous when misused and caused lots of fires and electrocutions, but the way those problems eventually got mitigated was by working out more sensible ways to use it rather than returning to an off-grid world.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI companies try to pay staff in AI tokens, not money⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think they are even going to allow them to use these credits at home honestly, the whole idea is just that being able to claim that a previous job gave you $X in AI credits is valuable for a resume and and so counts as compensation. Kind of what you would expect from an article that is mostly about things people said on LinkedIn I guess.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Probably want to stop using Booklore...⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  One example of a place where quantity is lacking is web browsers. Another might be mobile operating systems. I am glad projects like Firefox and GrapheneOS exist, but it’s obvious that the volume of work needed to achieve broad compatibility and competitiveness for these types of software is a limiting factor. As for the idea that any LLM use is a slippery slope, the way to avoid the slippery slope fallacy would be to have compelling evidence or rationale that any use really does lead naturally to problematic use; without that the argument could apply to basically any programming thing that gets to be associated with things done badly (ie. Java), but I think it isn’t usually the case that a tool has genuinely no good or safe ways to use it and I don’t think that’s true for AI.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brazil revokes visa of US diplomat who sought to visit Bolsonaro in prison⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  To the AP’s credit, at least they do mention the coup attempt later in the article

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Probably want to stop using Booklore...⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I will complain about quantity, many areas where open source projects are competing with closed source commercial products they have not achieved feature parity or a comparable level of polish, quantity matters. So does, as someone else touched on, quality of life improvements to the process of writing code like ease of acquiring and synthesizing information. That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a worthwhile tradeoff, but how much is really being sacrificed depends on what exactly is being done with a LLM. To me one part of what’s described here that’s clearly going too far is using it to automate communication with other people contributing to the project, there’s no way that is worth it.

  As for the gun thing, I will support entirely banning LLM powered weapons intended to kill people, that’s an easy choice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Probably want to stop using Booklore...⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ll argue that it is a tool, and object to automatic zealous hostility towards anyone using it, but that doesn’t mean criticisms of how that tool is being used aren’t valid. It seems like that is what people are focusing on here, and they definitely aren’t Luddites for doing so.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI companies try to pay staff in AI tokens, not money⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The Business Insider article this article references makes a big stretch to try to frame it as compensation:

  In other words, access to AI may soon matter as much as access to a fat salary and juicy equity awards. As a coder in the AI era, if you don’t have access to massive compute, you might end up producing far less software than your colleagues, threatening your career prospects.

  But what they’re talking about is pretty clearly a business expense and not payment, because it’s something they only get to use at work in order to do their job.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scams could now cost Americans $119 billion a year, study finds⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I like the suggestion of banning data brokers to make it more difficult for scammers to easily find victims

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This Fall, Florida Students Will Be Forced to Take “Anti-Communist” Classes⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe let them cook, if this is as moronic as it sounds, maybe it will turn out like D.A.R.E.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Epic Games needs Fortnite players to "help pay the bills" as the multi-billion-dollar company raises V-Bucks prices while making Battle Passes and Crew way worse in value⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s funny, since what they are actually selling (cosmetic items) is basically free and any scarcity of those is entirely artificial, even if the cost of actually running the servers is not. The only factor that makes sense for determining the price is what prices will translate into the most revenue. I guess before they were setting prices lower than the maximum they think people will be willing to pay? Or that somehow people are willing to pay more now?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Video] American militants stealing gold during their 2003 invasion of Iraq⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Looks like it only works when it is embedded, not when you go to imgur itself

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cable and movie rentals was probably the optimal amount of digital media for a functional society. Get rid of commercials and that was probably peak.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If much of what it displaced was books and conversation, seems like a big step backwards for a variety of reasons. Less depth, less interactivity, more centralized control and utility for propaganda. The general mindsets of older generations probably reflect its influence.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I built a self-hosted period tracker because I couldn't find one worth using⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  because I don’t know jackshit about coding and I am not gonna pretend I do.

  But if OP does know and apply that knowledge to what they are doing, it’s not the same thing and doesn’t make sense to have the same disclaimer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I suck at reading comprehension... what the heck does this law even mean? [8 U.S. Code § 1451 - Revocation of naturalization]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Damn those are some long and wordy sentences

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cable and movie rentals was probably the optimal amount of digital media for a functional society. Get rid of commercials and that was probably peak.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know, I have a feeling that television by itself was very damaging to society and Fahrenheit 451 was basically right.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Assuming an average value of $500k per-house, a millionaire could own two houses and a billionaire could own the entire neighborhood⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Rather than a hard cap, I like the idea of property tax rates that go on an exponential curve depending on how many houses you have beyond the one you live in, which are used either to subsidize building more housing or somehow redistributed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Polymarket Takes Down Betting on Nuclear Detonation After Backlash⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  800k could buy a lot of hard drugs, and those underground bunkers might last a few weeks

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Highguard will permanently shut down on March 12th.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  What a waste, make all these people spend years of their lives building a whole videogame and then immediately make it impossible for anyone to ever play it again. A company shouldn’t have the right to erase a game from existence, even if it is a bad one.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨California law to require operating systems to check your age⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Forcing everyone to use an approved OS is draconian.

  I agree, but my point is that it wouldn’t be that easy to do either. I am hopeful that a system where servers take the OS’s word for it that you are in a certain age category would not smoothly transition into one where they also need proof that the owner of the hardware cannot decide that category, and that the system working this way would be accepted as a long-term status quo like those age selection menus were, because it would be actually a bit more effective at stopping kids who don’t know how to reinstall an OS so legislators could plausibly claim they did something.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pissing in the shower is better in every way than pissing in the toilet.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  How can you tell that this is even happening? There isn’t a visible yellow mist. There isn’t a smell.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This plastic is made from milk and it vanishes in 13 weeks⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Probably more associated greenhouse gas emissions than the plastic one

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨California law to require operating systems to check your age⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  At least there’s some nontrivial additional challenges to make the jump, such as authenticating the user is on an approved OS, and the infrastructure for identity verification itself. I like this better than other age verification mandates because those make the latter the first step, fueling the growth of surveillance tech and the companies providing it as a service.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The same people who rage against authority love moderating communities where their ideology is the only one allowed⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  for some percentage of the population, morality isn’t a guardrail

  There’s more to human behavior than expressing ideas of correct behavior and violent enforcement of those ideas. Both of those are very limited, rely on oversimplified abstractions of how people are, and often have adverse side effects. What we are like and how we live is a complex product of how we engage and relate to our environment and the people around us; the best overall solutions to problems will be holistic improvements to that environment.

  To extend your medical analogy, sometimes serious threats to your health call for antibiotics, but it is not the case that scouring your body of foreign organisms will make you healthier in the absence of an antibiotic-treatable threat, it’s actually important to have those.

  Bringing it back to how online spaces are organized, I think it’s important for most people to feel like there is a way to express their genuine thoughts because if it’s all just people finding different ways to repeat a dogma, that’s a failure of communication, communication is not meaningfully happening, and an environment where you are unable to communicate is a shitty and dysfunctional one. That doesn’t mean all spaces must accept all points of view, but sincere and open communication should generally be a priority, protecting that is what free expression is about.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Millions worth of prediction market bets placed on US airstrikes on Iran⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The article is insinuating that inside information was used to make money on the specific date:

  Now there are suspicions that other insiders used the Iran strikes to get rich. Six accounts on Polymarket reportedly won approximately $1.2 million by predicting the U.S. would launch a strike on Iran on February 28, according to CoinDesk.

  The other example is more convincing though:

  When the U.S. captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January, an individual with a relatively new account pumped $30,000 into a bet that Maduro would be ousted. Hours later, the Trump administration captured Maduro, earning the gambler more than $436,000.