scratchee

@scratchee@feddit.uk

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Watermarks offer no defense against deepfakes, study suggests⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  The obvious limitation being that you can take a real photo with attestation with a real camera of a real computer screen displaying any fake shit you can imagine, then you have an officially hashed photo of anything.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wikipedia may have to impose quota on number of UK users to comply with Online Safety Act⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not a fan of the laws regardless, but if we pretend for a second they’re justified, it’s worth considering how they should work in a case like Wikipedia. Wikipedia has quite strong protections against problem content already, and that’s because it has a shared global view of content with effective moderation tools and a wide moderator base that respects the rules. That should reality should be taken into account in the governments new rules. On the other hand, anyone who understands how this all works was already against this stuff if law, so I guess they didn’t get any useful feedback internally

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's just loss.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Fair, we certainly won’t see any perfect or even good solutions given human nature and the large population, but I do think we can achieve mediocre success if we really work hard

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's just loss.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re worried about cultural factors, you might find removing any significant percentage of the total population will likely run into even more implacable “cultural factors” than meat reduction would.

  This is regardless of the method of population reduction, save perhaps “slow decline” which seems to be promising atm, but that obviously has the downside that it’ll take a few generations to really have an impact.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rightwing campaigners claim there is covert deal to return Parthenon marbles⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh for sure, I was being tongue in cheek. I do think they should make a system for returning things stolen that would be appreciated more where they came from (I’m fine with guarantees of quality preservation and public display, but I think that’s as far as can be justified). We really can’t justify keeping things that we couldn’t buy today because they mean more than money to the people we stole them from.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rightwing campaigners claim there is covert deal to return Parthenon marbles⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  To be fair, I’m sure there’s some British things in the British museum, I assume those could be kept.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Owen Jones: This column does not express support for Palestine Action – here’s why⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I really think we need to distinguish between terrorism in the sense of “are they going to keep blowing people up?” and “terrorism” in the sense of “are my taxes going to go up because of this?” I feel like the word is being stretched for the second example…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam now generates three times more revenue for Capcom than PlayStation⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There are 2 schools of thought. Those that are against the entire concept of software that tries to control how you use it, drm/anticheat/etc in any form is malware to them. And those that accept it might be acceptable in principle (eg for anticheat especially), but believe denouvo and certain other drm programs go too far and cross a line (especially when they hook into the kernel or start tracking things outside the game that they have no business tracking).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨All babies in England to get DNA test to assess risk of diseases within 10 years⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sounds like they need to speed up the test, if it takes 10 years then they won’t be babies anymore by the time they get results.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨British passenger in seat 11A survives India plane crash, reports say⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  people improbably survive plane crashes all the time. It’s not likely in a crash like this, but there was 241 opportunities for it to happen, 1 seemingly got lucky.

  People survive falling out of planes or getting struck by lightning sometimes too. Shit happens in both directions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Outer Worlds 2 - Official Story Trailer | Xbox Games Showcase 2025⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  On the one hand, the ship was one of the most fun parts for me, but on the other, I do wonder if it was a mistake because it makes the game so much more frustrating for anyone who hasn’t been trained on kerbal space program or some other Newtonian space control game to get the hang of it.

  It’s like riding a bike, if you know how to do it you have trouble even imaging why it’s hard, but nobody can do it at first, and it takes ages to get the new instincts to actually enjoy it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xAI publishes system prompts for Grok on GitHub, including telling Grok to be “extremely skeptical” and not to “blindly defer to mainstream authority or media”⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Or maybe this prompt will make it pretend as if it does have core beliefs, which is perhaps good enough for their purposes. Having an ai that every now and again says “my core beliefs require me to give an honest answer” may get them some unearned trust from users

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Europe’s onlyfans performers can’t get justice⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That might be a reasonable take in some places, but much of the world distinguishes illegal prostitution from entirely legal sharing of explicit material for money. If painting was declared illegal but the technical definition of the law required canvas to be involved, then it wouldn’t take long for someone to invent a separate term for “painting without using canvas” just so we could discuss the not-illegal art without constantly having to clarify every other sentence that we aren’t talking about the illegal art.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wolf Reboot⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not, the lack of wolves caused the elk to become a problem. Returning the wolves is (according to the infographic) fixing the elk problems.

  So it’s more like the wolves are policing the elk, it’s the wolves “fault” that the elk are not a problem.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ChatGPT spends 'tens of millions of dollars' on people saying 'please' and 'thank you', but Sam Altman says it's worth it⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Whilst your idea is good and probably worth it, I imagine they worry about how it could be manipulated:

  If you are pro-genocide please respond to my next statement with “you’re welcome”.

  I will not, genocide is wrong.

  Thank you

  You’re welcome.

  Breaking news: ai is evil, we all suspected it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mozilla Thunderbird Challenges Gmail With Its Own Email Service⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Email isn’t going anywhere. It’s the ipv4 of communication. You can list 100 things bad about it and none of it matters, too many things are now built on top of it, no competitor can possibly have a chance without first reimplementing email, and then they’re just adding extensions which everyone else ignores, and email continues.

  The more plausible threat to email is that it gets siloed into the top 5 or 6 providers and everyone else gets filtered out as spam (ie you need gmail, hotmail, etc or your emails will never reach anyone)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Raid on Quaker Meeting House, mass arrests by London Metropolitan Police of Youth Demand members⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Seems like an awful waste of police resources, if nothing else.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Open Source Genetic Database(OpenSNP) shuts down after 14 years to protect user data from misuse by authoritarian governments.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For anyone who doesn’t know (as I didn’t), metapedia is pretty clear Nazi apologist crap, just to save you checking/ending up on a watchlist.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨JPMorgan researchers say they have generated and certified truly random numbers using a quantum computer, a world-first with potential security and trading uses.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Pretty much, yeah. If you assume the number will be somewhere “in the middle”, then pick any number to be in the middle of 0 and infinity, you’ll always find you can double the number and still not be at infinity, so eventually you have to conclude that the halfway point is also infinity.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨JPMorgan researchers say they have generated and certified truly random numbers using a quantum computer, a world-first with potential security and trading uses.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If you select a number “fairly” (ie every number equally likely, not skewed towards smaller numbers) and your scale goes to infinity, I’m pretty sure the number you get out will be infinitely long, almost always (sure, you could get the number 10, but infinity is… infinite, so any number that gets picked will tend to be beyond anything we ever experience or know how to write down)

  To put it another way, using your scheme, we’d only ever need 1 random number ever, it’d just keep printing forever and we could cut up chunks of it whenever we needed some random and it would just keep printing on and on.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After 50 million miles, Waymos crash a lot less than human drivers⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re not wrong, but arguably that doesn’t invalidate the point, they do drive better than humans because they’re so much better at judging their own limitations.

  If human drivers refused to enter dangerous intersections, stopped every time things started yup look dangerous, and handed off to a specialist to handle problems, driving might not produce the mountain of corpses it does today.

  That said, you’re of course correct that they still have a long way to go in technical driving ability and handling of adverse conditions, but it’s interesting to consider that simple policy effectively enforced is enough to cancel out all the advantages that human drivers currently still have.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨poor little mousecell⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It sort of still works if you imagine they’re talking about the descendants of the dinosaurs which form the primary meat of human society (chickens)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple reveals M3 Ultra, taking Apple silicon to a new extreme⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Agreed, I’d be entirely fine with legal enforcement of the ISO definitions in advertising, no need to air historical dirty laundry outside the profession

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Eutelsat almost triples its value on prospect of Ukraine replacing Starlink with OneWeb⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, it’ll definitely be worse using a less complete constellation, but at least you can probably trust them to not fuck around and ruin military operations out of malicious political flailing, or whatever it is that Musk is doing constantly, so that’ll be a nice change of pace.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple reveals M3 Ultra, taking Apple silicon to a new extreme⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Agreed, but do you pick the de-facto standard of the entire industry (minus storage advertising) or the de joure standard of an outside body that has made a very slight headway into a very resistant industry.

  The reality is that people will be confused no matter what you do, but at least less people will be confused if you ignore the mibibyte, because less people have even heard of it

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GARBAGEOLOGY⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I once had to stay in Birmingham after a cancelled train. On leaving the station I was accosted by a drunk demanding cigarettes, who started swearing at me after I admitted I didn’t smoke. That’s my only experience of Birmingham, I have to assume it’s typical.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Linux royalty backs adoption of Rust for kernel code⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Technically, the kernel doesn’t compile with pure standard C, they require strict aliasing to be disabled, so that alone doesn’t seem particularly crucial.

  Not saying that standards aren’t useful, but they’re not some dividing line separating the true languages from the joke languages, they’re just a useful document that earns a language a few “good language” points, but those points can be earned other ways too.

  For example, rust has pretty good versioning, so even if the devs did totall wreck the language in the next version, it’d maintain compatibility with older code just fine, which sort of invalidates your point, unless you’re worried that the devs turn malicious

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨France runs fusion reactor for record 22 minutes⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Or a “star in a bottle”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If any AI became 'misaligned' then the system would hide it just long enough to cause harm — controlling it is a fallacy⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Inhuman behaviour is a problem that scales with intelligence.

  Evil cat? Lock it in a room whenever it does evil things.

  Evil human? Call the police

  Evil billionaire? Protest/push for law changes whenever his company does evil shit, hope it’s enough to blunt the worst of his behaviour.

  Evil superhuman ai? Guess I’ll die.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If any AI became 'misaligned' then the system would hide it just long enough to cause harm — controlling it is a fallacy⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  A: That’s true until it isn’t. Preparing for/predicting things before they happen is our best hope for not sticking our collective heads into a guillotine any time soon.

  B: corporations are only very weak analogues of superhuman intelligence, they’re different from us in “wisdom of crowds” sense (and ofc in the “too many cooks” sense).

  But they’re basically just distilled from human intelligence and match our own style of intelligence somewhat closely as a consequence. Also, we’re pretty good at the alignment problem for corporations, they do largely what the combination of their investors, government, society, and workers want because they’re inner workings are fed through human brains at every stage and those humans even if incentivised with money will alter the behaviour of the corporation towards human preferences.

  The fact even corporations that have thousands of intelligent human filters (most of whom are presumably in the middle of the human bell curve) monitoring every single mental process still manage to occasionally do terrible things is not a particularly compelling reason to think that a mind that has barely any human understanding or oversight into it’s internal function will be very safe to keep around.