kibiz0r
@kibiz0r@midwest.social
- Comment on Researchers discover new security vulnerability in Intel processors 17 minutes ago:
Another day, another speculative execution vulnerability.
- Comment on AI Could Be the Most Effective Tool for Dismantling Democracy Ever Invented 2 hours ago:
I don’t believe the common refrain that AI is only a problem because of capitalism. People already disinform, make mistakes, take irresponsible shortcuts, and spam even when there is no monetary incentive to do so.
I also don’t believe that AI is “just a tool”, fundamentally neutral and void of any political predisposition. This has been discussed at length academically. But it’s also something we know well in our idiom: “When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” When you have AI, genuine communication looks like raw material. And the ability to place generated output alongside the original… looks like a goal.
Culture — the ability to have a very long-term ongoing conversation that continues across many generations, about how we ought to live — is by far the defining feature of our species. It’s not only the source of our abilities, but also the source of our morality.
Despite a very long series of authors warning us, we have allowed a pocket of our society to adopt the belief that ability is morality. “The fact that we can, means we should.”
We’re witnessing the early stages of the information equivalent of Kessler Syndrome. It’s not that some bad actors who were always present will be using a new tool. It’s that any public conversation broad enough to be culturally significant will be so full of AI debris that it will be almost impossible for humans to find each other.
The worst part is that this will be (or is) largely invisible. We won’t know that we’re wasting hours of our lives reading and replying to bots, tugging on a steering wheel, trying to guide humanity’s future, not realizing the autopilot is discarding our inputs. It’s not a dead internet that worries me, but an undead internet. A shambling corpse that moves in vain, unaware of its own demise.
- Comment on Cloudflare CEO warns AI and zero-click internet are killing the web's business model 1 day ago:
For a glorious second, the entire world was able to communicate as one.
Then we catalogued every accessible reservoir of culture and knowledge, mined them bare, and refilled them with slop.
A global collective consciousness, hollowed out, replaced with static. No signal. Only noise.
- Comment on Looks like i'll have to start hating everyone 2 days ago:
I’m-a firin my Franco-beam
- Comment on guys what the heck theyre putting micro chips in the cheese and using blockchains to track the micro chips 3 days ago:
I don’t get why people think putting manifests on a blockchain is a good idea. Fraudulent manifests are usually the result of entering fraudulent data into the system, not modifying it mid-flight. If you want a way to address those situations, you need another layer where a trusted central authority is able to revise events. At which point, why even have a decentralized layer?
- Comment on I will step on you and spill your food, my small friend 2 weeks ago:
I hate it more when People do it with just a few Words, arbitrarily.
It’s like they saw a Smart Person do it to Make A Point, and then they decided to just Do It All The Time.
- Comment on In heat 3 weeks ago:
They’re an ad company that just happens to offer search as a way to show ads.
Their ideal scenario is one where you search forever and never find what you were looking for.
- Comment on The Social Network That Can't Sell Out: Understanding Mastodon vs. Bluesky 3 weeks ago:
I look forward to the documentary.
“Mastodon: Victory Through Technical Superiority”, available soon on Laserdisc and Betamax
- Comment on This is real 3 weeks ago:
He has a legal status similar to refugee, but not technically the same because he didn’t apply for asylum within a year of entering.
So yeah, not an illegal alien. Legal resident.
- Comment on There are two root-reasons why people laugh about something that was said. 4 weeks ago:
But… I don’t think that’s true, and yet it didn’t make me laugh.
- Comment on Trump pardons crypto exchange for money laundering, possibly preventing them from even being investigated again 4 weeks ago:
- Comment on Do it 4 weeks ago:
Do you know the muffin man in my ass
- Comment on Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk would like to ‘delete all IP law’ | TechCrunch 4 weeks ago:
IP law does 3 things that are incredibly important… but have been basically irrelevant between roughly 1995-2023.
- Accurate attribution. Knowing who actually made a thing is super important for the continued development of ideas, as well as just granting some dignity to the inventor/author/creator.
- Faithful reproduction. Historically, bootleg copies of things would often be abridged to save costs or modified to suit the politics of the bootlegger, but would still be sold under the original title. It’s important to know what the canonical original content is, if you’re going to judge it fairly and respond to it.
- Preventing bootleggers from outcompeting original creators through scale.
Digital technology made these irrelevant for a while, because search engines could easily answer #1, digital copies are usually exact copies so #2 was not an issue, and digital distribution made #3 (scale) much more balanced.
But then came AI. And suddenly all 3 of these concerns are valid again. And we’ve got a population who just spent the past 30 years living in a world where IP law had zero upsides and massive downsides.
There’s no question that IP law is due for an overhaul. The question is: will we remember that it ever did anything useful, or will we exchange one regime of fatcats fucking over culture for another one?
- Comment on The sound of Windows 95 about to disappoint you added to Library of Congress significant sound archive 4 weeks ago:
Fourth week of getting NixOS running on an aarch64 laptop here… If I could get the adsp running by the time I get to userspace, you better believe I’d play a tada.
(In all seriousness, it’s not that bad. But it does make you very aware of just how delicate the whole stack of software is.)
- Comment on Trump cuts funding to FOSS projects. 5 weeks ago:
It’s okay, Let’s Encrypt only provides SSL certs for… 63.7% of the market?
Okay okay, that is a lot. But what does a CA need funding for anyway? It doesn’t take much bandwidth to send out new certs.
The only thing that could be expensive is if they had to rapidly invalidate thousands of certs to protect the security of the entire internet.
But haha, that’s a pretty outlandish scenario that would never happen.
- Comment on EU considers tariffs on digital services Big Tech 5 weeks ago:
Don’t use tariffs. Legalize jailbreaking and adversarial interop instead. Disregard American DRM.
- Comment on If you're still on Reddit... 5 weeks ago:
Theiy’re*
- Comment on Horses ARE Forever 1 month ago:
But people want the freedom that comes with having a horse. Maybe if we could put horses on the tracks and hook them up to each other.
- Comment on Horses ARE Forever 1 month ago:
It’s kinda weird that between unicorns, centaurs, giraffes, and horses, horses are the only made-up ones. Like come on, it’s a centaur with a dumb face, but instead of a chest and arms it’s just more neck?
- Comment on Call it an excuse. I call it therapy 1 month ago:
Careful about rewarding yourself for getting upset.
- Comment on Will big tech be caught in the crossfire of trade war? 1 month ago:
“The ACI allows the European Union to suspend intellectual property rights, it allows some people to use software for free, for example licence fees on things like streaming services or software could be suspended,” said Conall Mac Coille, Chief Economist at Bank of Ireland.
Fucking do it!
This is what Cory Doctorow has been telling Canada to do for months now.
Also worth noting: tech companies would not be “in the crossfire” — they are the primary fire.
On Democracy Now:
And if they do remove these laws, if we do allow domestic tech competitors all over the world to reverse engineer, modify and erode the high monopoly rents extracted by these American tech firms, we do something very effective in this trade war, because the only thing keeping the S&P 500 afloat are these tech monopolists. If you take the Big Tech stocks out of the S&P 500, you’ve got a stock market that has been in decline for a decade. And when you decompose their balance sheets and you see where they get all their money, it’s from price gouging on repairs, service, parts, consumables, software.
- Comment on DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse 1 month ago:
I know devs like everything to be perfect, but if your business can work around it for 15 years without fixing the bug or replacing the system, I dare say it doesn’t qualify as a major bug.
- Comment on Out of context Arcane spoiler 1 month ago:
I don’t get it
- Comment on DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse 1 month ago:
There are only two reasons softwares goes for decades without being replaced:
- It’s so unimportant that nobody uses it
- It’s so important that the last major bug was squashed 15 years ago
- Comment on Content moderation is what a 21st century hazardous job looks like 1 month ago:
“If something you see is really difficult then you can leave your desk, but at that moment you have to remember to put on your computer that you are on ‘wellbeing’,” explains Eyvazzadeh. “But if the supervisors think you are using wellbeing more than you should, they will intervene. They would say: ‘Your ‘production’ time is a bit lower than expected, you have been on wellbeing a lot.’ So you are pressured to increase your time on ‘production’ by decreasing your ‘wellbeing.’”
It’s bad enough we make overseas workers spend all day pulling the lever of a slot machine that yields mis-flagged puppy videos and gruesome beheadings with equal likelihood, but then we stack NDAs, legal obstacles, surveillance, and KPI admonishment on top of it.
If you wrote this in a sci-fi novel, your editor would say “that’s a little cartoonishly evil, isn’t it?”
- Comment on Get cancer screening guys 1 month ago:
Oh cancer shows up in bloodwork? I thought you needed a scan for that.
- Comment on Get cancer screening guys 1 month ago:
What prompted the screening? How does that even work? Like “Doc I don’t feel right, can I get a cancer-check?”
- Comment on After 50 million miles, Waymos crash a lot less than human drivers 1 month ago:
- Comment on Something Bizarre Is Happening to People Who Use ChatGPT a Lot 1 month ago:
those who used ChatGPT for “personal” reasons — like discussing emotions and memories — were less emotionally dependent upon it than those who used it for “non-personal” reasons, like brainstorming or asking for advice.
That’s not what I would expect. But I guess that’s cuz you’re not actively thinking about your emotional state, so you’re just passively letting it manipulate you.
Kinda like how ads have a stronger impact if you don’t pay conscious attention to them.
- Comment on Always guard against living in the world of fantasy rather than undeniable facts 1 month ago:
Guy on the right should be pointing at the dumb fuck