Telorand
@Telorand@reddthat.com
- Comment on The Consumer Safety Technology Act– what could this mean for the private sector? 5 days ago:
Can’t seem to find the actual article, so I’ll just engage with this small paragraph here.
Capitalism needs to be regulated. Given that the US is currently experiencing the effects of unfettered capitalism (fascism, bribery, oligarchy, price gouging, monopolization, market collusion, just to name a few), I’m for more oversight.
However, the current administration and current Congress are both generally disinterested in actual regulation and, in my opinion, unqualified to implement something like AI-powered guardrails. It’s just the whole “blockchain everywhere” debacle all over again.
Furthermore, who would develop and maintain such a system? There would almost certainly be bids from the usual suspects (i.e. billionaires) who would “definitely develop it in good faith, trust me bro.” They definitely wouldn’t use that kind of access to hamstring the bot that’s supposed to be regulating them. /s
Rather than just putting a bot in charge, how about we just make the wealthy pay their fair share? How about strong legislation that prevents fraudulent transactions and mergers? How about meaningful punishments that deter bad actors, rather than slaps on the wrist that are just “the cost of doing business?”
We don’t need robots and software, we need sensible legislation.
- Comment on Valve dev counters calls to scrap Steam AI disclosures, says it's a "technology relying on cultural laundering, IP infringement, and slopification" 6 days ago:
Hmm, sounds like a “Freeze Updates” option should be available per game. I don’t do much modding, but I’ll see if I can suggest that idea somewhere or +1 any existing similar suggestion.
- Comment on Valve dev counters calls to scrap Steam AI disclosures, says it's a "technology relying on cultural laundering, IP infringement, and slopification" 1 week ago:
If your games are breaking on update, isn’t that the game devs’ faults?
- Comment on OpenAI Is Having a Mental Health Crisis 1 week ago:
artificially incompetent
Borrowing that: AI = Artificial Incompetence
- Comment on Bossware rises as employers keep closer tabs on remote staff 1 week ago:
Man, Douglas Adams was a real one.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
I vaguely remember it having a USB mode, but it’s been a long time. Check the settings.
- Comment on Big Tech Wants AI to Shop for You—Retailers Want Your Data. Guess Who’s Winning? 3 weeks ago:
Also, chargebacks aren’t zero-sum for the merchant. It costs them money on top of the cost of the sale, so enough people doing it would likely lead to legal action against the AI companies that negatively affect merchants’ bottom line.
- Comment on Camera Capabilities Unlocked From A Mouse 3 weeks ago:
That’s honestly probably a good sign. It means we’ve now come to a point in scientific achievement where that is a genuine possibility that we consider.
- Comment on Palantir CEO Says a Surveillance State Is Preferable to China Winning the AI Race 4 weeks ago:
Right? How about neither option? How about Authoritarianism is bad, regardless of who’s doing it?
- Comment on Palantir CEO Says a Surveillance State Is Preferable to China Winning the AI Race 4 weeks ago:
Precisely. Just ask Naomi Wu (SexyCyborg) how much she enjoys the surveillance state, how much she enjoyed being disappeared for a few months, how much she enjoys being told not to do any more techno State Resistance content, and how much she enjoys being able to leave but can’t, because her partner is queer.
Really, its a bunch of people who either like being in an in-group and/or they like feeling superior/powerful by promoting authoritarian communism.
- Comment on Bewildered enthusiasts decry memory price increases of 100% or more — the AI RAM squeeze is finally starting to hit PC builders where it hurts 4 weeks ago:
Saving for months ≠ using money earmarked for necessary expenses. I saved for months to buy the parts for my PC, and all of it was discretionary income.
But I otherwise agree that you should not spend your necessary funds on unnecessary expenses.
- Comment on Emergent introspective awareness in large language models 5 weeks ago:
Fair enough. I’m just hopeful I’ve given them a little spark of doubt and a reminder that multibillion dollar companies aren’t in the business of telling the objective truth.
- Comment on Emergent introspective awareness in large language models 5 weeks ago:
This is not a good source. This is effectively, “We’ve investigated ourselves and found [that AI is a miraculous wonder].” Anthropic has a gigantic profit incentive to shill AI, and you should demand impartiality and better data than this.
- Comment on Sam Altman Says If Jobs Gets Wiped Out, Maybe They Weren’t Even “Real Work” to Start With 5 weeks ago:
Considering your comments, you don’t seem to know what the point I made was.
- Comment on Sam Altman Says If Jobs Gets Wiped Out, Maybe They Weren’t Even “Real Work” to Start With 5 weeks ago:
Thanks! I appreciate you noticing.
- Comment on Sam Altman Says If Jobs Gets Wiped Out, Maybe They Weren’t Even “Real Work” to Start With 5 weeks ago:
Cool, know what job could easily be wiped out? Management. Sam Altman is a manager.
Therefore, Sam Altman doesn’t do real work. Fuck you, asshole.
- Comment on Self-Host Weekly (24 October 2025) 1 month ago:
It’s resistant, though, specifically because you can fork it. Don’t like where things are going? Like the features of a previous version? Fork that version and run with it.
It does mean extra work for somebody to maintain that forked version, but the option is nonetheless there.
- Comment on X is now offering me end-to-end encrypted chat — you probably shouldn't trust it yet | TechCrunch 1 month ago:
Cool, and I bet it will be just as trustworthy as WhatsApp (i.e. not at all).
- Comment on AI-powered CRISPR could lead to faster gene therapies, Stanford Medicine study finds 1 month ago:
Same
- Comment on This hidden electricity drain can have a massive impact 1 month ago:
It’s good to know what we can do to reduce our own use—we all have to live on this planet, after all—but these kinds of articles pop up and, at the very least, make people think their efforts will have a meaningful impact. They go to sleep thinking they’re solving the problem (barring extreme situations like war-driven scarcity, for example).
But if every household stopped using electricity, many countries would still have a massive energy problem on their hands, because households aren’t really the problem.
- Comment on AI-powered CRISPR could lead to faster gene therapies, Stanford Medicine study finds 1 month ago:
This is actually an excellent use case for AI. Physics and chemistry as scientific disciplines are lots of complex pattern recognition and manipulation. AI is just a pattern recognition and generation engine, despite what the tech bros and apologists like to tell us.
What these engines generate will ultimately be vetted by experts before it even goes to trials. Scientists don’t just take things on blind faith simply because a robot or even another expert comes up with something; their entire deal is to understand their particular field of study in great detail, after all!
- Comment on Apple Banned an App That Simply Archived Videos of ICE Abuses 1 month ago:
You are correct, but who said it would be the Democrats doing the work?
- Comment on The Great Software Quality Collapse: How We Normalized Catastrophe 1 month ago:
This is one of the things that frustrates me about my current boss. He keeps talking about some future project that uses a new codebase we’re currently writing, at which point we’ll “clean it up and see what works and what doesn’t.” Meanwhile, he complains about my code and how it’s “too Pythonic,” what with my docstrings, functions for code reuse, and type hints.
So I secretly maintain a second codebase with better documentation and optimization.
- Comment on Flock Safety and Texas Sheriff Claimed License Plate Search Was for a Missing Person. It Was an Abortion Investigation. 1 month ago:
Precisely. Notice how they didn’t answer, because they can’t without ruining their little game of special pleading.
- Comment on Flock Safety and Texas Sheriff Claimed License Plate Search Was for a Missing Person. It Was an Abortion Investigation. 1 month ago:
When is a fetus a human?
- Comment on Flock Safety and Texas Sheriff Claimed License Plate Search Was for a Missing Person. It Was an Abortion Investigation. 1 month ago:
That sheriff has since been arrested and indicted on felony counts in an unrelated sexual harassment and whistleblower retaliation case. He has also been charged with aggravated perjury for allegedly lying to a grand jury. EFF filed public records requests with Johnson County to obtain a more definitive account of events.
At least his side of the story has a happy ending.
The rest of the story is bonkers, though. The headline could not possibly do it justice. This is one you need to sit down and read with a cup of tea.
- Comment on YSK: It's Bandcamp Friday, 100% of proceeds go to artists today (until 12 a.m. PT) 2 months ago:
Wait fr? Like Act 3 of their Mega Man story?
- Comment on Why do people say "as sweet as canned beans"? 2 months ago:
I’ve never heard this expression.
- Comment on Zuckerberg hailed AI ‘superintelligence’. Then his smart glasses failed on stage | Matthew Cantor 2 months ago:
If the stranglehold billionaires have on the world begins to diminish, I’ll start to suspect it’s been on purpose. Until then, they’re just fucking idiots who made worthless trash.
- Comment on YSK that designer psychedelics are a thing now apparently 2 months ago:
The science is certainly interesting. It is disheartening who is behind it, however.