SirEDCaLot

@SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastodon sees a boost from the 'X exodus,' too, founder says⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Quantity isn’t everything

  That right there hits the nail on the head. There is a certain critical mass, an activity level that makes satisfy most discussion needs for most users. It’s a tiny fraction of the total traffic of a place like Reddit or Twitter.
  But if we have that, and keep the quality level up, we can succeed.

  Success to me doesn’t mean killing Reddit and Twitter. It means creating a place where smart people can come and find enough content and discussion that they don’t need Reddit and Twitter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'My personal failure was being stumped': Gabe Newell says finishing Half-Life 2: Episode 3 just to conclude the story would've been 'copping out of [Valve's] obligation to gamers'⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I. Do. Not. Care. About. The. Tech.

  Exactly. The tech doesn’t matter. Tech only exists in service of the gameplay, and (introduced with HL1), the story (previous to HL1 the ‘story’ of most games was just a quick blurb on why there’s monsters and why you have to shoot them).

  Gamers DGAF about new tech. Gamers wanted to be told a story. We LOVED the story.

  Valve could’ve used the existing engine, built NOTHING AT ALL NEW, and just finished the story with existing assets and we’d all have been over the moon happy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit says it is not covered by new Online Safety Code as it has moved its jurisdiction to the Netherlands⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean full respect when I say this- but if you advocate for a law or policy, don’t shy away from the hard questions about it. Think them through BEFORE you advocate for the policy, as part of your thought process of whether that’s a good policy or not.

  In this case, those hard questions are exactly why I’m NOT in favor of such a policy.

  If you make it illegal to recommend suicide, you create a situation where anyone who says anything even vaguely pro-suicidal is open to both criminal prosecution and civil liability. So that guy who (without any desire to see the poster suicide) said take a long walk off a short pier now is facing criminal charges, will have a criminal record, may go to jail, and then he’ll be sued by the family of the deceased and probably lose his life savings (or whatever he’s not already spent on lawyers).
  Or, what if it’s not the disturbed guy from the scenario who suicides, but some other random person a month later and they see that the ‘long walk off a short pier’ post was in that person’s browser history? Do we blame that person for every single person who suicides who might have read that thread?
  That in turn has a chilling effect on any online discourse and you’ll get a lot more people using proxies and VPNs and anonymizer systems just for basic online discussion lest something they say be taken badly and the same happen to them.

  And then in the wake of some publicized suicide, some politician will say it’s time to clean up the Internet to keep our kids safe, and they’ll task an investigative agency with proactively seeking out such things. Suddenly online message boards are crawling with cops, and if you say anything even vaguely pro-suicidal your info gets subpoena’d from the platform and you get cops knocking on your door with a court summons.

  Is this ‘better’? I don’t think it is.

  To be clear-- I have great value for the sanctity of human life. I don’t want to see anyone dead, including from suicide. I think encouraging anyone to suicide is abhorrent and inhuman and I would personally remove such posts and/or ban such users from any platform I moderate.
  But that’s my personal standards, and I don’t think it right or practical to throw people in jail or ruin their lives because they don’t agree.

  I also think one part of free speech is if someone else wants to create a toxic cesspool community, I don’t have the right to order them not to. I’m okay with requiring a warning label on such a space though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit says it is not covered by new Online Safety Code as it has moved its jurisdiction to the Netherlands⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think I might be okay with encouragement of homicide or murder or terrorism being at least somewhat illegal.

  Question for you though, let’s say you have a person with numerous documented mental health problems, who has been suicidal for quite some time, they post some awful shit on a forum one day when upset. One of the responses is to go take a long walk off a short pier. Only they go and do that, with a bunch of rocks in a backpack, and they drown.

  What punishment would you prescribe for the person who told them to take a long walk off a short pier?

  Making things illegal is easy, but all the law does at the end of the day is a list of if you do X your punishment will be Y.
  So for the dude that told him to take a long walk off a short pier, what is the punishment?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit says it is not covered by new Online Safety Code as it has moved its jurisdiction to the Netherlands⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  there are always some restrictions on speech.

  There may be a few, but they should be as minimal as is humanly possible. Restrictions on any civil right should be seen as an absolute last resort, to be tried only when all other options have failed and there is an overwhelming need to fix some desperate problem.

  but on the other hand, if you have people committing suicide because they were encouraged to do so, then maybe it makes sense to make pro-suicide speech illegal

  No it doesn’t.

  You are focusing on the symptom rather than the disease. The problem isn’t that there is pro suicide content, the problem is that people are listening to it. If your society is so gullible and fragile that they will kill themselves because some asshole online says to, you have a much much bigger problem than online speech. You have an education problem and that is what you should fix. You are not teaching your kids critical thinking skills and you need to start. Getting rid of the pro suicide content is just starting a game of whack-a-mole because the next guy will post something else equally damaging that gullible people will fall for.
  Birds aren’t real, climate change is a hoax, the Earth is flat, vaccines react with 5G cell phone towers to cause autism, and forward this message to 50 people or you’ll die tomorrow. Even if you get rid of the more harmful ones, your society is still collectively prey to any intellectual abuse and/or memetic virus.

  The solution to disinformation isn’t to block disinformation, it’s to harden your society against it. Do that and the problem will solve itself, because people simply won’t listen to the crap so there will be a lot less reason to post it and even fewer people spreading it.

  Train your people to employ critical thinking skills, and when they don’t, blame them and not whatever moron they were listening to.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'll share a troubling fact with you if you share one with me⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The chlorine does its job, and whatever shit it kills becomes chloramine. Chlorine does have a smaller smell of its own so maybe they just put a shit ton of it in also.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'll share a troubling fact with you if you share one with me⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Here’s a fun one

  You know how you go to the public pool and you smell the chlorine keeping the water clean? That’s not chlorine you’re smelling.

  Chlorine is a great sanitizer but when dissolved in water it has almost no smell. However, chlorine binds to organic substances like dead skin cells and especially strongly to urea (aka pee), forming chloramine. Chloramine has significantly less sanitizing capability than chlorine, but it has a very strong chloriney smell.

  You can get rid of chloramine by ‘shocking’ the pool- adding an oxidizer or increasing the chlorine level very high to what’s called breakpoint chlorination. Shock powder is expensive though so it’s not always used as often as it should be.

  So when you go to the public pool and you get that strong chlorine smell, all that means is either the pool water is dirty and hasn’t been shocked in a while, or someone peed in the pool recently.

  Enjoy your swim!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit says it is not covered by new Online Safety Code as it has moved its jurisdiction to the Netherlands⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Disclaimer- in this reply I may use some offensive words as examples, none of which I agree with. To summarize my views- I believe the married gay couple should have guns to protect their pot farm and legally adopted children from harm, knowing that single payer healthcare will prevent them from going bankrupt if one gets hurt.

  ---

  In that case, what is the line between “simply” hate speech and actual radicalization to terroristic acts and/or conspiracy to terroristic acts and/or incitement to terroristic acts?

  There’s two lines. The line I’m more concerned with (and you should be too), is where’s the line between ‘simply’ a controversial opinion, and ‘actual’ hate speech. If platforms are required by law to ban ‘hate speech’ then where does that line get drawn and by whom? And how do you differentiate between a controversial but honest opinion, and a prejudiced and hateful statement, when the two share the same position?

  For example, is ‘gay people freak me out’ an opinion or hate speech? What about ‘I don’t think gay people should be allowed to adopt children because it could harm the children’? What about ‘I don’t think gay people should be allowed to marry because marriage is supposed to be a man and a woman’? Are those opinions or hate speech? Is there a difference between ‘I don’t think gay people should be allowed to adopt children because it might harm the children’ and ‘I don’t think gay people should be allowed to adopt children because fuck the gays’?

  Depending on how you define ‘hate speech’, it might require platforms to themselves remove anything even vaguely anti-gay.

  I have no problem with any private platform choosing to adopt whatever rules they want. I have a BIG problem with government-mandated censorship of controversial opinions (and I think you should also).

  ---

  As for the two lines, let’s do a spectrum— again, this is presented as an example, I do not agree with any of the following statements.

  1. I don’t like gay people.
  2. I don’t think gay people should be allowed to adopt children because it would harm the children.
  3. I don’t think gay people should be allowed to marry because it’s bad for society.
  4. I don’t think gay people should be allowed to marry or adopt because I hate gay people.
  5. I don’t think gay people should have the same rights as straight people.
  6. I don’t think gay people should have traditional civil rights.
  7. I don’t think we should tolerate gay people in our society.
  8. I think we should send a message to gay people that they’re not welcome.
  9. I think we should round up the gay people and kick them out of town.
  10. I think gay people are a cancer on society that should be excised.
  11. I can understand why someone would want to get rid of gay people.
  12. I think it’s reasonable to want to get rid of gay people.
  13. I want to hurt gay people and you should too.
  14. I want to help get rid of gay people by any means necessary.
  15. It’s time to take up arms against the gay people infiltrating our society.
  16. I’m going to get my gun and go shoot some gay people.
  17. You all should get your guns and go shoot some gay people.
  18. We’re meeting at 8pm at (place) to pass out guns, then we’re going to (gay nightclub) to shoot gay people. Come join us!

  Where do YOU draw the line in there?
  For me I’d say the line between opinion and hatred is between 3 and 4, and the line between hate speech and criminal incitement is between 12 and 13.

  The problem though is if ‘ban hate speech’ is codified into law, if platforms are REQUIRED to police it, then ALL of this becomes essentially illegal to say, essentially starting with #1. And while it’s sad that anyone would say any of this, that basically makes it illegal to express ANY dislike of gay people because of the murkiness of the line between unfortunate opinion and hate speech.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit says it is not covered by new Online Safety Code as it has moved its jurisdiction to the Netherlands⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Perhaps it’s not easy to decide where the line of legality should go though, which is why this topic is controversial.

  It’s not easy. Especially when you need to determine what’s a controversial opinion and what’s hate speech.

  For example (and this is NOT anything I agree with)-- if one said ‘I don’t believe gay people should be allowed to adopt children, because science shows both male and female influences are more helpful when applied together for a child’s development’ what is that? Is that hate speech because it advocates taking rights away from gay people? Is it an opinion stated with the goal of protecting children?

  Does it become illegal to express almost any position that isn’t pro-gay?

  It’s a VERY slippery slope.

  Certain speech is criminal like inciting violence. If someone said ‘I’m going to buy a gun and kill gay people, and you all should kill gay people too’ that is a specific statement of criminal intent and also inciting violence. That will get you cops knocking on your door (and rightly so).
  You can apply a ‘test’ to that- does it show specific intent to commit a crime? Does it encourage others to commit crimes? Yes on both.

  But how do you ‘test’ someone saying they don’t think gay people should be allowed to adopt? How do you tell from a few words if they have a hate-filled heart, or if they legitimately think gay people can’t provide a loving home? You can’t.

  For the record- I’m using LGBT as an example. I personally liberal-libertarian— I believe married gay couples should have guns to defend their adopted children and pot farms from criminals, with single payer healthcare to keep them alive if they get hurt. I’m against almost any effort to take away anyone’s rights.

  So I’ll fight for the asshat’s right to say ‘fuck the gays’ just as hard as I’ll fight for the LGBT person’s right to marry, adopt, and use whatever bathroom they want (provided they wash their hands).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit says it is not covered by new Online Safety Code as it has moved its jurisdiction to the Netherlands⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A better question is where is the line between ‘simply’ a controversial opinion and actual hate speech?
  Because if a platform is required by law to ban hate speech, that’s going to sweep up a lot of controversial opinions along with it.

  Is it ‘hate speech’ to express any negative opinion about an oppressed group? And if not, where do you draw THAT line?

  (if you want an answer to your original question I wrote one out but it’s somewhat long…)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit says it is not covered by new Online Safety Code as it has moved its jurisdiction to the Netherlands⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  For the record, I personally thing everything you said is truly repugnant. Although I’d point out the first one I’ve seen applied to Trump voters, frequently, in mainstream discussions on ‘civilized’ platforms, with little or no moderator response. So apparently it’s okay to be prejudiced and discriminatory as long as it’s against someone others don’t like.

  That said, my problem is not the banning of these statements. Most platforms quite reasonably would ban such things, and I have no problem with that.

  What I have a problem with is the government REQUIRING a platform ban certain speech. I don’t care if it’s the most vile horrible hate filled shit. It should be up to the platform, not the government, to decide what speech is acceptable or not.

  Because if government gets to decide what private citizens are allowed to discuss on privately-owned forums, that’s a very slippery slope.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit says it is not covered by new Online Safety Code as it has moved its jurisdiction to the Netherlands⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s absolutely the one! Truly great American. We could all learn a thing or two from him.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit says it is not covered by new Online Safety Code as it has moved its jurisdiction to the Netherlands⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  On the censorship thing, maybe it is okay if an online messaging website bans certain content, like pro-suicide content, or pro-terrorism content, etc. You could call that censorship but you could also call it safety.

  I think that should go either way and I have no problem if a platform decides to ban that kind of stuff. I certainly have no desire to consume such material.

  I have a BIG problem when the government decides that platforms are required to ban things. Even if they’re things I don’t myself want to read.

  It’s a slippery slope.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Large Boeing Satellite Suddenly Explodes Into Pieces⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is actually a real problem more so in this case than most. There’s an awful lot of satellites in low Earth orbit, altitude of a few hundred to several hundred kilometers. Atmospheric drag still exists here a little bit, and thus space junk will reenter and burn up in years or decades.

  This satellite was in geostationary orbit, at an altitude of about 36,000 km. Debris up there can take hundreds of years to come down. Geostationary is a special altitude where the satellite orbits at exactly the same rate as the Earth spins. That means that a fixed dish on Earth will always point at the satellite without needing to move or track. So there’s just one narrow orbital ring around the equator for that. That ring is not a place we want space junk to be, because if it gets too hazardous for satellites in GEO that basically removes our capability as a species to use fixed satellite dishes for anything. And that problem won’t go away for centuries.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit says it is not covered by new Online Safety Code as it has moved its jurisdiction to the Netherlands⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In concept I agree with him on that. I support your right to say awful shit, but I am not going to spread that message to others. Where Elon lost the plot was thinking of Twitter as a public square. It’s a nice thought, but it requires the whole platform to be 100% neutral and unbiased. So it’s all good to call Twitter the public square, but that’s a lot harder to take seriously when the guy in charge of policing the square is heavily biased.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit says it is not covered by new Online Safety Code as it has moved its jurisdiction to the Netherlands⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  how can we protect people without this censorship?

  We don’t, nor should we try to.
  Protecting people’s feelings from offense is not a valid activity in a free society. The second you start down the road of ‘we must regulate this guy’s words and actions to protect that guy’s feelings’ we become a nanny state full of people with paper thin skins. We accept that one consequence of free speech is that sometimes people will say things that are hurtful. We do that because the alternative is getting rid of free speech.

  Hate must be addressed at its root.

  I could not agree more. Fighting hatred with hatred only breeds more hatred. But that seems to be the standard strategy today, it’s okay to not just refuse to tolerate intolerance, but to be actively intolerant of those who themselves seem intolerant. It is just fighting bad with bad and the result is more bad.

  The way we fight the roots of hatred is with open discourse. The people who have hate in their hearts, we do not isolate them, we do not wall them off from society, we do not practice and encourage intolerance against them. We show them a better way. We make ourselves examples of doing better, not just against the people they don’t like, but against the people we don’t like.

  We try to build bridges and encourage communication. For all the people who say immigrants are lazy lawbreakers, we show them immigrants who are the hardest working motherfuckers there are and pay their taxes. For the people who think black people are a problem, we introduce them to black people who break their stereotypes.

  For the overwhelming majority of people who have hate in their hearts and intolerance and prejudice, those feelings are based on stereotypes.
  People don’t join the KKK because they start in a mixed culture and then conclude black people are a problem. They join the KKK because they have stereotypes they see reinforced in media and TV.

  There was a famous Black dude whose name I don’t remember, but he of his own volition managed to deprogram a whole bunch of KKK members. All he did was sit down and fucking talk to them. That’s it. Like sit down at the bar next to them and start a conversation. Many of the KKK members had never encountered a respectable well-spoken black person before (let alone one willing to talk to them) and were completely blown away because it broke the stereotype of a black person that they joined the KKK to fight against.
  A good number of them ended up leaving the KKK and giving this man their robes on the way out. So there’s this friendly black dude who has a big box of KKK robes that were given to him by ex-members he deprogrammed.

  That is how we fight hate. We fight hate with love, we fight intolerance with tolerance and open arms, we fight stereotypes with exposition, we fight ignorance with knowledge.

  Otherwise it’s like we are saying there’s too much stupidity in society so we’re going to prevent people with lower IQs from attempting school. It doesn’t work.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit says it is not covered by new Online Safety Code as it has moved its jurisdiction to the Netherlands⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a big difference between hate speech and revenge porn.

  A person has rights to their likeness and image. That’s why anybody who goes in front of a camera, be it a porn star or a model or an actor, signs a ‘model release’ giving the photographer authorization to publicize and sell their images. Without that simple one page contract, nothing in the photo shoot can be published. Porn actors do that. And in fact, they usually do it on video, where the actor holds up their driver’s license and says ‘my name is blah blah I am a pornographic actor and I am consenting to have sex on camera today and authorize this production company to publicize and sell the resulting video’ or something like that. Revenge porn victims have made no such agreement, and while the penalties are stronger because of the harm it causes them, the legal basis for having any penalty at all is simply that they did not consent to having their likeness and image publicized.

  Hate speech has no such issue. It may be harmful to a person or group, but if you remove the very broad ‘hatred’ label, it becomes just an opinion that would otherwise be protected speech.

  The other problem is that what considers hatred is very much subjective. For example, if I say wanting to own a gun is evidence of mental illness, a lot of people on Lemmy will agree with that and I will probably get upvotes. If I say wanting to use the bathroom of other than your biological genetic sex is evidence of mental illness, I will probably get banned. What is the difference between the two? Supporting LGBT rights is popular, supporting the second amendment is not. So you create the situation where the only difference between a valid opinion and an invalid one is whether or not it’s accepted mainstream, and that’s a bad way to go.

  Also, in a free country, it is generally considered that expressing an opinion which may be detrimental to others is not in itself considered bad. If I say that people over 80 years old should require a yearly driving test, that’s a valid position for me to have and nobody will call me ageist for saying it. If I say that Donald Trump should be arrested rather than elected, that is directly detrimental to a person but it would get me upvotes here. If I said that being Republican is evidence of mental illness, that is directly prejudicial against an entire group which has many different reasons for believing as they do, and it would probably get me upvotes also.

  My point is, hate speech as a concept is difficult to define and when you try to ban it with censorship you are just starting down a slippery slope that will have the opposite of the desired effect. You legitimize the counterculture and do nothing to stop the real problem, the actual hatred.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit says it is not covered by new Online Safety Code as it has moved its jurisdiction to the Netherlands⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You are addressing the wrong problem. You’re focusing on the symptom rather than the disease.

  Fighting hate speech rather than hatred itself only strengthens the hatred. As soon as you say “you mustn’t say that” you validate the hatred and give it power. Look at any counterculture, positive or negative. Trying to suppress it only validates it, gives it legitimacy as being important enough for the establishment to want to suppress, and if the people who might support the hatred already don’t like the people who would suppress the hate speech, you’ve just poured fuel on the fire.

  The problem to be fixed isn’t hate speech, it’s hatred. It’s a tougher problem to solve, but a much more important one that you will actually get a productive effect by solving it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit says it is not covered by new Online Safety Code as it has moved its jurisdiction to the Netherlands⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That I would actually very much agree with. As Elon himself said in the early days of the Twitter takeover, “free speech does not mean free reach”.

  This is also why I think engagement algorithms are a cancer on our civilization. If it is in a platforms monetary interest to amplify the most vile anger inducing stuff, be that stuff that is actively bad like hate speech or simply divisive like a lot of political crap, that is bad for our society. It pushes us farther apart when we should be coming together to fix the problems that we can agree on.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit says it is not covered by new Online Safety Code as it has moved its jurisdiction to the Netherlands⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You don’t have to be a porn star or even a porn consumer to oppose laws banning porn.

  And you don’t have to be a shitbag to recognize that, while well-intentioned, censorship is still censorship.

  I have absolutely no love whatsoever for the people who would spread such crap. I would love to get rid of it. But banning the speech doesn’t do that. It’s like smashing the altimeter in the airplane and then declaring that you’re not crashing anymore. But the reality is, smashing instruments in the airplane is never a great idea whether you are crashing or not. It just prevents you from seeing things you don’t want to. And you get hurt in the process.

  Censorship, historically, has never ended up anywhere good.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit says it is not covered by new Online Safety Code as it has moved its jurisdiction to the Netherlands⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Absolutely fuck spez.

  But he’s right here. Just because he’s a fuckstick doesn’t mean he’s always wrong on every issue 100% of the time.

  Various forms of censorship under the flag of ‘online safety’ have been pushed by governments since the internet began to exist. And before that with print media and television. Censorship is not the answer. Never was. First it was for porn, then it was for video games, then it was for hate speech, it’s always something.

  But in the words of Captain Jean-Luc Picard,

  “With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.”

  Censorship must be opposed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon tech workers leaving for other jobs in response to return to office mandate⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  You nailed it. look at their more recent announcements about execs not taking bonuses— they’re giving up bonuses for the coming year. I expect most of them to ‘pursue other interests’ but they’ll keep their bonuses, whatever team gets brought in to right the ship will then get screwed.

  Might also be ass covering- with a pre-emptive promise of no bonuses it may be harder to replace them…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TSMC's 2nm process will reportedly get another price hike — $30,000 per wafer for latest cutting-edge tech⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  the end of Moores law

  It’s been talked about a lot. Lots of people have predicted it.
  It does eventually have to end though. And I think even if this isn’t the end, we’re close to the end. At the very least, we’re close to the point of diminishing returns.

  Look at the road to here-- We got to the smallest features the wavelength of light could produce (and people said Moore’s Law was dead), so we used funky multilayer masks to make things smaller and Moore lived on. Then we hit the limits of masking and again people said Moore’s Law was dead, so ASML created a whole new kind of light with a narrower wavelength (EUV) and Moore lived on.

  But there is a very hard limit that we won’t work around without a serious rethink of how we build chips- the width of the silicon atom. Today’s chips have pathways that are in many cases well under 100 atoms wide. Companies like ASML and TSMC are pulling out all the stops to make things smaller, but we’re getting close to the limit of what’s possible with the current concepts of chip production (using photolithography to etch transistors onto silicon wafers). Not possible like can we do it, but possible like what the laws of physics will let us do.

  That’s going to be an interesting change for the industry, it will mean slower growth in processing power. That won’t be a problem for the desktop market as most people only use a fraction of their CPU’s power. It will mean the end of the ‘more efficient chip every year’ improvement for cell phones and mobile devices though.

  There will be of course customers calling for more bigger better, and I think that will be served by more and bigger. Chiplets will become more common, complete with higher TDP. That’ll help squeeze more yield out of an expensive wafer as the discarded parts will contain fewer mm^2. Wouldn’t be surprised to see watercooling become more common in high performance workstations, and I expect we’ll start to see more interest in centralized watercooling in the server markets. The most efficient setup I’ve seen so far basically hangs server mainboards on hooks and dunks them in a pool of non-conductive liquid. That might even lead to a rethink of the typical vertical rack setup to something horizontal.

  It’s gonna be an interesting next few years…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Paralyzed Man Unable to Walk After Maker of His Powered Exoskeleton Tells Him It's Now Obsolete⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Absolutely 100% this. Or at the very least, have all schematics and software source code and other such things placed in escrow so if the company refuses to support them there is some kind of option. This goes double for anything implanted.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon tech workers leaving for other jobs in response to return to office mandate⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  So you’re left with departments full of clock punchers who don’t have vision or leadership. If you want to kill your Golden Goose, that’s a good way to do it. The remaining departments full of drone followers aren’t going to be making you the exciting groundbreaking products that make you money.

  Of course then again I personally see value in employees, maybe business leadership does not or thinks they are all generic replaceable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon tech workers leaving for other jobs in response to return to office mandate⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  No, but it will bring into question the process by which they were acquired to begin with. Somebody will ask, why did you spend x billion on real estate when it was obvious that remote work was the future? Or if they are locked into a long-term lease, eventually the question will come up why are we spending all this money for office space we aren’t using? Shouldn’t we have thought of this earlier? Not having workers in the office makes it obvious that real estate was a bad investment, and many of these companies are pretty heavily invested in real estate. Easier to screw the workers with what can be explained away as a management strategy than admit a wasted a whole bunch of money buying and building and renovating space you don’t need.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon tech workers leaving for other jobs in response to return to office mandate⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That and executive ass covering, a way to avoid admitting to shareholders that they wasted their money on useless commercial real estate.

  It’s also shooting themselves in the foot. The first people to leave aren’t going to be the clock punchers, it will be the best and brightest who can easily find other jobs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Man Arrested for Sharing Copyright Infringing Nude Scenes Through Reddit.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Probably the best idea yet. It’s definitely not foolproof though. Best you could do is put a security chip in the camera that digitally signs the pictures, but that is imperfect because eventually someone will extract the key or figure out how to get the camera to sign pictures of their choosing that weren’t taken by the camera.

  A creator level key is more likely, so you choose who you trust.

  But most of the pictures that would be taken as proof of anything probably won’t be signed by one of those.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Man Arrested for Sharing Copyright Infringing Nude Scenes Through Reddit.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not talking about the copyright violation of sharing parts of a copyrighted movie. That is obviously infringement. I am talking about generated nude images.

  If the pencil drawing is not harming anybody, is the photo realistic but completely hand-done painting somehow more harmful? Does it become even more harmful if you use AI to help with the painting?

  If the pencil drawing is legal, and the AI generated deep fake is illegal, I am asking where exactly the line is. Because there is a whole spectrum between the two, so at what point does it become illegal?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Man Arrested for Sharing Copyright Infringing Nude Scenes Through Reddit.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Actually I was thinking about this some more and I think there is a much deeper issue.

  With the advent of generative AI, photographs can no longer be relied upon as documentary evidence.

  There’s the old saying, ‘pics or it didn’t happen’, which flipped around means sharing pics means it did happen.

  But if anyone can generate a photo realistic image from a few lines of text, then pictures don’t actually prove anything unless you have some bulletproof way to tell which pictures are real and which are generated by AI.

  And that’s the real point of a lot of these laws, to try and shove the genie back in the bottle. You can ban deep fake porn and order anyone who makes it to be drawn in quartered, you can an AI watermark it’s output but at the end of the day the genie is out of the bottle because someone somewhere will write an AI that ignores the watermark and pass the photos off as real.

  I’m open to any possible solution, but I’m not sure there is one. I think this genie may be out of the bottle for good, or at least I’m not seeing any way that it isn’t. And if that’s the case, perhaps the only response that doesn’t shred civil liberties is to preemptively declare defeat, acknowledge that photographs are no longer proof of anything, and deal with that as a society.