supersquirrel
@supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
- Comment on To Curb Online Sexual Abuse of Children, Experts Look to AI: Researchers in Norway and the U.S. are training artificial intelligence to address cybergrooming. Will it work? 3 days ago:
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AI researchers often don’t understand basic aspects of how biases work in a cultural sense, like they get lost in the technical power and specifications of the machines they make and completely ignore the fact that they are working with a problem where you cannot eliminate bias or subjectivity in your filters, you can only be lucid and clear about what they are and try to minimize them in every way you can.
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This kind of narrative, and reasoning is VERY VERY VERY hard to stop once it gets momentum and can lead to a quick degradation of civil rights in a society, especially for younger people.
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AI is crap and it is always always always always always going to be worse than putting actual human beings who are professionals into positions where they can stop cyber grooming, bullying or harassment.
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Honestly, the fact that people are looking to AI to solve a problem like this inherently shows how little people actually give a fuck about solving this kind of problem shrugs . If kids are experiencing rampant toxic shit online, they need more adults to spend time with them and talk to them who they can trust, they don’t need more computer automated crap surveilling everything they fucking do and randomly dragnetting people with algorithms that are constantly wrong. The problem is that society has deemed children not worth the time for adults to spend quality time with enough that kids would be able to discuss and share these things easier, or that kids only have like a handful of adults in their life they can actually trust and they just don’t feel comfortable talking to any of that handful.
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- Comment on To Curb Online Sexual Abuse of Children, Experts Look to AI: Researchers in Norway and the U.S. are training artificial intelligence to address cybergrooming. Will it work? 3 days ago:
No, no it won’t
- Comment on Wounded Palestinians dying over lack of supplies, US surgeon who worked in Gaza says 4 days ago:
It isn’t an “offensive” against Hamas, this is a Genocide not a War.
- Comment on DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse 4 days ago:
I mean this is a great example of what happens when you put conservative men in power who think they know what they are doing but are just going to loudly, incompetently and incorrectly re-invent the wheel while everyone else suffers from not having an actual practical solution.
- Comment on Reddit’s 50% Plunge Fails to Entice Dip Buyers as Growth Slows. 5 days ago:
One man’s slowing growth is another man’s hardening growth (me, from reading this headline).
- Comment on Reddit’s 50% Plunge Fails to Entice Dip Buyers as Growth Slows. 6 days ago:
I would be lying if I said I didn’t find the fact that Reddit’s stock is crashing physically arousing.
- Comment on WW2 shooter Squad 44 from Offworld updates Easy Anti-Cheat enabling Linux support 6 days ago:
meh, Easy Red 2 never had any of that nonsense
- Comment on Activision User Research Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA 1 week ago:
They should name their union Unionvision
- Comment on YSK that in the US, denaturalization, the process of revoking a person's citizenship, does not require proof "Beyond reasonable doubt" 1 week ago:
lol, right
- Comment on Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying. 1 week ago:
Where is your evidence of this?
Everywhere? Every decade humankind becomes more uniform worldwide, but especially last few decades.
What? Do you not listen to music? Or enjoy art? Do you not watch theater or tv? Do you not enjoy going to local craft shows and seeing local artists?
What are you talking about?
That is an absurd claim to make.
- Comment on Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying. 1 week ago:
Another issue, is that publicity and interconnectedness of all discourses we have nowadays, increases a homogenuity of thinking patterns, in other words it hurts the diversity of the ways of thinking, that is also something that can be improved by more people going private and having closed interest groups in chats invisible to public web.
Where is your evidence of this?
- Comment on Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying. 1 week ago:
Well let me state this explicitly then, I don’t consider AI to be some kind of existential threat in terms of becoming sentient, or stealing all of our information and hoarding it away.
LLMs are powerful and have lots of use cases, but right now we are going through a really tiresome scifi novel delusion about mistaking the current wave of LLM innovations as being somehow able to transport us to the singularity or whatever boring tech bros are calling it these days.
yawn
longish response, no pressure to read
What scares me is the massive energy use of AI, it also doesn’t make money. If some AI scrapes all my stuff on the fediverse, ok that sucks but honestly that LLM they train off my posts is going to constantly complaining about corporations, AI bullshit hype and centralization of corporate power… yeah you can sanitize the data, they can profile me… yeah I know. I feel like that is already a threat enough and there is a tsunami like power that comes from reaching a public consensus through discussing things in public forums and putting our beliefs out there as a form of vulnerability. The more of us that do this, the more that people who disagree or agree can learn, the more we can establish conensus of shared values, the more we can build trust. The metaphor for our current late stage capitalist society on the afterburners of surveillance capitalism/mass dragnet surveillane and censorhsip is clearly the panopitcon en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon Image If you suspect you are in a panopticon, or in an environment that is threatening to collapse into an authoritarian panopticon type situation, than the best defense, because lets be honest if you are in this position you don’t have much power realistically do you? is to publically have conversations, share opinions, discuss honestly with people in a way that floods whatever commons that are left, whatever equivalent of yelling chants out of the prison bars to other prisoners… however you want to map the metaphor here… That is how we defend ourselves. The relevant question is whether you are in a situation where you can safely do that, if you can’t than take care of yourself, hide. Adopt good digital hygeine and help others out in an unjudgemental way how to do so themselves. If you feel at all that you can safely speak out, or honestly, if you feel like realistically you don’t have much to lose (because at the end of the day that is the position we are all existentially in, it is just a matter of who will suffer first and thus who has the right to want to delay that suffering the most) then the best defense here is to make as much as you can public through art, through any kind of discussion, because no matter how sophisticated and supercharged the methods of the oppressors are and no matter how overbearing false-consensuses become… …they still can’t ever really win in a moment to moment interaction with any half decent artist, any half decent person who knows their worth, any person willing to be vulnerable and say it how it is, and indeed really anyone that is willing to extend solidarity to strangers not because of some emotional need or ideological sense of superiority, but because it is something they try to do out of principle (and of course are imperfect at it). The nice thing is, we are talking about snowball effects here. One of the best drugs in life is doing a small good thing that ripples into a slightly bigger good thing all by itself, that takes a little life of its own. I don’t claim to be any kind of altruist, or someone who constantly does selfless acts but that isn’t the point. Most people feel a basic pleasure when it is easy to help, to help so long as it is simple and direct how to do so. Some don’t, so what.
- Comment on Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying. 1 week ago:
Anyway, the more general tendency of moving away from public spaces is a right and natural thing.
Let me emphatically say that NO it isn’t.
If you need to anonymize or disguise your identity because you feel threatened, I never want to make you feel like you shouldn’t take whatever steps of protecting your privacy that you feel you need to.
That being said, no, I fundamentally consider societal progress to be roughly equatable to how open the systems are in a society both in the material and ideological realm. Public forums are progress because they allow anybody with an internet connection to read through conversations, learn and eventually participate and add to a general collective benefit and community. This is the power of the internet.
- Comment on What is real in the age of AI slop and SEO spam? 1 week ago:
Yeah sorry I am tired and I realized after re-reading your response and my response that I misread you and should have taken more time to think my response over I apologize.
Thank you for the thoughtful response, I am sorry I didn’t give it the space in my mind it deserved!
- Comment on What is real in the age of AI slop and SEO spam? 1 week ago:
Of course, this is also something any artist who creates and performs art for an audience understands that as much as expression can be about vulnerability it can also be about lying, twisting the truth and getting people to agree to terrible things because ythe way you deliver it is charismatic or distracts sufficiently from the material reality.
I am really not interested in reading endless technica diagnosis of all the different species and taxonomies of manipulation that occur and could occur in public online conversations. It is great that people want to do that but I am an artist, I don’t need this explained to me in suffocating jargon, it is an immediate intuitive reality to an artist who is being honest with themselves.
All of this to say, yes, manipulation is still rampant, but we are talking in an a semi-abstracted space, manipulation will always be possible it is simply a question of how obvious it is to authentic users and/or how costly it is to create sufficiently convincing astroturfing bots and consensus.
Your response doesn’t invalidate my point, my point is that public conversation where people explain their arguments and give sources and people can respond and critique each other with no centralized authority necessarily determining the existential ability of users to participate in the conversation (i.e. you get banned from reddit for mentioning luigi) is the best solution we have. This is the fundamentally difficult problem of social media, all the programming, scaling up of server architecture, design of protocols, UIs and coding of clients, apps etc… that is the easy stuff honestly.
- Comment on Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying. 1 week ago:
quit whining tho?
- Comment on What is real in the age of AI slop and SEO spam? 1 week ago:
I really have very little tolerance for people on the continuum of techbro to libertarian that try to invent lots of technical hypothetical solutions to this that all boil down to systems of centralized control, or wildly unrealistic systems that will never take off the ground like fantastic depictions of flying machines…
Lets get straight to the point, the hard problem here is that philosophically there really is no shortcut to tell AI slop from genuine real information, there also can fundamentally be no logical operation you can perform that can seperate the “real” from “bot spam” because you fail at the first step of defining “real” especially if you are a techbro or libertarian fool who has never thought through the implications of any of this (see the shitshow that is the social media hellhole gab).
I think a lot of people I am tempted to refer to as “centrist”, though that is a problematic generalization it is of course more complicated, want to believe we just need more authoritarianism and advanced technology to solve this problem, and it is ultimately a fantasy.
At a philosophical level, which let me remind everyone, is the level you need to talk at before you ever bother thinking about technical implementations and advanced AI fact checkers blah blah blah… the only thing we can really do is design spaces that make it most likely for the human parts of real information to shine through in a way that makes it apparent that it is unlikely that information was generated by a bot or by a nefarious actor.
This is a game of probabilities, like trying to guesss someone’s intentions or understand what they are feeling, we might get very very very good at doing so but ultimately there is always a significant likelihood that we are wrong either because of a lack of context or just because that is how things go with unpredictable chaotic things…
**So then how do we design spaces so that they let the authenticity of “real” things shine through? I would argue the answer is genuine, spontaneous conversation and interaction in public or semi-public shared spaces. Forums, lemmy/reddit-likes and other forms of public discussion create conversations and as human beings we are INCREDIBLY good at observing interactions between strangers and deducing if those interactions feel genuine or not.
We can often be wrong about it, but anybody that has done theater for any amount of time, or really done any kind of art for an audience, knows that though the audience may not be able to put into words why something feels inauthentic, that the moment it does the audience will pick up on it. That is why art performed to an audience is so endlessly compelling and why you can spend a lifetime learning from it.
- Comment on Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying. 1 week ago:
Yeah, I don’t post private shit on forums, I discuss things publically so I can collectively have a conversation with countless other people.
Want to have a private personal conversation sure use a private chat room.
- Comment on Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying. 1 week ago:
No, it isn’t.
Make no mistake a primary monetization vector for Discord is to scrape the shit out of everything said on its chats.
By suggesting Discord for privacy you are effectively only giving corporations the benefit of a commons while denying that to the people.
Discord is NOT private, it is a corporation and your data is valuable.
- Comment on Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying. 1 week ago:
Discord is a terrible format to manage large, complex communities and projects, I don’t know what you mean by an alternative to Discord because my argument is that Discord is shit for organizing.
Discord is great for chat, both voice and text, it is a great live space to have for a community. I don’t dispute that. Sure there hasn’t been good alternatives to recently for that specific usecase…
What I dispute, and what I am pointing out is that Discord ate forums, it ate all kinds of public, publically accessible formats for online communities that were much more easily searchable and collatable into useful information for everybody.
Discord is a fucking hallway of a thousand fractured silo’d conversations locked behind an account login. I hate Discord for destroying the internet before it which I could freely browse and learn so much more from.
- Comment on Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying. 1 week ago:
I don’t think you can for most people that is what is so infuriating right? In my experience people who are entrenched in Discord are completely and utterly entrenched in it, to the point that I have lost contact with a lot of these people effectively since I don’t use Discord.
The important choice was with all the community leaders who decided to make the move to discord at crucial moments where they could have NOT done that.
I think any shift off of Discord is also going to have to come from community leaders of organizations, projects, game development communities etc… deciding to move off the platform at crucial decision points.
However, and this is something people who happily pushed their entire lives onto Discord would confidently tell me we could easily do if Discord got bad, everyone isn’t just going to straight up leave once they have built their entire digital communication around it…
Now I frequently see game developers complain that they can’t accurately get a picture of their playerbase because large categories of players aren’t on their discord!! and I have to keep my palm from blowing a hole through my face when the two loudly meet.
The brainworms are so bad that these developers will conclude the issue is with their playerbase not wanting to use Discord instead of it being an issue with DEVELOPERS DECIDING TO COMMUNICATE WITH THEIR PLAYERBASE WITH A SHITTY, EXCLUSIONARY TOOL THAT HAS AWFUL SEARCH.
I can’t express how much this gets under my skin, it is like this assumption that if you are even slightly a gamer than you are on Discord all the damn time has become rheified and cemented into place so rigidly that developers are literally tossing away large swaths of their playerbase feedback because they refuse to use a different tool to get feedback and communicate with their community. No forum, no custom website, nothing, Discord or bust.
I have seen the effects in games like Battlebit where it is clear that the developers are catering to only a very small subsection of the playerbase that is very active and prominent on the Discord and it ended up torpedoing the game because changes kept happening that clearly signalled to large sections of the playerbase that they were basically invisible to the developers.
- Comment on Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying. 1 week ago:
Yeah I remember saying this when all online communities seemed to be going to discord and people seemed to mainly laugh at me in response at the time.
Fuck Discord
- Comment on Cloudflare announces AI Labyrinth, which uses AI-generated content to confuse and waste the resources of AI Crawlers and bots that ignore “no crawl” directives. 1 week ago:
No, it is far less environmentally friendly than warrior bots made of metal, plastic, and electronics full of nasty little things like batteries blasting, sawing, burning and smashing one another to pieces.
- Comment on Cloudflare announces AI Labyrinth, which uses AI-generated content to confuse and waste the resources of AI Crawlers and bots that ignore “no crawl” directives. 1 week ago:
Definitely falls under the category of a Trap ICE card.
- Comment on Microsoft tells Windows 10 users to just trade in their PC for a newer one, because how hard can it be? 1 week ago:
ok, but you are ok with Nintendo then??
The form factor of switch/steam deck is expanding, valve doesn’t by any means have a stranglehold over it, they are by far the biggest player but the benefits to linux gaming are shared across the board which opens up the entire industry not closes it down?
- Comment on Microsoft tells Windows 10 users to just trade in their PC for a newer one, because how hard can it be? 1 week ago:
Personally, I want to ‘jail break’ my Switch and make mods for my console version of Skyrim.
Why not just get a steam deck?
- Comment on Discord is getting mobile ads 1 week ago:
wat no
- Comment on what is psychological definition of an ideal or good family? 2 weeks ago:
nope, that is the whole definition bud
- Comment on what is psychological definition of an ideal or good family? 2 weeks ago:
a group of people that are deeply committed to supporting one another for life
- Comment on Israel says it is cutting off Gaza's electricity supply 3 weeks ago:
genocide
