AlteredEgo

@AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨“You can't be expected to have a successful AI program when every single article, book or anything else that you've read or studied, you're supposed to pay for” Donald Trump said⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Don’t worry about the AI companies, they can afford it and then make a profit (eventually).

  Worry about the open source AI models that you can run locally using solar panels. They will become defacto illegal piracy. Affordable hardware to run large models without too much power is finally appearing (Ryzen AI max), but the software will become proprietary intellectual property of those who own the world. Which is the worst case scenario.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Adblockers stop publishers serving ads to (or even seeing) 1bn web users - Press Gazette⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah public broadcasting is under attack because of advertising. Advertising fuels private broadcasting and it’s in their owner’s interest to push anti public broadcasting propaganda.

  Any system humans design to serve us as a society will over time become “min maxed” by people or institutions seeking to maximize their profit or gain more power or maintain power in the face of changes. Advertising is a primary vector how those with the most economic power can influence society without people even realizing it. And everything is political.

  For example take the ratings and something like yellow pages and announcements for new businesses like a plumber - needing to invest additional capital in advertising has an effect too. It makes it so new businesses are more indentures, more like wage slavery, than if no advertising existed at all. Obviously no advertising at all would favor seniority. But we have advanced in technology since we designed our government systems - there should be an independent “forth estate” or fifth or something for economics and regulation. They could be independently voted on to the executive or legislative. And their job would be to deal with regulation in the public’s interest, and sponsor things like an independent ratings portal that is moderated, and force shops like amazon to use the independent ratings for the products and the vendors. It will stay a struggle to stay ahead of people trying to abuse the system for gain, but right now we pretend the tools we have right now are somehow god given. We Europeans are far more conservative than we like to think.

  If we want to have any resiliency against what is coming (because we destroyed our planet and let wealth inequality spiral and social media is nearly completely controlled by plutocrats) we need to push for better tools to govern democratically. And advertising is a major obstacle because it allows unmitigated influence of those who own the world.

  TLDR: We don’t *have to * screw over new plumbers, but we should do it if we had to because stopping the brainwashing is more important.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Adblockers stop publishers serving ads to (or even seeing) 1bn web users - Press Gazette⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ok, it’s obviously a complicated task, and banning advertising will make things more complex. But that is what progress often is.

  But before the internet we used to even have TV shows reviewing things, under the mandate they don’t get paid to do so. People do have an interest in learning about new cool things or improvements to old, and comparative reviews. There is no reason this wouldn’t serve the legitimate need for information better. Now we have ratings and that could be improved as well, through better technology to gather independent reviews.

  And yeah, there are not free lunches from corporations, but there are from people or from the government. We pay collectively for things and distribute them for free all the time. Public broadcasting could be extended to youtube or even news papers, to make them more independent from profit driven behavior or owners. You can’t have democracy without free press, and currently we don’t have that. We have corporate press and every single youtube channel has to serve corporate news. And as you point out, in capitalism there is no free lunch. But we can make it free so we can stop the insanity of neoliberal and fascist propaganda currently destroying our civilization globally.

  Another thing I forgot to mention, advertising is the main vector to increase consumerism. Which is killing our planet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Adblockers stop publishers serving ads to (or even seeing) 1bn web users - Press Gazette⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There are also market effects on what type of content is produced / profitable to advertise on.

  And mostly unknown psychological effects of advertising on the human mind. Maybe advertising has altered your mind so much that you “don’t even mind” it any more. It is a brainwashing technique after all haha. Maybe all those youtube ads made about 5% of the people’s brain soft enough to vote for MAGA. Maybe the effect of advertising is as bad as lead in gasoline.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Little Bullshitter⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This should be banned for self-censorsh!t.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨People angry that Superman represents kindness are outright admitting that they don't want to be good people⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah the value of art is that it can express or show things about the world that are hard to express in words. And we desperately need a new way and clarity about the failure of the old ways, because that is what leads to the cynicism and hopelessness. So either keep politics out of it, or have a bloody brilliant take on politics that provides actual value.

  I quite like superhero movies as escapism, like a fantasy world where clear definitions of good vs evil exist. But I can’t stomach biopics or docudramas that mix this fantasy with real world propaganda, like some nostalgic fantasy about US politics or journalism any more. It feels like they all want to recreate the beautiful fantasy of Sorkin’s “The White House” or the classic thriller take of “a bad apple in a good system” but today that is a dangerous lie.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨People angry that Superman represents kindness are outright admitting that they don't want to be good people⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I only watched a cam-rip and stopped after Louis Lane “interviews” Superman which was painful to watch. The typical reporter tearing and deliberately misrepresenting or framing things in the dominant world order, every question a cut and propaganda criticizing people who disagree. It was kinda gaslighting, like “why did you attack our ally unprovoked?! Also some people are saying you’re an alien spy!”. Instead of asking questions to get the truth, they are loaded questions that can’t be answered without making yourself look bad.

  What a total failures as a character introduction and makes her instantly an unlikeable removed. I mean holy shit is that bad storytelling. Or is that just me? If that is what you think a reporter should do, then don’t do it as a friend / girlfriend, and if that is how you see the world that you are not worthy of being the girlfriend of a hero like Superman. Because in my opinion you’re one of the villains in real life.

  I do suspect this plays into why some people disliked superman. What people seek in these troubled times is strength. And they hate what tears strength down, seeking to control or subdue it or put it in it’s place in the proper order of things. They want someone to break things because deep down we all know the path we’re on right now leads downward (economic inequality, enshittification of products, appliances and services, climate change and environment, rising tensions, news and social media, post truth world). The people voting aren’t entirely wrong in just wanting to see the world burn.

  There is a quote which I don’t know where it came from or remember well: “The samurai valued strength above anything else, because that is where all other values flow from”. Or differently: “The samurai believed that strength was the foundation of all values, as it enabled them to uphold honor, loyalty, and discipline.”

  But our liberal world order sees strength as something that has to be separated, atomized, means tested and distributed into channels to control. Controlled by laws, bureaucracy or better yet, the dictates of capitalism, because it’s oh-so-efficient. I suspect right wingers like Homelander not because he’s a corporate product, but because he breaks out of that and goes rogue, and also rejects the “we must not kill anyone and obey the laws or we will be like the villains!” bullshit.

  The cult of personality or hero worship represents a desire of people that someone comes and fixes all this shit and cuts through the red tape. Someone who has strength and the courage to use that strength, despite all the clever fucking shitty arguments and conventions to the contrary. Because we’ve heard it all before and it sounds so good but it’s clearly not working. Superhero movies are supposed to fulfill that wish and grand escapism into a world where our problems are magically solved. But recent movies (Marvel) failed to do that, instead pushing the failed real world fantasy of a liberal world order into the movies. Like the common trope of Washington and the government being fundamentally good and working well, except for a few bad apples, and as soon as you get the proof and give it to the good people or the newspapers, everything works out fine. Which is a painful reminder that it doesn’t in real life.

  I suspect the “reactionary backlash” is not just about racism, it’s about the rejection of the distraction of identity politics - that if we only lean in more, if we accept different cultures, everything will be fine - because that is just distraction from the continued neoliberalism and disaster capitalism. But breaking things and bringing things to a head is also an opportunity - accelerationism.

  These are just by jumbled thoughts on how this reflects on our culture war. Again, I haven’t watched the movie or read any of the right wing critiques, only seen the “liberal backlash to the backlash”. This controversy in itself is rather predictable and pisses me off. Like it’s a distraction in itself, a pair of two anger memes that complement each other perfectly are tossed into the ether to continue to keep us occupied.

  Also after I stopped the movie I read some (serious) reviews and it’s also just a shitty movie.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK: If you set up a Lemmy instance, and follow the Docker setup instructions to the letter, it will send lemmy.ml your admin password during the setup process⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh no, the secret plot of the tankies for world domination has been unmasked!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI agents wrong ~70% of time: Carnegie Mellon study⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re projecting. Every accusation is a confession.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI agents wrong ~70% of time: Carnegie Mellon study⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Emotion > Facts. Most people have been trained to blindly accept things and cheer on what fits with their agenda. Like technbro’s exaggerating LLMs, or people like you misrepresenting LLMs as mere statistical word generators without intelligence. That’s like saying a computer is just wires and switches, or missing the forest for the trees. Both is equally false.

  Yet if it fits with the emotional needs or with dogma, then other will agree. It’s a convenient and comforting “A vs B” worldview we’ve been trained to accept. And so the satisfying notion and misinformation keeps spreading.

  LLMs tell us more about human intelligence and the human slop we’ve been generating. It tells us that most people are not that much more than statistical word generators.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Q anon was a psyop.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The real psy-op was the billions they made along the way

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Welcome to the Labour police state⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  “Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of violence against non-combatants to achieve political or ideological aims.”

  If you call this terrorism, you can call anything terrorism, and anybody can be a terrorist. If you’re willing to do that to aid the Israel fascist state, that makes you a fascist.

  And sure, that was very much illegal and they could have used any number of laws applicable to attacking a military base. Just not terrorism. But the UK military is involved in a partnership in the gaza war. They are not “non-combatants”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Founder of Arkane Studios: "I think Gamepass is an unsustainable model that has been increasingly damaging the industry for a decade"; impacts sales⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Isn’t this an old strategy of microsoft? Dump shitload of money into a market, then once you captured a significant portion start the enshittification.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Welcome to the Labour police state⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Can you support “the political prisoners of Palestine Action”?

  Can you say “Palestine Action is not a terrorist organization”?

  Can you say “Outlawing Palestine Action is terrorism”?

  Or is that also illegal?

  Fucking fascists…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In 6 hours it will be illegal to say "I support Palestine Action" in the UK, with a sentence of up to 14 years in prison.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  No, it’s “Reductio ad Absurdum” showing how your argument is fallacious.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In 6 hours it will be illegal to say "I support Palestine Action" in the UK, with a sentence of up to 14 years in prison.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Really? Oh so is the USA and Israel a terrorist country too and any organization they support terrorists as well?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In 6 hours it will be illegal to say "I support Palestine Action" in the UK, with a sentence of up to 14 years in prison.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it’s a bit far to call them terrorists,

  Did you mean “a bit unfair”? Because I don’t see how anybody would be terrorized by this. It’s clearly illegal but using terrorism here is very problematic, especially since what the military does to people in the middle easy is actual terrorism but not called that.

  Afaik the “anti-Semitism in Labour” was basically a made up smear by the Labour Party themselves to prevent Jeremy Corbyn getting elected.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does one become a clown?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  “Baskets” is an excellent documentary series about becoming a clown (jk)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do “flagship” smartphone chips go out of fashion after just a year?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Basically when I look for new hardware, I always look at specs. And it’s so easy to get sucked in by “oh this is a little bit more expensive but has 20% more performance!”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No JS, No CSS, No HTML: online "clubs" celebrate plainer websites⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I was thinking of the Gemini (protocol) - Wikipedia but a bit more elaborate, and yeah I’m not sure how far text compression can be pushed. But I think LLMs could be useful and help reach a critical mass of being able to download and store tons of articles.

  Torrent V2 and other official extensions Updating Torrents Via DHT Mutable Items allow some ways to do this. Like hosting a youtube channel and updating it with new videos, without any new network protocol. Well theoretically since this isn’t yet supported well in torrent clients or lib.

  I’ve been thinking how this would work for a while but it’s kind of frying my brain haha. Like a P2P version control database that is truly open source. For articles and blog posts, but also for metadata for manhwa, movies, tv, anime, books etc. Like anybody can download and use it and share, edit, fork it without needing to set up some complex server. Something that can’t be taken down, sold or if abandoned someone else can just pick it up and you can merge different curated versions and additions easily.

  You’d basically want a “most popular items of the past X time” that almost everybody downloads, and then the whole database split into more and more exotic or obscure items. So everybody has the popular stuff but also has to host some exotic items so they don’t get lost. And it has to be easy to use and install.

  But the whole database has to be small and compact and compressed enough that you can still easily host it on a normal HDD. It the current times with economic and political dangers lurking this would be a crucial bit of IT infrastructure.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I know you degenerates want it⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Time to block this community lol

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No JS, No CSS, No HTML: online "clubs" celebrate plainer websites⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That is just stupid. How about a slighly more complex markdown.

  What I really want is a P2P archive of all the relevant news articles of the last decades in markdown like in firefox “reader view”. And some super advanced LLM powered text compression so you can easily store a copy of 20% of them on your PC to share P2P.

  Much of the information on the internet could vanish within months if we face some global economic crisis.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fairphone announces the €599 Fairphone 6, with a 6.31" 120Hz LTPO OLED display, a Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 chip, and enhanced modularity with 12 swappable parts⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I bought an oled phone for 200€ a few years back. What I’d really want is that every smartphone sold in the EU is open, with open drivers and OS with root access if you want to. And some investments by the EU to support open smartphone OS.

  What a shithole civilization.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨surprised_pikachu.jpg⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Source seems to be: metalsucks.net/…/another-woman-comes-forward-accu…

  So I first met him when I had just turned 17 and he was 33. I met him after a 30 Seconds to Mars concert. He was immediately flirtatious. And I want to make it clear, I thought this was cool at the time. I was a senior in high school from a small town. This was a big celebrity. And he was handsome. I thought it was cool. I would say by the second show, he had started to move from just like flirting to saying things of a more sexual nature.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI CEO – Replace Your Boss Before They Replace You⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I couldn’t remember it either. I described it to deepseek in order to find it. Ironically it mistakenly thought “the short story you’re thinking of is almost certainly “Nanny” by Cory Doctorow. It’s part of his collection Radicalized (published in 2019)”.

  If you find it, let me know. I think I might have been conned by deepseek.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨no way right⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Something like 70% of gradates in STEM fields in Iran are women. Their economy can’t absorb the skilled labors because of the sanctions though, but that is their goal: To hinder democracy and a middle class that wouldn’t want to sell out to the west. What the US and Israel is doing is meant to do the opposite of what leftists want for Iran. And war is certainly not going to make any of this better.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI CEO – Replace Your Boss Before They Replace You⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They would generate strategies that maximize their objective function based on the training data. Obviously garbage in garbage out, but my point is they would not be prone to certain irrationalities like humans.

  It might be possible to regulate how AI CEOs are optimized and trained though. You can tell a human CEO a thousand times “we only have one earth, if you all externalize your cost we will all die and have zero profits” but an AI might actually get it. AI might also be connected to a kind of crowdsourced democratic economic global forum, where people can discuss, complain and make suggestions.

  AI also has a much higher bandwidth and might catch institutional problems much easier because it doesn’t have to rely on summaries of subordinates to understand how things are going.

  More broadly, it might be theoretically impossible for humans to act according to our shared values - no matter what rules, institutions, education or culture we create. Like “theoretically impossible, the system always degenerates” because individual humans will always follow their own greed and lust for power while pretending to comply, and then using that power to slowly pervert the system and it’s rules. I believe that is the root of our current malaise. But even non-sentient AI might be able to help us just enough to make it work. It’s much more likely that those in power will use it for the opposite, but that shouldn’t stop us from thinking about if it can be used for good.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI CEO – Replace Your Boss Before They Replace You⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  People are a resource that keeps regenerating after all.

  That’s what the AI would call “sustainable business practices”?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨SpaceX's Starship blows up ahead of 10th test flight⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve been wondering why they don’t blow up more regularly. I imagine a few long range sniper shots would make them explode easily. They should be relatively easy to hit, seeing how big they are.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI CEO – Replace Your Boss Before They Replace You⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I suspect an AI CEO would be more rational and science driven, instead of believing in some ideology that says workers have to feel desperate to be most productive or something. It’s possible they’d look at science and then raise the minimum vacation time so people are more productive and generate more profit.