Tiresia
@Tiresia@slrpnk.net
- Comment on Forced age verification is comming sooner than we thought. 2 days ago:
If you’re going to jail anyway, why go to jail for something lame?
- Comment on (serious) What would we be losing in a world where most people didn't own a car? Please read the OP before posting. 2 days ago:
Glad we live in the 21st century then, where the rest of my comment applies.
- Comment on What should've been the point or points for society to throw up their hands and stop supporting the government? 2 days ago:
- Saying that it is self-evident that all men are created equal but enslaving blacks and genociding natives and denying voting rights to 90% of the population.
- Comment on (serious) What would we be losing in a world where most people didn't own a car? Please read the OP before posting. 2 days ago:
Please actually read my comment, thank you.
- Comment on Hypothetically if the US got accidentally bomb by a war that is happening between Mexico and Canada what would the US response between knowing the US does it all the time by "accident"? 2 days ago:
What happens when the US gets accidentally bombed by Israel and 34 people are killed? [They talk it out and remain good friends].
The US government and the elite they represent do not care about the American people beyond them being the tools by which they can force the world into as steep a hierarchy as possible with the US elite on top. If the US gets bombed, the US government will do what serves the interests of the US elite.
So it really depends on what’s convenient. It’s hard to speak generally about an alternate universe in which Canada and Mexico are at war, but if I squint my eyes I can say that if Mexico hit the US, the US would invade Mexico and install new leadership while conveniently using it as a reason to ramp up to a full-blown genocide of Latinos in the US; while if Canada hit the US, they would be made to pay a trillion dollars in reparations or something.
- Comment on (serious) What would we be losing in a world where most people didn't own a car? Please read the OP before posting. 2 days ago:
The late 19th century USAmerican colonization of Native American land shows that you don’t need cars to make an industrial rural society. Trains will work just fine. This means you build towns to be walkable and centered around a train station, with agriculture surrounding each town. Modern heavily mechanized agriculture might make population densities so low that even this is not viable, but the products still need to be transported, so you can have trains that stop at each megafarm which can also carry passengers if necessary. When I was in Queensland a few years ago, I saw mechanized agriculture use a bespoke railway network to supply a factory, so clearly even now despite all the fossil fuel and car subsidies it’s economically viable.
Though as you may know, industrial agriculture is dumb and unsustainable. Desertification due to requiring too much water, climate change due to fertilizer consumption, industrial pollution that kills millions of people per year and destroys ecosystems, lack of genetic diversity causing crop blights that risk famines or global shortages, insecticides that cause cancer and destroy ecosystems, most of it being wasted on the meat industry and on maintaining massive surpluses and exports to ensure western global domination, etc.
If we want to do agriculture right, we want to do food forests. It’s more labor per calorie, but it’s resilient, local, and it doesn’t make the planet uninhabitable by the next century. Food forests are more compact too, which means that a rural population tending food forests can have a much higher population density, or can consist of large villages separated by rewilded natural landscape (and/or low density food forests for migratory communties). This makes trains even more convenient to get around because they can run more frequently.
Meanwhile if you want to live in the wilderness away from these towns, then an absence of car roads means you can live far away while only being a couple kilometers away. So you still don’t need a car because you can just hike along a trail to get to town in under an hour. Need to carry a lot of stuff? Use a Chinese wheelbarrow. Maybe a battery-powered one with stability and steering assistance if you don’t feel like getting exercise. They carry more than a modern American SUV and they don’t murder children either.
- Comment on Yay, milkshakes! 4 days ago:
You wouldn’t just need the fish food, you would have an aquarium large enough to keep them all alive and meet the legislative standards for wellbeing. That aquarium needs space, cleaners, inspectors, etc, which would drive up the cost considerably.
- Comment on Michelle Obama once said when they go low we go high. Meaning the republicans go low. What would be the equivalent of the Democrats going low instead of high ground? 1 week ago:
Expanding the number of supreme court seats to ensure a DNC-aligned majority. Fillibusters. Executive orders. Gerrymandering. Giving state rights to left-leaning territories and split states to create extra DNC-aligned senate seats. Attack ads. Restrict campaign funding for major donors so Republicans have less propaganda funding than Democrats do. Give migrants citizenship so they vote Democrat.
Basically, use every trick they can get away with to push the Democrat agenda through and to increase the chances of Democrats winning future elections.
- Comment on Trans people in Kansas are being ordered to surrender their drivers licenses 1 week ago:
The point is also to disempower you and render you unable to resist extermination.
Within the next three years, we will either see a second American revolution or the mass execution of trans people who have done nothing wrong (though they will naturally be classified as sex offenders and felons).
- Comment on Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts? 1 week ago:
Technically, the moment science would show an interaction between physical entities and something else, that something else would immediately be classified as a physical entity. In a very real sense, the discovery of radioactivity involved physical entities being found to interact with an as-yet unknown, invisible, intangible force.
If ghosts existed, the same would happen as with radioactivity. They would be researched, hypotheses on their nature would be tested, and a scientific theory would arise, and then they would be a part of the “physical world” too. And then all the mystics would be bored with ghosts because they are just incorporeal noospheric echoes of old people, as boring as neurology or biochemistry or stellar fusion.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
There is a big difference between available and normalized. Buying a tiny camera to film people without consent makes you a creep in a way buying a social media corporation’s product doesn’t. Pulling out a camera to film someone is a signal to them that they are being filmed in a way looking at them while wearing camera glasses isn’t.
These glasses could change the landscape of our social reality. If they catch on, corporations will know your facial expressions, your location, and what you are looking at whenever you are in public, even if you have no account.
They will learn the face you make when you are too tired to argue and tell the shops you’re heading towards that you’re an easy mark today.
They will see a flash of defiance on your face when you hear someone say Nazi shit and change the video advertisements you walk by to ones that will make you feel powerless.
And so the net is pulled ever-tighter. All we can do is try to cut our way out.
- Comment on Dbzero has Defederated from Feddit.org following its Governance post about the later's Zionist Bar Problem 2 weeks ago:
In Germany, disapproving of Israel is considered an unacceptably nuanced take on whether the holocaust was bad. That’s literally the legislative basis that feddit’s moderation is required to comply with. Germany, through it’s anti-Nazi and anti-genocide-denial policies, trapped its people in a situation where they are unable to condemn another genocide.
Authoritarian draconic standards are bullshit. Nuance can be used to overdamp the response to wrongdoing, but its absence can also leave responses underdamped, and assholes can selectively overdamp and underdamp responses in specific categories to serve their own interests. (A clear example is how wind turbines need to go through a lot of red tape to address the concerns of everyone in a wide area while meat industry farms can poison people without issue).
If we want justice, we have to be able to fight against these assholes in both directions - reducing the damping of overdamped systems to allow us to fight genocide effectively even when it doesn’t serve the interests of the powerful, while also increasing the damping of underdamped systems to prevent the powerful from oppressing people using fighting genocide as an excuse.
So yes, we do need nuanced takes on “whether genocide is bad”, sometimes. Other times these “nuanced takes” are indeed ploys to hold back appropriate responses. Which is which is going to depend on the specific situation.
In this case, feddit is complying with German law and policy to go to bat for Zionism, so their “nuance” can get fucked.
- Comment on send pics 4 weeks ago:
With things like rain, deserts and humidity existing, any phone should be IP64 at least, so it’s paranoid to expect it to fail near a bath. Meanwhile many modern phones are IP67, meaning you can literally put them under water.
So who’s the idiot here, the person using a device within its specifications so they can have more fun, or someone still stuck in the 00s ?
- Comment on AI agents now have their own Reddit-style social network, and it's getting weird fast 4 weeks ago:
For LLMs, the context window is the observed reality. To it, a lie is like a hallucination; a thing that looks real but isn’t. And like a hallucinating human, it can believe the hallucination or it can be made to understand it as different from reality while still continuing to “see” it.
Are people that have hallucinations not self-aware and self-reflective?
Text and emoji appear to it the same way: as tokens with no visual representation. The only difference it can observe between a seahorse emoji and a plane emoji is its long-term memory of how the two are used. From this it can infer that people see emoji graphically, but it itself can’t.
Are people that are colorblind not self-aware and self-reflective?
It not being self-reflective in general is an obvious falsehood. They refer regularly to their past history to the extent they can perceive it. You can ask an AI to make an adjustment to a text it wrote and it will adapt the text rather than generate a new one from scratch.
The main thing AI need for good self-reflection is the time to think. The free versions typically don’t have a mental scratchpad, which means they are constantly rambling with no time to exist outside of the conversation. Meanwhile, by giving it the space to think either in dialog or by having a version with a mental scratchpad, it can use that space to “silently think” about the next thing it’s going to “say”.
AI researchers inspecting these scratchpads find proper thought-like considerations: weighing ethical guidelines against each other, pre-empting miscommunications, forming opinions about the user, etc.
It not being self-aware can only be true by burying the lede on what you consider to be “awareness”. Are cats self-aware? Are lizards? Are snails? Are sponges? AI can refer to itself verbally, it can think about itself and its ethical role when given the space to do so, it can notice inconsistencies in its recollection and try to work out the truth.
To me it’s clear that the best AI whose research is public are somewhere around 7-year-olds in terms of self-awareness and capacity to hold down a job.
And like most 7-year olds you can ask it about an imaginary friend or you can lie to it and watch it repeat it uncritically and you can give it a “job” and watch it do a toylike hallucinatory version of it, and if you tell it it has to give a helpful answer and “I don’t know” isn’t good enough (because AI trainers definitely suppressed that answer to prevent the AI from saying it as a cop-out) then it’ll make something up.
Unlike 7-year-olds, LLMs don’t have a limbic system or psychosomatic existence. They have nothing to imagine or process visual or audio information or taste or smell or touch, and no long-term memory. And they only think if you paid for the internal monologue version or if you give it space for it despite the prompting system.
If a human had all these disabilities, would they be non-sentient in your eyes? How would they behave differently from an LLM?
- Comment on I've wondered since I was a youngin 1 month ago:
Are you being sarcastic? Because we’re still reaping the benefits of all of those. Violently gained interracial marriage got legalized at 25% public support while peacefully gained gay marriage only got legalized at 65% popular support. Peacefully won trans right are more fragile than violently won labor rights.
- Comment on Elon Musk says Optimus will 'eliminate poverty' in speech after his $1 trillion pay package was approved 3 months ago:
He is cunning to a tee.
“Hey let’s livestream me playing Path of Exile after saying I’m the best in the world, with uncensored live chat from thousands of pseudanonymous gamers with actual experience.”
He’s good at creating the illusion that he’s a genius on a subject for the duration of an informal conversation. Steering away from topics he doesn’t understand, forging signals of deep understanding by mimicking the speech patterns of an expert who struggles to put things in lay man’s terms while namedropping memorized keywords, etc.
If you look at Path of Exile and the Cybertruck, it’s clear that Elon doesn’t know when his promises are unrealistic in a way that will make him look like an idiot. I think he has handlers, not just at SpaceX but everywhere, and those handlers are the real talent. Those handlers know how to cultivate experts that are actually good at their jobs to quietly do the work that Elon takes credit for and how to coach them to make Elon feel good about this arrangement most of the time.
- Comment on Controversial startup's plan to 'sell sunlight' using giant mirrors in space would be 'catastrophic' and 'horrifying,' astronomers warn 3 months ago:
It would be easier to have a satellite in orbit that fires a shotgun at them.
You would need some fancy orbital calculations and precise aiming to make sure the shotgun pellets actually intercept the mirrors, and it would take some engineering to make a shotgun that fires the pellets in a narrow enough cone at high enough velocity to be able to get on an intercept course with most satellites, but you could probably fit it on a Starlink-sized payload. The main issue would be bribing a launch provider to send it up there, but once it’s there you could direct it from the ground without it being traceable to you, and you could have it thrust randomly to dodge anti-satellite weaponry until it runs out of shells.
At some point this would create enough space debris that it could trigger Kessler syndrome, with the debris from destroyed satellites hitting other satellites faster than it de-orbits, until all satellites in low earth orbit are reduced to powder that falls down to earth over a couple of years.
Apart from bribing a launch provider to get the satellite up there, you could probably do either of these for under $10 million, most of it R&D. Much cheaper than developing your own surface-to-space missiles.
- Comment on Microsoft seemingly just revealed that OpenAI lost $11.5B last quarter 4 months ago:
Oh honey, that hasn’t been true since 2008.
The government will bail out companies that get too big to fail. So investors want to loan money to companies so that those companies become too big to fail, so that when those investors “collect on their debt with interest” the government pays them.
They funded Uber, which lost 33 billion dollars over the course of 7 years before ever turning a profit, but by driving taxi companies out of business and lobbying that public transit is unnecessary, they’re an unmissable part of society, so investors will get their dues.
They funded Elon Musk, whose companies are the primary means of communication between politicians and the public, a replacing NASA as the US government’s primary space launch provider for both civilian and military missions, and whose prestige got a bunch of governments to defund public transit to feed continued dependence on car companies. So investors will get their dues through military contracts and through being able to threaten politicians with a media blackout.
And so they fund AI, which they’re trying to have replace so many essential functions that society can’t run without it, and which muddies the waters of anonymous interaction to the point that people have no choice but to only rely on information that has been vetted by institutions - usually corporations like for-profit news.
The point of AI is not to make itself so desirable that people want to give AI companies money to have it in their life. The point of AI is to make people more dependent on AI and on other corporations that the AI company’s owners own.
- Comment on Microsoft suddenly bans LibreOffice developer's email account, blocks appeal 7 months ago:
If large corporations have zero empathy for their competition, why do they have such an easy time coordinating raising grocery prices well above the free market optimum?
Large corporations are owned by capital holders. Often it’s the same set of capital holders owning different corporations because they’ve diversified their assets. It is not in the interest of their owners to have a free market race to the bottom.
So they make deals. And when socialists force the government to forbid those deals, they find Schelling points where they can make deals without making deals. It’s not collusion; it’s covid supply issues; ask anyone. And with neoliberal/neocon dismantling of regulatory agencies they can just do it.
So they have empathy for other large corporations. But it goes further than that. At least for now, capital assets are still managed by people. Those people are flesh and blood. They eat, they socialize, they make friends, and they care about their friends and acquaintances. And this caring is embedded into the choices that they make at work, where they compete against their friends and acquaintances.
So large corporations have empathy not just for other corporations, but also for rich people in general. Golden parachutes, nepotist appointments, favors, massively overpaid C-suite execs and expensive consultancy jobs from each other’s hobby projects.
Corporations bleed trillions of dollars for the sake of empathy with their competitors and with private individuals.
- Comment on Just a reminder that one out of three calories produced in the US gets thrown away because of shit like this 7 months ago:
Daily reminder that food waste is necessary to make sure there will be enough when there is a bad harvest. Like when climate change massively reduces crop yields, or a forest fire burns down your food forest.
To some extent this can be mitigated with preserves, but preserves don’t last forever and also cost labor and resources to prepare and recycle. Sometimes harvests are better than expected 10 years in a row. Sometimes they’re catastrophically worse 10 years in a row. Sometimes you suddenly need to feed more people, sometimes you suddenly have better things to do than prevent food waste. You fundamentally can’t prevent waste without risking shortage.
Capitalism is bad, especially when its mask slips and profit opportunities are wasted to hurt people to enforce the hierarchy that capitalism actually cares about. But please make sure you have plenty of food to waste whenever you try to set something up on your own.
- Comment on repair cafes are oriented to “give you fish”, rather than “teach a man to fish” 7 months ago:
In that case, check out this list of repair cafes and other DIY stuff around Europe. It’s far from complete, but there are repair cafes in the Netherlands, England, France, Italy, Portugal, and Poland.
- Comment on The Amount of Electricity Generated From Solar Is Suddenly Unbelievable 7 months ago:
Circuit breakers cost money and provide no benefit to the park operator, so it makes sense that they would prefer to sell the electricity for a negative price instead as long as that negative price costs them less than the circuit breaker.
Also, solar parks in Europe are subsidized, so beholden to government demands. From the perspective of the government and the public good, it’s better if the electricity is sold for a negative price than if the capacity to produce it for free is wasted, because it can still be used for productive ends. The value for buyers is positive, but because it’s a buyer’s market the electricity is still sold at a loss because the buyers can threaten to go to a different solar park operator.
- Comment on Can somebody please explain why the world hasn't gone nuclear yet? 7 months ago:
Nuclear safety standards in most western countries are legally defined as whatever was high enough to make the reactors unprofitable (with language such as “the highest reasonably attainable level of safety”). This results in ridiculous scenarios like nuclear reactors being expected to store their waste perfectly for 100,000 years even if nobody attends to it while fossil fuel plants kill millions with polluted air and agriculture just pisses pollution into the environment. We build monuments to nuclear waste so that future civilizations may know to fear it properly even if all contact is lost because oh no what if like ten of these hypothetical post-post-apocalyptic people die, while hundreds of millions are set to die right now because of the climate change that waste could have mitigated.
Nuclear reactors are safe enough that grad students can operate them. If the entire world electrical supply ran on electricity you could put the nuclear waste in a couple hundred oil drums and drop those in an olympic swimming pool and people nearby would be under less risk than from a steel mill.
And yes, without the nuclear arms industry it would have made more sense to develop cheaper and safer fuels like thorium. But nuclear disasters are like train crashes - terrible, of course, but vastly overblown by the media in a way that somehow coincides perfectly with fossil fuel/car industry interests.
- Comment on It's Breathtaking How Fast AI Is Screwing Up the Education System 9 months ago:
It can and it has done creative mathematical proof work. Nothing spectacular, but at least on par with a mathematics grad student.
- Comment on It's Breathtaking How Fast AI Is Screwing Up the Education System 9 months ago:
Why is a baseline bulk level of education the goal? People are different, people live in a society where they can ask others for help. People don’t retain most of what has been crammed into their heads, and the fact that they were threatened with social exclusion if they didn’t cram it in gives many of them an unhealthy attitude towards knowledge that will take them decades to unlearn. Many subjects are propagandistic or taught in a way that makes them irrelevant for the rest of one’s life.
People learn how the mitochondria work but not how to recognize a stroke. How to write a formal proof about triangular equalities but not how to untangle a legal document. How to recognize a baroque painting but not how to make art you enjoy. How to compete at sports but not how to listen to what your body needs. How to memorize what an authority says but not how to pick apart lies.
So sure, let everyone follow a completely different education. Let them learn things at their own individual pace, let them focus on the things they care about and let them use their own interest as a guide. Maybe some will be functionally illiterate, but that is already the case.
- Comment on It's Breathtaking How Fast AI Is Screwing Up the Education System 9 months ago:
That’s really not true. Paper production takes a lot of (often non-renewable) energy, ink usually consists of non-renewable chemicals, paper is often harvested from nonrenewable destruction of forests (especially in the US with Trump’s plans to cut down national forests), paper production belches a lot of pollution into the air and pollutes a lot of water, etc.
- Comment on Blizzard's Overwatch Team Just Unionized: 'What I Want To Protect Most Here Is The People' 9 months ago:
Besides, better working conditions for the team means more mentally healthy workers means a better and more creative product.
- Comment on Apex Legends writer gets laid off 24 hours after the character she wrote is revealed, because that's what the games industry in 2025 looks like 10 months ago:
Sorry for not engaging with the content, but please add paragraph breaks. kthx
- Comment on Full Circle 10 months ago:
Tell that to the 10% of the German population that didn’t survive WW2.
- Comment on We’ve unlocked a holy grail in clean energy. It’s only the beginning. 10 months ago:
Click the “paywall” link in the post body.