nednobbins

@nednobbins@lemmy.zip

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  As does Ring, Flock, Samsung, Apple, Google and so on. Some random person with any other hidden camera can easily upload them to creepy servers and do automatic face recognition on them too.

  Steve Mann en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Mann_(inventor) has been doing that for a long time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  They can produce better video than some cameras but not as good as others. 12MP ultrawide is pretty standard on security cameras and they’re already all over the place.

  Do you think that the current smart glasses are making surveillance more normalized or do you think that they’re getting more common because we’ve already normalized constant surveillance?

  I’d point out that the PATRIOT act passed a quarter century ago with only one “No” and one abstention.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  If I understand your response correctly, you’re arguing that the glasses themselves aren’t the issue, it’s the shifts that come with accepting the glasses.

  They may ironically have the reverse effect. I guarantee that corporations are already cataloging your facial expressions. Between Ring, Flock, Apple, Google, Netflix, Samsung, etc. there are many pictures of all our faces with rich annotation. Currently most people don’t even think about how thoroughly they’re being watched. These douchy glasses may actually draw attention to the matter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I dislike Facebook and deleted my account even before they changed to “Meta”. I also value privacy.

  But what privacy violations do “smart glasses” provide that weren’t already trivially available? Tiny cameras are insanely cheap. A reasonably handy person could hide several on their person and there are plenty of “spy shops” that sell actual wearable hidden cameras.

  The “I love ICE” kid was wearing Meta Ray Bans but the first video I saw of it was from someone else’ camera. I can’t leave the house without getting filmed from multiple angles. The only thing those glasses do is make it really obvious that the wearer is a dumbass.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We're just scanning for the bear...⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Many of them likely aren’t immediately useful to most people but here goes.

  1. I got older, got a few degrees, got paid a bunch and have been living in areas with extremely low street crime. I could probably pass out in front of my house with a Benji sticking out of my fly and it would still be there in the morning.

  2. I quit drinking. That wasn’t an issue when I was a kid but later on it provided 2 huge benefits: 2.a) My situational awareness is never impaired. 2.b) It eliminated the vast majority of situations where someone might find me an interesting target.

  3. I spent an absurd amount of time practicing and studying martial arts. The fighting parts of that aren’t that useful but many RBSD (Reality Based Self Defense) classes are actually practical. tl;dr It’s now fairly easy to find actual statistics on many forms of violence, look up the most likely ones for you, find the proven counters and practice those. For example, I’ve done a ton of drills that are a variation of shoving an attacker, yelling “Get away from me you PERVERT” (because while people tend to ignore cries for help, everyone wants to know who the pervert is), and running away.

  4. Closely related to 3 is the general realization that you don’t need to make yourself immune to violence. It’s hard to be a good fighter and it’s hard to make yourself the least attractive target. It’s pretty easy to avoid being the most attractive target. For example, men are often targeted by men who want to exert dominance. Looking tough is counter productive because the attacker gets more glory from taking down a tough guy than a wimp. Looking batshit crazy is pretty effective; if I feel like I’m being followed and there isn’t a convenient escape I smack my head a few times and start arguing with “the voices”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We're just scanning for the bear...⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Thank you. I’ve taken a much more holistic approach. It’s worked very well. Haven’t been mugged in decades.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We're just scanning for the bear...⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I was mugged in the playground of my building, the street across fine my house, my lobby, and at 57th and suttton, all in Manhattan. Then a few more times when I lived in Baltimore. I really hope most women don’t get raped that often.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We're just scanning for the bear...⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  As a fellow paranoid person I assume you also make some effort to concral when you’re looking around; tie your shoe, check yourself out in a store window, watch reflections on cars, etc.

  If some sketchy guy is following me, I want to know, without them knowing I know.

  We had people come into our grade school to give us advice like that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stephen Colbert says CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Talarivo and Crockett both seem like good candidates at first glance.

  Neither should b censored.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The news is sugarcoating how revolting the Epstein files are⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m willing to give the news some benefit of the doubt here because there actually are rational and non-evil reasons to do this.

  Socially, we have at least two related, but distinct forms of sexual atrocity.

  One is sex with children. There’s extensive evidence that sex before puberty leads to all kinds of long term negative effects for the victim.

  The other is non-consent. No matter what the age of the people involved, non-consent has serious negative consequences for the victim.

  The Epstein victims all seem to be extremely young post-adolescents. We generally wouldn’t care at all if they were getting it on with their high-school sweethearts.

  The problem with the Epstein victims was primarily one of consent. There was a vast human trafficking network and many of our leaders were active participants. The whole thing was so horrible that normal people are sickened by it happening to anyone, not just children.

  The reason we may want to be sticklers on this point is that this form of abuse is extremely common and really needs a spotlight on it. We don’t want people to come out the other end of this thing and think, “Sure pedophilia is bad but this guy is just pressuring his 18 year old secretary into sex and then making money passing her around to his buddies.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK that everything the New York Times about Donald Trump actually happened⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  youtu.be/c_ANImMrYu4?t=197

  The current stance of the president of the Heritage Foundation seems to be that if the left does not take up arms, MAGA will take over everything, permanently.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney supports the $900 million lawsuit against Valve, arguing Steam is "the only major store still holding onto payment ties and 30% junk fee"⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s simple and there’s oversimplified. The element your missing is “trust”. The reason gamers go to Steam is because we trust their reviews and return policies.

  The other storefronts haven’t built that trust. Most gamers have the experience of trying other storefronts, hating them, and going back to Steam.

  People don’t trust Gabe because he’s a billionaire, they trust him because he consistently makes decisions that gamers benefit from. No other game store CEO can claim that with a straight face.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney supports the $900 million lawsuit against Valve, arguing Steam is "the only major store still holding onto payment ties and 30% junk fee"⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That would be how monopolies work. You realize that Steam doesn’t require exclusivity, right? You can get BG3 all over the place. When customers have choice between vendors it’s not a monopoly, even if they tend to make the same choice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney supports the $900 million lawsuit against Valve, arguing Steam is "the only major store still holding onto payment ties and 30% junk fee"⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Do you think Larian’s management is also stupid?

  Any halfway decent GTM executive would have checked their distribution channel options and chosen the mix that makes them the most money, net of fees.

  Why would they pay for a service that harms them?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney supports the $900 million lawsuit against Valve, arguing Steam is "the only major store still holding onto payment ties and 30% junk fee"⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Are you actually confused about the information asymmetry in video game purchases? Given your weird movie references I assumed you were just trying to change the topic.

  I’ll try to use small words. Before you play a game, you don’t know if it’s goo;, just as used car buyers don’t know if the used car is a lemon. Without a buyer protections that drags the price of good games down just as lemons drag down the price of used cars. Akerlof goes into the proof for the car part of this in his paper.

  “Lemon laws” mostly solve that problem for cars. Steam mostly solves that problem for video games. That requires trust. You may not trust Steam but millions of people do. They’ve repeatedly made decisions that benefit gamers so gamers flock to them. Thats why they buy so many games from Steam even when they’re available elsewhere. If they broke that trust they’d probably never get it back but, until then, their net effect is to increase revenue for studios by providing a market where people are comfortable enough to spend more money.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney supports the $900 million lawsuit against Valve, arguing Steam is "the only major store still holding onto payment ties and 30% junk fee"⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So you don’t care that Larian isn’t harmed, you don’t care that the dev’s aren’t harmed, you don’t care that the consumer isn’t harmed.

  You just feel bad for Epic?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney supports the $900 million lawsuit against Valve, arguing Steam is "the only major store still holding onto payment ties and 30% junk fee"⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re the one claiming to be the economics expert. I’m simply correcting the record.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney supports the $900 million lawsuit against Valve, arguing Steam is "the only major store still holding onto payment ties and 30% junk fee"⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I haven’t studied “capitalism” but my Masters degree is in Financial Engineering. Since you seem to care about formal economics, how do you propose solving Akelof’s Market for Lemons?

  Valve solves the information asymmetry. That’s a net gain for both buyers and sellers. But you’ve studied economics, so you probably know that already.

  So let’s skip to the meat of the question. How do you propose determining the intrinsic value of resolved information asymmetry.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney supports the $900 million lawsuit against Valve, arguing Steam is "the only major store still holding onto payment ties and 30% junk fee"⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You seem to be operating under some notion that particular work deserves a particular amount of pay. That’s backwards. People pay for what they get, not for what the seller’s cost of goods.

  We know that Larian is doing very well financially. Their devs are happy and well paid.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney supports the $900 million lawsuit against Valve, arguing Steam is "the only major store still holding onto payment ties and 30% junk fee"⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s a completely irrelevant number.

  I have no idea how many devs worked on BG3 and that number has 0 impact on my enjoyment of the game. Given the number of hours I spent playing BG3, the price made it one of the cheapest forms of entertainment available.

  And, as a developer, I really don’t care how much companies pay to marketing vendors. Developer pay is generally negotiated when you’re hired. I haven’t worked in B2C but, as I understand it, they usually pay bonuses on sales volume rather than profits.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney supports the $900 million lawsuit against Valve, arguing Steam is "the only major store still holding onto payment ties and 30% junk fee"⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “overcharge” is entirely in the eye of the purchaser not the devs. Given the difference in user experience between Steam and any other launcher (sadly even/especially GOG), Steam charges less than I’d be willing to pay.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney supports the $900 million lawsuit against Valve, arguing Steam is "the only major store still holding onto payment ties and 30% junk fee"⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Valve doesn’t overcharge me.

  They provide an excellent user experience. They have one of the few stores where you can actually get reliable user reviews. Their return policies are generous. I’ve never had any problems with fraud or scams. Their search and recommendation functions are pretty good.

  To me, that’s a great deal and they’ve earned every penny of their markup.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mamdani to kill the NYC AI chatbot caught telling businesses to break the law— New York mayor says terminating the ‘unusable’ bot will help close a budget gap⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I just headed over to .ml and did a local search for “mamdani”

  I see a bunch of the more conservatives Democrats and their supporters complaining about him and conservatives of all stripes are really hoping he’ll fail.

  I’ve been called a tankie several times and I rather like Mamdani. I see him, AOC, and Sanders as the best hope for the future of the US.

  Where are these tankies that hate Mamdani so much? What do they hate him for?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's barely a science.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sort of. They won’t say that 2+2=5. The errors are in the isomorphism they claim and the empirical assumptions they make.

  Two of my favorites:

  1. Almost all of economics assumes normal distributions. We have good reason to believe that almost no economic variables are normally distributed. That means we routinely underestimate tail risk. We do it anyway because that’s the only way we can get the math to work.

  2. Almost all of modern economics assumes utility functions with transitive preferences. Testing shows that even the economists who published those theories don’t have transit preferences.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's barely a science.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Economists’ math is as good as anyone else’.

  The main problem is that economies are incredibly chaotic systems and all the math that humans can actually read described them poorly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Expecting a LLM to become conscious, is like expecting a painting to become alive⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  We certainly haven’t ruled out the possibility that the human brain is capable of some sort of “super Turing” calculations. That would lead me to 2 questions;

  1. Can we devise some test to show this? If we expand our definition of “test” to include anything we can measure, directly or indirectly, through our senses?

  2. What do we think is the “magic” ingredient that allows humans to engage in “super turing” activities, that a computer doesn’t have? eg Are carbon compounds inherently more suited to intelligence than silicon compounds?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Expecting a LLM to become conscious, is like expecting a painting to become alive⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a real vs theoretical distinction. Turing machines are defined as having infinite memory. Running out of memory is a big issue that prevents computers from solving problems that Turing machines should be able to solve.

  The halting problem, a bunch of problems involving prime numbers, a bunch of other weird math problems are all things that can’t be solved with Turing machines. They can all sort of be solved in some circumstances (eg A TM can correctly classify many programs as either halting or not halting but there are a bunch of edge cases it can’t figure out, even with infinite memory).

  From what I remember, most researchers believe that human brains are Turing Complete. I’m not aware of any class of problem that humans can solve that we don’t think are solvable by sufficiently large computers.

  You’re right that Quantum Computers are Turing Complete. They’re just the closest practical thing I could think of to something beyond it. They often let you knock down the Big Oh relative to regular computers. That was my point though. We can describe something that goes beyond TC (like “it can solve the halting lemma”) but there don’t seem to be any examples of them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Expecting a LLM to become conscious, is like expecting a painting to become alive⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Most modern languages are theoretically Turing complete but they all have finite memory. That also keeps human brains from being Turing complete. I’ve read a little about theories beyond Turing completeness, like quantum computers, but I’m not aware of anyone claiming that human brains are capable of that.

  A game of Magic could theoretically do any task a Turing machine could do but it would be really slow. Even if it could “think” it would likely take years to decide to do something as simple as farting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Expecting a LLM to become conscious, is like expecting a painting to become alive⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Feelings are certainly real. That doesn’t mean that they provide any evidence beyond the existence of the feeling. The standard thought experiment around that is to think about dreams. In a dream, everything I feel can be completely convincing and I have no way to know it’s a hallucination. Once I wake up that reality becomes clear and I know that the feelings I was 100% certain of a few moments ago, were false. That suggests that even complete certainty in our feelings is not indicative of underlying truth.

  The extra dimension thing is a bit tricky. The standard 3+1 are widely accepted. There are several conjectures that involve more dimensions but we haven’t found evidence to support them. All of those are still physical dimensions. They generally fall into 2 categories; testable and not testable.

  The non-testability is why everyone looks down on string theorists. Their models “explain” everything by piling on more and more dimensions but non of it is testable.

  Since none of the dimensions above 4 are measurable, I’m much more comfortable believing they don’t exist than that they do. I don’t see why it would make sense to fill a void of non-knowledge with arbitrary guesses. I don’t see a problem in not knowing if it’s possible for AIs (or humans) to be conscious.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Expecting a LLM to become conscious, is like expecting a painting to become alive⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I can understand a desire to find something beyond ourselves but I’m not driven by it.

  That’s exactly where Descartes lost me. I was with him on the whole “cogito ergo sum” thing but his insistence that his feelings of a higher being meant that it must exist in real form somewhere made no sense to me.