merc
@merc@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Pop it in your calendars 2 days ago:
Pop it in your calendars? Maybe I’m using calendars wrong, but mine aren’t filled with things I should avoid doing. But, I’m willing to learn. What date should I put “Don’t Buy Subnautica 2” on?
- Comment on Pop it in your calendars 2 days ago:
Seeing the underwater world was so much fun. I got it to play in VR and only did that a couple of times, but I completed the original and Below Zero because the exploration and underwater scenes were just so good.
- Comment on YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat 2 days ago:
Yeah, saying “it’s the companies (that I buy things from) that pollute and not me” is like saying “I don’t contribute to climate change because I don’t cook red meat, I go to the restaurant and order a steak and they cook the meat. It’s the restaurant that’s destroying the environment!”
- Comment on Companies That Tried to Save Money With AI Are Now Spending a Fortune Hiring People to Fix Its Mistakes 4 days ago:
Absent Indians using AI? The AI ouroboros?
- Comment on Viewers like you 6 days ago:
Even before that there was Walter Cronkite, then Peter Jennings.
That was back in an era where everyone watched the same “influencers”. The good part of that was that for the most part, these influencers were rigorously fact checked so the people who watched them agreed on the same set of facts, and those facts were more or less true.
On the other hand, there were times when these “influencers” were biased or even hid the truth. The bias was often something they even had trouble noticing. Like, they all believed communism was a big threat, or that police were trustworthy. As for hiding the truth, sometimes when a politician got in trouble the news would drop the story because of their deference to power. They’d also sometimes try to repeat whatever the government said as truth without checking it, or not investigate bad things the government was doing overseas because they saw that as being patriotic.
Overall, I think it was better when everybody agreed on most things, even if sometimes the news / “influencers” were biased. At least it meant that the government was more or less functional. At least it meant that people were relatively civil with each-other.
- Comment on What are the chances 1 week ago:
The 1950s economy was the result of:
- The New Deal
- A world war which destroyed the infrastructure of every developed economy except for the US.
The New Deal was only possible because of the Great Depression. Only that level of chaos was enough so that left-wing politicians could push through radical reforms that moved power from the elite to the workers. The reforms of the New Deal remained in place after the war, at least for a while.
The second world war saw the destruction of the industrial capacity of the UK, Germany, France and the USSR. Meanwhile the only attack on the US was an attack on military targets at a Navy base in a distant territory.
So, if you want an economy similar to the 1950s, arrange for a world war which somehow leaves the US unscathed but destroys every other similarly developed economy, then arrange for a great depression which destroys the economy to such an extent that radical reforms can be enacted to hand power to the average worker.
Yes, of course nothing bad would happen if we switched to a 20 hour work week. But, the people with the power aren’t going to just allow that to happen. The 40 hour work week only happened with a massive series of strikes that were brutally put down by the cops. The change to a 20 hour week isn’t just going to happen because some workers think it would be cool.
- Comment on What are the chances 1 week ago:
That’s absolute bullshit. When the 40 hour workweek was “invented”, men were working 12 hour days in factories and their wives also worked. The wives sometimes worked in factories, often worked as domestic servants for richer people, or did home-based work. Home based work was often laundry or cooking for other people, not just their family. They’d sometimes also finish goods that were produced in a factory. Both partners were working 12+ days. And, while women did most of the home cooking and cleaning, it wasn’t as though that’s all they did.
This system ended because the workers used their power and went on strike. The result was the Haymarket Affair and is the reason that most countries, other than the US, celebrate a worker’s day on May 1st. The striking workers were attacked and beaten by the cops, and then because a bomb was thrown at a cop, the leaders of an anarchist group were rounded up and hanged after show trials.
Eventually the striking workers got what they were working for: an 8 hour day. But, it took decades after the Haymarket Affair for it to happen, and it wasn’t something that happened because everyone agreed it made sense. It was a long and bloody fight where that was the compromise that reduced the bloodshed.
If you want a 20 hour work week, join a union, prepare to go on strike and prepare to be beaten by the cops.
- Comment on Facts and minds 1 week ago:
Except that may have been a fluke:
- Comment on Facts and minds 1 week ago:
I try too, but it’s frustrating. I just wish I knew of a good technique that didn’t involve out-and-out lying. Because it’s hard to compete when someone’s being spoon-fed misinformation and disinformation that’s carefully crafted to bypass all their filters, and you have to try to fight for the truth by being honest and using facts.
- Comment on Facts and minds 1 week ago:
It can happen, but often you can predict when someone will be utterly unwilling to change their mind, despite mountains of evidence.
If it’s something that someone doesn’t really have a stake in, they’re likely to follow the evidence.
But, it’s different when something is a big part of someone’s identity. Take an American gun nut: Someone who spends a lot of free time on gun-related forums. Someone who goes shooting sometimes with buddies. Someone who listens to podcasts about guns, and has a gun safe filled with favourites. That’s the kind of person who is never going to be swayed by rational arguments about guns.
Too much of their self-identity and too many of their social connections are gun-related. Changing their mind wouldn’t just mean adopting a new set of facts, it would mean potential conflicts with all their friends. It would mean leaving a social group where they spend a lot of their free time. They’d not only have to accept that they’re wrong, but that all their friends are wrong too.
Of course, there are ways to change the minds of people who are in a situation like that. Unfortunately, it mostly happens due to tragedy. Like, a gun nut will change their mind, but only when a family member kills themselves with a gun, either on purpose or accidentally. That new, and incredibly personal data point is enough to compensate for all the social difficulties related to changing your mind.
- Comment on We need to stop pretending AI is intelligent 2 weeks ago:
The other thing that most people don’t focus on is how we train LLMs.
We’re basically building something like a spider tailed viper. A spider tailed viper is a kind of snake that has a growth on its tail that looks a lot like a spider. It wiggles it around so it looks like a spider, convincing birds they’ve found a snack, and when the bird gets close enough the snake strikes and eats the bird.
Now, I’m not saying we’re building something that is designed to kill us. But, I am saying that we’re putting enormous effort into building something that can fool us into thinking it’s intelligent. We’re not trying to build something that can do something intelligent. We’re instead trying to build something that mimics intelligence.
What we’re effectively doing is looking at this thing that mimics a spider, and trying harder and harder to tweak its design so that it looks more and more realistic. What’s crazy about that is that we’re not building this to fool a predator so that we’re not in danger. We’re not doing it to fool prey, so we can catch and eat them more easily. We’re doing it so we can fool ourselves.
It’s like if, instead of a spider-tailed snake, a snake evolved a bird-like tail, and evolution kept tweaking the design so that the tail was more and more likely to fool the snake so it would bite its own tail. Except, evolution doesn’t work like that because a snake that ignored actual prey and instead insisted on attacking its own tail would be an evolutionary dead end. Only a truly stupid species like humans would intentionally design something that wasn’t intelligent but mimicked intelligence well enough that other humans preferred it to actual information and knowledge.
- Comment on Never easier to kidnap people in the USA 2 weeks ago:
Ah, so you believe ICE?
- Comment on Never easier to kidnap people in the USA 2 weeks ago:
There are a lot more, I just grabbed the first few.
- Comment on But I am mighty!! 2 weeks ago:
And only then?
- Comment on Never easier to kidnap people in the USA 2 weeks ago:
Maybe if that happened ICE would actually start identifying themselves.
- Comment on But I am mighty!! 2 weeks ago:
Maybe tens of thousands of years ago, but 2000ish years ago 60ish was old age. The main reason life expectancy has gone up isn’t that old people didn’t make it to 50, it’s that young people didn’t make it to 2. If a couple has 5 kids, 3 of them die as toddlers and the other two make it to 70 the average life expectancy is about 30, but that doesn’t mean living past 30 is unusual.
Also, tens of thousands of years ago there was an ice age, but for the last 10k years light-skinned Europeans still had normal summers and worked in the fields.
- Comment on But I am mighty!! 2 weeks ago:
I don’t either, but my nose isn’t hairy and it would burn to a crisp outdoors.
- Comment on Never easier to kidnap people in the USA 2 weeks ago:
There are lots of stories about this.
But, those are the ones we know about. Are there others we don’t? I’d say it’s certain.
For a serial killer, this has to be a gift from the gods. Get some gear from an army surplus store, cover your face, kidnap and kill someone, hide the body, and everyone will just assume that they were deported and lost in the system.
- Comment on Never easier to kidnap people in the USA 2 weeks ago:
Florida woman arrested for posing as ICE agent to kidnap ex-boyfriend’s wife: police
globalnews.ca/…/florida-women-arrested-impersonat…
Man accused of posing as ICE agent, sexually assaulting woman at motel: report
komonews.com/…/man-carl-bennett-jr-accused-of-pos…
Man arrested in attempted rape after allegedly posing as ICE agent in Brooklyn
Houston police: Man impersonating ICE agent responsible for robbery
- Comment on Never easier to kidnap people in the USA 2 weeks ago:
Do you mean the one from Norway? He wasn’t picked up by a van, he was denied entry at the airport.
- Comment on But I am mighty!! 2 weeks ago:
On the other hand, what bullshit is it that my stupid human body can’t survive being outdoors without medicinal cream. My ancestors would be ashamed.
- Comment on PewDiePie: I'm DONE with Google 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, even an established creator is going to have a hard time moving their audience.
If YouTube weren’t a near monopoly it would be different. Then other companies would be competing for creators.
Making it worse is section 1201 of the DMCA. It makes it a crime to circumvent access controls. In the past, Facebook was able to grow by providing tools to interface with MySpace. People didn’t have to abandon their MySpace friends, they could communicate with them through Facebook, and Facebook could ensure that messages sent on its platform arrived to people still on MySpace. But, if you tried that today Facebook has access controls in place that make that a crime. The same applies to YouTube. Nobody can build a seamless “migrate away from YouTube” experience because YouTube will use the DMCA to block them.
The governments of the world need to bring back antitrust with teeth and force interoperability.
- Comment on My parents wanted serotonin, so they had a baby. now i am forced to wage slave for the worst of us. 2 weeks ago:
The whole thing is pretty ridiculous. You don’t get to consent to being born. You don’t get to consent to having who you have as parents. And, legally they get to make every important decision about your life for 18 years.
Even if you have parents who actually loved you and showed it, who aren’t abusive, who did the best they could, you’re still stuck in a relationship you didn’t get a chance to consent to. Even “good” parents often mess up their kids by trying to live their lives through those kids. Like, parents who are failed athletes trying to push their kids into sports. Or, parents who miss having little kids around trying to guilt their kids into providing them grandkids.
And then there’s the whole expectation of taking care of the parents when they get old and sick. Yes, I get it, they changed their kids’ diapers when they were young. The kids are just returning the favour. But, those kids never had a choice. The parents (for the most part) chose to have kids, and chose to do that work. The kids never agreed to the terms and conditions that said they had to help out their parents when their bodies started failing.
Suicide is selfish, but ultimately, it is your life. It’s unfair that other people get an opportunity to tie all kinds of strings to you before your brain has even developed enough to understand the concepts of live and death.
Then again, we’re just animals. We only exist because a machine which exists to propagate its genes turned out to be effective at propagating its genes. Nature is brutal, and even if we don’t always admit it, we’re still part of nature. There’s nothing fair about it. It just is.
- Comment on A Tech-Backed Influencer Wants to Replace Teachers With AI 2 weeks ago:
I’m not even convinced that an “AI tutor” is better than nothing.
Probably better than sitting in a room staring at a blank wall. But, is it even as good as playing with lego? Playing tag with friends? Drawing with crayons? Taking a pet for a walk?
- Comment on Tesla Robotaxi Freaks Out and Drives into Oncoming Traffic on First Day 2 weeks ago:
All other things being equal, it would save a lot of lives to replace every human driver with a Waymo car right now. They’re already significantly better than the average driver.
But, there are a few caveats. One is that so far they’ve only ever driven under relatively easy conditions. They don’t do any highway driving, and they’ve never driven in snow. Another one is that because they all share one “mind”, we don’t know if there are failure modes that would affect every car. Every human driver is different, but every human is more or less the same. If a human sees a 100 km/h or 60 mph speed limit on a narrow, twisty, suburban street with poor visibility, most of them are probably going to assume it was a mistake and won’t actually try to drive 100 km/h. We don’t know if a robo-vehicle will do that. AFAIK they haven’t found any way to emulate “common sense”. They might also freak out during an eclipse because they’ve never been trained for that kind of lighting. Or they might try to drive at normal speeds when visibility is obscured by forest fire smoke.
There’s also the side effects of replacing millions of drivers with robo-cars. What will it do to people who drive for a living? Should Google/Waymo be paying most of the cost of retraining them? Paying their bills until they can find a new job? What will it do to cities? Will it mean that we no longer need parking lots because cars come and drop people off and then head off to take care of someone else? Or will it mean empty cars roaming the city causing gridlock and making it hell for pedestrians and bikers? Will people now want to live in the city because they don’t need to pay for parking and can get a car easily whenever they need one? Or will people now want to live even farther out into the suburbs / rural areas because they don’t need to drive and can work in the car on the way into the city?
Personally, I’m hopeful. I think they could make cities better. But, who knows. We should move slowly until we figure things out.
- Comment on Tesla Robotaxi Freaks Out and Drives into Oncoming Traffic on First Day 2 weeks ago:
a silicon valley AI project to put transit workers out of work
Silicon valley doesn’t have objectives like “putting transit workers out of work”. They only care about growth and profit.
In this case, the potential for growth is replacing every driver, not merely targeting transit workers. If they can do that, it would mean millions fewer cars on the road, and millions fewer cars being produced. Great for the environment, but yeah, some people might lose their jobs. But, other new jobs might be created.
The original car boom also destroyed all kinds of jobs. Farriers, stable hands, grooms, riding instructors, equine veterinarians, horse trainers, etc. But, should we have held back technology so those jobs were all around today? We’d still have streets absolutely covered in horse poop, and horses regularly dying in the street, along with all the resulting disease. Would that be a better world? I don’t think so.
It’s another project to get AI money and destroy labor rights.
Waymo obviously uses a form of AI, but they’ve been around a lot longer than the current AI / LLM boom. It’s 16 years old as a Google project, 21 years old if you consider the original Stanford team. As for destroying labour rights, sure, every capitalist company wants weaker labour rights. But, that includes the car companies making normal human-driven cars, it includes the companies manufacturing city buses and trains. There’s nothing special about Waymo / Google in that regard.
Sure, strengthening labour rights would be a good idea, but I don’t think it really has anything to do with Waymo. But, sure, we should organize and unionize Google if that’s at all possible.
Transit is incredibly underfunded and misregulated in California/the USA
Sure. That has nothing to do with Waymo though.
robotaxis are a criminal misinvestment in resources.
Misinvestment by whom? Google? What should Google be investing in instead?
- Comment on Tesla Robotaxi Freaks Out and Drives into Oncoming Traffic on First Day 2 weeks ago:
AFAIK they’re as safe as SawStop table saws. There has only ever been one collision involving a Waymo car that resulted in a serious injury. It was when a driver in another car, who was fleeing from police, sideswiped two cars, went onto the sidewalk and hit 2 pedestrians. One of the cars that was hit was a Waymo car, and the passenger was injured. Obviously, this wasn’t the fault of Waymo, but it was included in their list of 25 crashes with injuries, and was the only one involving a serious injury.
Of the rest, 17 involved the Waymo car being rear-ended. 3 involved another car running a red light and hitting the Waymo car. 2 were sideswipes caused by the other driver. 2 were vehicles turning left across the path of the Waymo car, one a bike, one a car. One was a Waymo car turning left and being hit on the passenger side. It’s possible that a few of these cases involving a collision between a vehicle turning and a vehicle going straight could be at least partially blamed on the Waymo car. But, based on the descriptions of the crashes it certainly wasn’t making an obvious error.
IMO it would be hard to argue that the cars aren’t already significantly safer than the average driver. There are still plenty of bugs to be ironed out, but for the most part they don’t seem to be safety-related bugs.
If the math were simple and every Waymo car on the road meant one human driver off the road with no other consequences or costs, it would be a no-brainer to start replacing human drivers with Waymo’s tech. But, of course, nothing is ever that simple.
- Comment on Tesla Robotaxi Freaks Out and Drives into Oncoming Traffic on First Day 2 weeks ago:
Waymo times than Teslas?
- Comment on Tesla Robotaxi Freaks Out and Drives into Oncoming Traffic on First Day 2 weeks ago:
Imagine you’re the guy who invented SawStop, the table saw that can detect fingers touching the saw blade and immediately bury the blade in an aluminum block to avoid cutting off someone’s finger. Your system took a lot of R&D, it’s expensive, requires a custom table saw with specialized internal parts so it’s much more expensive than a normal table saw, but it works, and it works well. You’ve now got it down that someone can go full-speed into the blade and most likely not even get the smallest cut. Every time the device activates, it’s a finger saved. Yeah, it’s a bit expensive to own. And, because of the safety mechanism, every time it activates you need to buy a few new parts which aren’t cheap. But, an activation means you avoided having a finger cut off, so good deal! You start selling these devices and while it’s not replacing every table saw sold, it’s slowly being something that people consider when buying.
Meanwhile, some dude out of Silicon Valley hears about this, and hacks up a system that just uses a $30 webcam, an AI model that detects fingers (trained exclusively on pudgy white fingers of Silicon Valley executives) and a pinball flipper attached to a rubber brake that slows the blade to a stop within a second when the AI model sees a finger in danger.
This new device, the, “Finger Saver” doesn’t work very well at all. In demos with a hotdog, sometimes the hotdog is sawed in half. Sometimes the saw blade goes flying out of the machine into the audience. After a while, the company has the demo down so that when they do it in extremely controlled conditions, it does stop the hotdog from being sawed in half, but it does take a good few chunks out of it before the blade fully stops. It doesn’t work at all with black fingers, but the Finger Saver company will sell you some cream-coloured paint that you can paint your finger with before using it if your finger isn’t the right shade.
Now, imagine if the media just referred to these two devices interchangeably as “finger saving devices”. Imagine if the Finger Saver company heavily promoted their things and got them installed in workshops in high schools, telling the shop teachers that students are now 100% safe from injuries while using the table saw, so they can just throw out all safety equipment. When, inevitably, someone gets a serious wound while using a “Finger Saver” the media goes on a rant about whether you can really trust “finger saving devices” at all.
Anyhow, this is a rant about Waymo vs. Tesla.
- Comment on the seven deadly companies 2 weeks ago:
Wait, you’re saying that The Hellbound Heart isn’t the original? Next thing you’ll be trying to convince me that Pope Greg is innocent of plagiarism, because he actually didn’t steal from Se7en.