theluddite

@theluddite@lemmy.ml

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DIY hot / bath tub in shed?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sounds very doable! My friend has an old claw foot tub that he lights a fire under. If you want something a little less country, you can buy on demand electric or propane water heaters and hook your hose up, though I’d expect the electric one wouldn’t be able to keep up at 120v. Hardest part of this project is probably moving the tub. I say go for it!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Vortex Cannon vs Drone' - Mark Rober shows off tech from a "defense technology company that specializes in advanced autonomous systems". That seems bad⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Totally agreed. It’s not okay to normalize making death machines. I’m involved in a project to tries to reach STEM students to explain that working in defense is actually morally wrong, and it’s very frustrating to see Rober basically run an ad for a defense company, complete with “bad guys” and normalizing a militarized border. I’ve already written about working in “defense” in general, but we’ll be responding directly to his video, not that we have anywhere near the reach that he has.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elizabeth Warren slammed for wanting to ‘break up Apple’s smartphone monopoly’⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Your comment perfectly encapsulates one of the central contradictions in modern journalism. You explain the style guide, and the need to communicate information in a consistent way, but then explain that the style guide is itself guided by business interests, not by some search for truth, clarity, or meaning.

  I’ve been a long time reader of FAIR.org and i highly recommend them to anyone in this thread who can tell that something is up with journalism but has never done a dive into what exactly it is. Modern journalism has a very clear ideology (in the sorta zizek sense, not claiming that the journalists do it nefariously). Once you learn to see it, it’s everywhere

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Suicide is on the rise for young Americans, with no clear answers⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  AI chatbots are the only possible answer: Loneliness and suicide mitigation for students using GPT3-enabled chatbots

  Oops nevermind that paper is a complete fucking fraud.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘The machine did it coldly’: Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The purpose of a system is what it does

  According to the cybernetician, the purpose of a system is what it does. This is a basic dictum. It stands for bald fact, which makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgment, or sheer ignorance of circumstances.

  The AI is “supposed” to identify targets, but in reality, the system’s purpose is to justify indiscriminate murder.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Internet providers have left rural Americans behind. One county is fighting back⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Vermont has several towns with as little as a thousand people that have fiber internet thanks to municipal cooperatives like ECFiber. Much of the state is a connectivity wasteland but it’s really cool to see some towns working together to sort it out.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Millions of research papers at risk of disappearing from the Internet⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m suspicious of this concept of editorial independence. I think it’s a smoke screen that lets companies have their cake and eat it too. As far as I’m concerned, whoever cashes the checks also gets the blame, because either ownership means something, in which case the concept exists to obfuscate that, or it doesn’t, in which case why is nature buying up other journals?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Millions of research papers at risk of disappearing from the Internet⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, it’s grotesque. Doubly so when you consider that it’s often public money that funds the research that they get to paywall. I’ve been really ragging on them lately for their role in the AI hype, too, which you can read about here and here if that sort of thing interests you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Millions of research papers at risk of disappearing from the Internet⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I cannot handle the fucking irony of that article being on nature, one of the organizations most responsible for fucking it up in the first place. Nature is a peer-reviewed journal that charges people thousands upon thousands of dollars to publish (that’s right, charges, not pays), asks peer reviewers to volunteer their time, and then charges rent the very institutions that produced the knowledge rent to access it. It’s all upside. Because they’re the most prestigious journal (or maybe one of two or three), they can charge rent on that prestige, then leverage it to buy and start other subsidiary journals. Now they have this beast of an academic publishing empire that is a complete fucking mess.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Dating App Paradox: Why dating apps may be 'worse than ever'⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve had similar experiences to what troyunrau@lemmy.ca describes. The problem comes more from the expectations that users have as consumers, which they bring with them to open source projects from general culture, not necessarily the existence of the users themselves. Some of those users for big open source projects are often corporations, to boot.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Dating App Paradox: Why dating apps may be 'worse than ever'⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve posted this here before, but this phenomenon isn’t unique to dating apps, though dating apps are a particularly good example. The problem is that capitalism uses computers backwards.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Florida Senate takes up bill banning kids from having social media accounts⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe this is a hot take, but it’s really unfortunate that only the unhinged conservative lunatics are willing to have this discussion. I actually think that it’d be really healthy in a democracy to come together and exercise some agency in how we allow tech companies to access our children, if at all, but American liberals seem committed to some very broken notions of technocratic progress paired with free speech, while American conservatives are happy to throw all that way in order to have total control over their children, arriving closer to the right place for very dangerous reasons.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A ‘Shocking’ Amount of the Web Is Already AI-Translated Trash, Scientists Determine⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  My editor is an actual saint. Imagine all the shit that she has to put up with that gets cut if that made it through!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A ‘Shocking’ Amount of the Web Is Already AI-Translated Trash, Scientists Determine⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Dates could be made up!, too.The blog posts that I generated for my site included made up dates in the past. The internet archive says it has a snapshot for March of 2023, but when I click it, it says it doesn’t, so I have no way of verifying. The theory about parking real estate hoping to sell it also seems pretty plausible to me. Who knows what dumb shit they’re up to.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A ‘Shocking’ Amount of the Web Is Already AI-Translated Trash, Scientists Determine⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s probably either waiting for approval to sell ads or was denied and they’re adding more stuff. Google has a virtual monopoly on ads, and their approval process can take 1-2 weeks. Google’s content policy basially demands that your site by full of generated trash to sell ads. I did a case study here, in which Google denied my popular and useful website for ads until I filled it with the lowest-quality generated trash imaginable. That might help clarify what’s up.