- 0 Posts
- 41 Comments
The term, “enshitification” is getting bandied about a lot. But the bots and corporations are an inevitable part of capitalism. Make money at all costs, never be satisfied with what you have, and treat everybody that isn’t you like a stepping stone.
Scammers and sociopathic c-levels are missing something fundamentally human. A complete lack of empathy. But this has always been a part of our species. The difference now is that we have a system that dramatically rewards that sickness. And that’s not even getting into how being able to be evil at scale is going to make the next few decades interesting.
My argument is thus:
LLMs are decent at boilerplate. They’re good at rephrasing things so that they’re easier to understand. I had a student who struggled for months to wrap her head around how pointers work, two hours with GPT and the ability to ask clarifying questions and now she’s rockin’.
I like being able to plop in a chunk of Python and say, “type annotate this for me and none of your sarcasm this time!”
But if you’re using an LLM as a problem solver and not as an accelerator, you’re going to lack some of the deep understanding of what happens when your code runs.
I think that it’s absolutely fair to jump on Microsoft for this.
There is nothing wrong with this hardware. RAM and CPU clock speed plateaued a long time ago. The overwhelming majority of these systems being thrown away would run Linux flawlessly.
Microsoft has never given a damn about security before. These new security “features” do more to lock people in than they do to keep them safe.
I stopped caring several years ago.
It’s like when Disney bought Star Wars. They homogenized it to make it more palatable and ended up making it dull and unappetizing. Neither franchise has a soul anymore. Just a formulaic plot with a set of waypoints in a dull 3 act format. Sprinkle in some in-humor, pedestrian jokes, and a special effects budget that would make the Pentagon blush and you have a recipe for dull tripe.
Depends on how you interpret the Golden Age text. But you’re correct that the former is the light bringer and the latter is adversary/legal opponent.
But the silver age crap messed with that canon.
My head canon is that Lucifer was a member of the Q Continuum while Satan was a misunderstood Time Lord.
The Pope needs to have a sit-down with the folks at Disney to learn how to properly manage a shared imaginary universe.
PTSD…
I once destroyed a CRT monitor by misconfiguring X11.
Nowadays Linux just works to the point where my 72 year old mother is able to deal with Pop_OS without issue.
But man, those early days of unstable drivers, slow dial-up internet, and navigating through Usenet and IRC for decent support was a nightmarish labor of love.
The silky smoothness that we have now was built on caffeine and the backs of millions of greybeards.
(For the record: “Greybeard” is a nerdy term of endearment that I’ve seen adopted by people identifying all across the rainbow. Kinda like dwarfs on Discworld).
Some of us do care.
A product directly bankrolled by Peter Thiel? A project, not concerned about blocking ads but rather making sure that it’s their ads that you see?
If you’re on iOS. Maybe the EU will bail you out and force Apple to allow other web engines.
If you’re on Android, Firefox works perfectly well and Fennec is a fine fork.
If you’re on anything else, Librewolf is fork of Firefox without all of the Pocket and other privacy hostile default settings.
I have to disagree (but won’t downvote!)
AI porn is creepy. In multiple ways!
But it’s also a natural evolution of what we’ve been doing as a species since before we were a species.
Does imagining a different partner while having sex or masturbating count? I would imagine most people would say, “no”.
How about if somebody draws a crude stick figure of somebody they met on the street? Unless you’re Randall Munroe, this is probably harmless too.
Now a highly skilled portrait artist paints a near replica of somebody he knows, but has never seen in the nude. They never mention their friend by name, but the output is lifelike and unmistakably them.
Maybe a digital artist finds a few social media pictures of a person and decided to test drive Krita and manipulates them into appearing nude.
Or, and this happened to me quite recently, you find your porn doppelganger. My spouse found mine and it ruined her alone time. And they really did look just like me! Taking that a step further, is it illegal to find somebody’s doppelganger and to dress them up so that they look more like their double?
Like you, I don’t want people like this in my life. But it feels like this is one of those slippery slopes that turns out to be an actual slippery slope.
You can’t make it illegal without some serious downstream effects.
If you did, the servers will just get hosted in an Eastern European country that is happy to lulwat at American warrants.
I don’t have any answers, just more Devil’s advocate-esque questions. If there was a way to make it illegal without any collateral damage, I’d be proudly behind you leading the charge. I just can’t imagine a situation where it wouldn’t get abused, a’la the DMCA.
I’m confused here…
The “horse and sparrow” types have been telling us to not spend money unnecessarily. This will lead to being able to afford more bootstraps.
Soon we realize that children are crazy expensive. Doubly so here in Freedom-land where you’re lucky if you get more than a few weeks off of work and a $75k hospital bill. Which your insurance company will fight to the bitter end.
So we decide to be responsible and postpone family plans until we can afford it without going into debt for the rest of our lives.
And now there’s a moral panic about that?!
Pick one! Give up your monthly mega-yacht and allow the breeder class to get caught up financially, or stop griping about millennials postponing having children.
Totally agree with you.
I was abused in church but never in school (outside of racial epithets). Sometimes it’s easy to forget that not everybody develops a gallows humor as a coping mechanism. Thinking back to those times while in a depressive stage is a recipe for disaster.
But you are absolutely correct. Some things should only be joked about when in a group of trusted people. And I accept your advice in the spirit in which it was meant. To foster a more accepting and safer community for everybody and not as a way of getting a cheap joke.
I’d much rather be gently corrected than to be part of the background noise that might be making people feel uncomfortable.
Genuinely, thank you.
My own anthropological pet theory.
Dunbar’s number is the concept that a person can only have so many meaningful relationships. Another way of thinking about it is that we, as a species, feel most comfortable in tribes with a certain number of people.
Which makes sense. I hated, hated the little rednecky town that I grew up in. But when I moved to a larger city, the first few weeks were spent overcoming the loneliness of not knowing everybody around me.
What massive online social media does is essentially short circuit the behavior that we developed when we began urbanizing.
Now a person can be a member of twenty tribes without ever needing to leave their homes. If we are, in fact, only capable of a finite number of close friendships then every close relationship that you have online is energy that won’t be spent on a physical one.
True story: I left Facebook in 2016. I had been miserable but didn’t even think to relate the two. About a month after I jumped ship I got adopted by a group of fellow nerds nearing midlife. We hang out at least twice per week. Pub trivia, bowling, hiking. Those interactions are so much more meaningful than anything you can get on social media. By our nature, humans crave physical company.
Social media isn’t going to “break” us. But, if nothing changes, it will further dramatically alter society.
Gotta mention Pop_OS! as a fantastic beginner distro. My 72 year old mother refuses to use anything else. It’s simple, has automated backups and disaster recovery, and installs non-free drivers for graphics cards.
I don’t personally use it since it doesn’t yet support Wayland and my gaming rig has a HiDPI screen and X11 doesn’t support fractional scaling. Or per screen scaling.
I’m legally obligated to inform you that I run Arch.
It’ll only affect 32bit systems with ancient operating systems storing dates in epoch time.
Not a small number. But nowhere remotely near what Y2K could have been.
Hopefully by the time we need to account for a 64bit rollover, I’ll be comfortably retired. But by that time, proton decay may be a more worrisome problem.