FaceDeer

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

I signed up to fedia.io (an mBin instance) as a fallback account and I can see votes there. Though I did notice that under "activity" I can only see the identity of who upvoted me but not the identity of who downvoted. I expect these are configurable settings that will vary from instance to instance, I'm of two minds on hiding the identity of downvoters like that and would hope that it doesn't become standard.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

I used this script to "port" my subscriptions over. I have some concern about keeping them synced since going forward I'll likely end up randomly subscribing to new communities from different accounts, hopefully that sort of thing is one of the things that Fediverse coders are working on making better to manage.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

Well that sucks. I've long thought it would potentially push things toward greater civility, since one couldn't sling negatives anonymously.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

I just set up an account at fedia.io, which is an mbin instance. When I ran the script posted over here to copy my subscriptions I had 111 subscriptions succeed and 49 fail. I've been checking the ones that failed and they've all been ones that haven't had anyone post in them for 5 months or more, so I'm guessing those are "dead" anyway. Seems not too bad, I'll see how it goes I guess.

I posted this same response from both of my accounts, I'm going to watch to see how well it federates back and forth.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

Weird. Your initial comment federated, since I was able to see it from both instances. All these responses to it did not, though.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

in the case of ai generated media, companies just decided that they just had the rights to use existing published media, so they harvested it without consent or compensation

Have you read the ToS of your favourite social media site lately?

In any event, it might well be that companies (and you yourself) have the rights to use existing published media to train AIs. Copyright doesn't cover the analysis of public data. I suspect that people wouldn't like it if copyright got extended to let IP owners prohibit you from learning from their stuff.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

It doesn't help that whenever this comes up there's a contingent of users who jump to Ernest's "defense" by calling the folks raising these issues "concern trolls" and accusing them of shilling for mbin.

No, this is simply a matter of what is actually working well. The point of federation is that one shouldn't need to have "loyalty" to any particular instance or any particular platform. Use whichever one's working.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

Here's one from yesterday.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

Did you read the article? It actually addresses much of what you talk about. For example:

“The promise of AI is a stake in human judgment and trying to automate some of it so that humans can focus on higher-order tasks that are much more fruitful,” he said.

The point is not to remove humans entirely. It's to automate the stuff that can be automated so that the humans you do have can focus on the important stuff that can't be automated. Human employees are expensive so you'll want to use them wisely, not doing busy-work that a machine can handle.

I’ll be supporting the incoming “Not made with AI” products and businesses so hard from here on our to just take away whatever monetary resources I can from dipshits like this.

If you wish, but you'll likely end up paying a hefty premium to do so. This is like insisting on only eating hand-churned butter or only wearing hand-stitched clothing - you can probably find niche providers that supply that but you've got to be pretty rich to pull that off as a lifestyle.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

Yeah, and as a programmer-person I've pondered where new programmers will come from once AIs replace all the interns.

There's a potential solution, though. Have you ever sat down with an AI and used it as a "tutor" while learning new stuff? It no doubt varies from person to person since different people learn different ways, but I've found it downright incredible how easy it is to learn when I've got an infinitely-patient AI I can ask to have walk me through new stuff. So maybe in future lawyers and programmers and whatnot can just skip the larval stage.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

The new jobs may come whether they "mean to" or not, though.

All that money that gets saved goes somewhere. Yes, "trickle-down" is a lie, simply feeding more money to already-rich people won't mean much to the economy. But if AI makes it cheaper to run a company it can also make it cheaper to start and grow a company. It's not just giant companies that will be making use of these tools.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

It's also possible that you've inadvertently wandered into an asshole convention.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

And while it's probably true that "we're not ready", we're never going to become ready until the tech actually arrives and forces us to do that.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

I find that often "movements" end up focused more on just continuing their movement rather than the underlying purpose of why they started moving in the first place.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

The abuse of power is instance-specific, fortunately. The whole point of all this is that there are multiple instances. Just ignore the ones that are run by tankies, those instances are theirs to wallow in if they want.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

"Prompt engineering" is simply the skill of knowing how to correctly ask for the thing that you want. Given that this is something that is in rare supply even when interacting with other humans, I don't see this going away until we're well past AGI and into ASI.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

Given how I usually feel kind of sucky for a day or two after getting a Covid shot, that's not what I'd call "free."

Unless perhaps I could get all 217 shots at once, to get it all out of the way in one go?

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

The problem is that nobody else has 1085G. What's the point in a super-advanced phone when there's nobody you can talk to with it?

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

I'm a fan of Kyle Hill's work in general, but I really wish he hadn't used the term "Dark Forest" here - it doesn't really align with the Fermi Paradox version and I think he just used it because it's a popular and scary-sounding phrase right now.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

It's important to note that the novels had to make up a lot of details to get the Dark Forest to "work" in that setting, in real life there are a lot of reasons why Dark Forest is implausible as a real explanation for the Fermi paradox.

Just getting that out there because I see a lot of people ending up scared of it in real life. It's no more scary than Freddy Kruegar.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

I recall being quite interested when I dug into the details of panpsychism. At first glance it's pretty woo-woo, talking about the state of "consciousness" for things like individual electrons or whole galaxies, but there are some good ideas in there for a framework for considering the concept of consciousness in general. It's especially relevant now that things like LLMs are raising actual practical questions about how to define and measure consciousness.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

You have misunderstood me. You said "Apple spent twenty years building the ecosystem Spotify and Epic want to exploit for free." I'm pointing out that the amount of effort Apple put into building the ecosystem is immaterial to whether they're doing illegal things with it.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

Indeed. Firefox already has "sponsored links" and such in the built-in homepage, I simply disable those when I first install it and get on with life.

Big projects like Firefox need big money to support it. If you don't want it to be beholden to Google it needs to find ways to earn some on its own.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

It says "opt-out" in the title.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

I haven't read more than this summary, but I wonder if their attempts at cruelty might actually backfire. It will be good for Ukraine in the long run if more of their citizens stay to rebuild, and there are less-militaritly-inclined allies who can pick up the humanitarian slack.