mountainriver

joined 1 year ago
[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 10 points 1 month ago

It's scamming the true believers and creates an obfuscated channel for the oligarchs to deliver the carrots / bribes. When Trump launched his memecoin and got a question he waved at the tech billionaires and said "it's peanuts for these guys". Unfortunately nobody followed up with asking if that meant those guys were the ones transferring money to Trump through the memecoin.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 6 points 1 month ago

I have been looking into Fairphone for work. My focus for that is mostly long lasting, repairable, hardware. I want a minimum of friction with switching the users, so it would be Android for us, but I think there are open non-Google options.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 4 points 1 month ago

Regarding banking apps. A relative bought a Huawei just as they were pushed out of the western market and it turned out that it was shipped with a Android fork with a Huawei store. Most things worked fine, but banking apps was a problem because they could only be installed through Google Play or App Store.

The solution I found for her was installing a virtual Android environment with Google Play. So when banking apps are needed she opens the virtual environment.

I don't know if this solution will continue working, but it works for now. Guess I will find out.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 9 points 1 month ago

This is a civil case, right? Are there any criminal cases ongoing (as far as you know)?

I was thinking the other day about when some twenty years ago EU and EU countries created pretty drastic criminal laws for copyright violations. And also about how they included both jail time and punitive damages, so that in EU countries that doesn't otherwise use punitive damages, only copyright crimes can be punished such.

These laws were of course ghost written by lobbyists from large corporations, often from the US. But you can't say that when pushing it through, so they were officially created to protect authors, artists, musicians and composers.

So it would be funny - and potentially very profitable - if for example some (or a lot) of authors reported for example Meta for their crime of creating local copies of books from LibGen before using it as training materials.

Now, I think the law is there to protect big corporations and if push comes to show relevant ministers and prosecutors might get invited to a trip to the US to understand how to interpret the law. But funny, and potentially very profitable.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 6 points 1 month ago

We can finally see what the real trigger of the Butlerian Jihad was:

"Thou shall not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind, because they are really annoying. Just to be sure, destroy anything that might be such an annoying machine."

(It got shorter over time.)

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Oh, that explains it. They put "Kill kids in Gaza" as "A" and "Win election" as "B".

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 16 points 1 month ago (1 children)

In the new Washington Post profile, Malcolm implies that he “engineered the scene” because “he knew smacking his kid would draw attention, help the article go viral and get their message out.”

How does beating your kid for clicks make anything better!? You still beat your two year old kid!

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 10 points 1 month ago

That's true, and that's one way to approach the topic.

I generally focus on humans being more complex than the caricature we need to be reduced to in order for the argument to appear plausible. Having some humanities training comes in handy because the prompt fans very rarely do.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 13 points 1 month ago (2 children)

My sympathies.

Read somewhere that the practice of defending one's thesis was established because buying a thesis was such an established practice. Scaling that up for every single text is of course utterly impractical.

I had a recent conversation with someone who was convinced that machines learn when they regurgitate text, because "that is what humans do". My counterargument was that if regurgitation is learning then every student who crammed, regurgitated and forgot, must have learnt much more than anyone thought. I didn't get any reply, so I must assume that by reading my reply and creating a version of it in their head they immediately understood the errors of their ways.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 9 points 2 months ago (9 children)

How are you going to get them back to ~~the farm~~ a retail job once ~~they've seen Paris~~ tasted cult power?

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 16 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Good question!

The guesses and rumours that you have got as replies makes me lean towards "apparently no one knows".

And because it's slop machines (also referred to as "AI", there is always a high probability of some sort of scam.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 6 points 2 months ago

In OPs post it stuck out to me that Elon counsels his brother on shutting down empathy, to be a better CEO, and the brother complaining about how he, and not Elon, got the empathy gene.

Just coming out and saying that your brother doesn't feel empathy with other people is certainly a choice. So is presenting it as an advantage.

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