mountainriver

joined 1 year ago
[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago

From topic and lack of citation I just assumed that they had an LLM write it.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I was going to write that it was good that you didn't say "um" all the time. (Being silent in pauses is in my experience a learned skill for most people and one that comes once one has heard oneself say "um" too many times.)

The sound was fine. I think your (Jabra?) headset did its job unless that was also the result of editing.

The imagery got a bit distracting because you look to the side of the camera. No problem for podcasts, but for video it's better to look straight at the camera to look at the audience so to speak. (Also a learnt skill.) So maybe a webcam you can place in front of the screen you are presumably reading of?

No idea about marketing a YouTube, but you got in the "like and subscribe", so that is probably good.

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

I'm thinking stupid and frustrating AI will become a plot device.

"But if I don't get the supplies I can't save the town!"

"Yeah, sorry, the AI still says no"

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

These stiff-armed salutes are not expressions of sincere Nazism but an oppositional culture that, like a rebel band that keeps wearing fatigues after victory, has failed to realize it’s no longer in the opposition.

"Keep wearing", so is he saying that Musk et al "keep doing" "stiff-armed salutes" (that anyone with eyes can see are Nazi salutes) in public?

I know one shouldn't expect logic from a Nazi, but claiming that the fog horn is actually a dog whistle is really ridiculous. "You heard nothing!"

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Not only that, calling the field "AI" is built in hype.

  • I work in the field of intelligent machines.

  • Oh cool, so you can build intelligent machines?

  • Hell no. We just call the field that. For reasons.

Edit: my dialogue dashes became blocks. Must be an intelligent machine changing them or something.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago (2 children)

In one corner: cheating US AI that needs prompting to cheat.

In the other: finger breaking Russian chess robot.

Let's get ready to rumble!

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

Some years ago I read the memoirs of a railroad union boss. Interesting book in many aspects, but what I thought of here was a time before he became a union boss. He was working at the railroad, was trusted in the union and got the mission to make store keeping of supplies and spare parts more efficient.

This wasn't the first time the railroad company had tried to make it more efficient. Due to earlier mergers there was lots of local supplies and a confusing system for which part of the company was supplied from where. In short, it was inefficient and everyone knew that. Enter our protagonist who travels around and talks to people. Finally he arrives back to HQ and reports that it can't be done. Unless HQ wants to enact a program where everyone who is made redundant gets a better job, with the company footing the bill for any extra training or education needed. Then it could be done, because then it would be in the interest of the people whose knowledge and skills they needed.

This being in the post war era with full employment policies, labour was a scare resource so the company did as they were told and the system got more efficient.

It's all about who benefits from the automation. The original Luddites targeted employers who automated, fired skilled workers and decreased wages. They were not opposed to automation, they were opposed to automation at their expense.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 6 points 2 months 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 2 months 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 2 months 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 2 months 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 2 months ago (4 children)

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

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