Bistable multivibrator
Non-state actor
Tabs for AI indentation, spaces for AI alignment
410,757,864,530 DEAD COMPUTERS
LW subjected me to a CAPTCHA which I find pretty funny for reasons I CBA to articulate right now.
Claude couldnāt exit the house at the beginning of PokĆ©mon Red, an incredibly popular and successful game for children, therefore itās dumber than an average child? Sounds dubious. I couldnāt figure out how to do that either and look at how intelligent I am!
You mean MAD doesnāt stand for Unilaterally Assured Destruction?
I think itās still interesting to contrast between the classical Eliezerite fear of the bot going FOOM and declaring humanity as we know it obsolete, and Musk fearing that a superintelligence might use its godlike power to be a lib wokescold and not say slurs or draw racist caricatures. Both are fears rooted in a fundamentally fascist worldview, but one scenario is apocalyptic and fantastical and the other is comparatively more grounded yet focusing on entirely the wrong thing.
And now theyāve apparently pulled it after the anti bias bot started unbiasedly lostcausing the KKK. Those poor southern WASPs and their anxieties.
Oh hey, this is good. Wouldnāt want to have obsolete strings. About time they did away with the obsolete concept of ānot selling your personal dataā. Looking forward to April when thatās finally deprecated.
+ # Obsolete string (expires 25-04-2025)
does-firefox-sell = Does { -brand-name-firefox } sell your personal data?
# Variables:
# $url (url) - link to https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/privacy/
+ # Obsolete string (expires 25-04-2025)
nope-never-have = Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. { -brand-name-firefox } products are designed to protect your privacy. <a href="{ $url }">Thatās a promise.</a>
Good food for thought, but a lot of that rubs me the wrong way. Slaves are people, machines are not. Slaves are capable of suffering, machines are not. Slaves are robbed of agency they would have if not enslaved, machines would not have agency either way. In a science fiction world with humanlike artificial intelligence the distinction would be more muddled, but back in this reality equivocating between robotics and slavery while ignoring these very important distinctions is just sophistry. Call it chauvinism and exceptionalism all you want, but I think the rights of a farmhand are more important than the rights of a tractor.
Itās not that robotics is morally uncomplicated. Luddites had a point. Many people choose to work even in dangerous, painful, degrading or otherwise harmful jobs, because the alternative is poverty. To mechanize such work would reduce immediate harm from the nature of the work itself, but cause indirect harm if the workers are left without income. Overconsumption goes hand in hand with overproduction and automation can increase the production of things that are ultimately harmful. Mechanization has frequently lead to centralization of wealth by giving one party an insurmountable competitive advantage over its competition.
One could take the position that the desire to have work performed for the lowest cost possible is in itself immoral, but that would need some elaboration as well. Itās true that automation benefits capital by removing workersā needs from the equation, but itās bad reductionism to call that its only purpose. Is the goal of PPE just to make workers complain less about injuries? I bought a dishwasher recently. Did I do it in order to not pay myself wages or have solidarity for myself when washing dishes by hand?
The etymology part is not convincing either. Would it really make a material difference if more people called them āautomataā or something? Äapek chose to name the artificial humanoid workers in his play after an archaic Czech word for serfdom and it caught on. Itās interesting trivia, but itās not particularly telling specifically because most people donāt know the etymology of the term. The point would be a lot stronger if we called it āslavetronicsā or āindenture engineeringā instead of robotics. You say cybernetics is inseparable from robotics but I donāt see how steering a ship is related to feudalist mode of agricultural production.
Hello, I am the the technology understander and Iām here to tell you there is no difference whatsoever between giving your information to Mozilla Firefox (a program running on your computer) and Mozilla Corporation (a for-profit company best known for its contributions to Firefox and other Mozilla projects, possibly including a number good and desirable contributions).
When you use Staples QuickStrip EasyClose Self Seal Security Tinted #10 Business Envelopes or really any envelope, youāre giving it information like recipient addresses, letter contents, or included documents. The envelope uses this information to make it easier for the postal service to deliver the mail to its recipient. Thatās all it is saying (and by it, I mean the envelopeās terms of service, which include giving Staples Inc. a carte blanche to do whatever they want with the contents of the envelopes bought from them).
Whether the terms are abusable by design or by accident doesnāt really matter, you get is abuse either way.
How I wish we could have some nice things sometimes.
The update on their news post supports the ādonāt sue us for sending the data you asked us to sendā intention.
UPDATE: Weāve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses, so we want to clear that up. We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldnāt use information typed into Firefox, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice.
Whether or not to believe them is up to you.
Maybe. The latter part of the sentence matters, too
ā¦you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
Good luck getting a lawyer to give a definitive answer to what exactly counts as helping you do those things.
The whole sentence is a little ambiguous itself. Does the āas you indicate with your use of Firefoxā refer to
B seems fairly innocuous and the intended effect is probably āif you send data to a website using our browser, donāt sue us for sending the data you asked us to sendā. The mere act of uploading or inputting information through Firefox does not ā in my (technical, not legal) expert opinion ā indicate that Mozilla could help me navigate, experience, or interact with online content by MITMing the uploaded or input data.
A is a lot scarier, since the interpretation of what it means to āhelp you navigate, experience, and interact with online contentā does not depend on how you use Firefox. Anything that Mozilla can successfully argue to help you do those things is fair game, whether you ask for it or not, which seems a lot more abusable.
Opera Mini was (is?) an embedded/mobile browser for Symbian dumbphones and other similar devices that passed all traffic through a proxy to handle rendering on server side and reduce processing effort on the (typically slow and limited) mobile devices. This could be construed as helping the user navigate, experience, and interact with online content, so there is precedent of a browser MITMing its usersā data for arguably helpful purposes.
I would never accept hijacking my web upload and input data for training an LLM or whatever mass data harvesting fad du jour happens to be in fashion at a given time and I do not consider it helpful for any purpose for a web browser to do such things. Alas, the 800-pound gorilla might have some expensive reality-bending lawyers on its side.
I thought about the āanthro picā too, but it feels like a low hanging fruit since the etymological relation of anthropic and anthropomorphic (from ancient Greek į¼Ī½ĪøĻĻĻĪæĻ) is so obvious.
Last time I wore a suit I kept track of the way everyone around looked at me and five of them looked hatefully. The first one was reading Lenin and nodding approvingly. The second one was trying to covertly plant a comically oversized microphone with Russian markings and a hammer and sickle on it. The third one was handing out militant union agitprop and advocating for a good work strike among transit workers. The fourth one was wearing a ZhÅngshÄn suit (which is technically also a type of suit, so that was quite hypocritical of him) and proudly proclaiming to be Maoist Third Worldist. The fifth one I made up just to feel a little more persecuted so you can imagine the proof of their radical socialism by yourself.
Aww thanks, kind of you to say that.
I paid for the whole motherboard, Iām using the whole motherboard thank you very much. ASCII was good enough for the Bible, so itās good enough for me. God included character number 7 for a reason, even if that reason was for me to hear obnoxious buzzing from my audiophile grade piezo beeper.
My favorite bit:
When software that came pre-installed with the base OS reaches end-of-life (EOL) and no longer receives security fixes, Pacman canāt help
What base OS? The base metapackage that pulls in a small core of system software packages that are then treated and updated like any other package? What the hell is an EOL? You mean the thing that happens to non-rolling release distros such as Not Fucking Arch?
When GNU Scrotum 5.x series becomes unsupported after release 5.56, people running Arch Linux will be happy to know they already have gnu-scrotum-7.62.69-rc1 installed from their repositories. Itās the people on LTS Enterprise distros who have to start whining at their maintainers to backport a major version of GNU Scrotum released since the Obama administration.
Humans have bouba intelligence, computers have kiki intelligence. This is makes so much more sense than considering how a chatbot actually works.
Ah, I recalled it having recovered quite a bit some years ago, but apparently that was temporary and due to a weather event. Even so, the direly depleted form of Ozone layer present in the Antarctic is still better than anything Mars could support.
Not that solar UV is going to be your biggest problem when the atmosphere is so thin you might as well try to breathe in a vacuum and >90% of the little that is there is CO2. If you can figure out how to breathe, you can probably come up with sunblock, too.
Theyāre really fond of copypasta:
The issue with Arch isnāt the installation, but rather system maintenance. Users are expected to handle system upgrades, manage the underlying software stack, configure MAC (Mandatory Access Control), write profiles for it, set up kernel module blacklists, and more. Failing to do this results in a less secure operating system.
The Arch installation process does not automatically set up security features, and tools like Pacman lack the comprehensive system maintenance capabilities found in package managers like DNF or APT, which means youāll still need to intervene manually. Updates go beyond just stability and package version upgrades. When software that came pre-installed with the base OS reaches end-of-life (EOL) and no longer receives security fixes, Pacman canāt helpāyouāll need to intervene manually. In contrast, DNF and APT can automatically update or replace underlying software components as needed. For example, DNF in Fedora handles transitions like moving from PulseAudio to PipeWire, which can enhance security and usability. In contrast, pacman requires users to manually implement such changes. This means you need to stay updated with the latest software developments and adjust your system as needed.
Can you blame someone for hoping that maybe Musk might plan to yeet himself to Mars. Iād be in favor, though Iād settle for cheaper ways to achieve similar results.
Gold, the best substance in existence outside a societal context. Extremely nutritious and tasty. Great for making tools. Easy to form into clothes, which are warm and breathable too. Ideal building material. Obviously the main reason gold is valuable is its usefulness as non-corroding coating for electronic connectors, not that itās a socially constructed status symbol.