• 0 Posts
  • 621 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle



  • This article is giving them too much credit, frankly. Saying Republican support dropped from “majority to minority” is misleading, bordering on clickbait.

    All that happened was support dropped from 55% to 46%. They were only ever barely a majority.

    Saying “Nearly half” or “over half” of all Republicans don’t support gay marriage is splitting hairs. They all support the candidates that are against it.

    The real story here is that even support among Democrats and Independents dropped a bit in the last 2 years. Meaning the fear mongering is pervasive enough to affect everyone.








  • Sure, but she’s also his mother, not a random family member. I’m not going to fault a mother for standing by their child, no matter what he did.

    She didn’t let him buy anything, but she couldn’t make him get rid of it because it wasn’t in her house. It was locked up at a friend’s house in a different town.

    She was also ill, poor, dyslexic, and a single parent dealing with a difficult child. She doesn’t seem to have much in her life but her children, I’m not going to condemn her for not banishing him from her life. It’s not an easy thing for a mother to do.





  • I’ve seen people defend using AI this way by comparing it to using a calculator in a math class, i.e. if the technology knows it, I don’t need to.

    And I feel like, for the kind of people whose grasp of technology, knowledge, and education are so juvenile that they would believe such a thing, AI isn’t making them dumber. They were already dumb. What the AI does is make code they don’t understand more accessible, which is to say, it’s just enabling dumb people to be more dangerous while instilling them with an unearned confidence that only compounds the danger.


  • Another friend of mine was reviewing software intended for emergency services, and the salespeople were not expecting someone handling purchasing in emergency services to be a hardcore programmer. It was this false sense of security that led them to accidentally reveal that the service was ultimately just some dude in India. Listen, I would just be some random dude in India if I swapped places with some of my cousins, so I’m going to choose to take that personally and point out that using the word AI as some roundabout way to sell the labor of people that look like me to foreign governments is fucked up, you’re an unethical monster, and that if you continue to try { thisBullshit(); } you are going to catch (theseHands)

    This aspect of it isn’t getting talked about enough. These companies are presenting these things as fully-formed AI, while completely neglecting the people behind the scenes constantly cleaning it up so it doesn’t devolve into chaos. All of the shortcomings and failures of this technology are being masked by the fact that there’s actual people working round the clock pruning and curating it.

    You know, humans, with actual human intelligence, without which these miraculous “artificial intelligence” tools would not work as they seem to.

    If the "AI’ needs a human support team to keep it “intelligent”, it’s less AI and more a really fancy kind of puppet.



  • That’s kind of what I’m thinking too.

    Legitimately, the degree to which proton advertises, the sheer amount of blog spam and such, made me very, very resistant to it. I really don’t care how private it all is or how well it works, I have spent enough time on the internet and engaged with enough small tech company services to recognize a fierce push for growth, and experience has taught me to avoid a for-profit company that sells to you that hard. One day the growth will stop, and the cannibalizing begins.

    But a move to a non-profit model is, at least theoretically, a move in the right direction. I’m more willing to engage.

    I still don’t trust that they won’t change their mind down the road, but it’s a start.

    And the point about OpenAI is moot because being non-profit doesn’t make the actual purpose of the company any less shitty. Especially when Microsoft was feeding it money for the purpose of harvesting what they would create. They still had shitty motives and created a tool that is very ethically “questionable” at best, and that was true from the very beginning.The fact their ethics team was gutted the moment they tried to exercise their purpose tells you everything.

    The non-profit company created a tool that will be used primarily by for-profit companies and hurt individuals. The moniker barely applies.



  • Very common tactic for many of these sites. They’re either paid by Microsoft or they’re just run-of-the-mill Microsoft boot lickers.

    If you search for how to disable or bypass something in Windows, these SEO’d junk articles pop up and trick you into reading them. It’s usually a long preamble full of arguments for why you really shouldn’t try to disable or bypass the thing, because Microsoft’s shit doesn’t actually stink, and they know better than you. Then at the bottom they put the generic instructions that may not even work anymore, that you’ve likely already read.