Are fingerprints unique? Not really, AI-based study large-scale statistical analysis says

Getting real sick of everything being “AI”.

I’m dumbfounded that any Lemmy user supports OpenAI in this.

We’re mostly refugees from Reddit, right?

Reddit invited us to make stuff and share it with our peers, and that was great. Some posts were just links to the content’s real home: Youtube, a random Wordpress blog, a Github project, or whatever. The post text, the comments, and the replies only lived on Reddit. That wasn’t a huge problem, because that’s the part that was specific to Reddit. And besides, there were plenty of third-party apps to interact with those bits of content however you wanted to.

But as Reddit started to dominate Google search results, it displaced results that might have linked to the “real home” of that content. And Reddit realized a tremendous opportunity: They now had a chokehold on not just user comments and text posts, but anything that people dare to promote online.

At the same time, Reddit slowly moved from a place where something may get posted by the author of the original thing to a place where you’ll only see the post if it came from a high-karma user or bot. Mutated or distorted copies of the original instance, reformated to cut through the noise and gain the favor of the algorithm. Re-posts of re-posts, with no reference back to the original, divorced of whatever context or commentary the original creator may have provided. No way for the audience to respond to the author in any meaningful way and start a dialogue.

This is a miniature preview of the future brought to you by LLM vendors. A monetized portal to a dead internet. A one-way street. An incestuous ouroborous of re-posts of re-posts. Automated remixes of automated remixes.

–

There are genuine problems with copyright law. Don’t get me wrong. Perhaps the most glaring problem is the fact that many prominent creators don’t even own the copyright to the stuff they make. It was invented to protect creators, but in practice this “protection” gets assigned to a publisher immediately after the protected work comes into being.

And then that copyright – the very same thing that was intended to protect creators – is used as a weapon against the creator and against their audience. Publishers insert a copyright chokepoint in-between the two, and they squeeze as hard as they desire, wringing it of every drop of profit, keeping creators and audiences far away from each other. Creators can’t speak out of turn. Fans can’t remix their favorite content and share it back to the community.

This is a dysfunctional system. Audiences are denied the ability to access information or participate in culture if they can’t pay for admission. Creators are underpaid, and their creative ambitions are redirected to what’s popular. We end up with an auto-tuned culture – insular, uncritical, and predictable. Creativity reduced to a product.

But.

If the problem is that copyright law has severed the connection between creator and audience in order to set up a toll booth along the way, then we won’t solve it by giving OpenAI a free pass to do the exact same thing at massive scale.

Nothing, if that’s genuinely what you’re doing.

But it’s dangerous to incentivize it, because you get short-term gains by firing anyone, whether or not it’s the right long-term call.

It’s also just difficult to identify bad performers. Fundamental attribution error is a bitch. And because we’re really bad at seeing the entire system surrounding someone’s productivity, we tend to blame operator error only to find that the next operator we hire has the exact same problem.

His last wish:

“I want one of my inventions to finally do something good for the world!”

choking noises

Not only invented them, but poisoned the hell outta himself trying to prove they were safe.

And then when he was too bedridden to do anything, he invented an automated bed to help him move around and strangled himself to death in the ropes.

Truly an inspiration.

loose an afternoon

That’s alright. A chiropractor can tighten up that afternoon for ya.

If you’re gonna print a weapon, a balisong is the right choice. You were gonna hurt yourself with it anyway!

as megaprojects expert Bent Flyvbjerg explains in the following article, these grandiose projects operate by an iron law: over budget, over time, over and over again

Performance data for megaprojects speak their own language. Nine out of ten such projects have cost overruns. Overruns of up to 50 percent in real terms are common, over 50 percent not uncommon. Cost overrun for the Channel Tunnel, the longest underwater rail tunnel in Europe, connecting the UK and France, was 80 percent in real terms. For Boston’s Big Dig, 220 percent. The Sydney Opera House, 1,400 percent. Similarly, benefit shortfalls of up to 50 percent are also common, and above 50 percent not uncommon.

https://www.cato.org/policy-report/january/february-2017/megaprojects-over-budget-over-time-over-over

How does your ISP have anything to do with port forwarding, or wired vs. wifi?

People have a fucked-up understanding of voting in the US. You are not voting for the person you agree with. You are voting for the person you’d rather negotiate with.

If you actually care beyond the aesthetics of whether you did the cool thing or not, you have to think about the function of what you’re doing and not just whether it feels good.

I don’t think Biden has an ideological bone in his body. Supporting Israel is just good business. Simple as.

Some things to consider:

• Check out some maps of Israel-Palestine over time and tell me whether fleeing Palestinians will ever get their homes back
• Gaza has no bomb shelters. The best they have are their own homes, and hospitals – which are already overrun with local populations, let alone migrant populations, and are being targeted by Israeli air strikes
• Israel is using white phosphorous against a territory which, if considered a country on its own, would be the third-most densely populated in the world
• Supplies of food, water, electricity, and fuel have been cut off, so people who leave their local support systems have no chance of acquiring vital supplies
• There is no exit. Sea has a permanent blockade. The only airport has been a crater since 2001. There are two ground crossings (Israel and Egypt), and the Egyptian one has been repeatedly closed due to Israeli missile strikes – after Israel advised civilians to go there.
• Israel is already targeting evacuating convoys
• Earlier this year, displacement from the war in Sudan was repeatedly called a “crisis” by relief orgs when it reached a displacement of 1 million people in a country of 45 million, one month after fighting began. We’re talking about 1 million in a territory of 2.3 million, in 24 hours

From the original source:

The use of white phosphorus in Gaza, one of the most densely populated areas in the world, magnifies the risk to civilians and violates the international humanitarian law prohibition on putting civilians at unnecessary risk.

Upon contact, white phosphorus can burn people, thermally and chemically, down to the bone as it is highly soluble in fat and therefore in human flesh. White phosphorus fragments can exacerbate wounds even after treatment and can enter the bloodstream and cause multiple organ failure. Already dressed wounds can reignite when dressings are removed and the wounds are re-exposed to oxygen. Even relatively minor burns are often fatal. For survivors, extensive scarring tightens muscle tissue and creates physical disabilities. The trauma of the attack, the painful treatment that follows, and appearance-changing scars lead to psychological harm and social exclusion.

Attacks using air-delivered incendiary weapons in civilian areas are prohibited under Protocol III of the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW). While the protocol contains weaker restrictions for ground-launched incendiary weapons, all types of incendiary weapons produce horrific injuries. Protocol III applies only to weapons that are “primarily designed” to set fires or cause burns, and thus some countries believe it excludes certain multipurpose munitions with incendiary effects, notably those containing white phosphorus.

Human Rights Watch and many states have long called for closing these loopholes in Protocol III. Palestine joined Protocol III on January 5, 2015, and Lebanon on April 5, 2017, while Israel has not ratified it.

And for some context on exactly how fatal this might be in a place like Gaza…

We’re talking about place where urban areas are 4x as dense as Los Angeles. Where people are not in the most steady health to begin with, given that 90-95% of the water supply is unsuitable for consumption, over 75% are food-insecure, 50% suffering malnutrition, the median age is 18, and there is no electricity or fuel to power the hospitals and ambulances – not that it matters anyway, because even humanitarian aid facilities are being targeted by air strikes.

You could easily die from a small cut in Gaza. Anyone in the AoE here is totally fucked.

No joke, there are billionaires scouring the futurist community looking for a reassuring answer to that question.

Douglas Rushkoff wrote a whole book about it.

https://rushkoff.com/books/survival-of-the-richest-escape-fantasies-of-the-tech-billionaires/

“Careless” is an understatement.

Kyle Hill’s episode on the demon core: https://youtu.be/aFlromB6SnU

If you look at the data flow diagram, this is basically just OAuth for a device ID and APK combination. It’s a far cry from “always on DRM”.

Piracy can’t be stealing if paying for it isn’t owning.

I mean, it’s Google. What did you expect? Android is free because having it on a ton of cheap phones helps Google collect data and sell ads.

Side-rant:

Apple’s got plenty of problems and anti-consumer behavior, too, don’t get me wrong… but it’s incredible how far they’re able to enforce privacy, down to the hardware level, while still giving devs almost the same level of control over OS features as Android.

Like, look at how ARKit does point cloud sharing vs ARCore. iOS limits sharing scanned AR environments to peer-to-peer local connections, and it’s a totally opaque object. Android meanwhile uploads your scanned room to a Google server, and the privacy terms for that data are the same as the ones for Youtube, search, maps, etc.

It drives me crazy how many FOSS nerds will rail against Facebook’s data collection and chokepoint capitalism, but then go on to praise Android for standing up to that no-good Apple. They hear “I can sideload apps” and they drop all of their recent cynicism about why they’re getting nifty stuff at a hefty discount.

The era of speculative investment in centralizing communication was not “the open web”, but rather an interruption of the open web.