Notices by Dan Sugalski (wordshaper@weatherishappening.network)

@cwebber The incentives in education currently make ChatGPT and other cheat tool use pretty much inevitable and inexorable and that was a really depressing sentence to have typed out.

Fixing this isn't complex, but like many not-complex things I don't think it's going to happen. Unfortunately.

@tchambers Every company I've seen who wants Chrome would be unarguably worse for the browser than Google. And I have no illusions about how good (or not) Google is for Chrome.

I think you're right, this is the kind of resource where a non-profit (I'd say governmental agency, but *gestures wildly*) with stable funding should manage it. I could make the case we should have several, just so the whole world doesn't settle on Chrome as the One True Browser.

@cwebber Voting "Getting out" though it's more "I want to get out, do know how, making plans".

I wonder if all the infrastructure slashing and burning from the acquisition has *finally* caught up to Twitter. https://mastodon.social/@verge/114139122939934347

I will note that the solution to about 75% of the current set of problems the West has right now involves taxing the rich more.

"1 BTC TXN on avg consumes as much power as a US household over 1.5 months.

It just gets even worse if you consider e-waste generation & water consumption as well, since on average one iPhone’s weight worth of e-waste is generated on every single BTC TXN while a full backyard swimming pool worth of water goes up in smoke as well"

Good grief. I knew they were bad but I didn't realize *how* bad. (Money laundering, turns out, can be extremely profitable...)

https://mastodon.nl/@digiconomist/113902314417904379

Whenever I see the phrase "no in-the-wild exploits" for an exploit I silently add "that we know of" to the sentence and I suspect 90% of the time I'm right.

https://geeknews.chat/@theregister/113879714566271850

@cwebber The only thing IQ scores are good for is as a quick sorting function -- anyone who goes on about how high their IQ is can generally be dropped right into the "raging douchebag" category and ignored with some enthusiasm.

@drahardja @liztai aw, c’mon, Dave — if we started questioning whether we’re the greatest country on earth the next thing you know someone’ll notice the country was built on genicide, conquest, and slavery! Can’t have that, what would the neighbors think?

@sophieschmieg https://giphy.com/explore/facepalm

@sophieschmieg "We trained our neural net on thousands of images of lava lamps and can now generate an endless series of random numbers!"

@simon @profdiggity @cwebber ...so what you're saying is we're doomed? /ducking

@simon @cwebber @zacchiro Yeah, this is very much true. There are a *very* small number of people for whom "my phone is listening to what I say" is a reasonable threat model, and those folks already know who they are. For everyone else it's just a combination of fantastically bad statistical understanding and a depressingly deep (and, unfortunately, earned) distrust of complex systems and the orgs that run them.

@cwebber @simon @profdiggity This isn't to say that our phones are listening and ad targeting, they almost certainly aren't. And it's not to say the transcription you'd get from them would be good, because it'd be crap and probably ~80% accurate (to pull a number out of nowhere). 80% for transcription is *horrible*, 80% for a signal to feed to an ad targeting algorithm is just fine.

@cwebber @simon @profdiggity As a specific data point, Dragon NaturallySpeaking was released in June of 1997 and ran on x86 systems. The amount of computer power an x86 system had in 1997, compared to even a mid/low-level phone ARM chip in 2017 is... not big.

@cwebber @simon @profdiggity FWIW, the kind of voice recognition you'd need for this kind of ad targeting has been feasible with 2017-phone-level computing power since the turn of the century. (he says, as he turns to dust and blows away) Honestly with 2017 level phones you could probably run a continuous voice recognition transcriber and not use a noticeable amount of CPU/power for it.

The transcriptions would be kinda crap in many cases, but for ad targeting that'd be just fine.

@mekkaokereke I've never really understood the level of delusion necessary for people who are clearly on the outside of American racist politics to support those same politics. I mean... have they never *looked* at US history? Any of it? Seriously? Horrible as it is, it's been pretty damn consistent over the past few centuries. The loathsome things they say are the loathsome things they want to do, it's not some kind of Jedi mind trick.

@simontatham Plus the ever popular "WE DON'T KNOW WHAT WE WERE THINKING, IT WAS 3AM WE WERE EXTREMELY DRUNK AND THERE WAS ALSO A DONKEY WHICH WE SHALL NEVER SPEAK OF AGAIN"

@cwebber Oh, yes, this level of mortality is, I expect, borderline *terrifying* for epidemiologists. As long as the spread is both only animal->human *and* very hard then it's a concern but not a worry. If we get human->human transmission or animal->human gets easier... yeah, that'll be a very bad day.

Hopefully this is a MERS situation, with low transmission and some care kept it from being bad. It is, though, influenza and the flu is an absolute bastard virus

@cwebber I thought it was important to make 'em but I couldn't think of a way to phrase it as a reply that didn't either co-opt the thread or "well, actually"''d it, neither of which is cool. That thread is useful and derailing wouldn't help!

I stats for a (partial) living, though, and I know how folks tend to misunderstand them. (Which is fine, stats are weird, and frankly if you think about them and your head *doesn't* hurt you're probably missing something. Maybe that's just me, though...:)