Notices by Mathaetaes (mathaetaes@infosec.exchange)

@dalias @glyph It's not necessarily brain rot.

Humans are pretty good at optimization. We're also not great at picking the right thing to optimize on. For the last 200 years or so, most of western society has optimized on wealth; specifically, individual wealth. That creates perverse incentives to do all kinds of things that are good for an individual but terrible for society at large.

Some examples just in my lifetime: Cigarettes. Oil (and petrochemicals in general). Cryptocurrencies.

Until the various world societies as a whole decide to reorganize and start optimizing on things that benefit the whole over the individual, we will always be subject to empty promises of quick easy wealth. That's *incredibly* easy to manipulate because it pits individuals against each other.

Honestly, just like mechanical automation, AI (once it matures) has the potential to make society so much better. We no longer need a fleet of people to pick a field of crops; for many crops, a single person can harvest it in an afternoon. The same work getting done with fewer people *should* free up people to do other things: make art, help people who need it, etc. We can, and do, produce the same amount of resources for basic necessities with far fewer people than we did 80 years ago.

Unfortunately, with our current capitalist priorities, in the current system it's only going to widen the wealth gap and hurt a lot of people. We choose not to provide a minimum level of support for basic needs, so people starve while others throw out food.

it's pretty f*cked up, when you think about it, but it's never going to change without a massive cultural shift.

Frankly, I'm not sure we're capable of such a thing.

@glyph I’m not an AI doomer and I pretty much agree with your whole thread, but something to consider: when I think of AI taking over humanity, I see The Matrix more than Terminator. A hypothetical super intelligent AI wouldn’t necessarily need complete self-replication ability… it just needs the ability to influence humans enough to have them do the parts it can’t.

If you think about it, we’ve been building tech designed specifically to manipulate human behavior since the advent of social media… and it’s effective. If humanity were any good at protecting itself or organizing for the greater good, the perverse reward systems of capitalism would’ve been brought into check long before US oligarchs like Musk and Zuck could have been able to amass their power.

In a hypothetical world where machines rule, the more likely scenario is a majority of humans self-oppressing because they’ve been manipulated into it by adjustments to the algorithms that feed them the information they use to establish reality. We become part of the system.

The only real difference between that world and today is that today it’s a handful of billionaires controlling the algorithms. Replace Zuck and a few others with sufficiently capable AI and is it really that unbelievable that society would just keep cranking out more machines despite a slow degradation of quality of life?

Anyway - great thread and a fun topic to kick around. Thanks for posting it.

@MsMerope @ai6yr because there's only one of them. Otherwise it'd be "a 101" and wouldn't be very specific.

@ai6yr @MsMerope Norcal people are adopting habits from the flyover states.

If they want to behave like landlocked, flat-land, dust bowl folk, that's their choice I guess. :)

@MsMerope @ai6yr In all seriousness, I suspect it comes from the fact that almost all of our highways are also freeways...

"Take 5 freeway" is improper English. "Take the 5 freeway" is correct.

Contrast that with "Take Highway 1" vs Take the Highway 1" - the former is correct.. except pretty much all of our highways are also freeways. Over time, "Take the 5 freeway" turned into "Take the 5"... and the distinction between freeway and highway has always been fuzzy down here - we do have highways that are not freeways, but not many, and on a long enough timeline, they're all doomed to become one.

Based on your use of English, I have to assume norcal has far more highways that are not freeways, just like most of the flyover states. Thus, when you folks refer to a numbered road, it was always "take highway 66" which turned into "take 66", and the trend then migrated to include all numbered major thoroughfares.

... but I still think you all talk like flat-land dustbowl people. 😛

@tinker Making a mental note to uninstall the EA app from my machine.

Software auto-updates... and while I don't expect EA to stick privacy-invading code into some future update, I only run software from organizations I trust on my machine, and I definitely don't trust something headed by Kushner and a random foreign government.

@steter Life aspirations.

@MLE_online People who use a lot of electricity have the money to influence politics. People who use little probably don't have the money to counter that lobbying of regulatory authorities.

That said - there's some level of overhead required to maintain all the power lines and equipment. Historically, most of that cost has been worked into per-kwh rates. However, as people work to reduce their consumption and/or offset with solar, it gets harder and harder to spread that cost across usage. Shifting more cost to a fixed monthly fee that covers maintenance is logical.

That said, the cynical part of me also sees a company that still makes profit per KwH incentivizing using more KwH.

Deregulating a resource with inelastic demand run by a monopoly business was a really bad idea. Pete Wilson really screwed us on that one. I think these changes would probably happen even if SCE was a non-profit or a government-run entity, but it'd certainly feel quite a bit less evil in that case.

@inthehands lets not forget the “visual coding” hype, where people were going to generate all their code straight out of a UML model. No need for developers there.

@inthehands The thing is, if it doesn't have to be right, why bother doing it at all?

@ai6yr surprised I didn’t see a “one of the good ones” dropped somewhere in there….

Maybe the reporter was kind and spared us. I’m sure it was dropped at least once.

@nemo Pretty sure this has already been fixed.

@nemo I mean... it was pretty wide open, so who knows if it was ever actually exploited and what the consequences of that would be... but I thought I saw @GossiTheDog post sometime yesterday that he tested it and confirmed it no longer leaks data.

@0xabad1dea by that logic, I’m a master craftsman. The number of projects that made it to 80% before I got distracted or ran out of time are too numerous to count.

@northernlights @tinker @jerry TBH, I’m not sure I see a problem with this precedent.

Banning all billionaire-controlled, algorithm-defined social media would probably be a net positive for society.

@inthehands my theory is that the press just regurgitates what the candidates say.

They don’t run a story saying “Biden is old”, they run “‘Biden is old’, Trump says”.

Trump can’t run on his positive qualities; he has no good ideas, no qualifications, and no historical record to point to. All he can do is try to make his opponent look worse than him.

Harris, on the other hand, has plenty of positives. Lots of policy, lots of qualifications, lots of history. Harris doesn’t need to spend her time levying insults at Trump. Since she’s not talking about how old he is, the newspapers aren’t writing articles about her talking about how old he is.

I don’t know if it’ll be a winning strategy, and it seems like some democratic politician somewhere should be making coments go generate those headlines… but clearly they’ve decided not to.

@GossiTheDog I get that question a ton too, and the best answer I have is that I was the one willing to do the stuff nobody else wanted to do.

It doesn’t work anymore because everyone wants to be a “cybersecurity” professional, mostly because someone told them we get paid a ton.

I’d love to meet that someone and see where they’re getting their info, because from what I can see, we get paid the same as senior devs to do stuff that makes everyone’s job harder, and if we do it right nothing happens.

@inthehands If it was literally anyone other than a police officer, we'd be calling it a mass shooting, reporters would be digging up dirt on the the disturbed shooter/shooters, someone would inevitably call them 'crazy' and try to blame poor mental health, people would be pointing fingers at who gave them the gun.

But because the guy managed to complete 6 months of community college-level education, we give them a gun and a free pass.

@mattmay Is anyone checking him, or are they just letting him run rampant?

Sometimes, it's better to make the environment such that the uncle cannot wait to get away from the party, rather than make the party feel uncomfortable with the uncle.

I understand polite company and all that, so maybe it's not the right time/place. I've got an uncle like that, though, and he just won't talk anymore if I'm in the room. I've checked him enough, in front of everyone (except grandpa... polite company and all) that he's just given up.

Family gatherings are far more tolerable in this state.

@mekkaokereke wait, what?? Is this a real thing people believe, or is this just absurd hyperbole set to illustrate the ridiculousness of the white right’s propaganda in general?

I don’t know if I should be proud that my timeline curation doesn’t even let these rumors reach me, or ashamed that my social media bubble is too small to even pick up people talking about this.