Notices by ShadSterling (shadsterling@mastodon.social)

@xgranade I wish it were new. I mean I think it’s new from him, but there have been others drooling over the land grab the whole time. Another layer of disgusting on top of all the horrifying

@inthehands the basic problem with that kind of “encrypted” “email” is that it’s only one of those at a time; it’s either encrypted end-to-end and delivered some other way, or it’s encrypted per-hop and delivered as email. None of those services do both at once. It should be possible to do both at once using GPG or S/MIME, but for that to actually work every provider would have to handle it well, and AKAIK none do.

It still baffles me that banks haven’t been pushing this

@inthehands while that update is an improvement, and maybe better than some other orgs, I wouldn’t go so far as to applaud. I can’t quantify how much the bad post decreased my perception of how much good they do, this followup has increased it from there but not as far as back to where it was

@eff moving their moderation team into a jurisdiction that intentionally endangers the lives of cis women and all trans people warrants condemnation, not applause

@Virginicus @nebulos @futurebird that’s like an extension of “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

@inthehands @mcnado my only concern with this approach is that if he does issue a pardon and the CEO assassin is released then we’ve expanded his authoritarian powers

@mkj @Owlor @mcc I always hate these “you must sign away whatever we want or you can’t do this” checkboxes, especially when “do this” amounts to “have a job” or “get healthcare” or “use a bank”. The lack of protections for people to have necessities under fair terms is a scourge on our society

@inthehands @TomWellborn I dunno, passing off a death trap on someone else isn’t a great way to handle that

@mekkaokereke @Okanogen @luciano I remember that statement from news reports at the time, but didn’t see the connection to insurrectionists until now. Are there news outlets that did make that clear? I’d sure like to follow them

@inthehands @atrupar @LizDye saw a news report the other day that talked about how white women are angry about overturning roe and have made videos about cancelling out your husbands Trump vote a thing on TikTok, and said early voting so far is 53% women. I hope that’s a good sign, but I don’t know of a way to tell. I don’t know who put it this way first, but the stakes being what they are and having unclear signs like that have me “nauseously optimistic”

@pixx @eniko @angelastella @gabrielesvelto @cederbs why do people incinerate plastic? Is that better than burying it in a landfill?

@inthehands I remember Amelia Bedelia being surprised that some people would “dust” their furniture - she would un-dust her furniture!

@inthehands wasn’t this was widely believed to be the case at the time?

@carlysagan I went back to college inspired by the possibility of dramatically increased computing power to improve physical simulations, ultimately completing a triple-major in CS, physics, and statistics. Afterward I haven’t been lucky enough to do that kind of work, but I know a fair bit about doing physics on a computer, and the statistical underpinnings of ML. From my perspective, this prize is a betrayal of everything that made the Nobel prize worth aspiring to.

https://www.reuters.com/science/hopfield-hinton-win-2024-nobel-prize-physics-2024-10-08/

@futurebird eventually they’ll figure out that Computer Science has a split personality, one side almost the same as Pure Math, the other side they’ll say is like Applied Math but very disorganized because they won’t admit how much that side is like Economics but focused on building Rube Goldberg machines

@inthehands there’s a weird variation of this in the online product page Q&A systems, where someone can ask about some obscure detail and the site will email the question to a bunch of previous buyers and a bunch of answers will come in from them basically saying they don’t know

@HistoPol @simon @annaleen @BBCWorld existing AIs are already doing billions of dollars in harm to our society just by amplifying ongoing harms without getting anywhere near the capabilities that the hype says are dangerous. The real multibillion-dollar AI question is will we choose to stop using it to hurt ourselves?

@HistoPol @simon @annaleen @BBCWorld AI is being put to use where we refuse to fund human work, for things like filtering applications for all kinds of things - jobs, schools, scholarships, asylum, etc - and these AIs are trained on the same human biases that made Microsoft’s Tay turn antisemitic, and makes ChatGPT say doctors and lawyers can’t be women. We’re doing this despite knowing the harm it’s amplifying, and buying in to the hype helps increase the harm

@HistoPol @simon @annaleen @BBCWorld if you mean the kind of self-development a person can do, we first need to develop a way to make software than can reason, and remember; two things none of our existing ML methods can include in their creations. And even when/if we do develop such a method, I we don’t know that it would be capable of developing any faster than a human baby

@HistoPol @simon @annaleen @BBCWorld no it isn’t. The current problems with AI come from it being far less capable than the hype suggests, but being used carelessly despite its limitations. Like law enforcement using facial recognition (which is made with ML, tho not called AI) even though it’s unreliable, and especially unreliable with non-white faces. We already overprosecute non-white people, this use of AI adds to that