Notices by Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz), page 2

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A couple of questions, is the Prav co-op plan for each person with an account to pay a subscription? If so, will this be a requirement for use, or an optional way to support the service?

As you said in an earlier post, not everyone can afford to pay. Which is why Snikket's hosting service charges per server, not per account. The assumption is that a group of people can find a way to fund that cost more easily than each individual alone.

@praveen
> it has to be a public service like Quicksy, hence we built Prav on Quicksy. Prav is a coop variant of Quicksy

If you mean Quicksy.im that's just a tool for matching phone numbers to JIDs, and a client app. Who hosts the servers you are encouraging people to sign up on? How are the costs of running those servers covered?

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@praveen
> going forward, we want users to subscribe to cover costs. We are in the process of registering as a coop

Sounds great. The aspirations of @snikket_im and Prav seem very closely aligned, and I'm sure collaboration would be welcome. You may know this already, but for the record, Snikket is is not a co-op, but is it registered as a not-for-profit social enterprise in the UK.

@mcv
> Is follower-only a thing on ActivityPub?

Yes. They're called Followers posts in Mastodon now.

> I thought everything was unencrypted and basically accessible to any server that receives it.

Yes. There's been all sorts of research into things like Object Capabilities, that could force receiving servers to do what they're told. But for now, not displaying Specific People posts publicly, or showing Followers(-only) posts only to followers, is an unenforceable handshake agreement.

@evan

The obvious counterargument is; no matter how much better our simulations of fluid dynamics in water get, they never get any wetter. "Wetness", it seems, is a property of reality that can't be digitally simulated.

Similarly, no matter how perfect your simulation of cognition, there's no reason to think it will ever be conscious. At best, you're creating high-resolution digital ghosts. Which may freak out the living, but do nothing whatsoever to extend the life of the person simulated.

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However, in the fever dreams of transhumanists, once we can accurately simulate consciousness, we can simulate *our own* consciousness. Then we can "upload" it to The Cloud, and live forever in digital heaven.

This is, as Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic) and Charles Stross (@cstross) put it in the title of their co-written sci fi novel, The Rapture of the Nerds.

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Put this way, it's clear that what we have here is not scientific futurism, but fundamentalist religion. The idea that we already live in a simulation, because 'probability', is based in the dogmas of this religion. Like other religions that can't wait for the Rapture, it's profoundly anti-life.

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All of which helps to explain why people like Melon Husk are happy to emit any amount of carbon in pursuit of developing "AI". Because like the characters in Ben Elton novels like Stark and This Other Eden, they're not trying to save the human race and the biosphere we depend on. They're trying to survive it.

They are the pyramid builders of our time. Obscenely powerful people, who can think of nothing better to do with their power than trying to make themselves immortal.

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What we're really looking at here, among those who want to 'upload to The Cloud', is a kind of mental illness. A narcissistic ego addiction. Like all addictions, it consumes the life of the addict, and anyone else who let's them get too close.

Which would just be sad and pathetic, if it wasn't an existential threat to the rest of us.

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#Watching Star Trek Discovery season 5 (yes, I know, I'm a bit slow off the mark). Half way through episode 1 we're introduced to a planet that looks *exactly* like Tatooine, from Star Wars. These people can't even remember which franchise they're milking like a cash cow.

Then Burnham and Book teleport in, and Book says something about "Just like old times". Something like that, ae ; )

#TV #SciFi #StarTrek #discovery #StarWars #Tatooine

Self-sealing stem bolts 😂

"So given that we're clearly on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality... and there would probably be billions of... computers... boxes, it would seem to follow that the odds that we're in base reality is one in billions."

#MelonHusk, 2016

"Can you imagine that as recently as a few years ago, people used to sit around and nod along as they listened to this... bullshit?"

#ParisMarx, 2024

https://techwontsave.us/episode/247_data_vampires_fighting_for_control_episode_4

#podcasts #TechWontSaveUs #DataVampires #simulation

Melon Husk has made *so* many illogical leaps here. The most obvious one being that simulated computer game characters will one day be capable of experiencing themselves subjectively. Because otherwise there's nowhere else we could be, but "base reality", as he puts it.

Is computer science going to achieve that? It seems unlikely, mainly because there are good reasons to think it might be philosophically impossible. Let's unpack this a bit.

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Despite all the increases in the graphical resolution of computer games (mainly by increasing the number of transistors used to run them), we've yet to get NPCs that simulate intelligence. Let alone *consciousness*.

Mainly because we don't yet have a scientific model of what consciousness *is*, or how it works. If we don't even begin to understand it's mechanisms (if indeed it has any), how can we simulate them?

So is this a tractable science problem requiring only time? I suspect not.

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In A Brief History of Everything, Ken Wilber posits that reality consists not only of "surfaces that can be measured" - the realm of the sciences - but also "depths that must be interpreted". The realms of the arts and ethics.

If this model is even vaguely correct, we can measure heads and brains all we want, as well as the EM fields surrounding them, and even aspects of cognition. But none of that will ever allow a psychologist to tell someone how they feel, rather than having to ask.

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Transhumanists like Melon Husk live in a model of reality where all depths are squashed up into their corresponding surfaces; what Wilber calls "flatland". In this model, humans are "philosophical zombies", who only think we are conscious beings;

https://jaronlanier.com/zombie.html

In flatland, consciousness is a trick reality plays on us with our brains, and/or other purely material phenomena. So as soon as we can simulate enough of those, we can make a consciousness-in-a-bottle.

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@Hyolobrika
> Why is the translation different in this case?

Because as I said;

> >The word "tino" is an intensifier

... and "very chieftainship" doesn't make sense in English. If full chieftainship/ sovereignty wasn't the intended meaning, there would be no need to use "tino".

@nicholas

#FediLab has had a bunch of irritating bugs for a while now. Most of which haven't been fixed by the last few versions, and there hasn't been a new version shipped in F-Droid for 8 months.

I tried to join their chat room using the Matrix address on the fedilab.app website;

fedilab_apps:matrix.org

... but apparently it's now invite-only?

None of this bodes well for the future of the project. Can anyone recommend a fediverse app available in F-Ddroid?

@apps

@Suiseiseki
> F-Droid now uses the nonfree Google SDK to build the applications

I see no link in this blog post to a primary source proving this claim, and it seems extraordinarily unlikely. Because of the Sagan Standard, I consider it FUD until proven otherwise.

@Suiseiseki
> [F-Droid] appear to use a proprietary buildsystem to build things now

Intriguing. Links please?