Notices by Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@dalias/113263575877116616

@campuscodi Obligatory

@hipsterelectron Lifehack: KN95 makes bullet 3 go away entirely.

@resonancewright @futurebird The Fermi paradox isn't a paradox at all, just scifi sophistry. Space is just utterly gigantic. This does not tell us anything about likely outcomes of civilizations.

I didn't assign you a label "out of mental frustration". I assigned it because you're giving off al lthe signs.

@dymaxion Firefox can be configured officially to use your own sync server instead of theirs, but it's a massive nasty software stack to run.

Otherwise, there are ways of transferring your profile. It can be done with adb, or direct filesystem access if you have root. AFAIK none of them are normie-accessible though.

@kernellogger It would be better to do this in a way that's reversible without reboot. Like setting the modprobe command sysctl to /bin/false.

@resonancewright @futurebird LLMs have nothing to do with human minds. They are distillations of past usage of *language* only, into a statistical model that can predict language usage likely to be misinterpreted as intelligent/meaningful by humans. You are deep in the singulaity/AGI delusion.

@futurebird @resonancewright For things like creating a simulation of a human (or other animal) mind, I think the more interesting, less eugenicist-adjacent concept is "artificial life".

@resonancewright @futurebird Um, no. No actual scientist "defines" "AI" as "passing a Turing test". Turing did not propose it as such and was very careful to describe the intricacies of this misconception. It sounds like you have a pop-scifi understanding of this stuff and want to pick fights with people who don't subscribe to your techno-futurist fantasies.

@resonancewright @futurebird Beyond that, pretending the name "artificial intelligence" has any connection to reality is premised on the concept that "intelligence" is a tangible thing you can measure and replicate and is a legitimate basis on which to evaluate/compare the worth of beings.

@resonancewright @futurebird I'm not going to try to "reclaim" a name that has always meant scams. I want no association with it. I'm not ceding anything to them by this. I'm refusing to participate in the farce that "artificial intelligence" has any meaning beyond scams.

@resonancewright @futurebird They absolutely are "AI".

For over half a century, "AI" has been a marketing term for parlor tricks to bamboozle folks without technical expertise to know better that the computer is doing something vastly more impressive than what it's actually doing.

That is THE meaning of "AI".

If you know how to use it, the tsearch() family gives you reasonably efficient key-value mappings in C with no dependencies and virtually no code. I just put together whats basically an in-memory hierarchical "filesystem" (part of musl locale builder for locale project) in under 100 LoC.

And, despite the footguns, had it basically working on first compile, and working after a small fix (related to the footguns).

Yes the POSIX tsearch() interface family is a huge footgun (and slightly misdocumented in POSIX, leading to UB if you follow the directions) but is also soooooo good for rapid prototyping & making things that don't need to be efficient.

@waldo.net Or a far worse one..

But the grifters really just think it's that way because, well, that's the way it is. They're opportunists with a *kind* of savvy and loose morals that position them well to take advantage of people. They aren't particularly curious about why, or how, it all got to be this way; or why, or how, it seems to stay this way no matter how badly they behave.

Trump and his goons are all grifters.

The masterminds know better: they can see the meticulous interconnected systems...

3/

@gwynnion This about "small business owners". In aggregate (not knowing individual owners) I think I'd rather patronize big businesses than small businesses because at least the former isn't enriching the shittiest people within my own local community and at least the former has HR departments.

The grifters know that none of it is actually true and spend all their time farming the marks for money and clout. Pundits, most politicians, most consultants, many high-level executives at corpos, most of the top 5%.

This is where you get stuff like US healthcare and corporate welfare, bank bailouts and most of the tech industry. A lot of SuperPACs and political NPOs are also graftastic money pits. I'd guess three-quarters of all Christian pastors are in this class.

2/

A problem is that there are three kinds of person in any anti-social ideology: the marks, the grifters, and the masterminds.

The marks literally think the thing is a totally different thing. They're MAGA folks who think MAGA is all about "ending tyranny" and giving their kids a better future. They're Dem voters who think Democrats are just frustrated progressives who care deeply about people

Even politicians can be marks! There are Dem pols and GOP pols who really believe their propaganda

1/

@bytebro No, it's subtle and I'm not sure the terminology is exactly right, but this subtlety is important to debunking the myths of capitalism being just.

"People's personal things" are the things that are like extensions of your being, that play a role in your everyday activities. Things where you would rightly feel personally violated if they were gone.

Private property is much larger in scope and extends to things you "own" as a matter of convention. A house you don't live in but rent. A factory you don't operate but keep the profits from. Symbols of wealth.

Machinery for taking care of the place where you live could fall somewhere in between, but when you don't even really own it (because the vendor who "sold" it to you still controls it) I think it's far more like *their* private property.

@foolishowl @hipsterelectron I actually don't want to scare off corporations from using our software as dependencies. Them doing that gives us power/leverage.

(Unlike ingesting it in LLMs and pretending they can get back something just as good without depending on us.)

What I want is for them to stop polluting our space with corporate-controlled nominal-FOSS that displaces real FOSS and gives them leverage/power and dissolves ours.