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AnarchistArtificer

@ AnarchistArtificer @slrpnk.net

Posts
5
Comments
702
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Do you like to have music while coding/studying? If so, what genres?

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  • "this is a big Butt"

    Nice.

  • Do You Disregard People IRL who You Know ask AI everything?

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  • I don't think it's a lowering of expectations — it feels like more of a qualitative difference. Like, the thing I'm looking for now is for someone to have given a fuck about what they're trying to say. "Earnestness" is probably a good word for it.

    Another factor in this is probably the fact that I was one of those kids who was at the top of my class for my entire school life, then went away to a prestigious university that just made me ramp up the pressure on myself even more. For a long while, I had built so much of my identity up around being smart, which led to me becoming overly preoccupied with ensuring I appeared smart too.

    To give a concrete example, I'm a scientist who isn't particularly well read, and for a long while, I held myself back from really engaging with the humanities, because I felt like I needed to stay in my lane and not make a fool of myself by having ill-informed or incorrect opinions on things like art or literature. I was too up in my head to be able to read a poem and actually have my own emotional response; internally, I'd be orienting myself around what seemed like the "correct" response. Ironically, being overly preoccupied with appearing smart led me to act quite dumb (though fortunately I met many delightful humanities nerds while I was at university, who were excited to both help me learn bits of the technical theory, whilst also being enthusiastic about my own crude, unrefined opinions).

    So yeah, I used to be overly fixated on ideas of correctness and good execution in basically everything, and that made me hold back from engaging with my passion for the world, for fear of being wrong. I guess the point I'm making here is that my recalibration with respect to AI has also come alongside a personal arc in which I am learning to open up and let myself care about things without having to be good at them.

    For instance, I am a deeply mediocre musician, but I have a lot of fun jamming with friends. I wouldn't have been able to do this 10 years ago. So when I see someone being courageous enough to actually try to say or make something meaningful, I respect the guts of it, even if the execution is not great. A human can learn how to communicate better, but an LLM will never be able to actually give a fuck about what it says

  • Do You Disregard People IRL who You Know ask AI everything?

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  • I don't know anyone like you describe (at least, not nearly this level of bad).

    But I want to offer a more positive contra-example. Since AI has become ubiquitous, I have become a lot more forgiving of mediocrity in human made stuff, whether that's a piece of art or other media, or simply someone trying to articulate themselves, but poorly. I'm way more likely to work harder to try to understand the point that someone is making, and to see the thing I'm engaging with as an earnest attempt to communicate with another person.

    In a weird way, I think that AI has made me a better person because of this. It's reminded me of what things truly have value

  • Do You Disregard People IRL who You Know ask AI everything?

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  • Yeah, I agree.

    I'm someone who, when overwhelmed by life (often), opening and reading emails is disproportionately difficult for me. The idea of spending the time and energy to read an email that someone couldn't even be bothered to write is offensive to me

  • Meta's AI Data Center Caught Infecting Town Water Supply With Deadly Bacteria

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  • Yeah, it scares me too. Though it does give me some comfort to exist in communities like this, where people are well informed of the kind of fuckery done by big tech and other asshole corporations, and thus are not surprised by this kind of news. Although it's pretty grim that we all recognise how fucked things are, it's within communities like this that I often find my will to live be bolstered.

    Maybe it's to do with the average political inclination of folks here, or maybe it's just that Lemmy has a high concentration of creative, nerdy people who find joy in making or sharing cool stuff. Or maybe I'm just so burnt out that I'm desperate to construct and/or clutch onto anything remotely meaningful ¯(ツ)_/¯. Regardless I find it reassuring to see so many people trying their damnedest to forge something good — not in ignorance of the world being on fire, but precisely because we need good reasons to live now more than ever.

    Sometimes I find myself thinking that I wish I could put my head in the sand and find some bliss in the ignorance of it all. I don't really want that though. Real hope is built on a comprehensive understanding of the problems we face, with a hearty dash of some potentially irrational defiance.

  • Andy Burnham set to ditch Palantir from NHS

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  • Good start

  • Can anyone name a solid price equivalent provider to Namecheap?

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  • I'm on porkbun and am quite happy with them. Been with them a while, but when I first purchased my domain name, they were one of the cheapest and looked decent in other ways too

  • Valve says it isn't subsidizing the Steam Machine's $1050 price because of its "religious" refusal to "build a more closed system"

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  • Line Khan made incredible headway in actually enforcing the (actually pretty good) antitrust legislation that already exists, but alas, she's not in the role anymore (since Trump entered office, I think)

    Despite this, I have no doubt that we'd see some pretty efficient antitrust stuff against Steam if they did subsidise the Steam machine, due to the efforts of the competitors to Steam.

    The thing is, I do think that Steam has a monopoly, in that if they suddenly turned evil, it would have a disproportionately large impact on the overall gaming ecosystem. However, they only got to this position because they understood that piracy was a service issue, and did legitimately better than most of their competitors

  • Gig workers are endlessly exploited. AI could make more of us share their fate

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  • None of us are free until all of us are free. AI is nothing new, just more of the same forces trying to crush more of us into a permanent lower class.

  • Warrior, rogue or mage, why?

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  • Mage, because one of the first games I really got into was RuneScape, and mages have a lot of utility spells (mainly teleports)

  • Exclusive: Tesla presented misleading ‘Full Self-Driving’ safety data to European regulators

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  • There have been some wins from GDPR, but it's woefully under enforced. I became very familiar with the GDPR when I did an internship in the regulatory risk department of a big bank when everyone was frantically trying to rebuild shit to ensure compliance. I think it's a damn good piece of legislation, and it's a shame to see it doing so much less than it could be.

  • Tesla on Autopilot Smashes Straight Through Garage Door, Driver Says

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  • I really like the automatic cruise control on my fairly new Honda Jazz. I've found that it has a net positive effect on my attention to the road, because I become less fatigued from the small, brief slowdowns that I might encounter on a motorway. There was actually an instance where I narrowly avoided a crash while using this system because of how quickly I acted when a potentially dangerous situation developed into an active crash; I felt like I was more alert than I would've otherwise been after a day of driving

    However, I do not like the lane-keeping system, especially combined with the automatic cruise control. I remember testing it when I was on a clear but fairly curved section of the motorway, with my hands completely off the wheel (but hovering over the wheel, ready to take control again if necessary). I was horrified by how effectively it took me round the bend — effectively enough to be dangerous. There is a warning beep if you spend too long without your hands on the wheel at all for a while, but this was just something I did while testing it. I've not used it since, because I was confident that, unlike the automatic cruise control used on its own, this would diminish my attention and leave me unable to properly respond to an exceptional circumstances.

  • Why do you cook?

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  • I'm really good at it, and that means I can show off and cook for other people. I like flexing my skills while also doing something kind for someone.

    One of my other hobbies is sewing my own clothes. I get a lot of compliments on what I make, especially if people know I made an outfit myself. But I don't get nearly as many compliments as I do on my food.

    Cooking is the only hobby in which I can make something I'm proud of and show it off to someone in a manner that involves all 5 of their senses, before the social contract compels them to give me feedback and potentially even help me tidy up the mess.

  • Asia tech stocks extend sell-off with SoftBank down over 7% as investors sour on AI-linked names

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  • "I mean, we'll have to handle it, we won't have a choice."

    A lot of people won't handle it though. I'm too disabled to work, so even if I had been old enough to be working during the dot-com era and the '08 crash, I still wouldn't have had a job to lose.

    However, I have had my benefits temporarily removed due to various bureaucratic bullshit, and there have been multiple points where things got bad enough that I'm honestly surprised I'm still here to write this comment. And it sucks to know that for all the trauma and disadvantage I face, I am one of the lucky ones.

    That's what's so grim people being pushed to their limit — when we don't have the luxury of choices, then it's easy to get drawn towards choosing "the bad ending" so to speak. Even during difficult times where I've not been at risk of making that particular choice myself, I nonetheless found it comforting to fantasise about, as the escape lever that no-one could take away from me.

  • FR#164 – The Pope on Defederation

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  • I read a fair bit of it, and I was surprised to see so many of the talking points I hear from some of the techy/sciencey people I most respect, just with a religious coat of paint. He's clearly got some pretty clued up people advising him, and is wise enough to listen

  • What's the biggest misconception you think many people have?

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  • As an add-on to this, people having the thought pattern of:

    They're saying that my friend said something racist -> Therefore they're saying my friend is a racist (TM) -> However, my friend is a good person -> Therefore they're not a racist -> Therefore what my friend said wasn't racist -> Therefore the people calling my friend out are the bad guys

    You can substitute in words like homophobic, transphobic, ableist, classist etc. for racist — the flow goes the same. An excellent book that helped me to understand this was "racism without racists". Reading that as a teenager helped me to more constructively respond when I have been called out for prejudiced attitudes, such as racism.

    It makes me feel deeply uncomfortable to think of myself as a racist — and so I don't. However, unlike people who default to this thought pattern that turns cognitive dissonance into indignant resistance to change, I work to accept the fact that I am absolutely capable of doing, saying or thinking racist shit — it'd be hard not to, when I've grown up in a systemically racist culture. But I can acknowledge that without blaming myself for it, which allows me to avoid the discomfort of considering myself a racist whilst maintaining my moral fortitude.

    A phrase that's helped me a lot is "you're not responsible for your first thought; you are responsible for your second". That helps me to actually interrogate where something is coming from if I catch myself having a reflexive thought that shocks or disgusts me. Unfortunately, this habit isn't one that many people have.

    Thinking about things in terms of innate essences people have (even if they're less binary than good Vs evil) is harmful even when we're just looking at harms to ourselves. For instance, I was a super bright kid, and "the smart one" was a core pillar of my identity. However, as I entered my teens, I was so scared of losing this that I became more concerned with appearing smart than actually being smart. It felt like something I didn't have control over, which was terrifying. But I often say that I got a hell of a lot smarter when I let myself be dumb. That's because when I think about what a smart person actually does that makes them smart, it's stuff like being curious about the world, self reflecting on one's beliefs and knowledge and being open to being corrected etc.. It was a lot less pressure once I stopped thinking about things in terms of immutable, innate essences

  • What's the biggest misconception you think many people have?

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  • Plastic leather also wears out so quickly. Real leather is much stronger and easier to repair/restore.

    As the person highlighted (and you have expanded on), there are a lot of ethical and sustainability problems with the leather industry as it is, but I think it'd be far better to improve the problems with natural leather than to expect much from the plastic leather

  • What's the biggest misconception you think many people have?

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  • That science is rational and objective.

    In reality, the way that science works is much muddier than most realise. It's full of subjectivity, and this isn't a bug, but a feature. Intuition and tacit knowledge play a big role in basically any research (and this is why I am confident that AI can't replace scientists). Politics are also present at every stage of the process. Science is at its least objective when scientists convince themselves that they're being objective. We can't escape our biases, so we need to actively acknowledge them and embrace the subjectivity of our situated perspectives.

    The problem is that talking about this is a great way to piss off other scientists. I've been accused before of "betraying the side", by a scientist who was aware that science has a disproportionately large epistemic platform (epistemic means pertaining to knowledge — basically just that as a result of the huge benefits of scientific advancements in the last century or so, science has been on a bit of a pedestal in terms of trusted expert knowledge in society. Criticising this is seen by a betrayal by some because of the concerning rise in psuedoscience and anti-scientific rhetoric.

    However, I'm of the belief that some of what has driven the rise of psuedoscience is that the average person doesn't like to be told "shut up and do what the smart people say". They feel a lot of mistrust towards society (which, in many cases, is entirely reasonable, especially in the case of marginalised groups who have been heavily exploited by science and scientists),

    The problem goes far beyond just science, but I think this is certainly an aspect of it. I sympathise with scientists who want to continue to have the privileged position they hold, but I don't think that's helpful in the long term.

  • What are some of your favourite developer tools?

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  • What's a shell script that you're particularly chuffed with in terms of how much time/effort it saved you?

  • Ask Lemmy @lemmy.world
    AnarchistArtificer @slrpnk.net

    Do you know any songs about trains?

  • ADHD @lemmy.world
    AnarchistArtificer @slrpnk.net

    How to Be Composed and Focussed: ADHD edition (crosspost from a comment on a meme)

  • Science Memes @mander.xyz
    AnarchistArtificer @slrpnk.net
    meme request

    Dinosaur or frog memes for a sad friend

  • Ask Lemmy @lemmy.world
    AnarchistArtificer @slrpnk.net

    How do you build a life up from scratch?

  • Ask Lemmy @lemmy.world
    AnarchistArtificer @slrpnk.net

    Harm reduction tips for an All Nighter