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rottingleaf

@ rottingleaf @lemmy.world

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2012
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • With a Trump-driven reduction of nearly 2,000 employees, F.D.A. will Use A.I. in Drug Approvals to ‘Radically Increase Efficiency’

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  • Even an RNG does decision-making.

    I know what LLMs are, thank you very much!

    If you wanted to even understand my initial point, you already would have.

    Things have become really grim if people who can't read a small message are trying to teach me on fundamentals of LLMs.

  • With a Trump-driven reduction of nearly 2,000 employees, F.D.A. will Use A.I. in Drug Approvals to ‘Radically Increase Efficiency’

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  • It doesn't. I understand the actual technology. There are applications of human decision making where it's possibly better.

  • With a Trump-driven reduction of nearly 2,000 employees, F.D.A. will Use A.I. in Drug Approvals to ‘Radically Increase Efficiency’

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  • I'll try arguing in the opposite direction for the sake of it:

    An "AI", if not specifically tweaked, is just a bullshit machine approximating reality same way human-produced bullshit does.

    A human is a bullshit machine with an agenda.

    Depending on the cost of decisions made, an "AI", if it's trained on properly vetted data and not tweaked for an agenda, may be better than a human.

    If that cost is high enough, and so is the conflict of interest, a dice set might be better than a human.

    There are positions where any decision except a few is acceptable, yet malicious humans regularly pick one of those few.

  • Why Denmark is dumping Microsoft Office and Windows for LibreOffice and Linux

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  • 15 years ago this statement would lead to accusations of being anti-globalist, communist, economically illiterate.

    15 years ago this made economical (just not political) sense and was the right approach.

    Now it still is, but there's an additional quality - I think the incentive is not of public good, it's of strengthening authoritarianism on both sides of the Atlantic ocean. Domestic authoritarians always want to play with their toys without foreign authoritarians meddling. But if the domestic environment is not authoritarian, only foreign is, then they are not in conflict, and the other way around too.

    So this may mean that both USA and EU are changing for the worse, for now.

    Not attacking Linux or LibreOffice.

  • Smartphones are Designed to Fail Us (and We Have to Change That)

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  • I've recently learned that the device Sun first made Java for was, well, almost a smartphone in idea. So those Java phones and now Android are not a perversion of the initial intent.

    I also think that, if you only compare various places in reality and various casinos by the amount of endorphine per minute spent, you'll choose casinos (OK, maybe brothels).

    The reason you don't choose a casino is because you know that in average the casino always wins. That's a knowledge of how casinos work.

    The reason you don't choose a brothel is because you know that many people working there are disadvantaged, and because you can control your impulses. That's also a knowledge of how brothels work.

    This means, that if we make an analogy between casinos, brothels and the computer industry, including smartphones and the web, the user has to know how it works to make the right decisions.

    So the commonly repeated point about grandmas and casual users is simply wrong. There's no way they don't get deceived by the other side profiting from their ignorance, other than learning how things work.

    So - I think we need a global social network. We have siloed services because it doesn't bring profits to make such a global service, and the one Sun, Netscape, Macromedia (yes) and many universities made in the 90s has gone obsolete. The Internet itself allows to make a global Facebook. But instead of solving the problems of technical debt and adoption for that, it's simpler to use a centralized service which was relatively easy to launch initially.

    From Facebook (or others) you ultimately need 1) search of 1.a) contacts, 1.b) groups and 1.c) posts, 2) storage of 2.a) contacts, 2.b) groups and 2.c) posts, 3) universal forward identifiers of 3.a) contacts, 3.b) groups and 3.c) posts.

    With cryptography and #3 you can use untrusted services for #1 and #2.

    If they can be untrusted, services for #1 (indexer crawling the network and answering search requests in a standardized way, similar to RSS, maybe just with RSS ; the crawler service and the search result storage can be separated too) and #2 can be contributed to their respective pools like with SETI@home or other projects.

    There is the question of a financial incentive to providing such a service. That can be done with using, say, (maybe number 4), a pool of billing services. A user makes a payment and before requesting a search service or a storage service, requests a billing service on which they are registered, providing it with the identifier of a resource they are going to use, that billing service and that resource interact in the sense of payment in background, giving the user a token with which they request the service itself. To pay for used storage or a heavy search request (or a request above a threshold).

    Well, that looks ugly, maybe some other way is possible.

    Those search results from search services and objects fetched from storage services are presented in a native application similar to Facebook, perhaps.

    Contacts would be just PKI certificates or something, with a valid certificate for a registrar domain someplace in chain.

    So you'd request in DNS (or someplace else, I dunno) pool.search.nihilsoc.org for a bunch of uniform indexer services, pool.store.nihilsoc.org for a bunch of uniform storage services (if we don't have a paid service saved, probably even encrypted on some available storage service), pool.relay.nihilsoc.org of a bunch of notification servers similar to IRC (except not used for chat directly, or maybe even that), pool.billing.nihilsoc.org to pay for services requiring it. It wouldn't matter much which ones you'd hit, because every post, contact and group identifiers would be global, containing parent identifiers and such.

    It would supposedly be seamless for the user. You search for a group on a few indexers, you get a few lists of results showing on which storage services it's present and how much of it, you deduplicate those and you ask those directly by global identifiers, check signatures yadda-yadda.

    Seems very archaic, I dunno why nobody is doing this, probably because things seeming simple are complex.

    OK, about smartphones and casinos - just like the way to fight gambling lies in knowing that the casino always wins and there's no luck, the way to fight enshittification lies in users caring what they use. Yep, technologies and systems involved are complex, then maybe those should be made simpler for users to understand. Simpler inside, like OpenBSD, not simpler outside, like ChatGPT.

  • Why Denmark is dumping Microsoft Office and Windows for LibreOffice and Linux

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    1. When you can spend a lot on security staff, they'll probably convince you that your own installation of Windows is sterile.
    2. They probably use Macs.
    3. They might even only use air-gapped machines, with sufficient paranoia.

  • Speaker Mike Johnson suggests California Governor should be ‘tarred and feathered’

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  • Molotov was a diplomat (sort of).

    And it's better to use an FPV drone with, I dunno, a canister of something good.

  • An analysis of X(Twitter)'s new XChat features shows that X can probably decrypt users' messages, as it holds users' private keys on its servers

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  • No way. Impossible. Of course convenience never has a price tag.

    /s for typical users of today's Web

  • VPN Registrations Increase by 1,000%, less than Hour After PornHub Blocked France From Accessing its Website.

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  • I mean, neither does the Web by now.

  • Oppose STOP CSAM: Protecting Kids Shouldn’t Mean Breaking the Tools That Keep Us Safe

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  • And that's intentional.

    So I'm going to say into the air that I was lucky in my selection of mass culture in my childhood.

    Star Wars EU before 2010 - everything around us and that feeling of desperation and who can and can't be trusted and the rapid change of the world, "rapid" meaning in the span of 13 years for prequels and then 20 years after them till OT, which is similar to our reality, HP - things about terfs and culture wars are really not important, because its world functions similarly to our surrounding world.

    Tolkien and Chesterton and Lewis.

    Lots of crazy stuff, Honorverse and Forgotten Realms and small fandoms.

  • News outlets in crisis mode as Google-led AI search push crushes website traffic

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  • AI stands for Ambitious Indian

    (Just plagiarizing the joke about that company that went bankrupt)

  • VPN Registrations Increase by 1,000%, less than Hour After PornHub Blocked France From Accessing its Website.

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  • You'd have good games and no bullshit on your PC.

  • VPN Registrations Increase by 1,000%, less than Hour After PornHub Blocked France From Accessing its Website.

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  • It's an easy proxy.

  • An LAPD helicopter claimed to have ID'ed protesters from above and threatened to "come to your house"

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  • Those Republicans should just think of a practical 2A air defense solution

  • VPN Registrations Increase by 1,000%, less than Hour After PornHub Blocked France From Accessing its Website.

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  • That'll be really slow.

  • VPN Registrations Increase by 1,000%, less than Hour After PornHub Blocked France From Accessing its Website.

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  • Except it's fucking awful to wait for buffering over Tor or a VPN

  • VPN Registrations Increase by 1,000%, less than Hour After PornHub Blocked France From Accessing its Website.

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  • BTW, who even had the brilliant idea to block pr0n for French of all people?

  • Tech moguls want to build a crypto paradise on a Native American reservation

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  • BTC has an unregulated currency (yes, it still is capable to function as that) to show for it. Probably somebody could have invented a better emission mechanism for it, but not being that somebody, I can't think of anything with the same qualities.

  • Tech moguls want to build a crypto paradise on a Native American reservation

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  • Governance is actually important. Whoda thunk?

    Some day you'll read Tao Te Ching and maybe stop thinking in absolutes.

    Where I live libertarians are the most adequate part of the social fabric suppressed by that governance. Trots are the second.

    In any case, you can have a thought experiment of the same town the same size with a group of people assuming governance and telling others what to do. They can collect taxes and tell they are using them as well as they can. The bear problem will probably be smaller, albeit sometimes someone complaining will accidentally meet a bear, the drowning in trash one - I dunno, probably the trash will move to the places furthest from where that group lives, but won't be really disposed of, because - why? No incentive.

    I've become a libertarian after watching one enthusiastic teacher organize some sort of discussion clubs. Everyone in favor of more governance eventually shifted to authoritarianism, when talking long enough, because when you are thinking as if you were the government, you just won't understand why you shouldn't surrender power and then why you should answer to anyone. Less governance - OK, I was alone in that, but the best (in their opinion) argument the others found was "so how do you host olympics in a libertarian land, or build a centrally planned new city? checkmate", and of course there's nothing I can answer to that because I don't think a society needs global projects or flag days.