navigating this space without alignment with larger corporate players

stares into middle distance, hollow laugh

No need for xcancel, Gebru is on actually social media: https://dair-community.social/@timnitGebru/113160285088058319

We know $10 USD may not seem like enough to reclaim the internet with the browser we barely maintain and take on irresponsible tech companies that pay us vast sums of money. But the truth is that as you read this email, hundreds of Mozilla supporters worldwide haven't realized we're a charity racket dressed up as a browser who will spend all your money on AI and questionable browser plugins. And when each one of us contributes what we can, we can waste the money all the faster!

With the rise of AI (you're welcome, by the way, for the MDN AI assistant) and continued threats to online privacy like question like integrating a Mr. Robot Ad into firefox without proper code review, the stakes of our movement have never been higher. And marks supporters like you are the reason why Mozilla is in such a strong position to take on these challenges and transform the future of the internet in any way we know how -- except by improving our browser of course that would be silly.

(I'm feeling extra cynical today)

upside of this: they’ll get told why they’re not getting many of those $10 donations

downside of that (rejection): that could be exactly what one of the ghouls-in-chief there need to push some or other bullshit

is this what gaslighting is?

Instead of improving LLMs, they are working backwards to prove that all other things are actually word prediction tasks. It is so annoying and also quite dumb. No chemisty isn't like coding/legos. The law isn't invalid because it doesn't have gold fringes and you use magical words.

None of these fucking goblins have learned that analogies aren’t equivalences!!! They break down!!! Auuuuuuugggggaaaaaaarghhhh!!!!!!

The problem is that there could be any number of possible next words, and the available results suggest that the appropriate context isn't covered in the statistical relationships between prior words for anything but the most trivial of tasks i.e. automating the writing and parsing of emails that nobody ever wanted to read in the first place.

This is just standard promptfondler false equivalence: "when people (including me) speak, they just select the next most likely token, just like an LLM"

Damn, 3 hours late to the party. Despite my disdain for their game, i can only recall enjoying CAH’s liberal antics.

Considering the style of humor they have and Musk tries to show, I do wonder how hurt Musk is over all this. And only a matter of time before his sycophants create 'CAH is dying' graphs and animal meme images with testicles.

I look forward to the 'but we often disagreed' non-apologies. With absolute lack of self reflection on how this helped push Sailer/Unz into the positions they are now. If we even get that.

Also John McCarthy and Ray fucking Blanchard

I'm mildly surprised at Krugman, since I never got a particularly racist vibe from him. (This is 100% an invitation to be corrected.) Annoyed that 1) I recognise so many names and 2) so many of the people involved are still influential.

Interested in why Johnathan Marks is there though. He's been pretty anti-scientific racism if memory serves. I think he's even complained about how white supremacists stole the term human biodiversity. Now, I'm curious about the deep history of this group. Marks published his book in 1995 and this is a list from 1999, so was the transformation of the term into a racist euphemism already complete by then? Or is this discussion group more towards the beginning.

Similarly, curious how out some of these people were at the time. E.g. I know that Harpending was seen as a pretty respectable anthropologist up until recently, despite his virulent racism. But I've never been able to figure out how much his earlier racism was covert vs. how much 1970s anthropology accepted racism vs. how much this reflects his personal connections with key people in the early field of hunter-gatherer studies.

Oh also, super amused that Pinker and MacDonald are in the group at the same time, since I'm pretty sure Pinker denounced MacDonald for anti-Semitism in quite harsh language (which I haven't seen mirrored when it comes to anti-black racism). MacDonald's another weird one. He defended Irving when Irving was trying to silence Lipstadt, but in Evan's account, while he disagrees with MacDonald, he doesn't emphasise that MacDonald is a raging anti-Semite and white supremacist. So, once again, interested in how covert vs. overt MacDonald was at the time.

Who could have predicted that liberalism would lead into scientific racism and then everything else that follows (mostly fascism)???

This stuff feels like a DJ is cross-fading between the different hype cycles.

He wants an AI that handles data security breaches by itself. He also now writes emails with ChatGPT

He is the data security breach.

E: Dropped a T. But hey, at least chatgpt uses SSL to communicate, so the databreach is now constrained to the ChatGPT trainingdata. So it isn't that bad.

I’m so sorry. the tech industry is shockingly good at finding people who are susceptible to conversion like your CEO and DSO and subjecting them to intense propaganda that unfortunately tends to work. for someone lower in the company like your DSO, that’s a conference where they’ll be subjected to induction techniques cribbed from cults and MLM schemes. I don’t know what they do to the executives — I imagine it involves a variety of expensive favors, high levels of intoxication, and a variant of the same techniques yud used — but it works instantly and produces someone who can’t be convinced they’ve been fed a lie until it ends up indisputably losing them a ton of money

It’s the exact same shit CEO is spewing.

I have realized working at a corporation that a lot of employees will just mindlessly regurgitate the company message. And not in a "I guess this is what we have to work on" way, but as if it replaced whatever worldview they had previously.

Not quite sure what to make of this TBH.

Ugh, I'm sorry man. That's awful.

Also means we're likely to have a better jumping on point to explain these people to those who aren't already here. Hope he does one on Yud and friends in the not too distant future.

the only worthwhile use of LLMs: endlessly prompting the L Ron Hubbard chatbot with Battlefield Earth reviews as a form of acausal torture

How would you audit a computer? Would they add USB-C ports to the cans?

Doesn't have his body tethans so would be a different person or something.

They've had enough problems with the guy who claimed to be the reincarnation of LRH.

I reckon Miscavige wouldn't want a robo-LRH as it could challenge his power within the organization.

Yes crypto instances, please all implement this and "disallow" everyone else from interacting with you! I promise we'll be sad and not secretly happy and that you'll make lots of money from people wanting to interact with you.

if a user on lemmy.ee want to post on lemmy.world, then lemmy.ee have to pay 10 lemmy.world coin to lemmy.world

Note that you don't need cryptocurrencies for this. I think Jaron Lanier talked about an idea like this ages ago, before people tried to put cryptocurrencies into everything.

that's lemm.ee last time i've checked. he made that mistake 14x

1 post 6 comments joined 3 months ago, "i'm naive to crypto" "I want to host an instance that serves as a competitive alternative to Facebook/Threads/X to the users in my country,"

yeah he doesn't even have to charge for interacting with him i'll avoid him without it

technical aspect seems to be for now that israeli secret services intercepted and sabotaged thousands of pagers to be distributed for hezbollah operatives, then blew them up all at once. it does look like small, reportedly less than 20g each explosive charge, but orange site accepted truth is that it was haxxorz blowing up lithium batteries. israelis already did exactly this thing but with phone in targeted assassination, and actual volume of such bomb would be tiny (about 10ml)

what we are best at here at HN

It’s always bootlicking with this crowd jfc

“best at”, they say? I shall have to update my priors

his delivery regarding the content is absolute perfection

The only invidious instance that works this week is nadeko:

https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=3jhTnk3TCtc

If you're against unrestricted genAI then you're also transphobic

What. Wait has anyone claimed this? Because that's absurd.

I suspect it'll land somewhere above "halitosis" but below "wearing black socks with crocs"

convenience xcancel link

fucking Mozilla really is going all in on this whole “you can’t trust AI, except when we and our business partners do it” openwashing thing completely unaware of how it looks, huh? like, they’ve pushed AI so hard and violated so much community trust in the process that I can’t imagine this is doing anything but costing them their remaining donors.

Oh, and I just saw this: https://mastodon.social/@stevetex/113162099798398758

they’re really speedrunning this downslide, huh

from their Wikipedia page I’m starting to get why I’ve never previously heard of The Browser Company’s browser; it’s about a year old, it’s only for macOS, iOS, and Windows, and it’s just a chromium fork with a Swift UI overtop and extremely boring features you can get with plugins on Firefox without risking getting your entire life compromised (til Mozilla decides that’s profitable, I suppose)

Arc is designed to be an "operating system for the web", and integrates standard browsing with Arc's own applications through the use of a sidebar. The browser is designed to be customisable and allows users to cosmetically change how they see specific websites.

oh fuck off. so what makes something an operating system is:

• the whole UI got condensed down into an awkward-looking sidebar that takes up more space instead of a top bar
• you can re-style websites (which is the feature that enabled this hack, and which must be one of the most common browser plugins)
• you can change the browser’s UI color
• it can run “its own applications”? which sounds like a real security treat if they’re running in the UI context of the browser. though to be honest I don’t see why these wouldn’t just be ordinary web apps, in which case it’s just a PWA feature

Hm, I don’t really see the sneer. They wrote a nasty bug, got notified and had a patch out for it within 36h. The remediations look reasonable too: better privacy, less firebase, actual security audits; even the bounty program is probably the right call (but they result in so many shit reports, it’s probably a wash).

I gotta admit I’m kind of partial to them and their browser? It’s the non-Brave one that ships with an Adblocker by default, has much nicer UI than the existing ones, and the sync thing isn’t half bad (if it doesn’t sync security badness to all your instances, ouch). Sure they sound like a cult but I guess that’s how browser dev gets funded since the 1990s.

nobody in the community is actually interested in the Basilisk

But you should, yall created an idea which some people do take seriously and it is causing them mental harm. In fact, Yud took it so seriously in a way that shows that he either beliefs in potential acausal blackmail himself, or that enough people in the community believe it that the idea would cause harm.

A community he created to help people think better. Which now has a mental minefield somewhere but because they want to look sane to outsiders now people don't talk about it. (And also pretend that now mentally exploded people don't exist). This is bad.

I get that we put them in a no-win situation, either take their own ideas seriously enough to talk about acausal blackmail. And then either help people by disproving the idea, or help people by going 'this part of our totally Rational way of thinking is actually toxic and radioactive and you should keep away from it (A bit like Hegel am I right(*))'. Which makes them look a bit silly for taking it seriously (of which you could say who cares?), or a bit openly culty if they go with the secret knowledge route. Or they could pretend it never happened and never was a big deal and isn't a big deal in an attempt to not look silly. Of course, we know what happened, and that it still is causing harm to a small group of (proto)-Rationalists. This option makes them look insecure, potentially dangerous, and weak to social pressure.

That they do the last one, while have also written a lot about acausal trading, which just shows they don't take their own ideas that seriously. Or if it is an open secret to not talk openly about acausal trade due to acausal blackmail it is just more cult signs. You have to reach level 10 before they teach you about lord Xeno type stuff.

Anyway, I assume this is a bit of a problem for all communal worldbuilding projects, eventually somebody introduces a few ideas which have far reaching consequences for the roleplay but which people rather not have included. It gets worse when the non-larping outside then notices you and the first reaction is to pretend larping isn't that important for your group because the incident was a bit embarrassing. Own the lightning bolt tennis ball, it is fine. (**)

*: I actually don't know enough about philosophy to know if this joke is correct, so apologies if Hegel is not hated.

**: I admit, this joke was all a bit forced.

Obligatory note that, speaking as a rationalist-tribe member, to a first approximation nobody in the community is actually interested in the Basilisk and hasn’t been for at least a decade.

Sure, but that doesn't change that the head EA guy wrote an OP-Ed for Time magazine that a nuclear holocaust is preferable to a world that has GPT-5 in it.

nobody in the community is actually interested in the Basilisk

except the ones still getting upset over it, but if we deny their existence as hard as possible they won't be there

Some of the things he points out about how thoroughly embedded coverage of this industry is with Google insiders or approved partners makes sense given how Google basically is web search these days, but then that's kind of the whole goddamn problem isn't it?

I literally just saw a xitter post about how the exploding pagers in Lebanon is actually a microcosm of how a 'smarter' entity (the yahood) can attack a 'dumber' entity, much like how AGI will unleash the diamond bacterium to simultaneously kill all of humanity.

Which again, both entities are humans- they have the same intelligence you twats. Same argument people make all the time w.r.t. Spanish v Aztecs where gunpowder somehow made Cortez and company gigabrains compared to the lowly indigenous people (and totally ignoring the contributions of the real super intelligent entity: the small pox virus).

If only we had paid attention to the roomba hitting us in the leg. It wasn't adorable, it was a murder attempt!

AI misalignment leads to spinal misalignment.

This reminded me of that prediction I made w.r.t the "AI Doom" criti-hype (and touched on after SB 1047 popped up) back when OpenAI was gunning (heh) for DoD dollars.

Personally, I suspect that this might provide another case of "AI doom" becoming a double-edged sword for the AI industry. What can be dismissed as a simple error on their products' parts gets potentially a lot more problematic to deal with when a vocal minority is primed to find malice where none exists.

so according to @liveuamap, the backstory here is that this is to get his name out of news about the WildBerries shooting in Moscow - where a battle for corporate control came down to gunshots - because he was backing one of the sides

Is he inscrutable/obscurantist on purpose, or is it because he never had a proper humanities education nor an editor?

Im feeling the same way. Ever since my current job began pivoting to AI I’ve been casually browsing listings as well and have had the same experience.

The worst are those that list ”interest in AI“ or some variation of that as a required skill, lol.

But hey, try and apply for the kernel position anyway if it sounds interesting to you. Most requirements in listings are overstated anyway so it never hurts to give it a go.

[…] the tech giant would buy 100 percent of its power for 20 years.

I want them to fucking choke on this deal when the bubble bursts.

How the heck have people become so... blasé about climate change?? It is wild to me. If we're restarting nuclear reactors, with everything that entails, it should be with the goal of shutting down gas or coal power. Not to do more unsustainable garbage on top of all the existing unsustainable garbage.

Feels like the world's just given up sometimes, even though it's not quite too late.

"to give you more AI slop we have to restart TMI" is going to do wonders for the public's opinion of Big Tech

God almighty, the hubris to think that they'll this thing will be ready to go before the end of the decade. Who's going to be the prime contractor, I wonder? Bechtel?

Also, this gem inserted at the end as if it's nothing...I'm all for fusion research, but this is not happening by 2028. Someone needs to get the hook for Satya at this point, he's just lighting money on fire.

Microsoft is also pursuing power from nuclear fusion, a potentially abundant, cheap and clean form of electricity that scientists have been trying to develop for decades — and most say is still a decade or more away from generating electricity. Microsoft has signed a contract to purchase fusion energy from a start-up that claims it can deliver it by 2028.

I admit, in my haste, I read that link as Marc Andreessen openly announcing they're investing in the Chinese Communist Party, which is slightly funnier than the reality of yet another crypto game.

it's even funnier than that (albeit also super depressing, in some ways)

primer: hilmar (the head honcho at ccp) has been "crypto = bae" for going on 5~6y now (that I'm aware of, maybe longer), to the point that there are pictures of the guy at chain confs from around then, and mentions of people talking with him in The Private Backrooms at said chain confs. it's been his darling and he has wanted very, very hard to put it into tq (the main game server). see this for example (and fwiw, warning: eve reddit)

in-fill: there also appears to be quite a bit of cart before the horse element in how the company operates - they will frequently first work on something, then when it starts getting near release they'll send out some surveys that almost without fail have some extremely loaded questions in them. an example would be that instead of asking players what they generally think of xyz feature/intended mechanic/etc, the survey will instead garden path answers along, attempting to manufacture consent/compliance.

and, last little detail: keep in mind this is a game where people will min-max the everloving shit out of something, and where a fair number of people out there are willing to trade actual time to making in-game money with which to fund their gametime ("plexing"). people who would be willing to engage with some really ridiculous abstract/effortful shit for whatever gains they could, just because they could.

so with that said, during 2021/2022 (in the middle of the NFT tsunami of shit) the first big round of "we want to add NFTs to tq" came about. and there were a fair amount of indications that ccp had already sunk quite a bunch of devtime on it, and were getting ready to roll it out. the pitch was, uh, "not well received" would be putting it extremely lightly. it was panned so fucking extremely, they had to put out this newsblog which included the remarkably tortured phrase "Not For Tranquility"

which is the early strand of what leads us to this particular little "gem". it's hard to get specific details because they're fairly tight-lipped about internal processes and shit, so the following is definitely heavily conjecture. hilmar didn't want to break up with his bae, and kept pushing trying to keep this alive, somehow. whether the drive for this is also tied up with the Pearl Abyss acquisition some years prior is unclear (but Black Desert Online players all cried wolf when PA bought CCP, and said to expect increasing financial fuckery). what does appear to be the case is that a number of developers (possibly the pro-NFT among them) got sequestered off to the Special Project that became this thing, along with the a16z money a while back. the general feeling in the eve:o community is still largely "get fucked", and this project is likely to be double-stillborn (on account of dead kriptoes and an unwanted game/product)

I look forward in earnest to see just how dead it is on arrival

[0] - it took less than 2mo from the "would you like to play a fps in the eve universe? what would you want in it? what do you normally do in eve? what would you do in an eve-universe fps? why would you want your eve ...." survey going out to the announcement "hey surprise! we have an fps!"[1]

[1] - again. they've failed a few times, with multiples out. ccp product leadership real bad.

In 3 years they will release their NFT game.

Sometimes you read an article and you think "this article doesn't want me to do X, but all its arguments against X are utterly terrible. If that's the best they could find, X is probably alright."

that thread is an unholy combination of two of my least favorite types of guys: techbros willfully misunderstanding research they disagree with, and homeopaths

From the comments: "Putting my conspiracy theory hat on, the dental hygiene industry in the US is for-profit, like the pharmaceutical, and would rather sell you a treatment than a cure."

Have these people ever BEEN to the dentist? While I know that certain dental procedures (tooth straightening in kids, whitening, etc) are way overused in the US no dentist worth their salt will allow a check-up to go by without a stern lecture on preventing future trouble. And if they don't do that then the hygienist most certainly will...

Absolutely unhinged. Are these people from the As-Seen-On-TV dimension where it's common for folks burn their house down every time they try to fry an egg?

We could also just fluoridate the water supply, which also massively reduces cavities.

I won't be satisfied until I see a picture of the living accommodations that isn't an AI render of a futuristic skyscraper. I need to know how shitty the tents are gosh darn it.

If you want decentralized systems you have to take the good with the bad. It’s part of the game

I wonder if these people are at all familiar with the stages of grief

TIL that I'm constantly hacking containers when I docker run --rm -it --entrypoint /bin/sh to debug because fucking npm had a stroke again.

Also, another great sneer: (Matt Popovich) google maps app: crash detected ahead. rerouting. me: WHOA—this VERY troubling example of power seeking (gathering access to additional roadways) and instrumental convergence (converging toward an optimal path) shows this technology is OBVIOUSLY trending toward existential risk

It's pretty great. The closing bits of improv from her cohost are a bit meh imo but the AI hype assessments are legitimately amazing.

first comment is a masterpiece.

DHH: today I will RP as a high schooler writing an essay for software class about a program you should use

full disclosure: I use vim and honestly I don’t even know why anymore. Maybe it’s because I had a brief, trivial interaction with Bram Moolenaar (RIP king) in which he closed a bug that I opened by mistake, and I imprinted on him for some reason.

I almost made it but couldn't be arsed to replicate the explanation text

I realized late last night that I could give a better frame for this: it’s the equivalent of weekly shopping for 100~300 people (boundaries for varying lower or higher grocery taste)

our population is close to 60m

I honestly just use browser bookmarks. That’s always been enough for me. Firefox can sync them too, so that takes care of backups as well.

For anything that needs special attention, I create a todo item with the link in org-mode.

About a year ago I exported my bookmarks from there and dropped them in a self-hosted instance of linkding (using the recipe that puts it on fly.io with backups to b2). It works like a charm.

Do you actually need to share your bookmarks? I found that bookmarks in Firefox and an RSS reader hosted on my nextcloud are enough for personal use.