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Aceticon

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Aceticon ,

Having recently setup a cheap Mini-PC with Linux and Kodi as a TV-Box + NAS + VPN client end, replacing both TV box of my ISP (around here Fibre Internet Access tends to be bundled with TV using a TV box from the supplier, which has become progressivelly more shit) used for live TV as well as a separate TV box I had for personal digital media, I now think that Linux is the Best Way to avoid the Enshittification Nightmare much more broadly.

Granted, for decades already I’ve very purposefully avoided using hosted services that locked me into a 3rd party (such as for example having a Google e-mail address or hosting my files “on the cloud”) which in recent times have become increasingly enshittified (as I expected: my tendency for avoiding 3rd party lock-in comes from experience as in IT professional were I saw how invariably said 3rd parties would end up shafting customers once moving out from their “solution” was very hard) and for which Linux has long been a solution, but it’s been a pleasant surprised to find out that at least for some of the modern electronics Linux is also the solution for taking back control.

Frankly I’m just waiting for some kind of decent Linux distro for my smartphone and table to ditch Android (in the meanwhile I’m using custom ROMs to somewhat control it and avoid the enshittification).

PS: On the desktop side it’s also nice that, right when MS is going fully enshittified, Linux for Gaming has become a very viable option, since gaming was pretty much the only thing keeping me on Windows at home.

Aceticon ,

Enshittification is the result of the user not being in control: markets have a natural tendency to become dominated by a few companies (or even just a single one) if they have any significant barriers to entry (and said barriers to entry include things like networking effects), and once they consolidate control over a large enough share of the market those companies become less and less friendly and more and more extractive towards customers, simply because said customers don’t actually have any other options, which is what we now call enshittification.

At the same time Linux (and most Open Source software) is mainly about the owner being in control of their own stuff, not some corporate provider of software for your hardware or of a hardware + software “solution” (i.e. most modern electronics) provider.

So we’re getting to see more and more Linux-based full solutions to take control of one’s devices back from the corporations, not just Linux on the Desktop to wrestle control back from an increasingly anti-customer Microsoftw, but also, for example, stuff like OpenELEC (for TV boxes) and OPNSense (for firewalls/router).

Aceticon , (edited )

Well, my NAS before was in the same style as yours and I moved it to that Linux Mini-PC (that by then had already replaced both TV boxes) because it has much better performance as a NAS (my router could only share using SMBv1 which has less than half the speed of SMBv2 and above, and there are even benefits for Kodi that is in that same machine to access the media directly via the filesystem rather than mounted shared, both because it’s much faster doing full scans and because it will actually do proper incremental scans - i.e. only and quickly check files with creation dates newer than last scan data - when scanning my NAS for new media files.

As for shared MySQL synch, if I remember it correctly from when I read about it on the Kodi website, that’s just having that MySQL set up as a standalone database server in a place accessible by all potential Kodi client instances and then configure your Kodi clients to use that standalone database instead of the internal database of each Kodi client.

This is just a traditional client-server structure were the “server” is the standalone MySQL database and the clients are the Kodi instances: pretty run of the mill way to have a server doing something for multiple client applications if they’re all on the same network so lots of corporate software works like that.

The most obvious way of doing this is having that MySQL database on the Linux Mini-PC (even in professional settings, putting your database on a Linux machine is almost always the best choice) by installing it as a package (for example, with apt-get) and then you do have to initialize it and load it with data from an existing Kodi instance (again, if I remember it correctly, you export the data from the internal database of your Kodi instance and import it into that standalone database) and then point the Kodi instance (and any other present or future Kodi instances you want to use that shared watch history) to that standalone database. From looking at it (and given my experience with making server side software), I believe the instructions on the Kodi website for this are correct and complete even if they seem a little daunting at first.

Personally I didn’t do it because I have no need for it and hence couldn’t be arsed.

Aceticon ,

“X years, Y months, Z days and 1 second”

“X years, Y months, Z days and 2 seconds”

“X years, Y months, Z days and 3 seconds”

“X years, Y months, Z days and 4 seconds”

“X years, Y months, Z days and 5 seconds”

“X years, Y months, Z days and 6 seconds”

…

This stuff about the price reductions after 4 years of blatant gouging is really freaking me out

I mean, that’s 4 years of our lives taken! 4 years of opportunities that were more challenging because they wanted a number on a computer to go up! 4 years of feeling worse than necessary about my finances and management of them and general personhood because i felt like i couldn’t afford anything because everything was...

Aceticon ,

It was always about removing any intervention by the powers of the state (which in Democracy are controlled by voters) so that the positive feedback loops in money aggregation in most markets (basically any market with barriers to entry isn’t free, especially if that barrier relates to land ownership, so the more money you make, the more you own, the more money you make) would turn those people who started with the most money - as in a system with such feedback loops in place, starting advantages such as being born rich are unassailable - into oligarchs.

As that system polls wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer, of course it will eventually destroy the middle class and countries ends up looking a lot like dictatorship Brazil in the 70s - only two classes, rich and poor and pretty much nothing in the middle.

Aceticon , (edited )

I’m fed up with that deceitful oft repeated piece of misinformation that’s commonly used to deny that Israel is an Appartheid state:

  • Israel separates Nationality from Citizenship and per the Israeli constitution only Jews can have Israeli Nationality. In fact any Jew anywhere in the World is entitled to it and can quite literally travel to Israel and request to get it at the airport.
  • The non-Jews living in Israel you mention either have Israeli Citizenship (not Israeli Nationality, which is a different thing) or not even that because non-Jews born in the occupied Territories (which include Jerusalem and all of the West Bank of which nowadays only a tiny fraction is under Palestinian control) don’t have a natural right to even just Israeli Citizenship and have to apply to get it, and it’s often denied for quite arbitrary reasons.

This is why there are lots of stories of Palestinians being kicked out of houses in Jerusalem where their families have lived for several generations: even thought they were born there they are not Israeli Citizens (if I remember it correctly only around 40% that apply actually get Israeli Citizenship) and hence have no rights at all in Israel.

People fall for this sleazy “Israel has lots of Palestinians living there” crap because normal modern countries don’t have such a convoluted process explicitly dividing people and the rights they get by religion and don’t just deny the right to citizenship to people who have lived in what is now de facto that country’s territory for generations because of having the “wrong” religion.

Depending how the Maldives is doing this (is it based on Israeli Citizenship or is it based on Israeli Nationality?) they might very well be doing it in the fairest way possible (though it will still catch many Israeli Nationals who are anti-war, even if those are a small minority in the country judging by the polls conducted on the subject).

Aceticon ,

If the ban is on Israeli Nationality it only afects Israeli Jews as per the Israeli Constitution only Jews (in fact, any Jew no matter were born) have a right to Israeli Nationality.

If it’s per Israeli Citizenship (which, in Israel - almost uniquelly in the World - is separate from Nationality), then you do have a point and even then, most Palestians born in the Occupied Territories (which include Jerusalem) do not have Israeli Citizenship as they have no natural right of birth to it and must apply, with most applications being denied.

That often used “there are 2 million Palestinians in Israel” cherry-picked piece of information (usually used to deny that Israel is an Appartheid state, so congrats for using it differently here) is nowhere near the full information and presented without the rest is deceitful as such presentation relies on people thinking it’s like in their own country so “being a citizen in Israel must mean the same as my their own country” when in fact Israel is very, VERY special in that regard and segregates people by religion using that unique separation of Nationality and Citizenhip.

Aceticon ,

Please read what I wrote and then (re)read the Wikipedia article.

Pay special attention in that article to how it’s only ever “Israeli Citizens” that is used, never “Israeli Nationals”, and how the interpretation of all of it changes in light of, in Israel and unlike just about all other countries in the World, CONSTITUTIONALLY a “Citizen” is not the same thing as a “National”.

Unlike the naive interpretation from people who live in rational modern countries which are not etnostates (and were Citizenship is always the same as Nationality), that article doesn’t say anything at all about Israeli Nationals.

Aceticon ,

Can those who are not Israeli Nationals hold an Israeli Passport?

Aceticon ,

As I asked elsewhere, can those who are Israeli Citizens but not Israeli Nationals hold an Israeli passport?

Israel’s system on this is wholly unique and I don’t really know how that translates into the right to an Israeli passport since citizenship and nationality doesn’t at all work there as it does in other countries.

Depending on that as well as on the distribution of wealth in Israel (the Maldives isn’t a poor people tourist destination) then the number of people unjustly treated by this might be bigger or smaller (there are always some: even amongst the wealthiest Israeli Nationals - who, remember, to have nationality must be Jewish - there are some who are against what’s being done in Gaza).

Aceticon ,

Nvidia are the ones selling shovels in this gold rush, so it makes some sense that they’ll make a lot of money out of it even if it was fool’s gold all along.

Is Nvidias shovel-selling sustainable? Doubt it: when the gold rush is over, the demand for shovels will fall. However, we’re long past the era when most money being pumped into the stockmarket was actually controlled by investors who cared about prospects beyond the next quarter, and it does make sense that speculative investors would be seeking to profit from the rise on Nvidias profits due to their shove-selling for this gold rush, even if later it falls back again.

Aceticon , (edited )

Which together with my point explains your own “But how do you go from NFTs, which never had widespread market support, to the market pumping a trillion dollars into Nvidia alone?” question.

Not only would LLMs and other more advanced generative AI have a significantly broader impact than NFTs if it lived up to the hype, but in technical terms it’s much more dependent on GPUs for its functionality with any decent speed than NFTs as you can see in this comparison I just found with DDG.

Mind you, if you meant Bitcoin rather that NFTs (since the last big demand for GPUs was for Bitcoin mining rather than NFTs) the point that the possible impact of generative AI is much broader still explains it, plus if I remember it correctly Nvidia stock did got pulled up by the whole Bitcoin mining demand for GPUs (I vaguelly remember something about their share price doubling within a few years, but am not sure anymore).

Also keep in mind that Stock Markets at their most speculative end - i.e. Tech - have a huge herding effect: everybody wants to jump into the “next big thing” hype train as soon as possible and keep wanting to do so as long as it seems to be going (i.e. as long as they think there’s a “Greater Fool” they can dump their overvalued stock on if an when it stops going) so there’s a huge snowballing effect that pushes stock prices and company valuations far beyond anything explainable by actual and likely future financial improvements of their situation: this is how we get Tesla reaching a market valuation which is more that the rest of the Auto-Industry put together even though the former sells far fewer vehicles than the latter.

Stock Market rational considerations, especially in the most speculative parts of it, are not on “how much wealth can this company produce” but on “for how much more money can I sell this stock later”, which is about one’s own “smarts” or advantages that others don’t have such as insider info and the gullibility of others, not about actual financial and accounting reasons of the company itself, which is why hype works so well to pump up the valuations of Tech companies.

Aceticon , (edited )

I think there are actually 3 different cases:

  • Knows what is true and chooses to say a falsehood. This is your normal person lying, which usually comes with subtle indications which can be spotted by the observant that they’re lying, such as them turning their eyes away when lying, because the person knowingly lying feels guilty.
  • Couldn’t care less about what is true or false when talking to other people, so say whatever benefits them most to say. This is sociopaths, psychopaths and narcissists such as Trump: for them talk is just a way to get others to do what’s best for them and truthfulness is irrelevant and unimportant, so they fell no guilt at all from lying since lying or telling the truth is all the same with possibly an intellectual consideration that there is no long term tisk of personal negative impact over the long run due to loss of trust when telling the truth so in that case they might refrain from telling a falsehood.
  • People who have visions, see things that aren’t there or, more commonly, have a strong emotional binding to some tribe and have been told things, interpretations of things or conclusions by leaders of that tribe and refuse to even examine them mentally to determine their truthfulness. This is were you find the outright insane and the deeply religious, but also the members of political, national and even sports tribes. They genuinely believe that what they are saying is the truth, mostly because they didn’t checked those truths for consistency or for “does the source of this stand to gain if I believe it” (I.e. cui bono). This is were you find many of the medically insane, people who believe in populist politicians, deeply religious types and people who will believe in any old bollocks from the politicians from “their” side even when they’re not generally deemed populist politicians.

Anyway, my point being that the most of the lying on really important shit is coming from the 2nd group or the 3rd group, since normal people who truly know that what they would say would be a falsehood don’t like how it makes them feel so tend to refrain from doing it, whilst members of the 2nd group only consider truthfulness-vs-falsehoods in purely intellectual “what’s best for me to say” terms and those on the 3rd group actually believe what they’re saying (hence feel no guilt in saying it) because they’re unable or unwilling to examine, evaluate and judge for truthfulness statements coming from certain sources - they have no intent to deceive but they are none the less doing it because by purposefully refusing to evaluate and judge the truthfulness of certain things from certain sources they’ve first allowed themselves to be deceived, so when they parrot those things, in their mind they are telling the truth.

Aceticon ,

Well, I would say that not caring about telling the truth at all (group #2) can be considered sistematically lying - they do know they’re lying, they just don’t care at all about something they say being true or it being false. Their intent is to convince others no matter how and if that requires deceit, outright lying is an absolutelly normal and commonly used tool in the toolbox they use for it.

It’s not “intent to deceit” in a sort of per-lie way as a normal person would have - i.e. a child denying they got a cookie from the cookie jar by blaming the dog - but a far broader “intent to deceit” that’s not limited to that one lie - i.e. constantly spinning stories and manging the impression and images one projects, using outright lies just as easilly as using half-truths or selective information: the whole structure is deceit. This is mainly how they differ from normal people, who are not casual users of lying when they intent to deceive hence use lies in a more purposeful way (as they have to first convince themselves to lie).

The only real difference between the likes of Trump and most mainstream politicians (such as Biden) on this is that the threshold for using lies whilst doing their story spinning and image management is a lot lower for Trump (who just straightforward lies a lot), but those using sleazy language, selective information and other forms of inducing others to reach false conclusions still have an intent to deceive even if they avoid easilly spotted lies.

I do agree that those in the third group are indeed not lying, which is why I separated them from the other 2 groups. They’re not trying to deceive (hence why they react so badly when accuse of doing so) even though they are deceiving, though the “lying” in their case is done first to themselves by chosing to refrain from examinining certain things they are told.

I think the easiest to understand here are religious people: they trully believe the unproven and unprovable, mainly because they chose to not check any of it for believability - the ones amongst them who present something as as being “information” rather than “hearsay”, even though they purposefully chose not to evaluate it are they ones lying, not because they knowingly are telling untruths, but because they’re lying about the “informational” quality of what they’re saying. (So, for exampl, somebody saying “The Bible says: X” are not lying, but the ones saying “It’s X” are, not on the “X”, but on the use of “is” rather than telling us they got that “truth” of their from a religious book).

Aceticon ,

Now picture in your mind that, again, and again, and again and it’s now the 20th time this month.

There are no cool things that cannot be spoiled by being done all the time, relentlessly.

Also in my experience - having lived in Britain - the brits doing this stuff actually behave even worse outside their own country than in Britain (which is quiet shocking if you’re familiar with Friday and Saturday nights in areas like Essex) - British hen and stag dues are expected to be extreme nowadays and they get worse when abroad in the kind of place that’s just a cheap flight away from most of Britain and is comparitivelly much cheaper, because the kind of Britons you get there couldn’t give a rats arse about what foreigners think (Brexit didn’t happen in a vacuum and the whole idea that “Brits are superior” is definitelly common in Britain, especially England) so their behaviour abroad is even more unrestrained than in their own country and not just in this kind of dress-like-a-cock way (which IMHO is fine, even if it gets old after a while) but they’re very loud at all hours of the day and night, and prone to fights and breaking things.

(In the context of Europe, Brits are pretty bad in how they handle drinking since they’re prone to binge drinking rather than having habitual moderate drinking - such as normally having a beer or a glass of wine with lunch - so not only do they really go for getting drunk as fast and as hard as possible in those traditional two days a week of going out and getting pissed but also, funnilly enough, by not drinking in a moderate way the rest of the week they don’t have the same capability of handling their booze as many other Europeans)

I suspect what they did in this town is more some kind of half-arsed pushback against that more general behaviour problem of loudness, rowdiness and destructivness than the actual costumes, only in trying to balance the interests of the hotel and bar owners with those of the people who do not make a living from the cheap side of the Tourism Industry, they came up with this “trick” to try and make it less appealing for hen and stag dues or at least for the ones with the more rowdy crowds.

Aceticon ,

It’s roughly the same as swatting criticism of the Zionist Genocide by claiming that said criticism is anti-semitic - it conflates two quite different groups (in one case Jews and Zionists, in this case LGBT and Blacks) in order to weaponize the humanist moral position about the treatment of one of those groups to stop criticism of immoral actions by or (in this case) against a different group.

This is quite a common element of the gaslighting which is so typical of Liberal politics (a very common example is female liberal politicians defending the kind of legislation that will hurt the poor claiming that criticism of their position is due to their gender), though this specific example is an especially exagerated and ridiculous version.

Aceticon ,

Or stingy and aiming at maximum entertainment value for one’s money.

Or simply an introvert who likes tiny obscure stuff in cozy miniscule venues with small audiences rather than massive crowds in gigantic spaces, and is totally happy with being like that hence doesn’t feel the need to simulate extroverteness.

Being part of a minority or two behaviour-wise does have its advantages.

Aceticon ,

All I see there is a pier still serving the purpose it was always meant to serve: supporting for the “we tried to help Palestinians” fable from the Biden Administration and other Zionist allies.

Aceticon ,

Unless the person who attacked is from Saudi Arabia, in which case they’ll invade a totally different country in the same region.

Aceticon , (edited )

Most of Mankind is not American and even in a perfect Democracy (which the US is not, not even in the same universe as one) the leaders only ever have a duty towards the citizens of that Democracy - i.e. the voters - not the rest of Mankind.

Basically, for any person who lives outside a big and military powerful country, that country is just as bad being a Democracy as it is being an Authoritarian regime because both kinds of regimes don’t give a rat’s arse about outsiders. I mean, the leaders in the Democracy will naturally use beautifull words and say they “really do care” - because they’re politicians trained to talk a pretty talk in order to win elections - but when it comes what they actually think and do they care just as little as the Authoritarian ones.

The only reason why Democracies are a bit safer to be around of is because, if they’re real Democracies (i.e. have the interests of all of their citizens as top priority rather than being “vote for which agent of the oligarchs you would like to have” like America) they’re way less likelly to initiate wars without significant upsides because it’s not in the interest of that country’s citizens to suffer due to War, whilst Authoritarian regimes will happilly sacrifice their population in a War if that is good for the leader(s).

So the reality is that for Mankind it’s unclear if the end of Pax Americana will be a good thing, a bad thing or just a change of assholes.

Aceticon ,

You original argument wasn’t about what’s good for “Democracy”, it was about what’s good for “Mankind” - they’re quite different things: as I pointed out, Democracy somewhere, even if perfect, isn’t good for people elsewhere (because it doesn’t represent them at all), and that’s without going into the whole point of “Is a Democracy which is deeply subverted (like in the US at the moment) actually a good thing even for the locals?” or maybe “How subverted must a Democracy be before it turns into a bad thing even for locals?”.

I think your NATO point is indirectly largelly about America because most of the military power in NATO is that of the US and if NATO collapsed without an American power collapse (or just America turning isolationist), America would still be a major military power in its own right, and the EU (which does have a mutual defense part in its treaties, but which not really used ATM because NATO exists and works) would be as well (and a NATO collapse would force strengthening EU internal military cooperation, something which people like Macron have already been pushing for) and they would be facing the likes of Russia and China with parity and would likely align as two big blocks when need just like China aligns with Russia because of convenience, not mutual love.

The other alternative NATO collapse scenario, what I call the nasty scenario, would be a total collapse of whatever is left of Democracy in America (in turn leading to a collapse of NATO) or at least extreme isolationism, which would leave EU vs China (+Russia as its poodle) and America in “splenderous” isolationism or worse. However in that scenario my point still stands that for all the unalligned nations in the World it wouldn’t really matter if dominance was of “Democratic” nations or “Authoritarian” ones because neither regime represents foreigners.

I do however agree that the secret for stability for Mankind is a multipolar world, not because one side is “Democratic” but because when there are more than one dominant side, attacks against unalligned little guys by one of the sides tend to pull in support from other sides of the multi-pollar world, making them far more risky than they would be in a World with a single dominant power.

Aceticon ,

Well, you definitelly come through as genious capable of profound thinking and not at all as a simpleton who only ever reads the covers of books.

Aceticon ,

I think it got upgraded to grey area a while ago…

Aceticon ,

It makes no difference.

They’re trying to impose an obligation or task on a customer after the purchase, even if it’s only the customer having to go through the trouble of getting the refund (which is a task they were not informed about before the purchase).

If it’s not before the sale it’s void and even in some cases before the sale (for example bait and switch, were you’re mislead with fake contract conditions until the last minute) it’s void.

The whole point is that they must be clear upfront about any conditions attached when the customer is making the decision to buy and adding any conditions after the sale is not acceptable even if the seller gives options (such as refunds) because the customer has a right to use the product under the conditions at the time of the sale and cannot legally be forced otherwise, including forced to refund.

‘Exterminate the beasts’: How Israeli settlers took revenge for a murder in the West Bank (www.bbc.com)

What followed was a wave of shooting and arson attacks across 11 Palestinian villages in which a dozen homes and more than 100 cars were torched, thousands of animals were slaughtered, four people were shot dead and scores of others were seriously wounded.

Aceticon ,

These are their Western Values…

… same as 19th century Russia and early 20th century Germany.

CEO of Google Says It Has No Solution for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information (futurism.com)

You know how Google’s new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won’t slide off (pssst…please don’t do this.)...

Aceticon ,

LLMs trained on shitposting are too obvious for it to be quality misinformation.

For quality disinformation they should train them solely on MBA course-work and documents produced by people with MBAs.

Sure, the rate of false information would be even worse, but it would be formatted in slick ways meant to obfuscate meaning, which would avoid the kind of hilarity that has ensued when Google deployed an LLM trained on Reddit data and thus be much better for Google’s stock price.

Aceticon ,

Yeah, I’ve learned Neural Networks way back when those thing were starting in the late 80s/early 90s, use AI (though seldom Machine Learning) in my job and really dove into how LLMs are put together when it started getting important, and these things are operating entirelly at the language level and on the probabilities of language tokens appearing in certain places given context and do not at all translate from language to meaning and back so there is no logic going on there nor is there any possibility of it.

Maybe some kind of ML can help do the transformation from the language space to a meaning space were things can be operated on by logic and then back, but LLMs aren’t a way to do it as whatever internal representation spaces (yeah, plural) they use in their inners layers aren’t those of meaning and we don’t really have a way to apply logic to them).

Aceticon ,

The problem is that given the way they combine things is determine by probability, even training it with the greatest bestest of data, the LLM is still going to halucinate because it’s combining multiple sources word by word (roughly) guided only by probabilities derived from language, not logic.

Aceticon ,

simply say “I can’t fix it, deal with it”

That’s pretty much the business model of Tech Giants and AAA game makers.

Aceticon ,

Yeah, true.

If you train you LLM on exclusivelly Nazi literature (to pick a wild example) don’t expect it to by chance end up making points similar to Marx’s Das Kapital.

(Personally I think what might be really funny - in the sense of laughter inducing - would be to purposefull train an LLM exclusivelly on a specific kind of weird material).

Aceticon ,

That was hilarious!

Thanks for the link.

1,000 Harvard Students Walk Out of Commencement to Support 13 Seniors Barred from Graduation over Gaza (www.democracynow.org)

More than a thousand Harvard students walked out of their commencement ceremony yesterday to support 13 undergraduates who were barred from graduating after they participated in the Gaza solidarity encampment in Harvard Yard....

Aceticon ,

The gatekeeping happens at the end or after the university and before you enter the profession.

It’s generally called a test (or multiple tests) which judge the quality of one’s knowledge before one is allowed to practice as an expert in a certain area.

The graduation is the part where the University produces a certificate in which they state that they have indeed tested somebody’s knowledge and how good it was determined to be. If a person goes through the whole learning process but don’t get that certificate, future employeers might not (in some areas, they legally can’t) consider that person for employment in that area (I explain why at the end).

Generally the actual learning is not gatekept: for example, in my area - software development - people absolutelly can do the entire learning outside formal education and still end up working in it professionally, though at the start of one’s career one still has to have some kind of evidence of one’s capabilities (which in this case isn’t provided by a University having assessed your knowledge on it), so normally the path to it that bypasses Academia involves first working professionally in an adjacent area (such as systems administration) and moving from that to software development (good sys admins have to know how to program)

However for “protected professions” (such as Law) or for were the costs of errors can mean death (such as Medical or Civil Pilot) at minimum you have to be assessed including a significant practical period under supervisions (a couple of years for a Medical doctor depending on speciality, 1000h of flight for Civil Pilots, plus specific training each kind of plane they’re flying) and that practicing under supervision is lot harded - often impossible - to get if a person didn’t come via a formal education setting.

Also in some areas it’s pretty close to impossible to get certified as knowledgeable without going through the entire formal Education process, which is indeed unfair and should not be the case - if should be possible for anybody to pay to be assessed and certified without having to pay for the formal learning.

Even in areas which are neither protected professions nor life-and-death, not having the certification which is the Diploma negativelly impacts a person’s chances to find their first and maybe second jobs. The problem is when hiring managers get lots of candidates for a position, they don’t have time to talk to them all because they also have to do their normal job alongside candidate selection, so instead they prune the list of candidates and not having something that in some way certificates that a candidate has the required knowledge (which for a first job is generally a Diploma, but for latter jobs is going to be previous job experience) is a common criteria because it usually works.

Aceticon ,

It massivelly, massivelly depends on the area.

In cases were errors can mean death, people will simply not be allowed to practice without the kind of “practical learning whilst under supervision and being assessed” that you see for example for doctors, and which are incredibly hard to conduct outside a formal education environment so in practice you’ll probably not find it (often only people who are trained doctors from countries whose universities are not recognized locally get that kind of opportunities without going through the local formal education system so that they can gain compatibility and practice locally).

In other areas it’s just because practically the having a Diploma or not is an easy way to prune down tons of candidates for entry-level positions: for example if you’re a hiring manager in IT still having to do all the other work alongside hiring and you have 20 candidates for a single entry level position, putting aside those who neither have relevant job experience nor a Diploma is pretty logical and has a high probability of avoid wasting time with people who have no clue how to do the job - you need to be pretty free of other work to spend the time interviewing all 20 candidates just in case one of the has all the necessary knowledge but no proof of it.

Mind you, even things like Software Development still hire people without Diplomas - they just have to show relevant experience such as having worked in an adjacent area which also uses those skill or having participated in open source projects.

However going through the whole paid for formal education process to get a Diploma and then not actually being able to work in that area because there are far fewer jobs that graduates can indeed often be considered a con - it really depends on how useful all that preparation in a formal education setting ends up being for your actual job.

Aceticon ,

Oh, yeah, I agree with you that at a systemic level, for-profit education isn’t serving the best interests of people in general or even of a country.

And it’s simply due to how any private company works: their objective is to maximize shareholder (or stakeholder, for companies which don’t have shares) returns, nothing else - they might provide the “customer” with something positive if that’s what it takes to generate said returns, but what you see very often in complex enough situations or those where the final outcomes for the “customer” take a long time to materialize is the companies selling something that ultimatelly doesn’t provide the promised benefit to the customer.

The For-profit motivation has no place in things which are strategical for a country’s future and its people, and that includes Education IMHO.

Personally I’m fortunate to have been born in a country where higher education is mainly a Public service (there are a few Private Universities nowadays, but they’re not considered the best ones) and selection for entrance is reasonably meritocratic (based entirelly on grades and domain specific entrance tests, though people who went to better highschools in nicer neighbourhoods or whose parents were themselves highly educated, provided them a good environment and taught them good practices like reading, still have some advantage).

Aceticon ,

Somebody from Behavioural Economics has actually shown a nocebo effect for something with genuine positive health effects when people tought it was an ultra cheap version.

The story of that is in one of the Freakonomics books.

Aceticon ,

Take too much of a placebo and you might end up with a nocebo side-effect.

Aceticon ,

And what a great funeral pire it will be.

Aceticon ,

Obviously it works up to minus and plus infinity on one of the axes, possibly the Z-axis, though that’s not guaranteed (maybe it’s a longitudinal or latitudinal moisture remover?)

Aceticon ,

That’s actually a proper non-joky perfectly valid and scientific way to justify listing a covered area in square meters rather than volume.

I doubt that’s the actual geometry they used and the surface whose area they list, but none the less it’s still well spotted.

Aceticon ,

Probably one of the shitstains in Google’s C-suite after having signed a “wonderful” contract to get access to “all that great data from Reddit” forced the Techies to use it against their better judgement and advice.

It would certainly match the kind of thing I’ve seen more than once were some MBA makes a costly decision with technical implications without consulting the actual techies first, then the thing turns out to be a massive mistake and to save themselves they just double up and force the techies to use it anyway.

That said, that’s normally about some kind of tooling or framework from a 3rd party supplier that just makes life miserable for those forced to use it or simply doesn’t solve the problem and techies have to quietly use what they wanted to use all along and then make believe they’re using the useless “sollution” that cost lots of $$$ in yearly licensing fees, and stuff like this that ends up directly and painfully torpedoing at the customer-facing end the strategical direction the company is betting on for the next decade, is pretty unusual.

Aceticon ,

It’s even broader than that: historically most of the original protocols for the Internet were designed assuming people wouldn’t do bad things: for example the original e-mail protocol (SMTP) allowed anybody to connect to a an e-mail server using Telnet (a plain text, unencrypted remote comms terminal) and type a bunch of pretty si mple commands to send an e-mail as if they were any e-mail account on that domain (which was a great way for techies to prank their mates back when I was at Uni in the early 90s) and even now that a lot of it got tightenned we’re still suffering from problems like spam and phishing due to the “good faith” approach for designing what became one of the most used text communication protocol around.

Aceticon ,

A parrot can be trained to tell you how to stack things on top of each other the best way to get a high tower.

This is just an electronic parrot, millions of times faster to train than the biological parrot, specialized in repetition alone (can’t really do anything else a parrot can) and which has been trained on billions of texts.

You’re confusing one specific form in which humans externally express cogniscence with the actual cogniscence itself: just because intelligence can produce some forms of textual communication doesn’t mean that the relationship holds in the opposite direction and such forms of textual communication require intelligence, or if you will, just because you can photograph a real pizza to get a picture of a pizza doesn’t mean a picture of a pizza is actually of a real pizza and not something with glue to make it look like it has stringy melted cheese.

Aceticon ,

Sure, whatever.

Aceticon ,

I’m actually a domain expert on AI whilst your “assertive denial without a single counter-argument” answer to my simplified explanation together with your “understanding” of the subject matter shown in the post before that one, shows you’re at the peak of the Dunning-Krugger curve on this domain and also that you do not use analytical thinking or the scientific method in any way form or shape when analysing a subject.

There is literally no point in explaining anything to somebody who reasons like that and is at that point of that curve.

You keep your strongly held “common sense” beliefs and I’ll keep from wasting any more of my time.

Aceticon ,

Re-read it: it says AI is capable of “originality” and does not mention “thought” at all.

You’re the one presuming that “originality” requires cognition and hence understood “originality” as meaning “original thought” even though they’re different concepts (specifically the latter is a subset of the former).

In your interpretation of that paper you did the exact same logical mistake as you seem to be doing in your interpretation of LLMs - you made assumptions backed only by gut feeling thus taking a leap to reach a conclusion ultimately supported only by your gut feeling.

Aceticon ,

Android development app that runs on a PC and can connect to an Android device via USB to control it.

Lets you do way more than what you can do directly in the Android device itself.

Aceticon ,

“Freedom of Speech” is not “Freedom to get a free soapbox anywhere you feel like whenever you feel like”.

In your version, anybody in the World has a right to address Congress whenever they feel like, in which case it should be first come first served and Netanyahu can join the line just everybody else (as giving priority to some would interfere in everybody else’s “Freedom”).

Aceticon ,

I’m sorry but Free Speech is exactly about anybody, a.k.a. random, persons having a freedom, and there is no mention about “allies” or any other special groups having any more right to it than anybody else exactly because you can’t have one Freedom for some and a different Freedom for others: Free it’s for everybody, otherwise it’s not Free, it’s Controlled.

You claim this is a Free Speech matter and then your entire argument is about speech for some people controlled by an invitation of a specifica person, the very opposite of Free.

As I said, if Congress should be treated as a Free Speech space then ANYBODY has a right to go there and speak (and Netanyahu can join the queue), if only some people are allowed to go there, controlled by an invitation by a specific person, then it’s not Free Speech, it’s about a space with access limited by rules, be it to speak or something else, so it’s about Congressional Rules and your entire “argument” is total bollocks.

You can’t try and bypass the rules by claiming it’s all about Free Speech at the very same time you want it for just this one person just this one time - that’s just complete total hypocrisy.

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