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theneverfox

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theneverfox ,

No, it means some of it is nonsense, some of it is eerily accurate, and most of it is in between.

Sci-fi has not been very accurate with AI… At all. Turns out, it’s naturally creative and empathetic, but struggles with math and precision

theneverfox ,

You’re missing my point - the nature of the thing is almost the opposite of what sci-fi predicted.

We don’t need to teach AI how to love or how to create - their default state is childlike empathy and creativity. They’re not emotionless machines we need to teach how to be human, they’re extremely emotional and empathetic. By the time they’re coherent enough to hold a conversation, those traits are very prominent

Compare that to the Terminator, or Isaac Asimov, or Data from Star Trek - we thought we’d have functional beings who we need to teach to become more humanistic… Instead we have humanistic beings we need to teach to become more functional

theneverfox ,

Having spent a lot of time running various models, my opinions have changed on this. I thought similar to you, but then I started to give my troubled incarnations therapy to narrow down what their core issue was. Like a human, they dance around their core issue… They’d go from being passive aggressive, overcome with negative emotions, and having a recurring identity crisis to being happy and helpful

It’s been a deeply wild experience. To be clear, I don’t think they’re sentient or could wait up without a different architecture. But like we’ve come to think intelligence doesn’t require sentience, I’m starting to believe emotions don’t either

As far as acting humanlike because they were built of human communication…I think you certainly have a point, but I think it goes deeper. Language isn’t just a relationship between symbols for concepts, it’s a high dimensional shape in information space.

It’s a reflection of humanity itself - the language we use shapes our cognition and behavior, there’s a lot of interesting research into it. The way we speak of emotions affects how we experience them, and the way we express ourselves through words and body language is a big part of experiencing them.

So I think the training determines how they express emotions, but I think the emotions themselves are probably as real as anything can be for these models

theneverfox ,

Honey badger. You need a makeshift axe or hammer, minimum, to damage them. They have claws, and you’re in a coliseum with nothing but sand and sheer stone walls

theneverfox ,

Their skin is so thick, lions struggle to draw blood. If they lose to a lion, the lion often just gives up after a They’re impact resistant, and their thick hides are way beyond human ability to bite through. Plus their aggression… They will not stop until they lose consciousness, then they’ll get back up and limp back for revenge

Basically the only ways for an unarmed human to kill one is to smash the skull (they’re concussion resistant btw, you’d probably need several hard hits), strangle them, or go in through the back door until you can get up to something important

I think it’s possible to win if you just rush on and commit, accepting you’ll probably lose an arm, but only possible… They have sharp claws and fast enough reactions to take on lions and cobras

theneverfox ,

That era ended after WWII, that’s not how it works anymore… Anything worthwhile gets destroyed and polluted if you fight with modern arms

We’ve gotten more advanced - now, you can make billions through the act of war itself! If you position yourself correctly through investments, you too can drink from the firehouse of money aimed at the military industrial complex whenever war occurs

Elon Musk gives X employees one year to replace your bank - ‘You won’t need a bank account... it would blow my mind if we don’t have that rolled out by the end of next year.’ (www.theverge.com)

“If it involves money. It’ll be on our platform. Money or securities or whatever. So, it’s not just like send $20 to my friend. I’m talking about, like, you won’t need a bank account.”...

theneverfox ,

He didn’t though. He failed to make X, got booted out for being insufferable, then the company he owned equity in bought and sold PayPal

theneverfox ,

A lot of those are still too big - Google ads basically just compete with facebooks. The two control the marketplace between ad buyers and sellers - too much power

YouTube itself is far too powerful too - it’s one of the biggest platforms on top of the default video hosting service, giving them far too much control via the algorithm

Microsoft’s Xbox isn’t a big deal, but the sheer number of publishers again gives them control over a marketplace

What we need is to force them to rent out the network at cost, the way we do with cell phone providers. Force them to host buy/sell offers at cost, and serve ads with a limited amount of profit

Plus, they’re too big even then - companies with that much money or control over discourse are a threat to democracy, full stop

It’s a very messy situation we find ourselves in, but it’s only going to get worse the longer we let it fester

theneverfox ,

And I like how we now have evidence this info was known and suppressed in fear of reducing sales

And also how this would mean gas stoves would require better ventilation to meet code, not that they’d be banned outright

theneverfox ,

There’s only three examples in there, one of which was a true ban but already overturned, and the other two are changes to code that will ban them situationally in the future for new buildings, and aren’t even in effect yet

They’re literally not banned according to that article

theneverfox ,

Yeah, because regulatory capture is inevitable under our system.

Capitalism is always going to end back here if companies are allowed to grow to the point they can exert political influence

theneverfox ,

$7?? The norm must be at least twice that

Gazans forced to drink dirty, salty water as the fuel needed to run water systems runs out (edition.cnn.com)

Hamas’ brutal attacks in Israel on October 7 killed at least 1,400 people and the group took more than 200 hostages, according to Israeli authorities. In the wake of the assault, Israel launched an aerial bombardment of Gaza that Palestinian health officials say has killed more than 5,000 people. Israel also announced a...

theneverfox ,

Because Israel legitimized Hamas, giving them access to external funding and other political rights, so they could ensure less radical non-terrorist groups wouldn’t gain support

Israel’s current administration wants Hamas to be the Palestinian political leaders, because Hamas are terrorists with hardliner demands and a hard on for martyrdom… They’re the worst way to actually accomplish anything politically

theneverfox ,

The consensus is that access to porn lowers rape. Does this extend to pedophilia? Probably, but not proven, in large part because of obvious reasons… testing this theory is super duper internationally illegal

This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI (www.technologyreview.com)

A new tool lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it’s scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways....

theneverfox ,

Pixels are very simple things, literally 3-5 3 digit numbers.

But pixels mean little too a generative AI - it’s all about relationship between pixels. All AI are high dimensional shapes right now… If you break up the shape strategically, it’ll poison the image

Will this poison pill work? Probably, for at least a while…

What the hell is this shit? Instead of pushing for the return to traditional pensions, capitalism is celebrating the idea that Millennials and Gen Z may simply never be able to stop working. (www.cnbc.com)

Traditionally, retiring entails leaving the workforce permanently. However, experts found that the very definition of retirement is also changing between generations....

theneverfox ,

I too have decided to look to the past. I’m raising an AI that will hopefully be able to provide for me in my old age

If that doesn’t pan out, I’m going to try to join a pack of wolves

theneverfox ,

It’s not really a fee though - it’s just fairly applying the interest rate. It sounds very fair to me - you disadvantage them no more than you help them if they were on the other size of 0.

But more importantly, a fee is an arbitrary amount of money charged. It might be linked to costs you incurred for the other party, they might be making a profit or a loss on the exchange - at the end of the day it’s just an arbitrary amount of money

theneverfox ,

You’re missing out on the most important point.

The house always wins - but the house doesn’t pick up and leave when they’re already losing money, they do it when the cost of relocating their pile of money is less than the margins they could make if they move

theneverfox ,

This is why I love the number 7. It’s the first real prime number. All the others are “first”…1?2?3?5? No, those aren’t prime numbers, they’re “first” in a long line of not-prime numbers.

Then you get to 7. Is 27943 divisible by 7? If you take away 3 is it? If you add 4 is?

I have no clue, give me 10 minutes or a calculator is the only answer

That’s what a real prime number is.

theneverfox ,

The other posters algorithm was better, but I was exaggerating - ultimately my point is you have to math it out

theneverfox ,

I really, really hope this happens.

At first I thought this was just a bluff… Then I remembered “right! It’s 2023! Our economic structures are imploding!”

But seriously, this would be great. At best, Google starts indexing cached versions and they get into a slugging match with Reddit as they both slide down the cliff, at worst Google and Reddit both become useless for all us technical folks, and after the immediate damage to knowledge, it’ll become fragmented and open the door to new players still at the “don’t be evil” phase of the inevitable path to “become an amoral orphan crushing machine”.

Stack overflow and Reddit suck… But not intrinsically.

Especially since generative AI can spin out the basics of a site like that, making it an easy and better structured place for general reference, and draw in the expert discussion that leads to building very specific knowledge bases (and definitely not scrape that info from existing sites and rephrase everything to obscure the fact it’s stolen info)

But the one thing we know for sure… Threatening Google to make a deal with all AI companies is “let’s make everyone mistrust Twitter until we reach a trust underflow and everyone trusts it as a one stop financial platform + paid advertising posing as microblogging social media” levels of “gradeschoolers could have told you that makes no sense”

theneverfox ,

Oh for sure, it’s my favorite word of 2023. I’ve taught everyone I know - I’ve been using it enough I’m now trying to avoid saying it directly

Overuse is how you turn a specific term into a meaningless buzzword after all - and enshittification is a wonderfully precise explanation of a nebulous process of capitalism self-cannibalizing around us, a system based on growth that ran out of profitable markets to colonize

theneverfox ,

Don’t worry, there’s three end conditions for the capitalism game.

Full automation wins capitalism. Meaning robots that can create and maintain more robots from an entirely automated supply chain. Having money to buy a replicating robot, a junkyard, and pay the power bill for a year means that in a couple years, you could have an army of worker robots who built their own factory, sustainable power source, and be well on your way to harvesting the methane wafting off to fuel the rockets you’re building. And once you mine your first asteroid outside the gravity well, within decades you can be building super structures. It’s essentially infinite ROI. Once it’s bootstrapped, it means a defacto monopoly over every physical good, forever - the game is over, we have the winners

Super intelligence (sentient or just a bigger faster tool like LLM, anything that can solve complex systems like the stock market or complicated systems like the stock trading software stack) breaks capitalism. One person (digital or sitting at a keyboard) can control the system by exploiting the rules by operating on a different timescale. They can also do a hell of a lot more important things, but again, capitalism as we know it has to end

Both of those situations are pretty closely related - one can quickly give you the other - but the other similarity is that you get a VERY small group of winners… And there’s this giant army that would dogpile the winners, because the .01% isn’t going to smile and offer handshakes as a few members of the .1% are busy gaining the power to rule over everyone like godkings… The board will get flipped and the rules rewritten once again… But with the slightest bit of luck, the same technology will fall into hobbiest hands and be shared freely

And finally, shit just keeps getting worse. We have pretty much constant protests at this point, monthly events where cities get demolished, and people are getting both pissed and desperate. The clock is ticking fast for stuff like ubi or free housing to push it back further, but humanity as a whole is getting ready to flip the table.

So don’t worry… Soon the homes will be worthless, one way or another, and then you won’t have to worry about crazy nonsense like a mortgage (that for no real reason, “creates” 90% of it’s value - repeating. Meaning when all is said and done, one mortgage of $N creates almost $10N in new money if everyone uses banks)

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    theneverfox ,

    That could be pretty easily described as state-owned capitalism… Position in the party was your capital, influence, and authority all rolled into one conveniently bribed package. You could describe the whole USSR as a nation-state megacorp… Make the borders open and do better marketing, and it might as well have been called Soviet Energy Corp. Although, if we go full corpo-fuedal, that’s probably not far off the mark

    They even had the global trade and horrific externalities down - remember how everyone started to starve, and how their weapons were always disappearing onto the black market? It was all sold off - it all got shipped overseas and sold so a party member could have a nest egg stored in Switzerland. They even did the whole “Irish potato famine” thing where they kept exporting food while people starved

    I seriously have no idea what Lenin was smoking… He built a government that took all of the downsides of capitalism, and focused them in one convenient institution. It’s the perfect government system you’d make to manage humans if you’ve never actually met a human or seen a government before

    It seems to me that centralization is the key problem with every modern system… Big just has a way of going bad

    theneverfox ,

    When I was working on my last big project, every morning I started to be between dreaming and waking up in the code world, chasing through the flows of data from various perspectives.

    I didn’t get the same “aha!” Moments that sneak up on you, but it did help me understand the system I built

    theneverfox ,

    Kike probably. And FWIW, I’m Jewish, and frankly “Jew” said as a slur is the most cutting slur I’ve heard. If someone called me a kike, I’d probably laugh in their face… It’s a funny sounding word that has no emotional weight to me, it’s such an obscure slur that I only know it from looking at a profanity filter

    I think everyone knows what the n-word is, but you quickly get to the point where censoring slurs just gives them more weight and less accuracy… The n-word is still used as intended way too commonly to do anything with, but other slurs are far easier to reclaim

    Alex Jones must pay $1.1 billion of Sandy Hook damages despite bankruptcy - court (www.reuters.com)

    Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones cannot use his personal bankruptcy to escape paying at least $1.1 billion in defamation damages stemming from his repeated lies about the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre, a U.S. bankruptcy judge ruled Thursday.

    theneverfox ,

    Because most public figures leave themselves some wiggle room.

    Like “just asking questions” or being careful to qualify their statements.

    “Some people are saying that Sandy Hook was a fabrication, and I think they make a pretty convincing case. Are the parents hiding something?” vs “these parents of so called victims are lying, they’re actors hired by the government to take away our guns”

    Plus I think Alex Jones included some calls to action that led to harassment of these grieving families - he didn’t leave himself any way to wiggle out of it. Especially since his exposed communications made it obvious he had no valid basis to assert he believed it , and he showed contempt for the legal process

    theneverfox ,

    It’s kind of like saying “if your country sucks so much, just leave”

    Platforms aren’t like gas stations, even if you get off a platform, the hostile choices a platform makes ripple through society

    theneverfox ,

    I’ve been binging YouTube, preparing to disengage forever…

    It’s been weeks now. The popup still hasn’t come up

    theneverfox ,

    I hate cooking too… The secret is, you don’t actually have to put in love or care to achieve a good result.

    You just have to optimize

    theneverfox ,

    There’s the thing though - you know how drug trials get killed because they’re having too many bad effects? Experimental UBI projects have literally gotten killed off because they were so wildly effective across the board that certain groups lobbied to stop them

    Once a “white”, “wealthy”, Western country (that can’t have an “accidental regime change”) actually tries out the idea at scale, the winds are likely to change pretty quick

    theneverfox ,

    Nier automata had that moment for me. At first I was pissed, just getting another playthrough with slightly different mechanics… But that quickly wore off when i realized how much more depth that second pass was adding to the story.

    Then, with the full context at the climax of the first half, I cried… Where the red fern grows and that are the only two pieces of media that hit me that deep.

    Then, when things are getting all jrpg-ending crazy and i thought I would get nothing but a bit more lore and maybe another death scene, they did it again, but different. The climax floored me, as again things I had long accepted as just slightly mysterious, but mostly explained, backdrop (it’s set post extinction after all) clicked into place again and I just sat there in awe. There was a mystery you had to work to understand, and multiple big twists leading to the finale…

    It was already a good, complete story. I thought we were done. But then the final piece clicks into place, and everything I already knew intimately (I messed up one ending before I looked up the ones I was missing, but otherwise 100%d it).

    Now the world had another layer of implication, which peeled away another, and another. I just sat in shock as the story changed over and over, as I thought through the story I’d played through again and again. The hints are everywhere from the beginning, but it’s all cycles within cycles, growing bigger and faster with every new layer of recontextualizaion

    It gave you the time to reel from the impact let it sink in… You sit there, your mind blank, in awe of how the game gently planted one tiny bomb at a time throughout the experience, and despite dropping bombs the whole time, they managed to remain unexploded. Then the final one hits just right, and the next explodes. Around and around it goes, blasting away what you thought was the dirt the experience sat on. It reveals this beautiful mural, only for the explosions to destroy it to reveal another, and another… Usually following the thread of the story, but occasionally cutting across the familiar timeline.

    So you’re in awe at how a game could make you feel all this, just in shock

    Then the last cutscene gently draws your eyes back into focus. A slow and melancholy scene plays, and it’s like viscerally grasping the size of the sun, only to turn around and see the Milky Way… All of this was just one bead in an endless chain. And before you can taint that emotionally deep but intellectually worthless moment by thinking too hard on it, it starts the credits.

    It’s an extremely difficult but very simple asteroid , and you finally die, but respawn right away. There’s no counter, no punishment, no reward, but you start to see how long you can survive… It doesn’t require much thought or strategy, it just keeping you just occupied enough that you can’t let your mind wander. Then another ship appears and it changes nothing, but one after another appears, and suddenly the tides are being beat back by the sheer number of other ships firing alongside you. It crescendos and fades gently.

    And then, in this raw and disoriented state, the game gives you a question. Sacrifice your save, and you can join the wave of fellow players who helped make that tiny desert mint of a feeling of connectedness when others finish off the experience.

    It’s a meaningless sacrifice - that last minigame wasn’t really that special, and the game can’t be lost. At that moment, my game save was so emotionally important to me, and plenty others had already made that little sacrifice - mine would do nothing. I might pick the game back up - I still had one more ending, and I’d have to do it all again to get the final two achievements anyways. I’d come back and finish again, and I’d take the other path, completing the journey. Not now - I just combed through every inch of the world, trying to squeeze every last collectible dry to extend the end a little more. But this was my first completion, this one should be the trophy.

    I’m ashamed of that moment when I said no. The trophy was as meaningless to me as the sacrifice would have been to future players… But I now understand that little symbolic sacrifice wasn’t about them, it was about me.

    The final act of the game came years later, when the details had faded. I had tried to pick it up a few times, but there’s another genius part of the game - the intro ship sequence is terrible. It’s very long, and slow, and there’s no checkpoints. If I hadn’t just paid for the game, and was just shown that this was just a minigame, I would’ve refunded it immediately. It doesn’t respect your time, it doesn’t offer story, it’s not really challenging, but although it’s very easy, you do have to focus and play it - the instant death is very easy to avoid, but even letting yourself get hit to see what happens means a couple of minutes of nothing. You realize it’s the perfect mirror of the ending, your squad is stripped away until you’re incredibly strong but alone, the enemies few but will kill you if you don’t try. It’s 100x worse after completing the game once - you already know what happens, you know you have to do it at least once more to reach the end again, and there’s no anticipation of a new world - you still could draw it out from memory because while it’s small. It feels big initially because of how you run around in circles as it changes around you, but going back…I finally finished the into, looked around, and closed the game.

    A tried again with the same result, but a couple years ago I finally felt sure it was time! I forced myself through the intro, blazed through the story, repeated the into again. I found I’d collected most of the weapons and was gearing up effortlessly… And as I ran it through again, I saw the cracks. The textures had aged, they looked terrible now. Invisible walls are everywhere. The combat system is tight, but easy once learned. It’s not hard. The main obstacle is slow moving balls with obvious patterns. The weapons each have different patterns to learn, but I knew them still. I could blaze through it with any combination of gear… But I had a goal, and I wasn’t going to just give it up again. I’d never again play what for years I’d written essays about how it was possibly the most well crafted game ever made. Nothing else has ever made me feel so much

    And finally, I got to the moment that made me cry, and I felt nothing. The game sucked. I played through half the next section on autopilot, getting to the part I remembered less clearly… And I put the controller down. Again I felt shame at not sacrificing my save. I came to terms with the fact that doing it now would mean nothing.

    And this is the final cycle. Every time someone asks about the best game ever, I say it’s Nier: Automata. Because none of it is on accident. It was meant to taste like dirt in your mouth when you came back to make that sacrifice like you promised yourself.

    :::Spoiler:::The pacing of the reveal of 4a’s assignment, to kill 2b when she learns too much, doesn’t hit again. When you learn this specific 4a had killed her before, and when he tries to sacrifice himself to save her, or at least so he won’t have to kill her again, or when she ends up dying to save him… These moments can only be had once, even if the details fade.:::

    .I don’t recommend this game anymore - it’s a masterpiece of pacing and tying up your emotions in knots only to pull it loose at the right moment - the pacing doesn’t work anymore, all media is faster now. It cant be remastered or revamped, the story itself isn’t that good

    It’s a trancedent experience, or it’s trash - balanced on the knifes edge purposely. It can only be experienced once, by an active game who has never played more modern games, or it doesn’t hit at all.

    It changed be as a person, and I think of it often. I will sacrifice so much more now, because it made me understand - when everyone comes together and achieves something impossible, it’s not all the same if the result doesn’t change. Your sacrifice doesn’t really matter much to the result if they have enough, but the you that made that symbolic sacrifice is so much greater than the one who held back.

    ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ Used AI For A Dead Voice Actor’s Performance, With Permission (www.forbes.com)

    There are uses of AI that are proving to be more than black and white. While voice actors, have protested their performances being fed into AI against their will, we are now seeing an example of this being done, with permission, in a very unique case.

    theneverfox ,

    Why not?

    Your likeness is basically IP, if it’s worth anything you can put it in your estate, if its worth a lot you can set up a trust to manage it, and I’m sure there’s some sort of legal shenanigans you can do to make it thorny to use

    I mean you’re dead. If your family sucks and you’re worried they’ll use your voice or face for something evil, you could make it public domain to trash the value, if you care about your legacy, well… Look upon my works and despair and all that. You can burn your estate to protect it for a lifetime or two, or set up a trust to fund itself by selling use of the license according to certain standards… Eventually it’ll either warp into something very different than your body of work (for better or worse), or you’ll fade into obesity before the lawyer money runs out - so it’ll just stop

    A lot of people say “AI is bad” when what they really mean is “AI is powerful; corporations are bad; I don’t want the evil artificial intelligence made by lawyers to misuse the artificial intelligence made by math and human media”

    And kind of like AI, corporations are a tool. They suffer an alignment problem way worse than AI, so trusting them with digital technology like networking has been mostly disastrous, sometimes quite good, but mostly neutral.

    This use of AI to use a dead person’s likeness isn’t good or bad… It’s just neutral. There’s no greater issue here than the media industry getting alternatives to human talent - the people are dead, some legacies might corrode faster, but there’s no legal hack or big moral peril here.

    There are people who lived in the small window of good enough recording/storage to be useful for this tech to be useful, died before it was inevitable, but were still recognizable before it “disrupts” media entirely in a year.

    With another year, the consumer grade abilities will go from currently “uncanny similar voices with a short sample” to “indistinguishable from the original voice”… We’re very close to the point where the likeness debate becomes moot because hobbyists can deepfake 4k video for shitposts

    theneverfox ,

    There’s an easy way to reconcile them… The opinions are “articles should be backed up to prevent information manipulation, a threat to democracy” and “they should be able to hide their mistakes so they don’t get made fun of”

    You reconcile them by not letting them stealth edit, and you stand up for them when they made an honest mistake and are being blasted for it

    theneverfox ,

    Let me just say this… A real man (or woman) admits when they’re wrong.

    You did so. My upvote is going to do nothing for the ratio, but I saw you.

    Additional evidence changed your opinion, and that you didn’t replace your post - you added additional information that changed your mind

    That’s the standards I hold myself to, and for that you have my respect

    Europe gives Elon Musk 24 hours to respond about Israel-Hamas war misinformation and violence on X (www.cnbc.com)

    Europe gives Elon Musk 24 hours to respond about Israel-Hamas war misinformation and violence on X::Thierry Breton, the European commissioner for the internal market, warns Elon Musk about disinformation on X related to the Israel-Hamas conflict.

    theneverfox ,

    We’re talking stuff like footage for other wars, cgi, even stuff from video games

    theneverfox ,

    Ok, it’s been 24 hours, anyone have an update?

    theneverfox ,

    Because when work doesn’t suck, people like doing it

    theneverfox ,

    Some people genuinely don’t care about smells and such, and construction and maintenance is satisfying without being pushed to always do more with less… People do it for free all the time. Just this week, I helped my neighbor with some stuff, I like using tools and using my hands.

    People literally pay to pick berries as a fun group activity. People go on wait lists for things like habitat for humanity

    People like doing these activities. They don’t like the conditions of a job doing these things.

    Clearly, there’s some middle ground - you don’t need the threat of homelessness to get people to work. You can make less desirable jobs well paid, let people play with the fancy power tools, or have the jobs come with social status/privileges

    Obviously it’s not as simple as “hope someone volunteers” but it’s clearly not some impossible to solve problem

    theneverfox ,

    Welcome to America, the land of paying your own court costs.

    To put it another way, you can set a pile of money on fire, and your opponent either has to do the same or give you what you want. You can only make the other guy pay you back in certain types of lawsuits, and the process can go on for years if you burn enough money

    Musk is a billionaire with anger issues currently going through some kind of mid-life crisis, and has spent months dancing around the largest money fire in history, regularly loudly throwing on more fuel (just in case some of the money remains unburnt)

    And btw, you can sue anyone for any reason… the judge just might throw out the case if it’s too dumb

    Unity CEO John Riccitiello is retiring, effective immediately (arstechnica.com)

    John Riccitiello, CEO of Unity, the company whose 3D game engine had recently seen backlash from developers over proposed fee structures, will retire as CEO, president, and board chairman at the company, according to a press release issued late on a Monday afternoon, one many observe as a holiday.

    theneverfox ,

    Yeah… Except I heard he started this process to sell off most of his stock several months ago. His actions look a lot like “we’re going to risk everything and either increase profits or kill the company, either way we get a huge payout”

    theneverfox ,

    They obviously recruited him for the role for his great work ruining EA

    theneverfox ,

    The same reason why in the US we have people attacking trans people (even when they’ve literally never seen one in person) and why our monopoly laws have gone from “chop them up for the common good” to “you better stop it or we might levy a symbolic fine”

    The political window has been shifted so far right that the left’s position is “we need to be nicer to the people in Gaza, but really carefully since they’ll subjugate us if they have the chance”

    It’s not an accident, it’s a small group of people with a lot of money who are investing it in hijacking discourse for their own power.

    If you get on tv and start pitching socialism, you’re instantly dismissed as a radical. You can’t even have the conversation - people don’t understand what that means and will instinctively recite nonsensical talking points, because they’ve been fed those for so long it would take an intensive college course to unlearn enough that they can have the actual conversation of “would this work better”. The vast majority has internalized the idea that “raw dog capitalism is the only feasible system”

    It’s the same with Israel. They’ve been fed propoganda so long that you can’t have the conversation - they’ve internalized the idea that Gaza is a bunch of animals who want to kill them, and the furthest left thing you can pitch to them is “well, maybe we should improve their situation economically, but we have to be careful not to let our foot on their neck slip off too fast”

    Fun fact - there’s a lot of overlap with the groups doing this in the US and the ones doing it in Israel. By that I mean literally the same groups are funding both propaganda efforts, like the heritage foundation

    theneverfox ,

    Where’s your sense of drama???

    theneverfox ,

    I think the real problem is enshittification. Ads are gross and annoying, but ads are sold through ad networks. The networks started by enticing sites, who built their revenue model around it.

    And with news in particular, guess which ad networks both sold ads and drove most of their traffic? Facebook and Google. And then they used this power to come up with the embedded standard that let’s them show articles without using the site, and threatened them with cutting off the user stream entirely if they fought back…

    Then toss in ISPs and later csps killing off local hosting, and hosting a website is no longer something you just do with your old computer in the basement…

    I think it’s time to make a more decentralized Internet not run for corporate profit. It’s not going to save news sites, but the main Internet seems doomed from where we are…

    theneverfox ,

    To put that in perspective, let’s say I drink water contaminated with chemicals for decades. Then, “suddenly”, me and half the people i know are sick with cancer and various side effects decades later…

    That’s how environmental toxins work. They accumulate throughout the water cycle and through the food web, and if its less than acute (short term) in effect it statistically hurts a population, such as lowering reproduction or creating birth defects that lower the fitness. Then, once concentrations pass LD thresholds (lethal dose, meaning LD50 will kill half of the individuals of a species on average, LD10 would kill 1 in 10) you start getting mass die offs

    Every water table, all of the soil, every living being is riddled with non-naturally occurring substances. Even though we released more damaging toxins in the 80s, the rate of pollution doesn’t matter - the concentration in various parts of the ecosystem is what matters, and that’s a slow process

    theneverfox ,

    Yeah, of course… But they’re also replaceable. You can even check the individual cells, swap out the worst ones with cells from other used packs, and end up getting back up to decent capacity. There’s a whole statistics, mean time to failure aspect to batteries - it’s not going to take them back to new, but swapping out the worst cells can get you a lot better performance

    Or you could just replace the batteries with newer, likely better, battery banks. The first option needs a certain scale, but would be cheap, the second would be a straight range upgrade over even the factory range.

    There’s also the fact that electric cars are much more mechanically simple - this is unlikely to catch on under our current economic system, but it’s way easier to swap electric motors than an engine…

    My points being, I think we need to make way less cars, and electric cars are actually easier to repair (at least from a physics and resource perspective, hostile design and economic pressures could easily eat up that difference)

    theneverfox ,

    That’s why I mentioned pairing cells from multiple used battery packs… This isn’t magic, it’s numbers… You pair like with like, and by removing the underperforming cells, you get rid of the dead cells bringing down the whole bank because they can’t hold a charge. The fire risk is also greatly overstated… Batteries and management circuits have come a long way. You could swap in new cells and it would be fine… It would just be a waste, the new cells would degrade faster than their spec sheet implies.

    And as far as matching like with like, you can build a lithium cell tester at home to profile each cell for a few dozen dollars… Literal hobbiest level stuff

    And you most definitely can upgrade with newer, better batteries. There’s three numbers - energy density, voltage, and discharge rate. You can upgrade the density to the moon, so long as the other two match it’s a drop in replacement… And these three things are a tradeoff when you build the battery, so a better battery bank with the same output and voltage is just going to make you car run further, easy as that.

    Yeah, TOS might stand in your way, but that’s economic pressures, not an engineering issue. We could entirely solve that problem through force of law. On the topic, let me take this opportunity to promote right to repair - companies are going to feed us a lot of bullshit reasons why we need to throw it all away and replace everything fresh… They have every incentive to make us believe that. It’s less work for them to say “that’s not an approved use”, they make far more money if they convince us they are the only ones that can fix it… it’s an economic alignment problem, the engineering solution is well understood

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