FriendOfDeSoto

joined 2 years ago
[–] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 10 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Most people who say that do so for dogmatic reasons, not because they arrived at this conclusion after careful analysis. It's the political point of small government.

These are the same people who will probably be first in line shouting for government intervention when their drinking water is full of chemical waste.

You can try to reason with folks like that but you probably won't change their mind. Just try not to shout at them.

[–] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I would think the sandwiches would be delivered before any declaration of independence.

Language isn't logical in a mathematical sense. Every language develops its own logic over time as an unspoken consensus that only after the fact gets codified as orthography and grammar.

The big mother language to most languages in Europe, Protoindoeuropean, has its origins millennia ago somewhere in Ukraine. Linguists have pieced together what this language most likely sounded like. It's a game of probabilities and good educated guesses but it's fascinating. If you're a nerd. One theory is that at the earliest time when this language was formed, most if not all verbs were what we would call today irregular, think know-knew-known or sing-sang-sung etc. Small language communities have no problem with insane and arbitrary grammar like that. You learn it with your mother's milk so to speak. Very few outsiders have to deal with it. And life just goes on.

English is a true mix of stuff. The Germanic invadors after the Romans left had to deal with the native celts. They were themselves invaded by Vikings from Scandinavia and some 300 years later by Vikings that had become French. Both brought their own languages with them and influenced English. Both invasions caused situations where adults were put in a situation of having to learn another language. What kids soak up like sponges, grownups have a harder time with. So they take shortcuts in their speech. They didn't struggle too much with sing-sang-sung because that's a typical protoindoeuropean vowel change that exists just like that in many European languages to this day in versions of this particular verb. But some of the other verbs were just too hard to remember! Let's just whack a -t or -d sound at the end and Bob's you uncle. And that's how English lost a lot of its irregular verbs. Over time this became -ed in most cases. But, as I said, we don't follow a mathematical Boolean logic here. It allowed for hangers-on, regional varieties, and new formations of irregular forms. Burnt/burned hung on, fucked/fuckt did not. The reason is the flow of history.

I would think the same so-called AI that told us to eat rocks regularly, or that thinks it's still 2024, or that "hallucinates" other stuff will make conquering our planet harder. Particularly, if these aliens are unaware of the concept of deception.

[–] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 12 points 2 days ago (1 children)

For years, when Meta launched new features for Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook, teams of reviewers evaluated possible risks: Could it violate users' privacy? Could it cause harm to minors? Could it worsen the spread of misleading or toxic content?

Until recently, what are known inside Meta as privacy and integrity reviews were conducted almost entirely by human evaluators.

Really? Humans? Maybe even qualified humans? Huh! Never would've thought that.

Set your timers. We're going to hear about a non-ethical decision made by this system in 5, 4, 3, ...

[–] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I would say this system is safe until one password - through no fault of their own - gets leaked. Worse even, two of them. If a bored hacker sees them in a stolen list, they could go to town on all other accounts. So you should advise your acquaintance to change their system. Long passwords are great but if they repeat a lot of characters they are immediately less useful. If the repeating string is known it makes brute-forcing other accounts that much easier.

The best advice is to keep unique passwords for all accounts. And by unique I mean not following a system like that. Long, random, non-sensical crap is best (but also most annoying) - for now. Once quantum computers become a thing, all this probably won't matter any more.

Edit: And always with non-SMS, non-emailed 2FA. But if those are the only options available it's better than nothing.

People who really want to communicate with each other will find a way.

I think English<>French is a language pair you could get instant translations with the help of Google. So there's a tech solution that will cause humorous misunderstands but will make do. You could hire somebody who is bilingual for the first meeting to let the parents talk behind their kids' backs.

If they are French, they may actually be able to have a simple conversation in English but the boyfriend wouldn't know because they lose this ability the moment they cross the border back into France. That's a silly stereotype but I like it.

So, as I said, we need to look at the legal situation at the same time. The assholery of the bank is possible due to the assholery of these OS restrictions and the duopoly of mobile OSs. Everybody wants to have a walled garden. Outlaw or at least restrict walled gardens.

One thing politicians like to say is that they want to protect consumers. Forcing consumers into walled, privacy-invading gardens for essential services such as banking should be a change item on their agenda.

So looking at the status quo you're correct. I'm just hopeful we can change that. I'm also looking at these mobile compute devices in our pockets as universal ones. They can run any instruction set that doesn't burn their hardware. All of these restrictions - chipped components, unaltered OSs, software only from one place - are man-made/big corp imposed. With a view to a walled garden. That's where the law needs to intervene so you can bank safely from where you want.

[–] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 14 points 2 days ago (1 children)

We humans always underestimate the time it actually takes for a tech to change the world. We should travel in self-flying flying cars and on hoverboards already but we're not.

The disseminators of so-called AI have a vested interest in making it seem it's the magical solution to all our problems. The tech press seems to have had a good swig from the koolaid as well overall. We have such a warped perception of new tech, we always see it as magical beans. The internet will democratize the world - hasn't happened; I think we've regressed actually as a planet. Fully self-drving cars will happen by 2020 - looks at calendar. Blockchain will revolutionize everything - it really only provided a way for fraudsters, ransomware dicks, and drug dealers to get paid. Now it's so-called AI.

I think the history books will at some point summarize the introduction of so-called AI as OpenAI taking a gamble with half-baked tech, provoking its panicked competitors into a half-baked game of oneupmanship. We arrived at the plateau in the hockey stick graph in record time burning an incredible amount of resources, both fiscal and earthly. Despite massive influences on the labor market and creative industries, it turned out to be a fart in the wind because skynet happened a 100 years later. I'm guessing 100 so it's probably much later.

[–] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 1 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Google has a vested interest in keeping Android open source. Because the moment they turn away from that more antitrust action is going to hit them like a ton of bricks.

What's an "important app" to you here?

[–] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 0 points 3 days ago (4 children)

But that's not all phones, is it. If you buy your phone directly from Google, you made a mistake. Like buying one from Apple. If Google want to continue to claim Android is open source, they have to allow for devices that forego any of this crap and boot vanilla non-Google-Services Android. And if you're privacy oriented enough, you will give up on apps that are not.

And given enough time somebody is going to work out how you fool a modified system into booting. The problem is legal. Depending on where you are circumventing any digital locks can mean jail time at worst. We have to address the legal situation at the same time.

 
 

I don't have the foggiest idea where I could've gotten the idea from.

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