Joined the Mayqueeze.

  • 0 Posts
  • 105 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle
  • I take your point. It’s just that any scenario you’re describing with so-called AI could have been done by a search engine already. The slop of yesteryear was SEO ranking articles and fake links to make the algorithm prioritize your site over others. Well poisoning is how PR agencies get troublesome celebs out of the headlines again. The list goes on.

    I share your concerns about the black boxed nature of so-called AI and by extension their search engines. I’m not saying it isn’t a problem; it’s just not a new one. Up until now we have had companies in charge with a vested interest not to bend the flow of information too far from, let’s call it, the median truth. Now companies are letting models make these decisions and some humans afford these models more credibility than their common sense and that is all worrying to say the least. So I’m a worried as you are, it just started earlier for me.


  • All of these things would have been possible to restrict on good old Google searches. And they are enforced to varying degrees around the world to differing legal situations. You shouldn’t be able to search for child porn anywhere, swastika merch in Austria, insults of the king in Thailand, etc.

    Search on Google mainly got worse because of Google. They made their results more shit to get you to click on follow ups, the dreaded page 2 of results for instance, where they could sell more ads.

    I do agree that so-called AI search is more of a black box. Although the Googles and the Bings want you logged in to personalize the results, you can find a way to test their otherwise mostly obscured algorithms in a neutral setting. The models may not allow that and/or testing their metal may have yet to be invented. But they will replace search as we knew it.

    The growing faith people have in whatever LLMs spit out (over old school searches) is very concerning. It’s like LLMs are the new Facebook conspiracies. Schools need to teach media literacy as its own subject. All people under 70 today should have to get a media drivers license.

    Edit: And I didn’t even mention the “right to be forgotten.” That also exists in the EU.




  • It’s gossamer thin, admittedly. But there is a shred of a justification for striking Iran that is covered by international law. I’m not saying it is a proven case yet that a preemptive strike against their nuclear program was called for, against a state whose raison d’être is to destroy Israel. But if the circumstances were just right, the Israeli-US allies could get away with it. (And if no good proof materializes, I suspect they will get away with it anyway. Remember Colin Powell’s PowerPoint? Did that have consequences other than killing people next door? I suspect that’s why they’ve crossed this bridge.)

    There is not even a hint of a justification for what Russia is doing in Ukraine. Not in international law. And any possible moral high horse has already been shot long ago. It’s just imperial ambitions.

    So we should not equate these two special military operations just yet. We may in the future and then we can throw all our rotten tomatoes at DC. But right now one probably should reserve judgment and refer to them as “alleged orcs” if one is given to name calling.



  • In no situation where weed is legal minors are allowed to buy it. I would be onboard on this propaganda train if all I saw on Netflix is 15yo’s getting high. Which I don’t see that much really.

    Minors should not consume it. Minors have parents. Minors’ parents’ job it is to keep them away from that along with sniffing glue, tobacco, vaping, alcohol and eating laundry capsules, just to name a few dangers more.

    The negative effects on brain development I read about were all linked to regular, if not heavy use. There is enough wiggle room for school/education and, once again, the parents to step in.

    Idiocracy is happening anyway.


  • Discrimination in hiring happens every day. Be it conscious or subconscious. If there isn’t a hard, unavoidable quota no one can force anyone to hire people they don’t like. The laws may just forbid them from being this forthright.

    Never attribute to malice what you can more appropriately attribute to stupidity. The people who coded this may be young and not even on their first divorce yet. To me, that’s what this family plan business falls under. To leap from that to organized discrimination of folks being born out of wedlock seems a tad too conspiratorial from my POV.

    This may be a fryable fish. Yet I see much bigger fish elsewhere.

    What may also hold back development of functional patchwork family plans is legal hot water. Not every split is amicable. The Googles and Microsofts may simply have decided they don’t want to be put in a situation where they need to adjudicate between two warring ex partners whose bitterness is overriding their child rearing responsibilities with petty disputes. And building a system where maybe new partners can gain access - even just by mistake - to their spouse’s kids accounts also has very bad PR potential when it turns out the step parent is abusive.

    Nevertheless you should let them know about your feedback. Patchwork families are quite common and they can probably do more in that area.





  • This has to fall under the category of “never trust a statistic you didn’t forge yourself.” I’m confident without looking that the amorphous Western countries don’t all count suicides and attempts the same way. And for China you would have to trust official numbers or generate your own because the one thing the leadership does not like is looking bad in the international community.

    The other question I would have is this ratio based on absolute numbers or per capita. The reason why I ask is that China has a massive gender imbalance, a blast from the past when the one - child policy was in play and millions of female embryos were somehow aborted. And here I would also assume that official population numbers may not be entirely correct to make the generally known problem within the country look less severe.

    If there are more men in absolute numbers, there will be more male suicides, some of which one might attribute to the ripples downstream of that very same imbalance.

    Whoever concluded this may have accounted for all the pitfalls in their study. And the result may be fantastically accurate. But we oughta be careful and keep more than just a few grains of salt handy when we hear about something like this.





  • If you’re only looking at the tools everybody can get a hold of, I agree. I think if you look a bit further, you will find medical diagnostics that can hopefully top human detection scores and that’s worth pursuing as well.

    I don’t see any good reason why the general public needs to have access to most of the models today. Most people just play around with it - and I don’t see the value there. When we get the final tally, we will have made the climate crisis worse and caused droughts with all the thirsty data center consumption. All so Alexa can remember what you said two queries ago and you can animate your childhood teddy in the Ghibli style.


  • I agree that women are still being objectified and that’s bad. I don’t agree with workers being dehumanized by being referred to as such. “Workers of the world, unite!” was a big rallying cry. For some people, it’s an identity-establishing part of life that they’re using manual labor and not fart into a desk chair all day. They take pride in being working class.

    If by referring to a group of working folks is dehumanizing then we cannot talk about people like housekeepers, street sweepers, nurses, or engineers either. They’re people too. And I don’t see “people with job X” catching on in the language either.