Quexotic
@Quexotic@beehaw.org
- Comment on If You’re Going To Defend AI And Whine About Its Critics, You Should Probably Be Honest About Its Actual Harms 17 hours ago:
For my part, I have tried to be very clear-eyed about this and have been driven to learn and understand how it works. I want to know what its strengths are and what its weaknesses are. And mostly, I want to know how it’s going to be used to further subjugate us. I have already seen how it has been used to deny people insurance coverage and for various and sundry other nefarious uses. Most recently, it has been suspected as being one of the prime causes of the deaths of many little Iranian girls. The future is now.
I feel that if I understand it well enough, then I will be better equipped in the coming struggle against it I see how already people are losing their jobs at the mere possibility that AI might actually replace them and be able to do their jobs for them. And I relish the coming articles that go into detail about how badly it’s been overestimated and how completely it has caused ruin in the companies that have chose it over humans.
I use AI. I don’t trust it, but I know what it’s good at. I also know what it’s terribly bad at Most importantly, I have seen it improving and it is becoming more concerning.Articles like this seem to indicate the possibility that AI will become much more affordable and much more powerful very soon. and yet it seems clear that it is being intentionally kept out of our reach.
I am not so concerned about AI causing an extinction-level event, but more so in its acceleration of our own self-destruction through many other means, not the least of which is climate change.
I am reminded of an old adage.
To err is human. To really louse things up takes a computer.
The thinking behind this being of course that if you make one mistake and you automate it then you have the opportunity of exponentially failing, where otherwise it would just be a simple typo that you could fix with correction fluid.
To the point mentioned earlier though, I don’t think it matters as much whether the technology has advanced to the point where it can replace workers (it hasn’t, but it’s closer than I’d like), but that they believe that it already has and are replacing workers with it anyway.
/rant
- Comment on OpenAI Is Opening the Door to Government Spying 3 days ago:
I think since before 1998. There was a “prism” project. Supposedly they had the ability to use some kind of early STT to catch keywords on phone calls and had black boxes at every ISP that duplicated traffic to their servers.
- Comment on Age Verification Laws Are Multiplying Like a Virus, and Your Linux Computer Might be Next 4 days ago:
The very day I hear that my os is asking people their age is the day I find a different one.
- Comment on Callers to Washington state hotline press 2 for Spanish and get AI-generated accented English instead 1 week ago:
This seems like a kind of obvious and innocent mistake, really. So, what you have is an English voice model and Spanish voice model. You can give an English voice model Spanish and you can give a Spanish voice model English. Now, obviously the person that gave the Spanish voice model English text thought that it would translate for them. They were stupid. I don’t think this was malicious.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
I think the order actually is even more narrow than that in that it only deals with the part of the business that they do that has to deal that has to do with actual sensitive stuff that is, if the anthropic CEO is to be believed.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
I’m on the fence about whether I agree with you because it’s kind of a toss-up as to whether that’s true in my mind. Put on the flip side of that, they were already neck deep in with the DoD anyway, so your argument is convincing, in that respect at least.
- Comment on Keen bosses, strange mistakes and a looming threat: workers on training AI to do their jobs 2 weeks ago:
While it is correct and totally fair to challenge the math, I believe that’s the kind of math that HR typically does. Given that LLMs are so bad at math maybe they would be the best fit for job. It would be a nice change of pace because I’ve never been able to convince HR to give me more money on my paycheck, but I could definitely convince an LLM to do so.
- Comment on Keen bosses, strange mistakes and a looming threat: workers on training AI to do their jobs 2 weeks ago:
Seems like it’s time to buy wooden shoes and sand for all those new gears.
- Comment on Burger King will use AI to check if employees say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ 2 weeks ago:
A little MC is in order:
Please may please I please take please your please order?
<Order given>
Thank you your Thank you total Thank you will Thank you is Thank you $69.69 Thank you please Thank you pull Thank you to Thank you the Thank you second Thank you window.
- Comment on Sincere question: why play long video games? 3 weeks ago:
I’d argue that there is appetite and that those skills have not been lost forever and while there are those that would have use only play and consume, to assume that this is the only thing happening is a bit of a reductio ad absurdum.
- Comment on Sincere question: why play long video games? 3 weeks ago:
Guess I need to re-read my shit. Lol.
- Comment on Amazon Ring’s Super Bowl ad sparks backlash amid fears of mass surveillance 4 weeks ago:
They’ve left the door open to law enforcement for years. This is not new.
This article is from 2019 archive.today/kYbQV
…and if you believe that police really had to ask, I’ve got a bridge to sell ya.
- Comment on Do you think its worth while to put tape on back of battery banks to protect watt hr/mah info due to recent airplane regulation? 4 weeks ago:
Worst case, see if you can have a product listing with specs so they can visually confirm. Pretty easy solution
- Comment on Do you think its worth while to put tape on back of battery banks to protect watt hr/mah info due to recent airplane regulation? 4 weeks ago:
This has been the same in the US for some time. They don’t generally give you any funny looks unless you’re walking through with a 30 lb battery with an inverter attached to it or something.
I wouldn’t worry too much but your mileage may vary. Pun intended.
- Comment on Artsy darling Remedy Entertainment has a new CEO - a former EA exec and sports betting platform president - who is there to "accelerate growth" 4 weeks ago:
That’s so disappointing. I loved their games. 🥺
- Comment on Discord roll out global age verification system, including an "age inference" model that runs in the background 4 weeks ago:
I appreciate your efforts and good on you for doing this but I don’t have time to do that with hundreds of people.
It’s just not ready for production yet.
I actually just went and checked to see if I had any messages and element x was complaining that I didn’t have a separate app that I needed to use to get push notifications which one would think element x would do on its own but it does not.
Once I installed it apparently there’s some extra shit that I’ve got to do to make that work too and it’s just stuff like that that’s just user hostile and not good.
I do like element and I love the idea of it but it’s just not compatible with most humans, apparently even myself, though I’d thought I had it all ironed out.
- Comment on Discord roll out global age verification system, including an "age inference" model that runs in the background 4 weeks ago:
Yeah, it really is. I feel like if I have trouble getting it to work, my friends have no hope.
… I mean, I did get it to work but the struggle was real.
- Comment on Sincere question: why play long video games? 4 weeks ago:
For me, the cost benefit is about entertainment. I recognize there have been studies that supposedly show that games can help develop or maintain certain skills, but for me it’s more about learning the skill to experience the in-game reward. That’s just for some games. For others, that element exists but the game is telling a story too. One that is punctuated by struggle, maybe battles, and the overcoming which leads to power ups and more story.
So the cost-benefit is that it costs time, but it pulls you out of end-stage capitalism and puts you in flow state, engaging in another world.
I would suspect, though, that if you’re seeing video games through the lens of cost-benefit analysis, you might have trouble relaxing. People need rest.
- Comment on Western Digital details 14-platter 3.5-inch HAMR HDD designs with 140 TB and beyond 4 weeks ago:
- Comment on You Are Being Misled About Renewable Energy Technology [Technology Connections] 4 weeks ago:
The best part is if the third happens it doesn’t necessarily happen immediately. It might just happen while you’re sleeping.
Wheeeeeeee!
- Comment on You Are Being Misled About Renewable Energy Technology [Technology Connections] 5 weeks ago:
I believe it, most especially in your specific case.
- Comment on You Are Being Misled About Renewable Energy Technology [Technology Connections] 5 weeks ago:
I dunno, I did going in but what I got from it was his method of explaining it to people that truly don’t understand.
- Comment on You Are Being Misled About Renewable Energy Technology [Technology Connections] 5 weeks ago:
I’ve always liked this man. Today I love him.
- Comment on Some PCs are failing to boot after this month's Windows Update 5 weeks ago:
- Comment on I Can’t Sell You Laptops Anymore (video) (enshittification of computer repair) 1 month ago:
This is not enshittification. This is a calculated attack. It’s class warfare.
- Submitted 1 month ago to gaming@beehaw.org | 0 comments
- Comment on Heroic former PC Gamer writer creates a script to banish all the AI features from Google Chrome 1 month ago:
Yes and I have read them but the problem is that if you get people to start running random powershell from sources they don’t recognize, and you can’t tell me that the average Joe knows what GitHub is, that’s not a good thing.
It’s already a threat vector that’s being exploited in the wild.
Add to that that even though it’s verifiable, this also makes this guy a target for supply chain attack.
This is bad all around.
At the very least he could have signed the scripts which he did not.
Let’s say somebody tries to run this at work and they actually succeed and they manage to get it to run so that means they have bypassed the restriction that keeps them from running unsigned scripts and so right there they’ve made their machine more vulnerable so there’s that too.
Look, I recognize what the guy’s trying to do and it’s admirable but he should use a signed installer or put something in the Windows store (ok maybe MS wouldn’t like that) or at least use some sort of modern cryptographic protections. This guy (The article author really, I don’t blame the actual scriptwriter so much) is having people paste code and run it.
- Comment on Heroic former PC Gamer writer creates a script to banish all the AI features from Google Chrome 1 month ago:
Anyone that’s pasting shit like
& ([scriptblock]::Create((irm “raw.githubusercontent.com/…/main.ps1”)))
Into elevated powershell windows should be summarily fired and prosecuted.
- Comment on Heroic former PC Gamer writer creates a script to banish all the AI features from Google Chrome 1 month ago:
On Windows, all you have to do is open PowerShell as administrator and copy-paste this command:
& ([scriptblock]::Create((irm “raw.githubusercontent.com/…/main.ps1”)))
…said the Nigerian prince. Hahahahahahahahahahahaha
I’ve read enough.
No.
- Comment on Need help choosing a NAS. 1 month ago:
I went with qnap. Synology, I think, can’t be trusted to stick with that policy reversal.
