captainastronaut @ captainastronaut @seattlelunarsociety.org

Posts

15

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326

Joined

2 yr. ago

Nothing outside the LAN. Just Tailscale installed on my Synology NAS, on HomeAssistant and on all my machines.

So it’s like evil Shazam.

Oh good. Something else for me to worry about.

From RTO mandates to Slack monitoring to spy cameras to seemingly-random layoffs, and now this… after the pandemic people realized their boss would rather they die than miss work, and there has been an uptick in union activity and more resistance from employees since… and here comes the AI industry to the rescue, to put the power back in corporate hands and squeeze employees. 

A simple motion sensor would have sufficed. A classic example of someone getting excited about a Tech buzzword and cramming it into a product.

Any kind of mandate that tells employees where they need to sit to be effective at their job is misguided. The office should be a place where people can meet to share ideas and work on things together and socialize. They should be available to employees to use when they need them. Not everyone has a quiet space to work at home and some people enjoy the separation between their home and work lives of going to the office. Some people need quiet time to focus on their job without interruption and can do that better at home. Some people need a bit of both and the flexibility to enjoy both makes them more productive.

I don’t get why this conversation is so binary. Why not just focus on flexibility? Create spaces in the office that are appealing and productive and focus on shared work and team projects. People will use offices if they are useful. Put some walls back up in the office and create good focus spaces so even if someone is in the office for a team meeting they can still get their quiet time.

I am on zoom all day with coworkers around the world. I’m not going to go to an office and sit in a 2‘ x 2‘ phone booth all day just for the one meeting I have that’s in person. But if I had a comfortable private office with walls and a little space to pace around and some natural light where I didn’t have to wear headphones all day and fight distractions, I might actually go to the office for that one in-person meeting and spend the rest of the day there being productive. 

I don’t get why everyone’s always trying to build humanoids. It doesn’t need to have a human head and operating feet to be a good sex partner.

United Airlines - our planes are decrepit but at least the pretzels are… stale!

I’m holding out upgrading for the holographic nano dark matter drives that have infinite storage capacity and RAID data into 3 alternate universes for security.

We already do know where the wealth is and we aren’t taxing it. I think we know the answer to that question. Systems are only still functioning because there’s a dribble of tax revenue that still comes in. But we are already seeing schools lose funding and roads crumble as tax revenue hasn’t grown as fast as costs or populations. I don’t think it’s going to get better, because you have to be rich or have rich allies to get elected, so I don’t know how we could create different tax laws.

Throw in the floor mats and you got a deal

I think as a tool to synthesize and collect and organize information to help people make decisions, it has potential. Much like how machine learning is used to look at a bunch of MRI scans and highlight abnormalities and then medical professional looks at those anomalies to decide if they might be a tumor. But a machine is really good at finding things that are anomalous enough to be worth looking at. 

Things that you might have delegated to a secretary or assistant or business analyst might be worthwhile done by an LLM. “sort all these papers by which ones understood the topic the best so I can read those first“ “Do any of these articles contain new information I haven’t seen before?“ “based on the Billboard top 20, create 5 catchy beats for a backing track” “Draft a letter to this customer apologizing for our error and offering them a coupon for their next order” “analyze this email I wrote and help me make the tone more professional” 

I am terrified by what is going to be possible with phishing scams, spam email, fake articles, deep fake videos, reproduction of copyrighted works, an overwhelming volume of trademarks and patents that are meaningless, obtuse contracts that are purposely difficult for a human to read but contain surreptitious loopholes, software that is full of flaws and back doors, and corporations putting more barriers between customers and customer service people.

“find me the 50 most popular articles on this topic, synthesize them all into a 20 bullet point summary and highlight for me the differences of opinion presented so I can understand both sides of the issue” - super useful

“Generate 100,000 unique variations on a very professional email correspondence from a Nigerian Prince offering to pay $50,000 transaction fee for assistance with an international wire transfer “ - no

Unfortunately I don’t think there are any incentives for the companies building these things to limit use or install the guard rails necessary. And our laws, which always run a little behind technology, are thoroughly outpaced by the rate of innovation here. The very old people in charge of governments have no chance of staying ahead of these companies. It will get much worse before it ever gets better.

Honestly, we should just stick to porn. The Internet should just be for porn because everything else we do with it seems to turn evil. 🫤

“The Cybertruck does not ship with clear coat, that outermost layer of transparent paint that comes as standard on almost every new motor vehicle on the planet. Instead, each Cybertruck owner has the option to purchase a $5,000 urethane-based film to "wrap your Cybertruck in our premium satin clear paint films. Only available through Tesla."”

That’s bullshit from Tesla, because they definitely don’t have special PPF that isn’t available aftermarket. They certainly have not invented a vinyl film. That’s not an unreasonable price for a PPF job of an entire vehicle, but PPF isn’t suitable for every part of a car. The fact that the paint has no clearcoat at all should not be addressed by charging the customer extra. 

It’s pretty terrifying when you think about the possibilities of deception. And also how throwaway content is going to become. We are going to generate content at a volume orders of magnitude larger than our already current excessive volume, and finding the stuff that has real meaning and a real message is going to be even harder.

Also, artists whose work and styles fed this will be put out of business without ever being paid for their work that was used to train these models. 🫤

I hope not! I hope they interpret it this way and are willing and able to take action, by removing their catalog or maybe even a class action lawsuit. 

AM radio? Anyone who is listening to that probably doesn’t have a phone to call anyone about it, inside their Mad Max bunker.

The timing is probably just coincidence. He probably submitted a bug bounty weeks or months earlier and it just now got included in release notes. 

I use Downie (on Mac) but there’s a video downloader app for every platform. It doesn’t download the ads either 😉

That helped a LOT.

When Google’s shut down I switched to Feedly. They even imported my Google settings so there was no downtime. I’ve been paying for their Pro version ever since. It’s a really good app!