I Ranked EVERY Anime of Summer 2023 - Mother's Basement
jmp242 @ jmp242 @sopuli.xyz Posts 20Comments 537Joined 2 yr. ago
First of all AI is a buzzword that's meaning has changed a lot since at least the 1950s. So... what do you actually mean? If you mean LLM like ChatGPT, it's not AGI that's for sure. It is another tool that can be very useful. For coding, it's great for getting you very large blocks of code prepopulated for you to polish and verify it does what you want. For writing, it's useful to create a quick first draft. For fictional game senses it's useful for "embedding a character quickly", but again you likely want to edit it some even for say a D&D game.
I think it can replace most first line chat based customer service people, especially ones who already just make stuff up to say something to you (we all have been there). I could imagine it improving call routing if hooked into speech recognition and generation - the current menus act like you can "say anything" but really only "work" if you're calling about stuff you could also do with simple press 1,2,3 menus. ChatGPT based things trained on the companies procedures and data probably could also replace that first line call queues because it can seem to more usefully do something with wider issues. Although companies still would need to get their head out of their asses somewhat too.
Where I've found it falls down currently is very specific technical questions, ones you might have asked on a forum and maybe gotten an answer. I hope it improves, especially as companies start to add some of their own training data. I could imagine Microsoft more usefully replacing the first few lines of tech support for their products, and eventually having the AI pass up the chain to a ticket if it can't solve the issue. I could imagine in the next 10 years most tech companies having purchased a service from some AI company to provide them AI support bots like they currently pay for ticket systems and web hosting. And I think in general it probably will be better for the users, because for less than the cost of the cheapest outsourced front line support person (who has near 0 knowledge) you can have the AI provide pretty good chat based access to a given set of knowledge that is growing all the time, and every customer gets that AI with that knowledge base rather than the crap shoot of if you get the person who's been there 3 years or 1 day.
I think we are a long way from having AI just write the program or CNC code or even important blog posts. The hallucination has to be fixed without breaking the usefulness of the model (people claim guardrails on GPT4 make it stupider), and the thing needs to recursively look at it's output and run that through a "look for bugs" prompt followed by a "fix it" prompt at the very least. Right now, it can write code with noticeable bugs, you can tell it to check for bugs and it'll find them, and then you can ask it to fix those bugs and it'll at least try to do that. This kind of needs to be built in and automatic for any sort of process - like humans check their work, we need to program the AI to check it's work too. And then we might need to also integrate multiple different models so "different eyes" see the code and sign off before being pushed. And even then, I think we'd need additional hooks, improvement, and test / simulation passes before we "don't need human domain experts to deploy". The thing is - it might be something we can solve in a few years with traditional integrations - or it might not be entirely possible with current LLM designs given the weirdness around guardrails. We just don't know.
I don't think I understand exactly what you're describing here - so you would allow anything the current US allows, just with a different legal framework? If you swap out a corporate construct for a collective but based on cult of personality for say Twitter, does that actually change much? I.e. our political system in the US isn't capitalist, but we still end up with people who have more power due to seniority, "barter", and popularity. It seems like you could change who ends up the oligarch, but not the existence of them.
How do you have common ownership of natural resources and private ownership of land? Also, I get that you find current labor practices exploitative, but at least some of them are actually illegal, we just have difficulty enforcing them because of cost of legal actions and burden of proof issues. I don't trust that worker collectives would actually prevent wage theft - given politics and the ability to apparently convince people to vote against their own interests. More directly, union drives also show this isn't obviously going to go in a worker improvement way.
And slavery is currently illegal - you do have to be paid for your labor. The problem is how you value that labor? If it's a market economy, various labor is just going to be valued higher than other labor, and you basically have the problem I think you're pointing to with capitalism (because to me market economies are capitalism).
I also think you and I may disagree about what's actually happening theoretically in the current system with employees. At least to me, it's entirely consistent with practice and with the theories I'm familiar with in capitalism. An employee agrees to sell their output to an employer for a given rate. Both parties can put whatever contracts around that they like, and absent contracts, either can stop that arrangement at any time, either via renegotiation or ending the relationship. If you strip all contracts then do you envision a day laborer sort of arrangement? Everyone is an independent contractor so it's like a "virtual company" now? Like, practically - how do you envision this works?
I think there's all sorts of interesting stuff to discuss outside of whether a system is capitalism or not in your limited proposal here. However, I don't actually know what you want to get rid of from the current US capitalist system, so I can't really say more. I don't see a lot of value in just changing labels and nothing else however.
There are tons of Lemmy instances, so figuring out the right one isn’t as straightforward as stumbling upon a single central platform. I'm arguing that it's exactly as straightforward as picking between Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Pintrest, any website. How did these people who can't search find reddit? I get that it sucks leaving a company you have a relationship with. I just don't think it's hard, and I do think that the last 20ish years (at least) have shown that companies are "take it or leave it", and rarely if ever respond to requests no matter how you make them. So it's back to my initial point - you shouldn't want a "central platform" because eventually it becomes worse and worse. This holds true in theory (monopolies are bad) and practice over recent and longer history.
I guess I also don't get the concern about picking "the right lemmy instance" - at worst, it's like picking an e-mail server, or grocery store. Try a random one, find out what doesn't work for you (if anything) and then use that knowledge to evaluate the next one. Repeat until happy. In reality - that's also what we're doing up a level in terms of platforms in general - I was happy on reddit till I wasn't. Presumably same for everyone. Many people might still be happy on reddit. I don't judge that - my beef is if you're extremely unhappy and yet basically want someone to change reddit for you vs moving on.
I am NOT at all arguing that it's not difficult to move entire communities at all. I'm not sure if it's possible - you're going to basically fork no matter what. And that sucks, but it's also something the community risked (and always does risk) on a given platform if it becomes crap for some reason. A community is also never fixed and your reddit community is changing no matter what with the various things going on. I don't know how big a change it will be for any given community, but to the extent you're empowered by the central platform, you're losing some people (those like me) to alternative platforms. You can't stop that. Heck, even without reddit doing their best to burn their platform trust to the ground, there were always going to be people who move along, try and make a spinoff community either on reddit or elsewhere etc. You can't have a unified approach unless a large majority agrees to either live with reddit or to leave reddit to the same place. I don't think either is actually going to happen in the long run.
And software wise, I think as you have pointed out it seems reddit wants to make things kind of worse and lemmy and the fediverse is trying to make things better. So over time, just like how lemmy is WAY more active now than it was a month ago, I think we'll see the software improve too. So maybe today it's really in reddits favor to stay there as a mod - though I know /r/photography didn't agree - but I feel like each day those lines are getting closer together where you'll cross and probably end up with 2 viable communities, and one isn't on reddit and everyone has to choose if they want to be on both, or one or the other. The main thing is lemmy and the fediverse are all in on API access and anyone writing tools, and reddit has closed that off basically entirely. So as I understand it, there's very little chance to get mod tools back on reddit, but there's every expectation that people are building mod tools for lemmy. That's not to say a closed system is inherently bad - but I've rarely found it to be the most inexpensive or option filled. I also heard a recent techdirt podcast on distributed moderation and reddit and that all their public competitors have (had? Twitter got rid of theirs but went private) professional trust and safety moderation teams, and there's a good chance that's going to be something wanted for an IPO by investors expecting legal or regulatory risk, and with that will be a push for a homogenized set of moderation rules across the entire site. I think that is very plausible, but also will further kill what made reddit special, and if we're talking about centralized platforms, facebook dwarfs reddits users, and for the "I don't care about how the site is run" large mass crowd that also does't care about NSFW niches and such, and DOES care mostly about ease of entry and finding communities - I could see facebook groups eating reddits lunch in the masses, while the others move on to places like lemmy.
OT slightly: I've had multiple interactions on lemmy now where I seem to miss communicate something in a way I didn't on reddit or in e-mail listserves. And I'm wondering if it's cultural or ??? Specifically - I tend to quote and comment on the part of a comment I'm replying to that I have something to say about it. The parts I don't quote I (thought) I was implicitly not arguing with or for and at worst would be neutral to I support because I didn't "rebut" in my reply. But instead it often seems to be received like you did of me missing nuance. I tried in my initial reply to point out A) this is a rant (so don't take it that seriously) and I tried to imply B) I'm ranting about this one specific nitpick of the post. Is there some way to do that better? A "signature" I paste in (seems pretentious)? Some formatting change vs quote -> comment / rebut? Thanks.
Yes, it seems like capitalism to me. You just have different legal structures for companies. I don't know enough about worker coops, but do they work like a LLC then? Or are all the workers in the coop partners and hence liable for judgements? How broad is your exclusion of employer-employee contracts? How do consultants work? Service businesses? Someone wanting to hire a handyman?
The only part that might be weird is if you can't own things. I can't tell - can you own land? Are you allowed to buy and own and resell something you didn't make yourself?
I generally think a "market economy" == capitalism. Mostly because as far as I can tell, all capitalism requires is private ownership and abstracted stores of value. A market economy is already capitalism because human nature - as soon as someone can do bulk purchases, they're going to try and get better prices, and I think many sellers would willingly give them a bulk discount. It doesn't even start as coercive - but it sets you on the road to that, and so it's a difference in scale and not kind IMHO.
I also don't think coercion is a requirement of capitalism. It's something that I think will happen naturally, but you could still have capitalism with regulation reducing it / maybe preventing it. I'd argue that a lot of the problems in current capitalist societies are equally failures of the political system, or maybe a misunderstanding of humans such that large pluralities do not actually want to use their government to make life better for anyone or themselves, but instead to hurt an out-group.
Well, I think they do risk costing too much. I felt this with the recent Netflix changes. Spotify at least (to my understanding) has far closer to "all music" than any streaming service has "all shows / movies" so there's that too, you probably should compare to several streaming services.
But you're right - at a certain price people just have to go without. At a lower price people might still choose to go without. I don't know where those prices are for these services. The closest I've ever come is Satallite Radio. I was fine paying ~$100 a year when I drove every day. But they keep trying to charge like $260 if I don't watch it at renewal. I could call and get them down to about half, so it had crept up to $120 or so. But now I don't drive much with WFH. So even $120 wasn't worth it. For my once a month or so long trip, I have a smartphone that I can stream, preload with audio, and do podcasts from. So I cancelled. Eventually I got a letter "please come back" - we'll give you a year for $60. Well, I'm assuming they're not losing money on this - it would be kind of stupid to IMO, so it means they could probably offer it for $60ish a year but try and get 4 times that amount if you don't pay attention. IDK, I never would have wasted their reps time yearly or cancelled if it was just $60 a year. But in the aggregate I bet the people who just don't pay attention make them more money than the cost of dealing with someone like me.
What was my point? Oh yea - it's not just "can I afford this", but do I think it gives me $x in value? I might suggest keeping your eyes open for alternate sources or alternate entertainment and you might save a lot of money.
Well, assuming other inflation is pushing prices higher, you'll see it with anything trying to keep "real income" constant. That said, I've never seen the point of using spotify at all so...
Capitalism seems to be a system where people try to obtain ever larger amounts of some store of value, and use that store of value to enable that.
I may have managed to avoid using capital above, but I think capital is a store of value that a person controls via ownership concepts.
I think capitalism inherently enables people to earn what they produce, it seems like it's almost a fundamental of it. The problem is just that people with more capital can coerce and rig the system against people with less capital. Therefore someone who already has capital gets more capital increase from a task than someone with less capital would get for the same task in many situations.
Say you are an individual who sells something you create. Are you a capitalist? Yes If you are the above person, can you exist in both capitalist society and one in which private property has been abolished? Presumably no. If there's no ownership or private property, how do you sell something? Can you sell something you don't own or have permission from the owner to sell? Say you create and sell some product regularly (as above), but have more orders than you can fulfill alone. Is there any way to expand your operation and meet demand without using capitalist methods Probably not if you use a strict definition. The state, or other group could form to do so, but I'd argue it's not you making that decision. Is the distinction between a worker cooperative and a more traditional business important? Define "important". and Important to who?
I'd say it's meaningful because it is like democracy vs authoritarianism, but in terms of the actual real world pressures driving potentially similar behavior, I'm not sure how "important" it is. A worker cooperative might tend to treat employees better, might not choose some ways to compete that a traditional business would, and probably values other things than strictly make the most amount of profit for the investors. But does this rise to importance if the collective has to act in certain ways to remain competitive in the market? I would bet it depends on whether we're talking from the perspective of the employees or customers or society or the market.
Insurance companies are very good at taking more money from you than they give back. The ones who don’t aren’t around anymore.
Oh, I agree with that. I don't think anyone was thinking of insurance as an investment (except perhaps some interesting Youtube people and mutual whole life insurance policies), so this just seems like a weird way to think about it. Just like people who go to a casino - rational people aren't looking at it as any sort of investment or deal, but paying for a certain type of entertainment.
I also wonder who's looking at Insurance as a way to make them money? It's to either smooth out costs without a required ramp up time (i.e. you might be able to dedicate $20 a year to self-insuring your camera gear, but better hope nothing happens for 10 years which BTW is getting close to the useful lifetime of the gear.) or to improve piece of mind. $150 a year to literally think of my risk with my camera gear going out / using it at $100 vs $11,000? That's really cheap to me.
Indeed. Like I would have paid them too instead of leaving. That was like RIGHT THERE for monetization. I don't know how they missed that.
Lemmy (or any fediverse platform) isn’t exactly straightforward to figure out and start participating in. If you can even find the community you are looking for. Reddit also hosts a lot of support communities, who benefit from reddit generally speaking having a low barrier of entry. Many of those wouldn’t be able to be as accessible for the groups they are targeting on other platforms.
This just feels like a cop out - welcome to the Internet, you need to search to find stuff? Maybe I'm terminally techie, or got online way "to early", but my god, how did people get on reddit to begin with? It wasn't a default homepage in a browser. How did they get an e-mail account? How did they find an ISP? Did they need counseling to pick a cell phone provider?
This feels just like the "Linux isn't straightforward to ..." - Ok? Neither is Android or Windows or MacOS. You just went through that at some point in the past and don't remember the confusion.
And it's not like Reddit started out with those communities. I mean, either you don't care, or you care and hoping reddit changes is basically like being in an abusive relationship. Maybe try asking a techie friend if you really can't handle a search engine and reading a small amount.
I mean, we're not talking about setting up I2P to access an internal IRC network here, we're talking about picking a website and getting an account. This should not be hard. And if you're a mod fleeing reddit, maybe be the change you want to see and start a community on the fediverse.
I might be not getting something here but it just sounds like "All these people are trapped in a bad situation and I don't believe they have any agency or ability to learn anything new to get out of it". These people have agency. Instead of telling everyone "oh Lemmy is too confusing" - point them to the hundreds of posts and websites now explaining how to do it.
ok... breath... rant over.
I'm still pissed the /r/sysadmins didn't move over or even blackout. They have no excuse! Then again, I need to see if /r/linuxadmins moved over.
So Signal has stories but I can't figure out what it would be for.
I agree with everyone to not let the TV access the internet. Instead, get a raspberri pi or le potato or the like with LibreElec (or whatever the current successor OS is) running Kodi. Point it at a SMB share and bam.
I think you need to define "bad deal" a little more. Insurance is money you're basically throwing away if you never need to make a claim - and in a lot of cases you do hope you never need to make a claim. But that doesn't necessarily make it a "bad deal". If the items you're risking are enough that you replacing them would be more likely to kill your hobby - insurance isn't a bad deal, it enables you to have this hobby. Because if you leave your camera at home because you're afraid of losing it or breaking it - well, you're not actually getting much use out of it (in most cases).
The other thing is you can perhaps have more information about your situation and be pretty sure you'll need to replace or repair something in a way that doesn't necessarily widely apply or see insurance companies offering extremely low rates for some situations - perhaps something like loss leaders. An example might be some of the house insurance policies that have a rider for mechanical breakdowns, where the rider is a very low fee ($45 a year say). If you know it covers well pumps, and that you'll need to replace your well pump in ~10 years, the cost isn't going to exceed the cost of the well pump installation minus the deductible. I assume this sort of policy works because the company also sells a lot of these policies to people who don't have wells.
The other nitpick I'll have here is that unless you define "bad deal" as "not the cheapest option overall", you'll have way more reasons to discard this idea. For instance, in a lot of ways financing is a "bad deal" in that it costs more money, but might be a "great deal" because you can actually get a car you need to earn money to live with it, and you'd starve before you could save up thousands of dollars for a car.
I don't use a dry box.
I do get insurance. It'll depend on your country, but in the US, if it's not a business, you don't want the insurance that comes up with "camera insurance" searches - those are either a ripoff or focused on business insurance also. You want to contact a local insurance agent and ask about "inland marine" coverage. These tend to be pretty cheap - I have $11k of photography gear insured against theft / damage / loss for $150 a year with a $100 deductible. And I've seen some people get quotes for a bit LESS than that.
So, if your camera was like $300 then don't insure it. But if you've got thousands into it, unless you also bank those thousands for replacement, the insurance cost is quite low for this as a hobby if you do the inland marine coverage.
I swear why do we have to explain every 5 years to governments that encryption can't have backdoors and be usable encryption?
Indeed, IDK if you remember back in the bad old days but you used to need a specific browser, and if that browser was IE, good luck if you weren't on Windows. Sites would just block you.
I really hope this doesn't become a thing again - it's already stupid with so many "best on chrome" stuff, but at least I think Apple and Safari put a dent in that because Apple users are a big enough group, and generally identified to have and spend more money than Android / Linux / Windows users so there's that. And Firefox is... well... something. 10% now? IDK, it's hard to be single browser now adays, but with these "for security" things? Who knows.
I guess if Apple, Microsoft and Mozilla all refuse to go this way, it'll break it. The other option is something like Lets Encrypt being big enough they can't delist the attester, but it just attest everything so turns into garbage. Or enough accepted attesters (if it's like SSL PKI) "attest" that you paid them $50 that year and that's about it, so again, everyone who cares gets a Comodo attestation or whatever and use a browser / extension / proxy / OS / whatever that just sends valid garbage or spoofed stuff to them, like many do for the various existing non-secure identity fields.
Also, at least as the US goes, it might be a bad idea - take ways away from students to sound the alarm about a school shooter...
Yea, I guess I've outgrown Bleach or something - I sort of like the first part of TYBW, but the second part I just haven't made time to watch. I'm actually more interested in the Vending Machine one lol.