millie @ millie @beehaw.org

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Wasn't there somebody just the other day talking about Adobe's ever-growing bloated bullshit versus GIMP's sleek UI and consistent features? Oh. Right. It was me.

The title here is a little misleading. A signal that repeated once per hour, as in 60 minutes, would be pretty astounding, and might be a good way for a civilization with enough information about us to say 'hi' in a way we'd recognize. It would certainly be very strange to see a natural phenomenon ticking away the hours at a precise rate.

53.8 minutes, on the other hand, is a bit less attention grabbing.

I think when people think of the danger of AI, they think of something like Skynet or the Matrix. It either hijacks technology or builds it itself and destroys everything.

But what seems much more likely, given what we've seen already, is corporations pushing AI that they know isn't really capable of what they say it is and everyone going along with it because of money and technological ignorance.

You can already see the warning signs. Cars that run pedestrians over, search engines that tell people to eat glue, customer support AI that have no idea what they're talking about, endless fake reviews and articles. It's already hurt people, but so far only on a small scale.

But the profitablity of pushing AI early, especially if you're just pumping and dumping a company for quarterly profits, is massive. The more that gets normalized, the greater the chance one of them gets put in charge of something important, or becomes a barrier to something important.

That's what's scary about it. It isn't AI itself, it's AI as a vector for corporate recklessness.

So, just to make this clear.

The original goalpost was: "The US is exactly the same as Russia." This being in the context of an article talking about Russian librarians being imprisoned and active extreme suppression of the free exchange of ideas being organized by the Russian government.

There are certainly issues going on with libraries. John Oliver recently did an episode going over a lot of it. But the difference there is that these are largely organized by either fringe politicians or politicians in heavily right-wing states. I don't really see evidence of it at a Federal level, which is what would be the equivalent to what's going on in Russia. Even where some of this stuff is happening, it doesn't seem to yet be as extreme as the situation there.

Is it a similar and worrying pattern? Yes. Is it 'exactly the same thing'? Definitely not.

The US is extremely different from state to state, which can make getting anything done on a wide scale really chaotic, but it also means that we get to try new things and strike out on our own as a state if there's popular support. That's how we got marriage equality for queer folks, it's how we legalized marijuana in a lot of states, and it's what makes us able to do things like pass laws that protect people from other states' repressive laws. We can do things like provide a safe haven for people seeking abortions who live in states where it's illegal. There are states in the US that will literally take in trans folks as refugees from states with repressive laws. On the other hand, we have Florida, where there's actually a no travel advisory for trans people because they'll arrest us for trying to use a bathroom or having our gender on our driver's license.

And like, all this stuff you're saying is absolutely true. It is a huge mess of near unchecked capitalistic greed in a lot of cases.

But at this point we've moved the goal posts. Because they now seem to be "the US also has serious humanitarian problems". Which, that's true. But it doesn't mean the same thing as "the US is exactly the same as Russia."

We have our own set of problems.

Cool condescension, but I've been using Photoshop on and off since 2005, have occasionally used Illustrator, and used to spend an absurd amount of time with Flash. In addition to GIMP, I currently have Krita and Inkscape installed.

I literally prefer GIMP's UI. It doesn't have extra shit, it doesn't try to force me into a single window, and it goes really, really well with a multi-monitor setup. I don't care that it doesn't automatically edit non-destructively, because my workflow is adapted to it. Layers and folders are plenty.

No one piece of software is going to be the ideal solution for everyone. That's capitalistic exceptionalism infecting the rational analysis of what tool suits which user best. Photoshop may suit you better, but I'd take the sleek usefulness of GIMP over the bloat that accompanies all that extra stuff I don't need any day.

Why do I need an AI strapped to my tool for pixel art, pathing, and masking?

I absolutely love the UI. It's literally a major part of why I prefer it.

It literally isn't. Some states are pretty shit, but the US isn't forcing people into exile for building libraries. And some states are great places where people have rights and the legislature is actually willing to protect its population from authoritarian policies.

Those aren't gloves, they're just weirdly soft knuckle dusters.

Was that with Jack?

This isn't directly what you're asking for, but apparently the ancient Greeks thought the speakers of the PIE languages sounded like they were saying "bar bar bar bar". Thus, barbarian.

What do you mean? We have better voter engagement among young people than any previous generation.

I wasn't so much talking about having the knowledge to make it safe as like actually having some business being there. It's certainly dangerous, just like it's dangerous for anyone who's living in proximity to that. But it's not like they're some idiot tourists, that's actually the life their family has focused on. Like, it's what they do.

If you read the article, Lloyd grew up in Haiti and went to the US for college, which is where the two met. They then moved back to Haiti together. They're not some silly American couple with no business in Haiti, their family runs an orphanage and a school there.

Not really sure murdered missionaries trying to run an orphanage is a 'lol' situation.

I didn't even know Kimmy Schmidt was Estonian.

No, no, no. This is all wrong. USB has a spin of 1/2.

Yeah, that's very fair. They tend to have a ton of political power. But in some states where you have something like a ballot initiative process there could potentially be some creative solutions that could be effective.

Like I could see Massachusetts passing some form of police reform by circumventing legislators the same way we did for marijuana.

I mean, that depends on how the local policies handle enforcement. If you have harsh penalties for turning off body cams, it may prevent some of the more egregious abuses of power. It isn't going to stop it, or do much of anything about systemic abuse, but it may at least take some of the power to freely be an asshole from a few of the worst.

It's not a solution to the actual problem, but it might save some lives or at least make it a little harder to hurt people.

The National Transportation Safety Board released a preliminary report about the crash earlier this week, which did not include a probable cause. Those findings will be part of a final report that could take investigators up to two years to complete.

“Without the final report, I don’t think the vessel is going anywhere” far from Baltimore, Duan said.`

In the meantime, he hopes nonessential crew members will be allowed to get off the ship and stay temporarily on dry land to “ease their mental stress.”

They could literally be stuck living on an immobile cargo ship for 2 years. That's insane.

I mean, that kind of makes sense. A lot of small websites are probably for temporary projects, or may even be experiments. When the project ends, it usually makes financial sense to quit paying for hosting and domains.

Whole lotta small projects during COVID.

I mean, they're both at least illustrative I guess. In the case of particles and waves I may be quibbling a bit over the distinction that something is a particle or a wave versus exhibiting the properties of one or the other.

In the case of Schrodinger's cat, the thought experiment suggests that if the life or death of the cat is tied to the collapse of the state vector, an eigenstate of the two implies simultaneous life and death. But the varying interpretations of this problem aren't so straightforward as 'both dead and alive', and it's kind of misleading to just leave it at that.

Personally, I find it odd that they'd discount the cat's own awareness of the state vector's collapse. Obviously when the atom decays and kills it, it's going to know before you are regardless of the presence of cardboard.

It just seems like a lot of kind of imprecise throw-away mentions of more complex ideas for one sentence. But again, maybe I'm being cynical.