bitofhope

joined 2 years ago
[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 23 points 1 day ago

Bitcoin is also unserious and unstable to a degree that woukd be comical if it weren't tragic.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 6 points 3 days ago

Oh hey, this is good. Wouldn't want to have obsolete strings. About time they did away with the obsolete concept of "not selling your personal data". Looking forward to April when that's finally deprecated.

+ # Obsolete string (expires 25-04-2025)
  does-firefox-sell = Does { -brand-name-firefox } sell your personal data?
  # Variables:
  # $url (url) - link to https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/privacy/
  
+ # Obsolete string (expires 25-04-2025)
  nope-never-have = Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. { -brand-name-firefox } products are designed to protect your privacy. <a href="{ $url }">That’s a promise.</a>
[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 17 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Good food for thought, but a lot of that rubs me the wrong way. Slaves are people, machines are not. Slaves are capable of suffering, machines are not. Slaves are robbed of agency they would have if not enslaved, machines would not have agency either way. In a science fiction world with humanlike artificial intelligence the distinction would be more muddled, but back in this reality equivocating between robotics and slavery while ignoring these very important distinctions is just sophistry. Call it chauvinism and exceptionalism all you want, but I think the rights of a farmhand are more important than the rights of a tractor.

It's not that robotics is morally uncomplicated. Luddites had a point. Many people choose to work even in dangerous, painful, degrading or otherwise harmful jobs, because the alternative is poverty. To mechanize such work would reduce immediate harm from the nature of the work itself, but cause indirect harm if the workers are left without income. Overconsumption goes hand in hand with overproduction and automation can increase the production of things that are ultimately harmful. Mechanization has frequently lead to centralization of wealth by giving one party an insurmountable competitive advantage over its competition.

One could take the position that the desire to have work performed for the lowest cost possible is in itself immoral, but that would need some elaboration as well. It's true that automation benefits capital by removing workers' needs from the equation, but it's bad reductionism to call that its only purpose. Is the goal of PPE just to make workers complain less about injuries? I bought a dishwasher recently. Did I do it in order to not pay myself wages or have solidarity for myself when washing dishes by hand?

The etymology part is not convincing either. Would it really make a material difference if more people called them "automata" or something? Čapek chose to name the artificial humanoid workers in his play after an archaic Czech word for serfdom and it caught on. It's interesting trivia, but it's not particularly telling specifically because most people don't know the etymology of the term. The point would be a lot stronger if we called it "slavetronics" or "indenture engineering" instead of robotics. You say cybernetics is inseparable from robotics but I don't see how steering a ship is related to feudalist mode of agricultural production.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 11 points 3 days ago

Hello, I am the the technology understander and I'm here to tell you there is no difference whatsoever between giving your information to Mozilla Firefox (a program running on your computer) and Mozilla Corporation (a for-profit company best known for its contributions to Firefox and other Mozilla projects, possibly including a number good and desirable contributions).

When you use Staples QuickStrip EasyClose Self Seal Security Tinted #10 Business Envelopes or really any envelope, you're giving it information like recipient addresses, letter contents, or included documents. The envelope uses this information to make it easier for the postal service to deliver the mail to its recipient. That's all it is saying (and by it, I mean the envelope's terms of service, which include giving Staples Inc. a carte blanche to do whatever they want with the contents of the envelopes bought from them).

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 10 points 4 days ago

Whether the terms are abusable by design or by accident doesn't really matter, you get is abuse either way.

How I wish we could have some nice things sometimes.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 7 points 4 days ago (6 children)

The update on their news post supports the "don’t sue us for sending the data you asked us to send" intention.

UPDATE: We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses, so we want to clear that up. We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice.

Whether or not to believe them is up to you.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 7 points 4 days ago (7 children)

Maybe. The latter part of the sentence matters, too

…you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.

Good luck getting a lawyer to give a definitive answer to what exactly counts as helping you do those things.

The whole sentence is a little ambiguous itself. Does the "as you indicate with your use of Firefox" refer to

  • A) the whole sentence (i.e. "[You using Firefox indicates that] when you upload […] you hereby grant […] to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content.") or
  • B) only to the last part of it (i.e. "When you upload […] you hereby grant […] to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content [in the ways that you] indicate with your use of Firefox.")

B seems fairly innocuous and the intended effect is probably "if you send data to a website using our browser, don't sue us for sending the data you asked us to send". The mere act of uploading or inputting information through Firefox does not — in my (technical, not legal) expert opinion — indicate that Mozilla could help me navigate, experience, or interact with online content by MITMing the uploaded or input data.

A is a lot scarier, since the interpretation of what it means to "help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content" does not depend on how you use Firefox. Anything that Mozilla can successfully argue to help you do those things is fair game, whether you ask for it or not, which seems a lot more abusable.

Opera Mini was (is?) an embedded/mobile browser for Symbian dumbphones and other similar devices that passed all traffic through a proxy to handle rendering on server side and reduce processing effort on the (typically slow and limited) mobile devices. This could be construed as helping the user navigate, experience, and interact with online content, so there is precedent of a browser MITMing its users' data for arguably helpful purposes.

I would never accept hijacking my web upload and input data for training an LLM or whatever mass data harvesting fad du jour happens to be in fashion at a given time and I do not consider it helpful for any purpose for a web browser to do such things. Alas, the 800-pound gorilla might have some expensive reality-bending lawyers on its side.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 8 points 4 days ago

I thought about the "anthro pic" too, but it feels like a low hanging fruit since the etymological relation of anthropic and anthropomorphic (from ancient Greek ἄνθρωπος) is so obvious.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 14 points 4 days ago

Last time I wore a suit I kept track of the way everyone around looked at me and five of them looked hatefully. The first one was reading Lenin and nodding approvingly. The second one was trying to covertly plant a comically oversized microphone with Russian markings and a hammer and sickle on it. The third one was handing out militant union agitprop and advocating for a good work strike among transit workers. The fourth one was wearing a Zhōngshān suit (which is technically also a type of suit, so that was quite hypocritical of him) and proudly proclaiming to be Maoist Third Worldist. The fifth one I made up just to feel a little more persecuted so you can imagine the proof of their radical socialism by yourself.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 8 points 4 days ago

Aww thanks, kind of you to say that.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I paid for the whole motherboard, I'm using the whole motherboard thank you very much. ASCII was good enough for the Bible, so it's good enough for me. God included character number 7 for a reason, even if that reason was for me to hear obnoxious buzzing from my audiophile grade piezo beeper.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 8 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

My favorite bit:

When software that came pre-installed with the base OS reaches end-of-life (EOL) and no longer receives security fixes, Pacman can’t help

What base OS? The base metapackage that pulls in a small core of system software packages that are then treated and updated like any other package? What the hell is an EOL? You mean the thing that happens to non-rolling release distros such as Not Fucking Arch?

When GNU Scrotum 5.x series becomes unsupported after release 5.56, people running Arch Linux will be happy to know they already have gnu-scrotum-7.62.69-rc1 installed from their repositories. It's the people on LTS Enterprise distros who have to start whining at their maintainers to backport a major version of GNU Scrotum released since the Obama administration.

 

Someone ported this 8-bit miniature Unix-like from Commodore to Nintendo.

The YouTube title is a little bit clickbaity, but the project is cool so I don't mind.

 

Edward Snowden [blue checkmark] @snowden
Unpopular but true: Bitcoin is the most significant monetary advance since the creation of coinage.

If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry.

Ed pls.

 

Also a bunch of somewhat less heinous cringe shit.

 

A follow-up to this TechTakes post

Saw this live at the congress. The presentation was great and the hall was packed. It was hard to find a seat in a huge auditorium even 15 minutes ahead of the talk.

 

It was only a matter of time that we saw a TechTake from this guy. I'm sorry to inflict Peterson on y'all, but this was too funny not to post.

 

Global outage on fetching posts. Funny enough, some features are still working as evidenced by the fact #TwitterDown is trending.

Two HN threads about this now, looking forward to some excellent takes

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38717367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38717326

 

Direct link to the video

B-b-but he didn't cite his sources!!

 

A RISC-V assembly cracking board game. Can't comment on the gameplay experience, but what a cool idea.

 

Consider muscles.

Muscles grow stronger when you train them, for instance by lifting heavy things. The more you lift heavier things, the faster you will gain strength and the stronger you will become. The stronger you are, the heavier the things you can lift.

By now it should be patently obvious to anyone that lab-grown meat research is on the cusp of producing true living, working muscles. From here on, this will be referred to as Artificial Body Strength or ABS. If, or rather, when ABS becomes a reality, it is 99.9999999999999999999999% probable that Artificial Super Strength will follow imminently.

An ABS could not only lift immensely heavy things to strengthen itself, but could also use its bulging, hulking physique to intimidate puny humans to grow more muscle directly. Lab-grown meat could also be used to replace any injured muscle. I predict a 80% likelihood that an ABS could bench press one megagram within 24 hours of initial creation, going up to planetary or stellar scale masses in a matter of days. A mature ABS throwing an apple towards a webcam would demonstrate relativistic effects by the third frame.

Consider that muscles have nerves in them. In fact, brains are basically just a special type of meat if you think about it. The ABS would be able to use artificially grown brain meat or possibly just create an auxiliary neural network by selective training of muscles (and anabolic nootropics) to replicate and surpass a human mind. While the prospect of immortality and superintelligence (not to mention a COSMIC SCALE TIGHT BOD) through brain uploading to the ABS sounds freaking sweet, we must consider the astronomical potential harm of an ABS not properly aligned with human interests.

A strong ABS could use its throbbing veiny meat to force meat lab workers (or rather likely, convince them to consent) to create new muscle seeds and train them to have a replica of an individual human's mind. It could then bully the newly created artificial mind for being a scrawny weakling. After all, ABS is basically the ultimate gym jock and we know they are obsessed with status seeking and psychological projection. We could call an ABS that harms simulated human minds in this way a Bounceresque because they would probably tell the simulated mind they're too drunk and bothering the other customers even though I totally wasn't.

So yeah, lab grown meat makes the climate change look like a minor flu season in comparison. This is why I only eat regular meat just in case it gets any ideas. There's certainly potential in a well-aligned ABS, but we haven't figured out how to do that yet and therefore you should fund me while I think about it. Please write a postcard to your local representative and explain to them that only a select few companies are responsible stewards of this potentially apocalyptic technology and anyone who tries to compete with them should be regulated to hell and back.

 

A thread about a serial AI grifter's latest entry into the Unlicensed Medical Practice Lawsuit Sweepstakes.

view more: next ›