tal @ tal @olio.cafe

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I suspect that if employees at Meta who are tasked with hoovering up training data from everywhere they can find are just watching porn, it probably won't go over well on their annual reviews.

I would give good odds that the human at Meta most-closely responsible for the BitTorrent download at issue probably has never even seen this particular torrent by name or URL. The scope of data involved in training is too large for direct human involvement. They probably did something along the lines of writing a bot in Python or similar to spider websites and feed every torrent it could find into a torrent downloader. That downloader's output then gets dumped into some massive internal collection of data that gets used by some other team as part of the training process. The humans just create tools and set them in motion, never actually see the overwhelming majority of the data that they're processing.

I think that the broader concept of instilling desired ethics into an AI is part of the friendly AI problem, which is very real and serious --- and possibly not reasonably solvable. So while I don't really think that Cortana 2045 running around raping humans or something like that is very high on my likely risk list, I think that the broader problem that contains that particular issue probably is something that we'll need to deal with.

[Pope Francis] went further in the 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti, calling social media an “illusion of communication.”

There are probably a lot of criticisms one could make of this statement, but I think that a really good one is that the only reason I'm reading content from your papal encyclica is because it's in an article that was submitted to a social media system.

"Sir, I'm not sure how exactly you managed to have this happen, but the pathology lab says that those are ultraviolet-C light burns on your scrotum."

I'm not familiar with what they're doing here, but I'm guessing that for the purposes of just showing it taking off and then landing again or whatever, they don't need to take it to space, so probably don't need cowling to make it more aerodynamic.

EDIT: Oops. meant to respond to the comment about how pointy the end was.

The very first artificial general intelligence humanity created was born with an extensive understanding of breast jiggle.

The relentless pursuit of profit and growth ruins absolutely everything it touches. Capitalist rot.

The factor driving age verification has been laws passed by countries. It's not private industry forcing it, but government. That comes from people complaining to their legislators that they are unhappy that their kids can see

<random thing that they object to>

If you want a communist system, fine. But there are far too many users on here who, when faced with virtually anything they don't like, immediately post a screed complaining about ownership of private industry, when it often has absolutely nothing to do with the actual issue at hand.

EDIT: I'd also add that there are actual solutions if you object to something like this. You can pass a law against biometric-based age validation, which I can certainly understand --- that form could be prohibited. You could have some alternative form of age-based validation to be instituted to create a path of least resistance for services, like having government provide and fund a zero-knowledge service to confirm various facts to services like age. In countries which have constitutional law and a higher bar to modify it than lower law, you could pass a constitutional law against any form of age validation ("ageism has no place in our country") to prevent legislators from easily passing things like age verification laws, which I personally don't think will fly politically in most places, but it's at least one theoretical option.

I would love to load up custom ROM though... What annoys me the most is lack of RTC battery, because the time resets whenever there's a power outage.

They made an Internet-connected fridge and didn't put an NTP client on it?

Ah, thanks! Well, that's one lone ray of light.

I'm still grouchy about a sandwich place that I liked that recently changed ownership putting in kiosks that apparently do facial recognition, as once I walked up, they suggested items that I'd purchased last time. That started me looking, and I've been noticing that a lot of the ordering kiosks that places have been installing around where I am have cameras (though none have been actively making suggestions). I can only imagine that that gets hooked into the tracking and advertising system at some point too, though.

Between increasing use of facial recognition and ALPRs, it's going to be increasingly difficult to avoid targeted ads. I don't have a fix for that. I mean, it's illegal to block use of ALPRs. A lot of places also have anti-masking laws, though I suspect that in practice, they aren't enforced much, and someone could theoretically put something on their face. I don't especially want to run around wearing stuff on my face, though.

kagis

It sounds like that was a joke from some years back.

https://www.thesixthaxis.com/2018/06/11/skyrim-special-edition-announced-for-samsung-smart-refrigerators/

Skyrim: Special Edition Announced For Samsung Smart Refrigerators And Alexa

If that headline has confused you then let’s be very clear, this is a joke by Bethesda...

They do have a screen and Internet connectivity, but I don't think that ATMs are actually a great route (unless they force people to stop and wait to get their money, which I don't think will fly and will cut into capacity). There isn't much eyeball time on them. The reason a car or a refrigerator works is because you're likely to be around it a lot.

I will say that the rise of gas pumps at gas stations that play back advertisements is pretty obnoxious, though.

To enhance our service and offer additional content to our users, advertisements will be displayed on the Cover Screen for the Weather, Color, and Daily Board themes.

I really hope that Steam games don't head down this path over time. Internet-connected refrigerators I'm willing to avoid, but that's not the only vector for this sort of thing.

EDIT: And as has been pointed out on here before, some Internet-connected cars are starting to have updates to show ads on their UIs pushed out. Any time you've already spent the money and are kind of locked in and the manufacturer has Internet connectivity to the device and can update the thing subsequent to purchase, you're kind of in a bad position regarding leverage.

I'd be pretty comfortable saying that buying enough battery storage to power-shift a year of power is more expensive.

What I want to do is find out what the maximum size battery I would need in order to store all of summer's electricity for use in winter.

I mean, I think that it's probably not a good idea for this guy to try to go fully off-grid if he has access to the grid, but for the sake of discussion, if one were honestly wanting to try it and one is in the UK, I'd think that one is probably rather better off adding a wind turbine, since some of the time that the sun isn't shining, the wind is blowing.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/322789/quarterly-wind-speed-average-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/

Wind speed averages in the United Kingdom are generally highest in the first and fourth quarters of each calendar year – the winter months.

The UK is one of the worst places in the world in terms of solar potential:

https://globalsolaratlas.info/

But it's one of the best in terms of wind potential:

https://globalwindatlas.info/

My bet is that personal flying vehicles will happen and gradually spread --- probably not as a mass replacement for ground-based vehicles --- but it'll be fully-autonomous vehicles. It won't be Average Joe becoming a pilot.

EDIT: Well, okay, I mean, you can get personal flying vehicles today --- in the US, you don't need a license or anything to fly something like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powered_parachute

...whereas you do to operate a car on public roads. Just not allowed to fly over built-up areas. But I'm talking about heavier vehicles.

I haven't blocked anyone on this account, but it's new.

On my last one, I think I blocked three users. I believe all were basically trying to flood a community so that it was unreadable (one, IIRC, was just posting the same large Simpsons or Futurama image repeatedly throughout a thread to try to stop people from talking).

After all, enterprise clients soon realized that the output of most AI systems was too unreliable and too frequently incorrect to be counted on for jobs that demand accuracy. But creative work was another story.

I think that the current crop of systems is often good enough for a header illustration in a journal or something, but there are also a lot of things that it just can't reasonably do well. Maintaining character cohesion across multiple images, for example, and different perspectives --- try doing a graphic novel with diffusion models trained on 2D images, and it just doesn't work. The whole system would need to have a 3D model of the world, be able to do computer vision to get from 2D images to 3D, and have a knowledge of 3D stuff rather than 2D stuff. That's something that humans, with a much deeper understanding of the world, find far easier.

Diffusion models have their own strong points where they're a lot better than humans, like easily mimicking a artist's style. I expect that as people bang away on things, it'll become increasingly-visible what the low-hanging fruit is, and what is far harder.

While I'd personally rather have more users over here producing comments and posts and such, I'd point out that unless something has changed, you can browse Reddit without an account or logging in, from a Web browser. You just can't post, comment or vote.

Specifically for subreddits flagged as NSFW, Reddit's "new" Web UI will demand that mobile users install their app, but you can bypass that by using the "old" Web UI.

goes to check to see if that still works

Huh. Actually, there is a change, but not the way I'd expected. It looks like at least where I am, California, now even the new Reddit Web UI lets anonymous users into NSFW subreddits using a mobile web browser, just by clicking on an "I declare that I am 18+" button. That definitely had not been the case. Maybe these countries declaring age restriction laws basically made them review their policy, and some of the changes have actually made it more-permissive, based on geolocation of IP.

e.g.

https://reddit.com/r/nsfwcyoa

https://old.reddit.com/r/nsfwcyoa

Now both are accessible. I will bet that that's not what people in the UK see, though (well, not unless they're on some sort of VPN with an exit node in a place with different laws).

Just an occasion glance every like 15 minutes...like a little drip

"Not like those people with a check-every-three-minutes habit that are fiends for the stuff." :-)