AI and sentience; Sorry, I'm still on about this
To sum up, AI needs to be regulated for:
* Enclosure of the digital commons
* De facto colonial torture of human curators of training corpuses
* Environmental impact
The following are just intentional distractions:
* AI sentience and welfare
* AI superintelligence
prediction, funding, AI, re: google antitrust case, mozilla
@kescher Actually, let's try to predict the sequence of events in more detail, and I'm curious how close I'll end up being:
Mozilla will do a desperate funding drive, not just asking for donations, but also internally ask around to find investors in their own network. Nobody is willing to invest enough money for activist reasons to keep it afloat. Because of the entrenched structure of the organization, they cannot make it work with smaller offers of investments.
Eventually, a 'friendly' investor shows up who just so happens to be invested in an AI company. The AI company runs a proprietary cloud service, sure, but they've been looking to do better and go against the grain of the industry, and so they wish to partner with Mozilla, on the premise that Mozilla's ethical AI efforts are a good starting point for renewing their product to go in a more ethical direction.
However, their stakeholders need to be kept happy too, so in the short term, they would like for Mozilla to expand their AI offerings with something that integrates with their proprietary, hosted offerings. It will be optional, of course, and it would have a data protection agreement, and wouldn't it be good for the users too? After all, some AI models are just Too Hard to run locally, so for the really difficult things, they could shell out to the hosted service.
And so an integration with that proprietary service appears. There may be a paid plan associated with it, maybe for the more impressive tasks. It's all optional, so you can simply choose not to use it, so it's no problem, right? And in the end, that service will become more ethical due to Mozilla's involvement!
Huh, the AI market is trending down, it seems things are not going well, and investors are getting cagey, so the renewal of their product will have to be delayed to some later, eventual point, and for now they'll have to stick with the existing closed platform. But it's only temporary, and hey, in financially hard times we all need to do our part, right?
It's now three years later. ProprietaryCorp's AI system is still integrated into Firefox, Mozilla is now dependent on their yearly funding, so they can't just remove it. They never really came through with the ethical renewal of their platform, but they're nice people to work with, and nobody wants to rock the boat. Firefox now has a long-term integration with a proprietary hosted AI service that ensures its continued use.
Been doing handheld battery maintenance since last night. All my PSP Streets and PSP Gos were dead so a little overdue. Just the Gos left for PSPs, then on to Vita, then Nintendo.
If you have anything with lithium rechargeable batteries, here's a reminder to check their charge levels occasionally so they don't end up as spicy pillows!
@schratze i can connect my phone to my computer with bluetooth, and send audio from the phone to it
i have a jellyfin instance hosted on that computer, it is accessible through a domain name
the jellyfin instance contains my music collection, i can play it from my phone
through KDE connect i can control the media on my phone with KDE's media controls
isn't symbiosis beautiful :D
Any recommendations for an #Android app for keeping track of taking medicines/vitamins? Reminders etc.?
I used MediSafe for years, but they've enshittified it, now wanting 50€/yr to keep track of 3+ medicines/vitamins.🙄
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.medisafe.android.client
I see so many adults and professionals talking about how they are using LLMs to deepen their understanding of things, but I think this ultimately dives headlong into the “Gell-Mann amnesia” effect — these people think they are learning, but it only feels that way because there are ignorant enough about the topic they're interested in to not detect that they are being fed utter bullshit.
How shall we answer this? I think it speaks most urgently for people who actually know things, those with "intellectual power", to democratise our knowledge, throw aside the totems that make our fields inaccessible and obscure, and open the gates to the multitudes who wish to learn.
At first it seems like it would be easy to compete with LLMs (because they say only bullshit), but to actually compete with LLMs we need to produce educational materials that actually explain things properly. Any 'proof by intimidation' will immediately send our student to the LLM. The moment you rely on something that you haven't explained, same deal. So it may be that this era has a silver lining: we must finally teach mathematics properly.
subtoot
More specific to the broadcaster I'm subtooting here: in their parting statement, I am reading a subtext of "we were hoping that people would start conversations with each other under our posts"
And like... what?? That is not how any of this works. You're not a debate moderator who assigns the topics to speak about and then lets others do the work. You need to actually participate in the conversation yourself, if you want it to be had!
subtoot
There's like a 1:1 correlation between "organizations whose experiments of being on fedi failed" and "organizations which treated fedi as a write-only bullhorn"
just saw a neat feature on someone's wireless headphones. it has a removable battery so you can quickly swap it out for a spare, but it also has either a second internal battery or a supercap so the headphones stay powered and connected while you're swapping the battery over. no idea of the make/model, was just observing someone do the swap and noticed it didn't power off.
If you heard how Unity stiffed the startup I work for with a $5k/year per person license, and thought “nah, it’s because they are making weird VR software. I’m safe.” You should think twice! They even go after people you’ve worked with!
Do NOT start a new project with Unity. They have a division tasked with making you regret it.
my friend @rail_ told me they really liked this picture so i'm posting it
Technical debt collector and general hype-hater. Early 30s, non-binary, ND, poly, relationship anarchist, generally queer.
- No alt text (request) = no boost.
- Boosts OK for all boostable posts.
- DMs are open.
- Flirting welcome, but be explicit if you want something out of it!
- The devil doesn't need an advocate; no combative arguing in my mentions.
Sometimes horny on main (behind CW), very much into kink (bondage, freeuse, CNC, and other stuff), and believe it or not, very much a submissive bottom :p
My spoons are limited, so I may not always have the energy to respond to messages.
Strong views about abolishing oppression, hierarchy, agency, and self-governance - but I also trust people by default and give them room to grow, unless they give me reason not to. That all also applies to technology and how it's built.