I seriously hate this market so much.

People contribute to it. People don’t leave for alternative markets without central networked service dependency. Such alternative markets would need financial power to contribute to their survival (of course there’d be pressure to kill them), and for that they need to grow. It’s a chicken and egg problem.

Until enough people get burned by it, nothing will change. When they will, it’ll still be very uncertain, because there are harder and easier markets to make money. P2P applications make little money, because of their advantages being downsides for those trying to commercially sell them, for example. Providing infrastructure makes more money, but still less than platforms, where you sell infrastructure, connectivity, moderation and advertising simultaneously.

So when it’s only professionals’ and businesses’ choice, we lose and platforms win. They need to eat something, they prefer to eat better than to build a better world where someone else will say “thank you” to them and that’s all.

Conscious customer associations and education are mechanisms that might eventually change things, but that will take time, because both have been unbalanced by the insane amount of money tech industry has raised in the last 20 years and will raise more. Society takes time to adapt. Then it’ll be so-so, not good and not terrible, like with most things.

I was born in 1996, but the older generation (it’s Russia) that remembers Soviet schools sometimes remembers Soviet educational PCs. Those were a few series, I don’t remember names, the point is there were Apple II clones and there were PDP-11 clones (but in PC form factor, even with networking ability in the sense of there being one master machine and slave machines booting from it ; but those were not terminals).

So, that older generation remembers as if something normal being taught to program in BASIC, FORTRAN, later C or Pascal and operate machines. Soviet life was quite a lot poorer than even 90s despite all the retroactive disdain for that decade, still informatics classes were apparently at least educationally useful and had at least one operable machine usually.

The 90s generations at least got some computer instruction of general use.

And my generation got Windows machines and no real understanding by anyone what informatics classes are even for. Unless it’s some special school or at least with math focus.

Things people were taught in the 80s and which somehow don’t transition at all to their operation of modern PCs, that contrast still terrifies me.

So - it’s the same everywhere, it seems, because of the idea prevalent in the 00s that my generation is going to just wing it because of being exposed to electronics since childhood. An absolutely nutcase and absolutely winning (in the sense of popularity) idea.

I even have a pre-school brochure somewhere, if I’m not mistaken, with algorithmic problems and solutions. The earlier the better.

One can think in paranoid/cynical ways - “fools are easier to rule” or “so that’s why they were pushing hacker movies in the 90s to scare everyone”. I honestly think it was just fear of some day being less than capable of understanding the technology we rely upon to keep breathing. And that fear is unsubstantiated, because similarly to that most people don’t understand city planning, logistics, oil refineries, electrical engineering and one can go on. But due to that fear of singularity it was easier to start imagining that somehow new generations will gain hard knowledge naturally.

But even that wouldn’t be much of a problem if not for Microsoft. Hate them with passion. EDIT: For managing to sell, coerce and impose their monopoly upon the world and upon education most of all

More oligopolies than cartels, but zaibatsu are a common stereotype as something culturally normal for Japan, yes.

Of what I’ve read about Japan, a cartel being considered something bad in the society is an improvement.

Ah, yes, the bigger the company, the more willing to save something negligible on tools its business depends upon.

Honestly that’s why I wish more of FOSS were hobbyist like AROS, Haiku and such. FOSS projects shouldn’t be too readily usable by businesses, that allows bullshit shops with arrogant pigeon management to keep existing without building proper processes.

I mean, there’s some equilibrium here probably, but with what projects get from businesses bigger than nation-states using their work, - we’re far from it.

At the same time there are things like Java, PostgreSQL, Redis, Nginx and so on. I don’t know.

It just seems sometimes that FOSS breaks market mechanisms in favor of big businesses not giving back to the rest of economy, which seems the opposite of its intuitively and emotionally perceived goal.

But maybe archivers are not it. Not a fan of the idea of having a set of 10 different archivers all often needed, like people did in the 90s. OK, I was a baby in the 90s. Many people didn’t have PCs in the 90s.

But can we just go back to weak connectivity (say, asynchronous message exchange of everyone to everyone via BT ; global cryptographic identities and message ids, sort of a global p2p cryptographically contracted Usenet), a zoo of common operating systems and hardware platforms, evolution, competition, geekiness, interesting things.

Efficiency of processes is different in every situation, including long-standing ones, like one area having plenty of seawater and some other area having just lots of sand, some places being moderate-temperatured and some like central Siberia with hot summers and cold winters, things like that.

Meaning that one can’t say that gas cars are “better for the planet” or “worse for the planet” than EVs. Period.

This study is true for some set of conditions, but it’s pretty clear that people referring to it will use it outside of the scope.

There are better arguments than unprovable claims. Say, EVs use “universalized” energy, that is, can be charged from the grid, while gas cars require different kinds of gas depending on the specific engine and regulatory requirements. EVs have electric machines in them, pretty similar to those in electric trains or whatever else, but that’s not as important as less wear and more universality. EVs in theory should require less maintenance, but since these are usually new fancy cool things, their electronic components might have the common downsides of all new cars. Fire hazards are different between them. On the other side, gasoline can be stored more easily.

I mean, one would think civilization can exist without choosing just one.

If it took Russia so long with far smaller military budget, for USA it would take an existential war, so abundance of funds is sort of a defense social contract. Things cost 5x what they could, but they get designed, produced, procured, maintained and combined into a system.

Unless there’s some political struggle where the old military industry supports one side and the other needs a new military.

I really hate the way the word “nihilist” is used in modern English.

That aside - my point is that this was expected.

And they didn’t live during 30 years war or whatever they remembered as scary. Didn’t matter.

WDYM turned out? Reading about it, seems to just be a long-running project. Still in construction, nothing to see there, such stuff.

Why not, WWI and WWII and things around them outdid all the scary stuff people were predicting just fine.

WDYM why not drugs? Strong alcohol and tobacco were a state monopoly in many countries for many years, and still are that kind of business heavily intertwined with state.

And prohibited drugs are in a similar position, just the state monopoly is unofficial. Well, officially they are prohibited. As I said. OK.

There are plenty of different kinds of drugs with different degrees of addiction, lethality, damage to the environment in production too.

Anyway, about AI - were it not profitable, it wouldn’t be rolling. It might be a bubble, but it’s, for the users of this kind of technology, a qualitative change from precise algorithms and industrial optimization to fuzzy decisions based on statistics. Basically machines following human orders as humans mean them. Well, kinda like that, except very computationally expensive and as good as your dataset, but there are tasks hard to do the old way and easy to do the new way. Hence (on Jingle Bells melody) bombing swarms, bombing swarms, bombing all the way. I suppose not all the way, but the essence is here. Also surveillance, detecting and stopping people harmful for some political end without ever alarming them or anyone or using direct visible force, predicting events.

It’s inefficient when used for the same tasks a shell script can do. It starts being efficient when used on the scale of lives and families and groups and communities, and armies and economies. Matter of scale.

In that light I’m glad I never played that, living in Moscow near an internal troops division. Doesn’t matter, though, someone has.

Plus, it’s disgusting and should be illegal anywhere that it isn’t just in general. It’s weird that you’re defending it like it’s diet coke or something.

“It’s disgusting” is not quite the right argument for making something illegal.

And that “you’re defending” presupposition should honestly be your last claim in any group of people before being shown the door.

You seem to have that “all or nothing” mindset in an argument, as if you really didn’t like someone, then they should be prosecuted as a rapist, a murderer and an arsonist at the same time. Exaggerating, of course.

Quoting myself.

I “honestly think” each case is unique. Just like with everything else.

CP is harmful due to normalizing the thing, useful due to redirecting some of the energy people with that pathology have away from, you know, real children.

Well. To hang pictures and hooks it makes sense to have wall panels with holes or whatever. And not drilling bearing walls.

Small-small price might be even fine, it’s scary how we live in a world full of wireless connectivity. Just some wire between rooms, LOL.

Just - if attaching stuff with magnets isn’t generally common (except fridge doors), then making magnetic concrete walls doesn’t seem to have potential in helping with that.

When I saw that headline, I was thinking of something like concrete magnetic floors in space, something sci-fi.

Flying concrete from Earth’s gravity well seems very expensive, though.

it’s essentially iterating on known images

No. It’s iterating on the common traits of known images compressed plus lots of randomization.

If you trained a Stable Diffusion model on only pictures of Rwandan people, and asked for an image of “a man sitting on a chair” the man will look vaguely Rwandan.

If you train a model on adult pornography and non-pornography with children and adults alike, it might be capable of generating plausible child pornography.

When you train an AI on CSAM, it produces images that are based on CSAM. Real people were victims in the base material, too. Close e-fuckin’-nough. Real people’s victimization is literally the core of how those images are made.

I’ve just told you how this is not true.

You seem to have that “all or nothing” mindset in an argument, as if you really didn’t like someone, then they should be prosecuted as a rapist, a murderer and an arsonist at the same time. Exaggerating, of course.

Point being that child pornography without real victims is something not contested here and has its own implications. You are trying to argue on something out of reach.

And he started with police officers being supervised, but the real problem is not what we all see about an event, it’s whether we who see it one way have power over those who pretend they saw something else. So if those deciding also don’t want to reduce police officers’ loyalty to their superiors and readiness to obey on the job, they might find an excuse for a clear murder in FHD.

Usually the place of origin of a technology is also where most its uses are pioneered.

as much as Grok is a CSAM machine if you pay for it.

CSAM is Child Sexual Assault Media, and Grok is not providing that, it’s providing Child Pornography.

You are comparing making non-consensual material with real people to generating material with no real people (based off real media, though, but that’s an implication with everything AI-generated).

Non-malicious compliance would be a protocol extension, don’t ask me how, but if WebSockets exist, then it’s possible to make an EuHTTP standard to which you’d upgrade. So that all these popups wouldn’t be needed and you’d conveniently set things up on the client.

Actually owch. One can just take some WS library and make a Gemini-like protocol, only over WebSockets (allowing for much of normal infrastructure to support it, you know, nginx, haproxy, lots of stuff), that would leverage convenient existing technologies and without need for Google’s browser engine more complex and expensive than a rocket.

OK, that’s called NOSTR, they are just not aiming for replacing Web in any form. For now.

EDIT: And this probably is not what’s being discussed.