I’ve had a similar experience at my job, where we’ve gotten an unlimited access to a few models.

There’s one huge problem I’ve very quickly ran into - skill attrition. You very quickly get lazy, and stop being able to critically think about problems. Hell, I’ve only had access to it for two weeks, and I’m starting to see the effects. “Can you add this button?” is a very simple change that I could probably make immediately, but AI can make it a little bit faster, and without me putting in the effort. Or it can at least show me the correct script to put it in, without me having to go scouring the code looking for it. It’s addicting, and quite scary. YMMV, you might have stronger willpower and be able to switch between lazy and locked in mode, but I very quickly found out I can’t.

But is it useful? That very much depends on what do you want out of your job, and both cases have major (and mostly similar) problems.

If you don’t really care about the quality of your job, and are there just to work your 8/5 and get money, hoping to just balance effort vs. quality so they won’t fire you, the it might help. Especially at this point, where management isn’t really used to it that much, you can get away with a lot. But, eventually, you will very probably need to look for a new job, and good luck getting through an interview when you haven’t really thought about code without the help of an AI for the past two years. The fact that you started coding before AI is the only advantage you now have against literally EVERYONE who can do the same job with AI. And every day you don’t write a piece of code from scratch, you are loosing that advantage.

I have I job I don’t particularly care about, but I still use it as a learning opportunity. It might be vastly different in other projects, but my job is mostly just support and bugfixing on a game that has been released for years at this point by a large developer, so nothing really involved, so I can usually afford to use my time to research things I wasn’t familiar with, look into things we could do better thanks to new tech or updates that have been released, and how to refactor or rewrite our code into it. Or making tools that would make our testing easier. I could just not do that, easily get my paycheck, and be glad I have a somewhat stable position, but that would not help me much. In this case, AI is actively harmful for what I’m trying to get out of my job, even if it works pretty well. It only erodes my skills I have, which are not very practiced even without AI, since bug fixing isn’t really much of development. Adding AI to the mix would just throw away my years of college and dozens of projects I’ve learned on. And I won’t learn anything new.

Obviously, if you care about your job output and want to do it perfectly, you don’t want to erode your skills, and you don’t want AI output in your code. AI by definition outputs mediocre and average work, riddled with hard-to-spot bugs, and you should not be ok with mediocre if you really care about the work you do and leave behind.

Especially the point about the pretty large probability of having to seek a new job eventually is IMO the most important thing that’s really worth considering, before you go all in on AI. It’s something that a lot of programmers spend years (and in less developed countries thousands of dollars) in learning, and throwing it away in favor of a service that will very soon need to massively ramp up their costs to get out of red and earn billions they have invested into it is not worth it.

Currently, AI is cheap. It also actively harms your ability to do the job without it. They have also invested billions of dollars that they need to eventually make up, and you will eventually need to pass a job interview. Keep that in mind when deciding to offload your thinking to AI.

Remember that (I think) C++ race condition in RTG software, that killed people with something like 0.0001% probability and it was a huge deal and a reason to immediately retire the devices (or maybe just fix the bug, the point is that in medical, it’s super important to have a high success chance)?

I’m sure AI doing diagnosis will be able to get to a higher success chance, lol.

EDIT: From a quick search, it looks like mis-diagnosis chance in doctors is around 10%. I still don’t think AI can do better.

I’m also betting on Graphene. Been able to get by with a profile without Play Services, thankfully my bank doesn’t require it, but if they ever do (or the new integrity bullshit), I’m immediately switching banks to one that doesn’t.

That’s the only app I need on my phone, anything else I can get without if they require it.

In a hypothetical situation where you get a law passed in your country, where it’s mandatory to perform age verification on all social media apps, it’s simple.

No verification? Jail time. Will they go after you? They could, if someone pointed them towards your server. (I think they even have to, at least in our country, the government has to persecute a crime they are made aware of if I remember my college law courses right)

In some states, if I understand it right (based on a quick googling, might be false) failing to do verification for porn can be considered as a felony. It’s a slightly different example (porn vs. social networks), but if the laws are written in the same way, there’s not really much you can do about it.

Completely anonymous hosting that’s in no way tied to you (through IP, credit card, location, domain, logs, etc) is difficult. While you’d still probably be fine if you have a private-use server, you’d still give anyone who doesn’t like you and knows about it a pretty easy way how to make your life a lot more difficult. This of course heavily depends on how would (will) the laws be written in your country, but give the track record of lawmakers understanding tech, there is a chance that even small self-hosted stuff would catch flak. If it’s written in such a way to not be i.e limited by user count, then there’s not much you can do.

A lawyer would probably be able to talk you out of it, but you’d still be charged and it would suck (and be expensive) to deal with.

So, yeah. “How could the government force me to enable it” boils down to “jail time”. I mean, it’s basically a similar question like “how could the government stop me from using Telegram or VPNs”, and IIRC there are some examples for that already.

EDIT: Not having public sign-up enabled could be a way around it, since random people can’t make an account there, so you’re basically doing age-verification by a veto. However, if someone under-age got into your server, they then have a leverage on you, since they are there illegally (in the hypothetical scenario).

This is a good reminder for people to run Snowflake relay if they can. Just installing the relay extensions is all you need to do.

I’ve had the extension for a bit now, and I usually get a few connections the moment I open my browser. I quickly forgot about having it installed, and it never gave me any trouble.

Snowflake allows you to connect to the Tor network in places where Tor is blocked by routing your connection through volunteer proxies located in uncensored countries.

Similar to VPNs, which help users bypass Internet censorship, Snowflake disguises your Internet activity as though you’re making a video or voice call, making you less detectable to Internet censors.

I’ve been a fan of MASH, an ansible playbook that can host a lot of stuff.

I only have experience with their separate Matrix playbook, but it is super robust and I haven’t ran into any problems the playbook couldn’t deal with (aside from running out of VM disk space once), so I’d expect this would be similarly good.

Time to finally use my https://noyb.eu/'s free one hour of legal privacy consultation that comes with a membership to find out if forging my ID for the purpose of verification will get me realistically in trouble or no. And buy Death Stranding.

Fuck this.

I was pretty confused for a second, since I only saw a screenshot with Linux as OS, and no review, so both comments didn’t make sense.

The relevant screenshot is in the post link, not the post content that’s shown when you open comments.

Yeah, I’m all against this kind of surveillance, i.e the whole stuff about Ring cameras, but this is not the case.

It’s the product working as intended. If I ever had a reason to install security cameras to my home, I would expect them to work especially when someone is trying to cut out my power.

Oh, I though those are the same. AFAIK the 2021 version was never on Steam.

From a quick check, it looks like they only added a DLC, but most of the game is the same. EDIT: And some QoL updates, endgame and the like, which is all content of the DLC, but you are right!

IIRC it has been on the Battle.net store (and consoles) for quite some time now. Wiki puts it’s release date on 2021.

I’m using https://freetubeapp.io/ and so far it mostly works. You have to stay on top of updates, and age-restricted videos can be a problem, but the feature I love most is that it can subscribe to creators without an account, and it just shows you time-sorted feed. It also has native sponsorblock baked in, and has support for downloading videos, or using an invidious as a proxy.

You can turn off autoplay, comments, recommended videos and other engagement-maxing bullshit, so it’s just a video player without distractions that I can use to follow stuff I’m directly interested in, that doesn’t force content on me.

And pasted here so you don’t have to click.

Turning off TVs with adds has been the only usage I’ve been getting out of my Flipper zero. Doesn’t work always, but I did have some success and I’ll always try whenever I have to spend time longer time anywhere.

Exactly!

I have the same relationship with ads as the OP, and even deeper hatred for fingerprinting to the point there is a lot of friction in my daily tech usage. Lot of stuff breaks, I have to fill captchas often, maintain self-hosted tech, get wrong time zone and language I don’t know on websites, etc. (On one hand it’s a boon, because it is keeping my pretty serious internet addiction in check and it has kept me away from most social networks and short form content).

They have just installed this annoying kind of LCD slideshow adds that are a long screen alongside underground line, and I’m actively trying to avoid and not look at it, same with any IRL ads. I really hope we’ll get some FOSS smartglases tech eventually, just so I can have an IRL adblock that replaces adds around you that I’ve seen a demo for.

But, I have seen (single instances) of adds over the year that I appreciated, because it’s more a clever art than an add. But 99% of adds isn’t that, and it’s just annoying intrusive attention grabbing slop designed to burn into your mind. Fuck that.

I highly recommend looking into Matrix Ansible Deploy, has an amazing documentation and actually works robustly. It will make the whole process of hosting it way easier, I only needed to change like 5 config values, give Ansible the SSH key for my server, and then basically run “just setup-all” from a Ansible docker.

It’s extremely easy, the Matrix ansible deploy project is very simple to use (with at least basic tech literacy), is very well documented and as far as I’ve seen in the past few years of using it do deploy and update my Matrix instance - it’s also very robust. I haven’t seen it fail a single time, which tends to be a problem with larger Docker/Ansible projects.

I’m paying 7$ a month for a cheap server on Hetzner, you also need a domain name, and the whole setup took like an hour.

Ah, TIL. Though I can’t really come up with much that would scale well to the modern world where technologies are involved. But that might be only because I’m not thinking local enough, since that’s what matters.

However, I’m sure there’s an anarchist zine about exactly that.

Is it even possible? I mean, you need to share the chat, and probably have it publicly joinable.

Keeping feds out is basically impossible. Sharing the group only in person could work a bit, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they had undercover agents at any major gatherings.

“Dario Amodei’s 19000 word essay”?

More like, " Dario’s ass model’s", am i right :D