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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • A friend used to develop apps for Android and iOS platforms. WRT privacy lockdown and default permissions: Android < iOS < degoogled variants of android focusing specifically on privacy, security, or minimalist obscurity (e.g., graphene, lineage, etc). Retail Android is by far the worst choice for privacy, because Google’s primary motivation for contributing to the project was always instrumentation of a mobile platform for data harvesting and ad delivery.






  • Edit-pre: To be clear…

    I use LLMs rarely (personal reasons) and never for certain things like writing and math (professional reasons) but this comment is not an “AI good/bad” take, just a practical question of tool safety/regs.

    AI including LLMs are forevermore just tools in my mind. And we wouldn’t have OSHA/BMAS/HSE/etc if idiots didn’t do idiot things with tools.

    But there’s evidently a certain type of idiot that’s spared from their idiocy only by lack of permission.

    From who? Depends.

    Sometimes they need permission from authority: “god told me to!”

    Sometimes they need it from the mob: “I thought I was on a tour!”

    And sometimes any fucking body will do: “dare me to do it!”

    But all these stories of nutters doing shit AI convinced them to do, from the comical to the deeply tragic, ring the same bonkers bell they always have.

    But therein lies the danger unique^1^ to these tools: that they mimic a permission-giver better than any we’ve made.

    They’re tailor-made for activating this specific category of idiot, and their likely unparalleled ease-of-use absolutely scales that danger.

    As to whether these idiots wouldn’t have just found permission elsewhere, who knows.

    My question is whether some kind of training prereq is warranted for LLM usage, as is common with potentially dangerous tools? Is that too extreme? Is it too late for that? Am I overthinking it?

    ^1^Edit-post: unique danger, not greatest.

    Rant/

    What is the greatest danger then? IMHO settling for brittle “guard rails” then bulldozing ahead instead of laying groundwork of real machine-ethics.

    Hoping conscience is an emergent property of the organic training set is utterly facile, theoretically and empirically. Engineers should know better.

    Why is it greatest? Easy. Because some of history’s most important decisions were made by a person whose conscience countermanded their orders. Replacing empathic agents with machines eliminates those safeguards.

    So “existential threat” and that’s even before considering climate. /Rant







  • I actually wasn’t considering Harris on this really at all but of course she’s the go to example usually, even though she’s now forever unelectable. I guess in my head she lost for many other reasons altogether greater in sum than Gaza.

    But really I was referring to the much greater problem we’re facing right this moment not in the past. Would-be Dem politicians are right now facing battles with AIPAC supremacy.

    I’ll just use Mamdani since we’re just getting things off the ground here. That took record breaking grassroots activism and was still use one upset in a long history of utter domination. AIPAC’s batting average is still ferocious.

    Any blue candidate is liable to face them in some way. With Mamdani it simply wasn’t relevant to the job he was applying for and he stuck to that, bless him, and NYers believed him. Mazel. But dammit if they didn’t try to make his stance on Israel THE deciding factor of the election.

    You could say Mamdani was a coward for not taking on the genocide in Gaza more fully. It’s true. But my question was specifically “is that really what we need from candidates this year?”

    Because right now are tons of candidates right now being similarly put in these weird gotcha tribunals interviews and debates about allegiance to a foreign nation, albeit an ally, when IR and diplomacy is 100% irrelevant to the job they’re even running for. Is it really every candidate’s job to take a stance?


  • My impression is that what should be simple (always “genocide no”) gets much more mealy-mouthed (e.g. “I’m totally pro Israel…but maybe let’s rein in the genocide…oh no I don’t mean Israel shouldn’t have the right to defend itself!") precisely when anyone who wishes to do good by getting elected is confronted with the reality that there’s a rampaging nationalist organization sandbagging and bullying candidates, promoting others for policy favors and effectively holding big chunks of the electorate hostage in elections.

    In practice, that means when I see otherwise good candidates use their talking points or be evasive and spineless on the topic of Israel, I’m quicker to think that they might simply have chosen a different battle, than to think they actually believe that there’s nothing wrong.

    More simply, if standing up to the nationalist bully will almost certainly end their career/role/office before they even had a chance to begin, how many do you think will divert from the issues they entered politics for just to be the one to take out the bully? I’m guessing it’s a small number.

    So while I do see it as cowardly on a personal level, and personally I’d prefer to quit politics than to get pushed around and just hold my tongue or say their lines, I also assume that it’s a decision made under duress without further evidence to the contrary.

    In short, calling candidates “pro genocide” and expecting individual candidates to take the bully head-on in any particular race feels unfair to me, or at least misguided since, if we actually want to change this situation, my generation really needs to have some frank chats with their parents about their AIPAC donations.

    What am I missing?

    Edit: typos swype errors missing words


  • I believe it’s a holdover from older oven technologies. Like gas ranges with an always-on pilot light and manual gas on off pipe valves you were supposed to close before travel. IIRC those were the origin many historic city fires in dense housing, and the reason for a lot of current gas safety like the sulfur/bad-eggs additive that makes unburned gas an lot easier to detect.

    But nowadays the worst that awaits those who return after forgetting the oven is generally… just a bigger utility bill instead of losing everything and maybe killing people.