sailor_sega_saturn

OK to start us off how about some Simulation Hypothesis crankery I found posted on ActivityPub: Do we live in a computer simulation? (Article), The second law of infodynamics and its implications for the simulated universe hypothesis (PDF)

Someone who's actually good at physics could do a better job of sneering at this than me, but I mean but look at this:

My law can confirm how genetic information behaves. But it also indicates that genetic mutations are at the most fundamental level not just random events, as Darwin’s theory suggests.

A super complex universe like ours, if it were a simulation, would require a built-in data optimisation and compression in order to reduce the computational power and the data storage requirements to run the simulation.

So why must binary digits define, for all time, the limits of computation, and our experience of it?

There's enough layers of irony here that it's a bit hard to tell if he's making a serious argument here or not; but this is one of the weirder straw-men arguments I've ever read.

"No no no, it's not all the exploitation, social ills, lack of user control, shoddy quality, and general capitalism I hate in the modern "tech" industry; it's the fact that it uses binary!"

TL;DR:

AI will take over the economy for reasons so humans will have no economic value for reasons which is terrifying for reasons and also we can't just have males sitting around because y'know so we need to make a pretend economy because communism. So anyway y'know PageRank? Well don't be shocked but humans have relationships too. So yeah basically let's distribute ownership of all the world's resources once a month proportionally to how many likes they receive (no I am not a vtuber why do you ask?).

What the heck did I just read?

Bluesky is backed by a cryptocurrency venture capitalists, which makes me nervous: https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-24-2024-series-a -- but in the same press release they reassure people that they're not about to go all NFT (Non-Fun Tokens) just because of their backers.

This does not change the fact that the Bluesky app and the AT Protocol do not use blockchains or cryptocurrency, and we will not hyperfinancialize the social experience (through tokens, crypto trading, NFTs, etc.).

The couple’s long conversations about transgender people haven’t gotten as much attention, with just 2,500 views on a video in which they “explore the fine line between genuine gender dysphoria and the allure of a ‘trans cult’ that may lead non-trans individuals to make life-altering decisions.”

Oh boy an hour long video about how the trans are transing eachother as part of a trans cult!

But why aren't they concerned about kids being tricked into the life altering decision of being an "anti-woke" podcaster? 🤔

Edit -- made it through most of that video (how??) and it's a bunch of reaching and fear mongering while trying to sound like principled conservatives. The funniest part was probably them blaming anime avatars for trans people.

Edit -- just kidding the funniest part was the guy calling trans people the "priest class" of urbanism. Worship me and I shall bless you with seperated bicycle lanes and bountiful farmers markets!

Yeah absolutely. This is happening right on the coattails of that Character.AI suicide too so it's not like a freak impossible to predict accident. I mainly posted it because it flies in the face of all the talk of AI safety and "responsible AI practices".

Like Google says in their AI principles:

We will continue to develop and apply strong safety and security practices to avoid unintended results that create risks of harm. We will design our AI systems to be appropriately cautious, and seek to develop them in accordance with best practices in AI safety research. In appropriate cases, we will test AI technologies in constrained environments and monitor their operation after deployment.

I don't even care that much if Google wants to host a chatbot, but they keep trying to imply it has safety properties it doesn't. It's like writing a web framework without any HTML or SQL sanitation support and saying "We will continue to develop and apply strong safety sand security practices..." and acting shocked when all the websites get hacked.

Google's Gemini has told a user to "please die" and that they are "a stain on the universe" without provocation: https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/1gq4acr/gemini_told_my_brother_to_die_threatening/

The lack of a speedometer in front of your face is a pretty glaring quality issue. You have to turn your head to look at the massive touchscreen. The one that replaces all other dashboards and most tactile controls ~~for manufacturing cost savings~~ to be a cool futuristic vehicle of the future.

I won't even start talking about the whole CyberStuck thing again because that's too easy; except to point out that it has turn buttons on the steering wheel instead of a turn signal stalk, a shifter on the ceiling, and the steering wheel is not round.

I only recently bought my first car and it's just old enough that it didn't even have a backup camera until I got one installed. Honestly half the reason of buying used was so I could have a car without a touchscreen haha.

~~As AI technology advances, human oversight in military operations, though rooted in~~ ethics and legality, may emerge as a strategic liability ~~in future AI-dominated warfare~~.

Yeah it's sad. As the article points out similar incidents have happened repeatedly. Anyone who saw the door design could have (and did!) predict something like this would happen. My coworker was trapped in his Tesla in his garage for 15 minutes (and he wasn't in a panic).

Look at the picture of the manual door release here: It's pretty well hidden, you reach in and pull up on the door buttons.

... then scroll down and look at the picture of the rear door manual release. You have to pull off some trim from inside the pocket, pull off another panel, and then pull a cable.

... but wait! There's more!

Note: Not all Model Y vehicles are equipped with a manual release for the rear doors.

Jesus, I hope the engineers who signed off on this think about what they've done and do better. I would say I hope someone regulated bad emergency door releases out of existence but... y'know.

A bit of an aside, but how did everyone decide to use the exact phrase "decisive victory" when congratulating president elect Trump? It keeps jumping out to me and I find it kind of weird. It has almost a militaristic tone.

Apparently the 1x engineer is taking weekends instead of working 24/7.