I’m not sure this is a level headed take… They say, when someone tells you who they are, believe them. Meta has already made it very clear who they are; I’m not sure skepticism is really in order.

I’m not a Mastodon expert, but I’m pretty sure you can still get their memes if they reply to you (or @ you), or if they post to a tag you’re following.

Well… They are of course right about the fact that these sorts of decentralized systems don’t have a lot of privacy. It’s necessary to make most everything available to most everyone to be able to keep the system synchronized.

So stuff like Meta being able to profile you based on statistical demographic analysis basically can’t be stopped.

It seems to me, the dangers are more like…

Meta will do the usual rage baiting on its own servers, which means that their upvotes will reflect that, and those posts will be pushed to federated instances. This will almost certainly pollute the system with tons of stupid bullshit, and will basically necessitate defederating.

It’ll bring in a ton of, pardon the word, normies. Facebook became unsavory when your racist uncle started posting terrible memes, and his memes will be pushed to your Mastodon feed. This will basically necessitate defederating.

Your posts will be pushed to Meta servers, which means your racist uncle will start commenting on them. This will basically necessitate defederating.

Then yes there’s EEE danger. Hopefully the Mastodon developers will resist that. On the plus side, if Meta does try to invade Lemmy, I’m pretty confident the Lemmy developers won’t give them the time of day.

It goes along with how they’ve stopped calling it a user interface and started calling it a user experience. Interface implies the computer is a tool that you use to do things, while experience implies that the things you can do are ready made according to, basically, usage scripts that were mapped out by designers and programmers.

No sane person would talk about a user’s experience with a socket wrench, and that’s how you know socket wrenches are still useful.

Mine is that a cellphone should be a phone first, instead of being a shitty computer first and a celllphone as a distant afterthought.

This is proof of one thing: that our brains are nothing like digital computers as laid out by Turing and Church.

What I mean about compilers is, compiler optimizations are only valid if a particular bit of code rewriting does exactly the same thing under all conditions as what the human wrote. This is chiefly only possible if the code in question doesn’t include any branches (if, loops, function calls). A section of code with no branches is called a basic block. Rust is special because it harshly constrains the kinds of programs you can write: another consequence of the halting problem is that, in general, you can’t track pointer aliasing outside a basic block, but the Rust program constraints do make this possible. It just foists the intellectual load onto the programmer. This is also why Rust is far and away my favorite language; I respect the boldness of this play, and the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks.

To me, general AI means a computer program having at least the same capabilities as a human. You can go further down this rabbit hole and read about the question that spawned the halting problem, called the entscheidungsproblem (decision problem) to see that AI is actually more impossible than I let on.

Evidence, not really, but that’s kind of meaningless here since we’re talking theory of computation. It’s a direct consequence of the undecidability of the halting problem. Mathematical analysis of loops cannot be done because loops, in general, don’t take on any particular value; if they did, then the halting problem would be decidable. Given that writing a computer program requires an exact specification, which cannot be provided for the general analysis of computer programs, general AI trips and falls at the very first hurdle: being able to write other computer programs. Which should be a simple task, compared to the other things people expect of it.

Yes there’s more complexity here, what about compiler optimization or Rust’s borrow checker? which I don’t care to get into at the moment; suffice it to say, those only operate on certain special conditions. To posit general AI, you need to think bigger than basic block instruction reordering.

This stuff should all be obvious, but here we are.

The thing that amazes me the most about AI Discourse is, we all learned in Theory of Computation that general AI is impossible. My best guess is that people with a CS degree who believe in AI slept through all their classes.

I’ve been selling my Magic cards, and made like 20k off them.

So uh… who put the house up for sale? Did the bank foreclose on the house?

Fun question, but it leads to other questions…

First, are vampires stopped at the property line, or only at the threshold of some appurtenance (e.g., a house)? After all, you’re asking about real estate, and real estate is primarily concerned with land, not buildings.

This sort of matters because, are we assuming that vampire law is coincident with human law? By this I mean, if vampires were to take control of the government and abolish real estate law, would they then be able to enter any property or building, anywhere, anytime?

If vampires do observe human law, then realistically, they probably wouldn’t be able to enter a leasehold without the tenant’s permission. The fundamental right of tenancy is peaceful enjoyment, and in fact tenancy is a legal property right, to access the property in question and do anything, without undue burden, allowed under the terms of the lease. It would be a violation of peaceful enjoyment for a landlord to allow vampires into the unit.

The right of inspection, by the way, is explicitly carved out in real estate law. The right to let vampires into the unit is, to my knowledge, not enumerated.

Glow-in-the-dark heating elements…

“Plagued by visions” just sounds like a particularly obnoxious middle manager.

It’s older, but The Longest Journey is good. Unfortunately, the final game in the series kinda sucks.

While it’s an ensemble, most people would agree that the main character of Final Fantasy VI is a woman—they just might disagree about which woman is the lead.

I also liked the first Xenosaga game, but again, it’s a series that goes pretty badly downhill.

Things are politically stagnant because people believe that politics is about systems. Politics is about power, and politics will always be an expression of the dominant power dynamics. Governmental systems are just how power is explained to outsiders; it’s a mythology that’s told to disguise the real nature of power.

So the question of systems is a red herring, that’s been carefully instilled. This has been true for all history: Many kings don’t really rule, courtiers do. Only kings who can effectively wield power rule, and they’re historically in the minority. This should also be obvious in the US: corporate power is only ever checked in the presence of enormous public action. Not public bitching, public action—general strikes being the most important example.

Or to put it really bluntly, while there’s a lot of pageantry in politics, what politics actually is, is power struggles. But they sure don’t want people to recognize this, which is why there’s so much pageantry and partisanship.

This is also why the government is going so hard against Trump, but letting Pence, Clinton, and Biden slide. It’s not because they cooperated—if you or I had security clearances and just took documents out of a SCIF and kept them at home, we’d be in jail. It’s because Trump clumsily challenged existing power, namely the federal bureaucracy (which he conspiratorially calls the “deep state”), and he wasn’t up to the task.

This is a very computer sciencey view, which is why I leapt past the intermediate logic straight to its conclusion. But I’ll spell it out.

There is no rules-based system that will actually stand in the way of determined, clever, malicious actors. To put it in CS-style terms, you’ll never cover all the contingencies. To put it in more realistic terms, control systems only work within certain domains of the thing being controlled; partly this is because you start getting feedback and second-order effects, and partly it’s because there’s a ton of stuff about the world you just don’t know.

If a system is used as intended, it can work out fine. If someone is determined to break a system, they will.

This is why the world is not driven by rules-based systems, but by politics. We’re capable of rich and dynamic responses to problems, even unanticipated problems. Which is to say, the only actual solution to Exxon and Meta is to fight back, not to bemoan the inadequacy of systems.

Indeed, this belief in technocracy is explicitly encouraged by malicious elites, who are aware that they can subvert a technocracy.

Your post is arguing (by analogy) that we shouldn’t even bother trying. But I guess you don’t need a suicide note when you can just leave a copy of Atlas Shrugged by your body.

Similarly, if the Earth can’t survive Exxon, it was never going to succeed in the first place.

I just have to keep on hammering this point, because it pisses me off so, so much. Many people seem to believe that, since regulatory bodies can be captured, that regulation shouldn’t be done. This is called learned helplessness, and it’s something malicious people inflict on people they want to exploit.

It isn’t sticking your head in the sand to resist assimilation by an evil corporation.

So we’ve moved from implosions to explosions.