https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iukUMRlaBBE

I don’t think it eliminates it, but rather adds an additional, new dimension to social interaction that follows completely different rules. Pseudonymous communication being the norm, for example (which of course, contributes to people being assholes online).

But there are still rules and conventions that govern social interactions online, as well as different levels of enforcement. For instance, if I replied to you with a comment full of abuse, then you could block me. Additionally, you, or someone else on this thread could report my comment, which might lead to me being banned from this community. If I went and complained about this ban being the result of power tripping mods, people would be able to check the modlog and call me out on my assholeish conduct. And if I was consistently abusive across communities, someone might contact my instance admins (and if there were many abusive users from my instance and the admins didn’t take action, then other instances might consider defederating from my instance). It obviously functions completely differently to offline communication, but online social relations are just as real as offline ones.

This is one of the reasons why I have been enjoying the fediverse so far. We get to have conversations about how we should handle people acting shitty. Even though big tech also provides ways of blocking or reporting abusive users, there’s a distinct powerlessness due to the lack of transparency and accountability in how moderation happens. And I definitely agree with you that when we look at how the vast majority of people interact online, it does make it easier to not care about people, and to feel more disconnected with society. It’s why I find it so fun and interesting to be in a space where we can have these conversations

The meme doesn’t say anything about attractiveness though. As a not very attractive goth girl, I like goth style because it makes me feel less self conscious and more powerful in myself. The silly stompy boots help a lot with that

People like you help to make the internet a better place — which matters a lot to me, because one of my most desperately held beliefs is that it is possible to take the hopefulness of the early internet and combine it with the wisdom of the last few decades to produce a more robust kind of hope

Cory Doctorow actually goes more in depth on the radiologist example in a post from last year:

'If my Kaiser hospital bought some AI radiology tools and told its radiologists: “Hey folks, here’s the deal. Today, you’re processing about 100 x-rays per day. From now on, we’re going to get an instantaneous second opinion from the AI, and if the AI thinks you’ve missed a tumor, we want you to go back and have another look, even if that means you’re only processing 98 x-rays per day. That’s fine, we just care about finding all those tumors.”

If that’s what they said, I’d be delighted. But no one is investing hundreds of billions in AI companies because they think AI will make radiology more expensive, not even if that also makes radiology more accurate. The market’s bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: "Look, you fire 9/10s of your radiologists, saving $20m/year, you give us $10m/year, and you net $10m/year, and the remaining radiologists’ job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed, and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it’s catastrophically wrong.

“And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist’s fault, because they are the ‘human in the loop.’ It’s their signature on the diagnosis.”

This is a reverse centaur, and it’s a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it’s what Dan Davies calls an “accountability sink.” The radiologist’s job isn’t really to oversee the AI’s work, it’s to take the blame for the AI’s mistakes.’

In short, we definitely could (and indeed should) be using tools like tumor detecting machine vision as something that helps humans build a better world for humans. But we’ve seen time and time again, across countless fields that it never works out that way.

That’s because this isn’t a problem with the technology of AI, but the fucked up sociotechnical and economic systems that govern how this tech is used, who gets to use it, who it gets used on, whose consent is required for those uses and most significant of all: who gets to profit?

!Not us, that’s for sure!<

Marmite is really good for this. Some of the other go-to “umami bomb” condiments aren’t vegetarian, but Marmite works well for vegetarians

I didn’t know that about Framework HiDPI displays

I agree, but like others have said, it bodes well that they’re open about this in the article

I’d rather see multiple comments giving the same safety advice if it means people are more likely to be able to see it.

Telling kids “you’re only allowed to dig a hole that’s at least as wide as it is deep” is likely to go over a lot better than “you’re not allowed to dig a deep hole because it’s unsafe”

Thanks for sharing that talk, it’s pretty good.

I always find his talks interesting, because it often feels like it’s the same core talk each time, but changed through iterative refining of his ideas and rhetoric due to how often he gets the chance to talk about these issues.

Even though I’ve seen many of his talks before, I am surprised at how skillfully he is able to weave in new angles and themes. I mean, he has been doing this stuff for literal decades, but still, it’s impressive.

For his sake, I really hope he did do it. I mean, being imprisoned as he is would suck regardless, but it would suck extra hard if he didn’t do it

I’ve never been in a scenario where there was an emergency situation where I was on hand when someone needed to urgently take action to avoid a dire outcome, but I can only hope that I would have the courage that this guy had. Mad respect

The internet is full of loads of weird people doing their own thing. You don’t need to like that they like, but trying to shame people into acting differently is cringe. Get with the times.

These are great points

Yeah, I feel you.

It makes me crave analysis like Cory Doctorow often does when covering this stuff on his blog. Fuck performing some misplaced notion of “neutral reporting” — the matter at hand is far from neutral, so let’s be honest and call these abominable turd crumpets out for what they are

My favourite cheating story was when a friend was permitted to take a couple of revision cards of notes into her final exam (as much as you could fit on the cards — one dude took a microscope into his exam, but that is fairly common, apparently). My friend had a form of synaesthesia that meant that whenever she saw letters, she saw colours. Each letter (and number, I think) had its own distinctive colour.

So what she did was she wrote her notes in colour, allowing her to encode an entire additional layer of information. So let’s say the letters in the word “carbon” appeared to her as being red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple, then she could write the word oxygen with the “o” in red, the “x” in orange", the “y” in yellow etc., and end up with something that a normal person would read as “oxygen”, but she would be able to read it as “oxygen” and “carbon” simultaneously. Apparently it took work to be able to efficiently read two layers of information at once (or to focus on one layer and not be distracted by the other), but she started playing around with this back in highschool. She told me that the hardest part of this process was finding some coloured fineliners that were precisely the right colour for each letter.

However, she found that she was unsatisfied with the amount of extra information she was able to encode in this way. So instead, she broke down each letter into multiple chunks. So if she wrote the letter “o” in “oxygen” using 3 different colours (red, orange and yellow", and the “x” with “green, blue, purple”, then she has managed to encode the entire word “carbon” into the space of only two letters. In the end, I think she was able to encode 6-8 times the information density into her permitted notes.

But the most funny thing about this is that producing these notes took so much effort and focus that she accidentally learned the content so well she didn’t even need the notes. Task failed successfully, I guess? (If the task was writing some useful notes using this weird brain quirk or hers). She was salty at first at the wasted effort of making the notes, but I think she was glad to get to have such an absurd project

I can’t imagine what it must be like to perceive the world like that. It really cooks my brain. I remember I once wrote down a word in regular black ink, and asked her what colours it appeared as. Then I wrote down the same word but in red ink, and asked her if she could tell that it was red, and whether she could simultaneously still see the same colours as before. She told me that yes, she could, and honestly, my mind is blown anew every time I think of this.

Gosh, that was longer than I expected. It was fun to write though. I hope at least one person finds it fun to read too.

Yeah, it’s a really eloquent way of phrasing it.

It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, because I have a lot of friends who are doing PhDs at the moment. It’s interesting because especially at this stage, their actual research output isn’t the point. Like, ofc publishing your research is a key part of the process of getting a PhD, but that’s almost like an incidental byproduct of the process — the actual primary product is a person who is knowledgeable and experienced enough in the academic process that they can be trusted to be a part of the system.

(Tangentially, something I’ve been pondering lately is that I think Wikipedia works similarly, in that the encyclopedia itself isn’t the point, but rather the robust systems of editor organising and social infrastructure is the “real” product of value, and the encyclopedia is just a byproduct that exists downstream of the system of practice)

I see plenty of hate, but a lot of it seems to be coming from disingenuous places. Videos that hate stuff are much more likely to go viral than ones from people who are loving the show (or people whose take is “it’s pretty mid”).

Having deep disagreements over which Trek is best Trek is a part of Trekkie cultural heritage, so I have no problem with people who genuinely do hate the show. What I have a problem with are the people whose criticism is clearly coming from a disingenuous place. An example of what I mean is that I’ve seen a few people criticise episode 5 as simultaneously being too nostalgic for DS9, but also not nostalgic enough? People are contradicting themselves in their own reviews, and it makes their goal completely transparent.

Besides that, people who have been into Trek for longer than I’ve been alive have emphasised that this is fairly typical for whenever a new Trek show releases. Initial reactions are often disproportionately negative, because it’s different than what people are used to — but then over the years, the series comes to be viewed in a more positive light. I’m too young to have seen much of this play out first hand, but it does resonate with my own experience; TNG was what made me fall in love with Star Trek, and so when I first watched DS9, I hated it — it felt like an affront to Star Trek. Now, years later, DS9 is probably my favourite series, and I feel like it captures so much of what makes me call myself a Trekkie.

I have been enjoying Starfleet Academy, but even if it wasn’t my cup of tea, I think I’d still respect it for being bold enough to go where no Trek has gone before. It’s trying to do something different, and I appreciate its contribution to the wider conversation of what Star Trek is, or should be. It’s been such a long running franchise precisely because of this willingness to adapt with the times, and I am glad to see Starfleet Academy continuing that tradition

I don’t think it’s necessarily the goal — Discord is just a helpful yardstick to compare things to as a baseline (and some people are looking for something that replaces Discord as closely as possible). Having to switch services is a pain, and whilst it’s not optimal in the long term to just try to replace a thing with a clone, I can see why people don’t have the executive function energy to think too hard about this.

High throughput still helpful though. More rolls of the dice mean more chances to get a tip