gatonegro

Because more AI-generated SEO garbage is exactly what the Internet needs.

When updates or apps go wrong on Windows, you sometimes need to use Powershell. Sometimes it's easier to use Powershell for admin tasks to avoid janky settings menus. What's the difference?

https://archive.ph/9T3wA

It's perfectly doable. I set up Linux Mint for a non-technical family member on a laptop almost a year ago. They use it for browsing the Internet, watching things on streaming services, etc. I just told them to click on the small shield icon that pops up in the system tray now and again to install system updates. I visited them yesterday and asked to see the laptop out of curiosity. It's fully updated, fast, and does everything they want.

I think the comparison with nuclear tech is missing one crucial aspect: ease of access. Nuclear tech has been misused, and a sufficiently funded and motivated malicious actor could get their hands on it in some way to cause harm, but it is, for the most part, out of reach.

AI, on the other hand, is already being used by every hustler looking to make a quick buck, by students who can't be bothered to write a paper, by teachers who can't be bothered to read and grade papers, by every company who can get it to avoid paying actual people do to certain jobs... Personally, my problem is not with AI tech in itself, it's with how easy it is to get your hands on it and make literally anything you fancy with it. This is what a lot of the "AI for everything" crowd can't seem to grasp.

Because AI-paraphrased copy/paste jobs and plagiarism are the future of academic writing!

I think the so-called "replication crisis"[0] might have something to do with it, particularly in psychology.

The misaligned incentives to publish frequently to have a nice-looking list of articles to show when you next apply for a grant means there's tons of flimsy research that goes unquestioned. It's also fairly attractive to jump on specific bandwagons and publish noise just to get your name out there. A lot of these meta-studies are looking inward, at the field itself and what is currently accepted, and finding that a fair bit of it is of very poor quality, if not straight-up nonsense.

I think, overall, it's a good thing. Research should not be focused exclusively on new knowledge. We should also be validating what others put out there, to make sure it's worth listening to.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

it seems a lot of our modern afflictions come down to an gross imbalance of exercise, diet, sleep, and social connection

If you think about it in an evolutionary timescale, the way most of us live in the West these days is horrendously incompatible with the sort of life we evolved to live. Thousands and thousands of years were spent out in nature, in small communities, eating certain types of foods, engaging in physical activities, etc.

The sit-on-a-chair-all-day, look-at-screens-all-day lifestyle is a comparatively new development, and neither our minds nor our bodies are suited for such an existence. That's enough to cause us a fair amount of trouble. Add all the socioeconomic issues you mention into the mix, and it all starts to make perfect sense to me.

Now Apple just moved the search to the OS via an API call to its server, and people are noticing the traffic.

I'm not sure how photo hosting services doing this for the past 2 decades is related to this when the author of the post explicitly mentions he doesn't use Apple cloud services or products that would trigger such behaviour. This was the OS analysing someone's images, stored locally on their personal computer, and calling back to an API for no discernible reason.

I presume a lot of time is wasted grading papers and it seems like something an AI that can see pages should be well suited to automating...

I guess if grading papers is "a waste of time", then we shouldn't be surprised that students can't be bothered to write the papers themselves in the first place. Which raises the question: if students use AI to write their papers, and teachers use AI to grade them, what's the point of any of it?

Hard work is a means to an end. People want to work hard when their efforts are likely to have some meaningful result—higher pay or a promotion, if talking about a job; a good grade or admission to some institution or program, if talking about education; having a positive impact on someone else's life. Judging by the tweet author's bio, I assume he's focusing on employees and jobs.

Despite what founders and CEOs might think, most employees have no interest in working towards their "vision", particularly if that requires a large sacrifice of personal time and energy in exchange for barely enough money to survive and nothing else of any importance. Probably an unpopular opinion to express on this site, but it is what it is.

Don't expect people to "work hard" for you, especially if you're not going the extra mile yourself to compensate and acknowledge said hard work.

You might be interested in vx-underground[0]. They maintain a neat collection of malware samples and source code.

[0] https://www.vx-underground.org/

majority of my suggestions were Jordan B Peterson

I'm interested in psychology and philosophy, so I'll watch videos on those subjects every so often. Naturally, the Algorithm™ becomes obsessed with recommending me Peterson videos soon after. I'm 98% sure the "Do not recommend" and "Not interested" buttons are just there for show, because I keep seeing those suggestions whenever I wander off into psychology and philosophy videos.

Sure, that's a useful heuristic, but I'd say it works because we deal with other humans. It's safe to assume that, being members of our own species, they are likely to have an inner experience and consciousness too. How do you apply that to an entity that is completely different—chemically, mechanically, etc.—to you and any other conscious being you've ever met?

I always enjoyed the X-Files-style alien conspiracies. Abductions, Roswell, the Men in Black, crop circles, Area 51, that sort of stuff. Unfortunately, those seem to have fallen out of favour in recent years.

To this day, one of my favourite things to do for relaxation is playing Euro Truck Simulator 2 while listening to old Coast to Coast AM shows from the 1990s about aliens, or demonic possessions, the Georgia Guidestones, or doomsday prophecies about some catastrophic, civilisation-ending event happening at the turn of the millennium. It's better than watching a movie or a TV show for me.

Maybe it's because I don't keep up with this stuff anymore, but it feels like modern conspiracies have a very heavy political (and partisan) component, and that sort of thing just repels me. Used to be that governments, no matter their political leanings, were part of the cover-up and not to be trusted. Now it seems like half of the conspiracies are political ads for one side or the other.

https://archive.ph/tt0pY

I keep seeing talk of artificial consciousness with nothing more than a vague outline of what said "consciousness" would entail, or a hand-wavy "we'll know it when we see it." This is, of course, not that surprising considering we don't have those answers for our own consciousness.

At this stage I'd say we're way more likely to end up developing a system that can trick us into believing it is conscious, à la LaMDA and Blake Lemoine, than an actual conscious entity (whatever that means, exactly). And, if that were to happen, I don't think we'd have a way of knowing that's the case. We could just carry on believing we created artificial consciousness because our not-at-all-conscious robots are too good at saying the right thing with the right prompt.

I keep a line of JavaScript as a bookmarklet to do this:

  javascript:void(open('http://archive.today/?run=1&url='+encodeURIComponent(document.location)))

I tried Takeout on my main account, and I have to say I'm surprised. Took about an hour to process and it allowed me to download everything.

While I was waiting on that, I finally paid for a proper email service and migrated my domain, so I have a copy of my Gmail data and a working, Google-free email service now.

A few days ago I was going through an old Gmail account, and decided to get my data through Takeout. Told me it'd take a few hours, and the next day I had a link ready. Click the link, enter the password, it tells me I need a verification code that it wants to send to an address that stopped existing 15 years ago.

As it turns out, Google is not sufficiently convinced that I am in fact the owner of the account, so it refuses to let me download the data. I don't feel inclined to spend time trying to figure out this nonsense, but thankfully none of the information in that account is particularly important. I'll take it as a sign that I should just move away from Google, because next time the information on an account could be actually important, and I'd be screwed.

Would you be OK to find yourself in this situation[0] in the future? Personally, I feel like putting all your digital eggs in one basket, be it Apple's, Google's, Microsoft's, or anyone else's, is asking for trouble. And the deeper you get into any specific ecosystem, the harder it is to free yourself later if you need or want to for whatever reason.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34067857

It's just the "celebrity gossip" aspect of HN at work—where Elon Musk was, what Paul Graham had for lunch, etc. Truly fascinating.

treat your customers well. Supporting Linux is treating his customers well.

It's really won me over, I can say that much. When I was using Windows, I favoured buying games from GOG over Steam whenever possible. DRM and all that.

Ever since I moved to Linux, it's been the opposite. GOG couldn't care less about Linux compatibility, and while you can get their stuff going through some combination of Wine/Lutris scripts, the experience I get with Steam is so much better.

People were falling for "verified" tweets from blatantly fake accounts. The coming deepfake crisis is going to be hilarious and terrifying.

Here it is.[1] I missed the original post, thank you for mentioning it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33412932

I just got to a bit where Herzog is talking about how artificial intelligence is "the next step in human evolution", and Žižek brought up the idea of organising a "pro-artificial intelligence movement." Herzog then talked about making "films for the machines."

This is how it begins, isn't it?

Edit: Now Žižek is going on about full scale war between humanity and machines:

the alternative is either mutual annihilation or we continue in our present nonhuman forms. This would have been the only way to a true human—I don’t know what the right word is. Yes, I would have said, yes, let's get rid of them all!

I've considered going to someone like Krebs

This sounds like a good idea, honestly. Companies' reactions to vulnerability disclosures can be... unpredictable. If security research is not your area, it might be easier to get someone from that industry to handle the disclosure.

but I'm extremely hesitant to simply because of what could happen if this gets out without being patched.

If you found this vulnerability, odds are someone else will run into it too sooner or later.

The conclusion of this article does not follow from its premise. "Hydranencephalous babies are conscious, so materialist views of consciousness are wrong and dualism is the only explanation."

I am not familiar with hydranencephaly so I might be wrong here but, from what I can find, patients with the condition usually have some cerebral structures intact, it's just the cerebral hemispheres that are missing. Patients appear to be conscious, and react to varying degrees to their environment, though their sensory and cognitive abilities are severely impaired or outright missing. The exact degree to which they are conscious strikes me as unknowable, but there seems to be at least some level of consciousness there. All good.

Wouldn't this situation lend credence to the materialist explanation? A human being born with only basic cerebral structures intact displays only basic levels of consciousness.

The author claims that these babies are "interactive, and show a full range of emotions" and uses that as evidence for a dualist view of consciousness. He seems to conveniently ignore the severe limitations that these patients show, which appear to track fairly well with the severity of the condition. No dualism required here, at least in my view.

Now, if the author were to show evidence of a patient who displays some level of consciousness while missing all cerebral structures, I think he'd be onto something. But that's not a thing, as far as I'm aware. A materialist view should be able to explain how these patients appear to be conscious while missing large parts of their brains, and it hasn't done it so far. That is not an argument in favour of the opposing view.

Yes, sorry, my phrasing is somewhat confusing. In terms of energy they are faster, since more speed is required for higher orbits. They appear to be slower in a relative sense when observed from Earth — the Space Station or a Starlink sat will appear to be moving significantly faster than a satellite in medium or high-Earth orbit.

It also depends on the geometry of the orbit — an object in a circular orbit will move at a constant speed, while an object in an elliptical orbit will move faster or slower depending on which point of the ellipse it is.

I understood the parent comment to be focused on an Earth-centred perspective, since they were talking about Kessler syndrome and Earth-orbiting debris. I was trying to address that point from an Earth-centred perspective too, but I appreciate how that can be confusing.

But higher orbits are just higher speeds and when two objects collide and break apart some smaller fragments might fly off with speeds far greater than those of colliding objects.

Objects in higher orbits are slower[1] than objects at lower altitudes, and debris from a hypothetical collision between two high-orbiting objects would not accelerate to a speed "far greater" than the originating objects, because that increase in speed would require some form of acceleration. One satellite smashing into another would not add sufficient energy to the debris to alter its speed significantly. Any change to the speed of the resulting debris, if it were to occur, would also necessarily alter its orbit. The object's speed and its orbital altitude depend on each other.

So failure at very low orbit might add a lot of debris to higher orbits that might trigger Kessler syndrome.

It should be noted that "failure" does not mean "exploding into a thousand pieces", so a malfunctioning satellite by itself is not that much of a problem. Low altitude satellites such as Starlink are actually better from a space junk perspective — their altitude means the effect of atmospheric drag on the spacecraft will eventually (within months, sometimes) cause it to re-enter the atmosphere instead of just hanging around in Earth orbit forever, like dead satellites do at higher orbits.

Kessler syndrome would be more likely to occur with satellites in medium and high Earth orbit, since there is no drag to bring the dead spacecraft or debris back down to Earth. Anti-satellite weapons are particularly dangerous here, because they're likely to target high-orbiting satellites and leave debris fields behind.

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[1] As pointed below, in terms of pure kinetic energy this is not correct. I was referring to apparent speed vs an object in low-Earth orbit.

I'd be surprised if that warning made its way to the mainstream distros.

This is the first time I'm hearing about the warning, but I thought I'd run `egrep` and `fgrep` on my Arch system. Sure enough, both result in warnings: `egrep: warning: egrep/fgrep is obsolescent; using grep -E/-F`

So it's made its way into Arch, at least. Though, like I said, this is the first time I'm hearing about this.