catreadingabook

(TOS spoiler for one episode)

Just in case any lurkers are still wondering: I think - but don’t remember 100% - the guy everyone’s calling Kevin was some random crew member in TOS who took over the ship’s control room and started trolling the ship’s PA system, until the main characters managed to break into the room and subdue him.

The episode gave him an unreasonably long monologue with the PA system, during which he sang an entire song (“I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen”). It’s also a little weird that this one crew member can take over the entire ship even though he’s some average joe who we don’t really see again.

No idea where the memes about him started though.

Casualties… 8 crew members subpoenaed, 15 sent to mandatory arbitration. Let's not let their sacrifices be in vain. Ready the counterclaims. Prepare to file!

Advice against phishing emails can be reduced to, “1: Never click on a link, call a phone number, download an attachment, or follow instructions you found in an email unless you were already expecting this exact email from this exact sender. 2: If you really want to do those things, search up the organization’s website directly and use the contact info they provide there instead.”

imo it’s the ad-hungry articles stretching everything into 10+ pages that’s making advice so inaccessible to people. Super annoying because it dilutes the real, simple message that’s already there, it’s just locked behind an adwall.

I would really really recommend not underestimating the importance of medical treatment. It took me 4 tries to find the right medication (turns out an NDRI, not an SSRI, did the trick) to discover that actually, “normal” people are basically happy by default?? Like instead of it being this elusive reward that I had to work hard for, it’s like I can consciously hold on to my positive emotions and let go of the negative ones. Also, basic tasks that were endless nightmares before (laundry, cooking, phone calls) are now stress-free and even kind of satisfying?

I had the right tools before, like supportive friends, enough education about radical acceptance and coping skills, and a physically healthy routine, but it didn’t seem to help. And that makes sense now because it turns out, it barely matters how much happy chemicals your brain makes if it’s going to immediately throw them away. Not trying to tell you what to do (am neither a doctor nor a therapist) but I’m wondering if that’s what’s going on with you too.

Sorry, Zoning Violation is my brother. I’m xXG4M3R_G0D_420Xx. Easy mistake to make though.

Lmao imagine getting referred to a doctor for surgery, you look them up, and their professional webpage is like. “i wen’t 2 harverd”

Ok, let me be more specific so that it’s not open to uncharitable interpretation.

What happens when it becomes easy to make something as reliable and complete as, e.g., ChatGPT-4 without the hardware costs and other costs currently associated with it?

That’s true, but thinking about AI that is made to generate speech, processing power is still expensive enough that developers are careful with it. But what happens as memory gets cheaper and calculations get faster, and ordinary developers are able to train their own generative AI?

For example, what happens when a developer decides to train a LLM extensively on scam emails, and spammers love to buy copies of it - but the developer markets it as just “a helpful generative AI”? Or, what if a person trains their LLM on an extremist forum full of hate speech and disinformation, then offers it to a suicide prevention center as a 24/7 alternative to human labor? (Treating these as hypotheticals, where we assume the difference isn’t immediately obvious. Perhaps they also used some legitimate training data, so that most outputs seem innocent enough.)

To me it sounds more involved than selling just a word processor with autocorrect, but less involved than selling an instruction manual for committing crimes.

No way they don’t force you to agree to some “terms and conditions” along the lines of, “You accept full responsibility of all risk and if we get sued, you agree to pay on our behalf. And because we know you won’t read this, here’s all the risks so we can say you gave informed consent: …”

Completely speculating, because I don’t know many courts that have been willing to decide either way, but maybe:

If it causes harm in a way that was reasonably foreseeable, the person who turned it on and/or the person “operating” it might be generally liable on a theory of negligence (but not always).

If the harm was unpredictable, it might be on the manufacturer and the retailer under a theory of products liability (but not always).

Or it could be treated as “ferae naturae,” where owners are liable for their ‘dangerous animal’ pets because they knew the pets were dangerous and still decided to keep them (but not always).

If it’s an AI not associated with a physical device, maybe the programmer who “authored” the lines of code could be criminally liable for criminal “speech” (writing an AI) that incites and enables crime, even as a conspirator – that’s reeeaaally doubtful on Due Process grounds, but it would definitely light a fire under every developer’s chair to make sure their algorithms are explicitly trained against criminal behavior. (but still not always.)

Granted. Unfortunately, it only works when you send yourself hate mail.

The Vulcans might have approved. Something about the needs of the many…

deleted by creator

Dreams are at least somewhat influenced by your recent thoughts and experiences. For example, many studies found that people dreamed more about disease and confinement during the pandemic (here’s a medical journal article about it). You probably have a higher chance of influencing the subject of your dreams if you focus on the desired subject enough during the day.

Interesting, so what happens when an AI creates art that would infringe on a human’s copyright? Would AI art of Mickey Mouse be public domain, meaning AI could be the end of Disney’s insane licensing fee?

Edit: Nevermind, turns out this article is just editorialized. It isn’t public domain, it just isn’t eligible for the AI’s creator to copyright it if it’s fully autonomous.

afaik Amazon tries to offload the work of vetting its vendors by requiring them to have a registered trademark. This led to all the sketchy sellers making tons of fake companies with random strings of letters as names, knowing the USPTO is going to approve “AEGIJDU Clothing” because nobody is ever going to contest that name.

That’s why you see a ton of identical products listed with supposedly different, super random brand names, in case Amazon tries to take down one of the “vendors” (aka, one of the real vendor’s many fronts).

I feel like at this point, accurately reporting the state of the world counts as ‘Democratic scaremongering.’ Climate change is making the world less habitable. The coronavirus is capable of killing you. Some people will die as a direct result of the current forced-birth laws. It’s possible to have a functioning society without racism and sexism. For some reason, these facts are all “political” and it’s not the Democrats who are contesting them.

Galaxy brain idea: Just encrypt your messages manually. Agree on an algorithm and trade keys in-person, then send each other encrypted files that you decrypt with a separate program (and for added privacy, on a separate device that doesn’t have network access). It’s not convenient at all but the idea is hilarious.

There’s an urban myth at my university that two students did this to test rumors that the school emails were being monitored, and after a few weeks later IT emailed them asking them to stop.

Ugh, this takes me back to seeing r/AskMen constantly make the front page with posts along the lines of, “Men, what bad things are women doing to us that shows that they are evil and we are victims?” And then all the top answers are either women wanting to be left alone, or ancient stereotypes that apply to maybe 0.5% of women in real life and aren’t socially accepted to begin with. Really hoping we don’t see the same here.

It could still theoretically be that our reality is some kind of entertainment. For example, people enjoy playing The Sims. There are still active communities for the older versions even though there are newer, more engaging games out there. And more generally, some people prefer old games even though their computers have like 1000x the processing power needed to run it.

If the reality we experience is a simulation, it could be for similar motivations, the hardware would be sophisticated but still a user will run whatever they prefer on it.