Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
No bio...
User ID: 123
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
you shouldn't trust ridiculous nonsense like a Kardashian sponsored toothbrush
I figure that can be perfectly valid evidence for the quality of the product! A company shelling out money for sponsorships signal that they believe in the product itself, which is important in situations where the consumer needs confidence that they won't drop support for it in the near future. For e.g. tech like game consoles this is especially valuable.
The Kardashians also have a personal brand to protect. If they sponsor a product I can be more confident it won't be so bad it'll damage their image; ceteris paribus this is certainly better than nothing.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
With an account you can just use the API or the playground. That gives you access to the model without all the safety stuff trained into it, though you'll have to pay a modest sum for usage credits.
Using that you can create pretty much whatever problematic content you want.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
One of the earliest programs I wrote was a random name generator for the ABC 800, a Swedish Z80 computer from the 80s; grossly obsolete by the time I got it but could run BASIC* well enough.
My current handle was generated from that, initially for some elf character I made for a MUD that i kept reusing everywhere.
* From what I can remember it was some cursed de-Americanized version of BASIC that e.g. modified the keywords and replaced the standard "$" string symbol with the international currency symbol "¤" to counter American cultural encroachment. As a fun aside, when the Swedish keyboard was standardized it got prominently featured as shift-4 due to this, though very few people since have ever used it.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
It's not the fault of the website, it's just that they don't specify a file extension at all, and so the browser appends one automatically.
On Firefox (likely the same for Chrome) the browser asks the operating system for the appropriate extension it wants for the MIME in question ("image/jpeg"). On Linux, this is read from /etc/mime.types. On Windows, this is read from the registry (HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT > MIME).
You're seeing .jfif because Microsoft recently decided that should be the primary extension for that file type. Note that this is actually the proper name for "jpeg" files, as the container format is actually called "JFIF" – "JPEG" is just the compression method it uses which has become the informal name for it.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
We know what we are offering for this role is more than what you make
I dunno, I figure that the base assumption would be that wages are set by supply and demand, and as such in the long run it'll all be counteracted by an equal general rise in wages; or in practical terms all employees competing with other people who are in the same boat so it doesn't matter.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
It isn't really used for verification, no. Just a unique personal identifier for communicating with e.g. government agencies and banks; but there we're basically always using 2-factor authentication on top (a certificate you e.g. install on your phone, plus a code) so it doesn't really matter if my ID gets out.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
How concerned would you be if your home address was visible online if somebody googled your name? What about your age, SSN, tax return (naturally including your exact income), company involvement, real estate ownership, and every court case transcript and and police report you appear in?
In Sweden, that's all public information. If you looked up my name you'd find my address pretty much immediately, which you could drop into google maps to get a view directly into my kitchen. Police reports is slightly more difficult; you'll find websites stating things like "Foo Bar is present in 2 court cases! Pay $10 to see them!", and you'd have to send an email yourself to the court/police if you don't want to pay for that.
In addition, if you happen to work for the government, then all your work letters, emails, and instant messages become public information as soon as the case it concerns is closed. Tangentially this means that it's very easy for a Swedish person to be a major pain in the ass for government agencies, as you can anonymously keep bulk-requesting random emails and and the employees have to do time-consuming archive digging.
I find it interesting how people here really don't care about it. Hell, I don't really care, mostly because it's been like this my entire life and nothing bad has come out of it (yet? Knock on wood).
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
According to the Unicode CLDR (assuming the space character in the "localeKeyTypePattern" before the colon is the same as the space before the question mark, I'm too lazy to search around for the real spec location), Occitan and Breton does so too, somewhat unsurprisingly. The only other one that does is Adlam – a script used to write Fulani, a Senegambian language. Now that'd be a hard trivia question!
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Swedish and German does a thing where we end questions with "or" ("eller"/"oder"), causing people to write stuff like "Do you want a sandwich, or?" in English.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Ten years ago, I'd have said that the most likely way that I'd die would be of heart disease at 78 years old or the like.
Today? My "normal" death is forty years away! With the speed these models are advancing, and how we are still picking low hanging fruit in several different areas, it seems increasingly unlikely we won't have AGI by then – barring some disaster like a global nuclear apocalypse. Today, I'd say my most likely death is either getting paperclipped, or surviving for thousands of years until I die of some scifi crap I can't even currently imagine.
How should one act in the face of this? I'm not Yudkowsky; what little he can do to affect the course of humanity, I certainly can't do much better. Still, are there not steps one could take to improve one's own lot in case it works out for the better? I'd like to see some sort of "retirement plan for the AI-pilled", common sense stuff you can do to at least hedge for the eventuality. Post-singulary I'll get hopelessly outcompeted in alpha, but maybe there's some beta to be had if you act now? Buying physical items with historical significance, perhaps? I imagine the rich people of the year 3000 would pay a lot for an authentic medieval manuscript, for example.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Maybe intelligence is just a really slow and finicky thing to evolve, and "add moar mass" is a natural fast shortcut that evolution takes if the animal can support the extra size. Birds could not, since they still need to be able to fly. Humans could do it, at least until our heads became so large we started having trouble being born. After we reached that limit we'd need to "optimize" the brain instead to become much smarter, but that simply haven't yet had sufficient time to happen.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Much of media works on narratives. "Wealthy petrostate spends an obscene amount of money on prestige sporting event" is a nice bite-sized one.
If the journalist mentions that the official numbers might be made up, it adds complicated nuance to the story. How expensive is the World Cup really, if you can't trust the numbers? This leaves the reader uncertain and mildly confused instead of thinking they have learned something about the world. Easier for the article to just print whatever BS amount Qatar says and move on; the vast majority of journalists have tight deadlines and wouldn't have time to investigate it anyway.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
2yr ago
Same here, but presumably there's not nearly enough of us to significantly affect anything. I think it mostly targets children; they don't run ad blockers to the same extent as other groups, they often spend a large amount of time on youtube, and are more perhaps more easily influenced by advertising itself.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
2yr ago
Price too high and people complain about prices
I wonder if that's part of the reason for the giant "service fees" and such that the ticket vendors charge – by claiming a large part of the price is from the vendor, they are effectively unloading the bad publicity on them instead of on the artist. It doesn't really matter that much for Ticketmaster if people hate them, but it does for a musician with a fanbase to think about.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
2yr ago
Tangentially I find those youtube thumbnails ghoulishly inhuman. Creators have access to pretty complex A/B testing for what drives clicks with instant feedback, so over time they have slowly "gradient descended" into plastering those open-mouthed staring faces everywhere – not as a conscious decision by anybody, but simply because that's the local minima when you do large scale tests of the minds of children. It's almost Lovecraftian, like a human puppeted by a deeply alien mind that you have no goals in common with.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
2yr ago
Most people have no intention of ever getting into politics I don't think. Even so, for the examples we've seen of politically active people getting called out (Rachel Dolezal, Elizabeth Warren, and Shaun King, from the top of my head) they've leaned into their racial category more than simply using it for admissions. Even then, for Warren it took a while and she had to do something foolish like having her DNA tested for it to become obvious. Comparing with a strategic person who never mentioned their fake race again after being admitted and they'd probably never be found out.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
2yr ago
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
2yr ago
How easy is it for students to simply lie about their race in their application? It's not like the university is going to run a DNA test to see if your grandma was actually native American.
If you wanted to disrupt race-based admissions, the highest effect/cost thing you could do would probably be publishing a guide on how to pretend you're a minority like that. It doesn't even necessarily have to be very effective in practice, just be well known as something that happens, and it'd undermine the entire thing.
I'm still wondering if there are exploits that use a (modern) browser alone, without relying on opening other software.
Yeah. Any time there's a zero-day exploit for a browser you can be sure that attacks will start using it fairly quickly. For example, cursorily searching online I found an example of two from last year targeting Chrome in the wild.
Edit: Here's another relevant article, from this year: "Google Patches Third Actively Exploited Chrome Zero-Day of 2022"
do browser plugins even exist anymore? I can't remember the last time I saw a page with a plug-in.
I'd say Flash and Java are completely dead for any moderately recent website, yeah. Still, computers might have the plugins installed; perhaps for some internal corporate website that will never been updated. Other than that, I'd guess the Adobe PDF plugin should be fairly common too.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
2yr ago
Might this be testable?
IQ is valuable as it tracks actual intelligence fairly closely; if you are good at IQ-test-style puzzles you're very likely actually intelligent. This will be detectable in other things like complex creative tasks, and even practical areas like average income, crime rate, and so on. If the test was biased towards one gender by adding questions that the gender did better at, but weren't as strongly correlated with actual intelligence, you'd expect their IQ scores to be less correlated with the downstream effects of intelligence itself than it is for the other gender.
(Theoretical example: If men were a lot dumber than women in general, one could add "ability to lift weights" or the like to the IQ tests until both genders had the same average score. This would however result in IQ no longer being able to predict the ability of men to e.g. lead a company, like it still would for women.)
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
2yr ago
Could you, say, send an API request to a bank from within your webpage, and then read the response and cookies from the host page? I'm thinking this would be blocked by both browser and site technology. This has to be what CORS is for, right? Not just to annoy me while I'm developing?
Yeah, it shouldn't matter, but if a site has e.g. an XSS vulnerability the attacker will need to be able to run some initial Javascript as the victim to kick it off. Sending an email so that they'll visit a specific page might be just that.
nothing bad can really happen to you just from following some random link.
Attackers can host exploit kits on the target site, which spray a bunch of exploits against your computer if you visit them. If your browser/plugins/extensions/OS isn't fully up to date this might very well successfully install malware. This was really relevant when I worked in IT security about 6 years ago but seems to have declined a lot recently; still, it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand quite yet.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
2yr ago
Comparing it to Alpha Centauri seems almost unfair; considering it's probably the game with the most philosophical depth of all games, ever. It's not a coincidence that Scott frequently inserts references to it in his posts (click the colon characters in his review of Albion's Seed, or read Unsong, where I noticed at least one chapter deal with and directly reference concepts introduced in SMAC e.g. the quote from a "wise woman" here, a reference to this).
The chief difference I think is that the writers clearly had a whole bunch of genuinely interesting ideas stewing in their heads that they wanted to express, and chose the computer game medium to do so. Other games have a plot and then attempt to come up with "deep" ideas after the fact, something which almost always fail.
(Tangentially, If you've played it and enjoyed it as much as I did, I can recommend this blog containing in-depth analysis of basically every quote in the game.)
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
2yr ago
Some effect similar to the euphemism treadmill, perhaps? No matter what method you use, that method will steadily lose favour due to it being associated with killing, so you keep inventing new ones to shed the old emotional baggage.
Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus attempted that a bunch of times. It generally didn't go so well:
Immediately before the vote Bibulus ordered it suspended for religious reasons. Caesar, who was also pontifex maximus, the most significant religious official in Rome, ignored this and continued with the vote. Bibulus and two of his tribunes mounted the steps of the Temple of Castor and Pollux and attempted to denounce the bill. The crowd turned on him and his entourage, breaking his fasces (the symbols of his consulship), pushing him to the ground and pouring feces on him. Getting up, Bibulus uncovered his neck and shouted to the crowd to kill him to end his embarrassment. His fellow senators persuaded him to leave and regroup at a nearby temple, as the assembly proceeded to pass the bill.
In theory Roman law is very "hackable". In practice people are going to throw you out, dunk you in shit, and pretend you never said anything.
Well, I mean evidence in the bayesian sense. When it comes to "new crypto coin with no clear practical use case" my prior is strongly on "scammy pyramid scheme"; the soft evidence of celebrity endorsements does not do too much to move that.
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