And the worst part is, I’m not even sure if they believe it, or if they’re just lying to try and pump the value of the coins they’re investing in that claim to be capable of doing that in the future.

And honestly, I don’t know which I dislike more. Deliberate ignorance, or actual stupidity.

Not that long ago. Many still do, although you’ll primarily find them in more niche spaces within the overarching crypto community.

In fact, just a few years back, I used to be one of them. Of course, later on I became disillusioned with the promises of crypto after learning more about socialism, thinking more closely about how the system fundamentally worked, and realizing that it was effectively just a slightly more distributed variant of capitalism that would inevitably fall to the same structural failings, that being capital accumulation.

To clarify the reasoning that was often used, including by myself, the reason people specifically thought blockchains would make microtransactions better is because they thought that it would lead to more user freedom, and open markets. If you can buy a skin now, then sell it later when you’re done with it, then the effective cost of the skin is lower than in a game where you are unable to sell, for instance.

Obviously the concept of selling in-game items isn’t novel in any way, but the main selling point was that it could be tradeable on any marketplace (or peer-to-peer with no marketplace at all), meaning low to no fees, and they items could be given native revenue-share splits, where the publisher of a game would get a set % of every sale, leading to a way for them to generate revenue that didn’t have to be releasing new but low quality things at a quick pace, and could then allow them to focus on making higher quality items with a slower release schedule.

Of course, looking back retrospectively:

1. Financializing games more just means people play them more for money than for enjoyment
2. This increases the incentives for hacking accounts to steal their items/skins
3. Game publishers would then lose profits from old accounts being able to empty their skins onto the market when they quit the game instead of those skins being permanently tied to that account

There are a small subset of people who legitimately just don’t understand game development fundamentals though, and they actually believe that things would just be fully interchangeable. As in, you buy a skin in Fortnite, and you can then open up Roblox and set it as your player model.

Those ones are especially not the brightest.

To be fair, I do believe their research was based on how convincing it was compared to other Reddit commenters, rather than say, an actual person you’d normally see doing the work for a government propaganda arm, with the training and skillset to effectively distribute propaganda.

Their assessment of how “convincing” it was seems to also have been based on upvotes, which if I know anything about how people use social media, and especially Reddit, are often given when a comment is only slightly read through, and people are often scrolling past without having read the whole thing. The bots may not have necessarily optimized for convincing people, but rather, just making the first part of the comment feel upvote-able over others, while the latter part of the comment was mostly ignored. I’d want to see more research on this, of course, since this seems like a major flaw in how they assessed outcomes.

This, of course, doesn’t discount the fact that AI models are often much cheaper to run than the salaries of human beings.

Yes, unless that service is the kind of thing you think you might pick up later.

For instance, you might use LinkedIn to find a job, but that can still be something you might need in the future, because it’s unlikely you’ll hold that one job forever, and intermittently posting during your existing job could actually help your future prospects.

By contrast, if you used a random site to create a fancier resume, yeah, that account can go straight in the digital wastebasket when you’re done with it. You can always make a new account if you need to make a new resume, and it probably won’t rely on your old account’s data to get that job done.

Chrome is relatively limited in scope compared to, say, a user on an instance of degoogled chromium just using the same Google services along with all the other browsing they do. The extra data that’s gathered is generally going to be things like a little more DNS query information, (assuming your device isn’t already set to default to Google’s DNS server) links you visit that don’t already have Google’s trackers on them (very few) and some general information like when you’re turning on your computer and Chrome is opening up.

The real difference is in how Chrome doesn’t protect you like other browsers do, and it thus makes more of the collection that Google’s services do indirectly, possible.

Perplexity is still being pretty vague here, but if I had to guess, it would essentially just be taking all the stuff that Google would usually get from tracking pixels and ad cookies, and baking that directly in to the browser instead of it relying on individual sites using it.

Is this phone also more secure?

Probably not.

Apple & Google have spent considerable amounts of time building out hardware security infrastructure for their products that I find it extremely unlikely Fairphone would have been able to match.

For example, the popular alternative Android OS GrapheneOS only supports Google Pixels, because: (Emphasis added by me)

“There are currently no other devices meeting even the most basic security requirements while running an alternate OS. GrapheneOS is very interested in supporting a non-Pixel brand, but the vast majority of Android OEMs do not take security seriously. Samsung takes security almost as seriously as Google, but they deliberately cripple their devices when unlock them to install another OS and don’t allow an alternate OS to use important security features. If Samsung permitted GrapheneOS to support their devices properly, many of their phones would be the closest to meeting our requirements. They’re currently missing the very important hardware memory tagging feature, but only because it’s such a new feature”

If even Samsung, the only other phone brand on the market they consider close to meeting their standards, doesn’t support every modern hardware security feature, and deliberately cripples their security for alternate OS’s, as a multi billion dollar company, I doubt Fairphone has custom-built hardware security mechanisms for their phones to the degree that Google has.

Not to mention the fact that the stronger IP law is, the more it’s often used to exploit people.

Oh, did you as an artist get given stronger rights for your work? That platform you’re posting on demands that you give them a license for any possible use, in exchange for posting your art there to get eyeballs on your work.

Did your patents just get stronger enforcement? Too bad it’s conveniently very difficult to fund and develop any product at scale under that patent without needing outside investor funding into a new corporate entity that will own the patent, instead of you!

To loosely paraphrase from Cory Doctorow: If someone wants a stronger lock, but won’t give you the key, then it’s not for your benefit.

If corporations get to put locks on everything with keys they own, but also make it hard for you to get or enforce access to the keys to the locks on your stuff, then the simplest way to level the playing field is to simply eliminate the locks.

I tried replicating this myself, and got no similar results. It took enough coaxing just to get the model to not specify existing tariffs, then to make it talk about entire nations instead of tariffs on specific sectors, then after that it mostly just did 10, 12, and 25% for most of the answers.

I have no doubt this is possible, but until I see some actual amount of proof, this is entirely hearsay.

These folks include presenting a false person as being of age, then switching to underage at the time of meetup when the target shows up.

I’ve never seen even a single instance in my own viewership of numerous channels that engage in pedophile hunting where the person is presented as being above the legal age of consent, then only switching to underage at the time of the meeting. They’re presented as underage from the get-go.

Then the group tries to kill the person

Again, this doesn’t seem to be a widespread thing compared to the number of them that simply lure them to a location then ask them questions (and directly state that they are free to leave at any time since they’re not law enforcement and can’t arrest them) The people you’re talking about are a small minority of both the actual number of pedo hunters, and the number of overall views received.

And the perpetrators think this is justice.

I doubt the people that are explicitly lying to farm content think it’s justice. I do believe the people actually catching people who voluntarily contacted someone presented as underage from the start do.

It depends on how these channels are going about finding their victims for it to be considered similar.

Remember, entrapment is based around luring someone to do something they otherwise would not have done had the operation to entrap them not occurred. If they created an account posing as a minor, then directly DM’d a person asking if they wanted to do x/y/z with a minor, that would be entrapment.

But if they made an account claiming to be a minor on social media, and the person contacted them voluntarily, asked their age, was told it was under 18 and still continued messaging, then sent explicit photos, that’s not entrapment.

However, if they were then the people who initiated the conversation about wanting the person to come to their house / visit them somewhere, that could be considered entrapment, and the only evidence against the person that could be eligible for use in court would be the explicit material they sent without being prompted.

It varies case-by-case, but from what I’ve seen, most of the larger operations tend to try and avoid entrapment-like tactics in most cases, where they only allow the other person to initiate unlawful behaviors, rather than prompting anything themselves.

couldn’t they just run down the registered sex offender list

The point of their channels is usually to find new predators that haven’t been caught, so they can then face legal consequences, (or at least be pushed to stop acting on their desires) rather than to punish people for being pedophiles in general, so it wouldn’t really make sense to go after those who were already convicted.

hotel

I think you mean “all-inclusive” resort (that isn’t all inclusive and actually charges a gazillion dollars in random fees) that makes them feel like they’re experiencing local culture while actually just experiencing the effects of the resort chain exploiting the local population for cheap labor while cheaply imitating the culture.

Don’t worry, we Americans are definitely capable of escaping our cultural bubble! /s

1. Say something blatantly uninformed on an online forum
2. Get corrected on it
3. Make reference to how someone is perceived at parties, an entirely different atmosphere from an online forum, and think you made a point

Good job.

We cant even handle humans going psycho. Last thing I want is an AI losing its shit due from being overworked producing goblin tentacle porn and going full skynet judgement day.

That is simply not how “AI” models today are structured, and that is entirely a fabrication based on science fiction related media.

The series of matrix multiplication problems that an LLM is, and runs the tokens from a query through does not have the capability to be overworked, to know if it’s been used before (outside of its context window, which itself is just previous stored tokens added to the math problem), to change itself, or to arbitrarily access any system resources.

Here’s the key distinction:

This only makes AI models unreliable if they ignore “don’t scrape my site” requests. If they respect the requests of the sites they’re profiting from using the data from, then there’s no issue.

People want AI models to not be unreliable, but they also want them to operate with integrity in the first place, and not profit from people’s work who explicitly opt-out their work from training.

I’d say the same. Google dorks work much better than DDG’s filters for site-specific stuff, and generally for things like "search term" but for general searches DDG seems pretty similar.

The only things I’ve also had worse performance from DDG on compared to Google (in very minimal ways) has been:

• Highly specific searches (e.g. searching for a diagram of the dimensions of common connector types, DDG shows side-by-sides of connectors, Google does that but also with more diagrams that have dimensions in them)
• Context but not keyword based searches (e.g. “thing that has x y and z characteristics” returns more relevant results in Google than DDG, very marginally)

And of course, there’s always the !s bang to run a search through Startpage (which uses Google) if I’m not getting enough detail.

Surely the Democrats will stop moving to the center now that they understand that they weren’t properly addressing the needs of the people… right? right?

Not if his net worth drops enough to the point that a few lawsuits can drain what’s left of his assets.

If Alex Jones can be ordered to pay nearly a billion dollars from a lawsuit from a relatively small group of families, then I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of it happening to Musk. (Even if it is still tiny)

There are some things it would be nice to have a brain in a jar to do for me.

I do not, however, want that jar sitting in an Amazon-owned server room somewhere, where they can modify the jar to change how the brain works.

Take back your brain-in-a-jars from big tech! /j

. In absolutely no way did I even mention black people.

How did you not underatand that it was an analogy? I was testing your logic, by demonstrating that your exact argument can identically be applied to racist arguments, yet you would probably not see it as valid in that context, thus your own logic in this situation falls short.

People can have differences in opinion, but sometimes, those opinions are harmful, and there’s a reason why people are so angry at you past just simply disagreeing on logic.