valaramech

u/valaramech@fedia.io
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To extend this a little bit, I'm not convinced "is X conscious?" is really the question anyone is trying to answer. What I think we're really trying to sus out is "does X require rights?" and where is the line for that.

As another commenter asked, something like "is turning this off equivalent to murder?" is effectively asking if the thing deserves a "right to life" like any human might. At what point does a "thinking machine" cross the line from "person-like" to "person"? I doubt anyone has a satisfactory answer to that question and, unfortunately, I strongly doubt we'll have one until well after it's actually needed.

I think grappling with that question is maybe a little more straightforward when we consider other animals we already consider highly intelligent (e.g. pigs, dolphins, or octopi) but that we don't give the same kinds of rights to that we would a human. At what point would we consider a non-human animal to be equal to ourselves? How many person-like traits does something need before it is a person?

Anyways, all that aside, I think we should start asking the questions we're really trying to answer and stop using other questions as proxies for that one.

on i use this one a lot · c/linuxmemes · 3 pts · 256d

I wouldn't be surprised if all shells have some form of that, but not enabled by default. I know Bash does, but I've never turned it on.

In situations like this, the answer isn't to argue over the interpretation of the words: it's to fix the words.

If the writers intended "no excessive capitalization or excessive grammatical errors", then it should be changed to that.

If the writers intended "no excessive capitalization and no grammatical errors", then it should be changed to that.

Both situations remove the ambiguity and prevent pedantic internet arguments about language interpretation.

Pfff, all these amateurs here using Vim. Y'all should use Emacs. You still have all of these problems, but you get to act all superior about it. /s (except for the superiority complex; that's real)

I think the biggest problem is that the idea of copyright is good, but the implementation - in most places, anyways - is complete dogshit.

Like, I'm fairly certain the original implementation of copyright in the US only lasted 10 years or thereabouts. Like, that's more than enough time to profit off whatever you made but short enough that it'll be usable by others within their lifetimes. This whole "life of the author + 100 years" shit needs to die.

on TIME IS RUNNING OUT . · c/Mirror · 18 pts · 1y

Anyone that believes your phone is sending every sound it receives to the cloud knows absolutely nothing about data storage and transfer.

It would require more storage than the entire rest of the internet combined, would horribly tax both internet and cell infrastructure, and 99% of it would be useless noise. You might get that with targeted surveillance, but we're not all being targeted like that.

What's far more likely is that your phone is doing semantic analysis on what you're saying all the time and reporting that data. It's much less data, much easier to keep track of, provides actionable insights at scale, and would be far more useful to an oppressive regime. Your phone isn't sending recordings of your conversations, it's sending metadata about all your conversations.

My understanding is that running most of BlueSky is possible on small to moderate hardware. However, running all of BlueSky requires basically cloning 100% of all the content on BlueSky (which, as of Nov 2024, was ~5 TB).

So, like, yes, one can run part of BlueSky or a clone of BlueSky which has none of the main instance's user's content without much trouble, but actually running an entire BlueSky stack is eventually going to become cost prohibitive.

I found this write-up to be enlightening on the subject.

on Toleruleance · c/196 · 6 pts · 1y

I read a decent rebuttal to the "paradox" of tolerance. To summarize for those that don't know, the idea is that tolerance is a social contract. You tolerate everyone that's behaving according to the contract. Refusing to tolerate someone that has broken the contract isn't a violation of the contract; it's required in order to enforce the contract.

You break the rules, you lose the protections. Simple as.