@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Excrubulent

@[email protected]

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. View on remote instance

CEO of Google Says It Has No Solution for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information ( futurism.com )

You know how Google's new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won't slide off (pssst...please don't do this.)...

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Oh great, eugenics.

A good society protects its vulnerable members and that means people with impaired judgement, including the young & elderly.

You could say the same thing about a company that designs a system that tells people to eat glue. They have experts working for them that must have known this would be a problem and they released it anyway. Do they get yeeted from society for that, or are they still amongst the most powerful class of entities in history?

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

If San Francisco can do it then no city has an excuse.

https://api.trekaroo.com/photos/flickr_cache/75233/75233.jpg

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Emergency vehicles are clearly mentioned in the top text, that person just misunderstood it and now can't take the L and they're throwing around the R-slur whilst accusing other people of resorting to base insults.

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Building infrastructure is never easy. San Francisco's experience could aid in teaching other cities how it's done. If there's an easier method, then it could be used, but hills obviously aren't that big of a problem.

Also riding up hills is just a matter of having the appropriate gears: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipENw5mjjSg

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

I used it as an example of how trams can work on steep hills.

Now that DuckDuckGo is out. Give me your search prompts and I'll answer them as best I can. That includes images (based on what I have saved on my PC). So what is it you wish to know or see?

Edit: Due to popular demand FatTony Search servers are down for the time being. but has gone open source just in time (Yes that's how it works 😡) . You may now get responses from other users. Servers will be back up some time later.

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

gooned out popperbate edge session definition

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

I wouldn't be surprised if the ban was a pretext and the sub was just something admins found objectionable for their own reasons. Like as long as mods remove material and users when an issue is brought to their attention then the sub should be fine.

The fact they don't know why it happened is telling that they weren't given a real chance to correct the issue. Just centralised social media things I guess.

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Being a gooner is a significantly more worthwhile investment of your limited time on this earth than being a reddit admin imho.

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

I believe the admins do get paid. It's the mods that were fucked over here that don't get paid. I was really talking about your overall contribution to humanity.

What is the Legal copyright on a Lemmy Post?

Most instances don't have a specific copyright in their ToS, which is basically how copyright is handled on corporate social media (Meta/X/Reddit owns license rights to whatever you post on their platform when you click "Agree"). I've noticed some people including Copyright notices in posts (mostly to prevent AI use). Is this...

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Copyright is more than that, like who is allowed to make commercial use of a given work. Just because something is written down in a public forum doesn't give everyone free rein to do whatever they want with it under copyright.

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Uh, copyright always works that way. You're not supposed to make copies of movies most of the time, but people do, and it is virtually unenforceable as long as they take basic precautions. One of the only times it is reliably enforceable is when a business tries to make money off of your work and you can sue them.

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Sure, but I would say that there's a reasonability test there. Like, I could have a posted note somewhere on the internet that says, "by allowing my computer to download your content you grant me full license to use your intellectual property for any purpose in perpetuity throughout the universe," but that doesn't make it binding on anyone. Federation means other servers pull the data, so you don't have control over it, so you can't be considered to agree to a random server's terms.

The same thing happens when you download a website. The website always allows others to download its content, but that confers no license no matter what anyone else says.

"License free" doesn't mean "free license", it means the opposite. No explicit permission is granted.

Excrubulent , (edited )
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

I think this is a very fine distinction that would have to be settled in court and could go either way. I can only say what I think it should do. And to be honest I think copyright is garbage, but for it be consistent I don't think that this difference should matter.

I think an important distinction for me with federation though is that it's not just a push, you have to subscribe, so it's a two way street. It would be similar to an RSS feed, and I'm not aware of that having any particular implications for copyright. There is certainly no explicit acknowledgement of terms baked into either protocol, so I think the only reasonable conclusion should be that it doesn't impact copyright either way. That remains unlicensed and subject to the normal rules, which presuppose that permission is not granted.

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

The US nuking international law to protect a handful of criminals has been a matter of explicit policy since the Hague Invasion Act of 2002.

Yes, warcrime enthusiasts, I know it has a PR-friendly name that you would rather I use, but I'm not going to do your whitewashing for you. Cry about it.

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Oh come on, who wouldn't pay for that? To not run into trains? That's a bargain! Thanks Daddy Musk 🥰

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

You're right that it's just a name, which means it's within Tesla's power to not call it "full self driving". Like maybe keep the word "full" for when it's better than "full self driving brackets not really".

The reason it's called that is so when you're buying the car, you can read "full self driving", the salesman can call it "full self driving", and then you can get excited and think you're getting full self driving and pay stupid amounts of money for an iPhone on wheels.

It's also so Musk can get up on stage and lie for years about how you'll be able to go coast to coast while you sleep by the end of the year or whatever it is. Having a bunch of warnings in the software setup is not enough for someone gargling Musk's jizz to cough it up and see it for the bullshit that it is.

You can give us all this extra info but you can't change the core reality that the name is a lie.

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

I notice you danced around the question of whether it was a lie to focus on bullshit legal stuff, which isn't the arbiter of truth and reality. As I once heard a judge say, "You don't come here for justice, you come here for a judgment."

Anyway since you think it matters, the lawsuit you're talking about is happening and a judge has ruled that the case has merit to continue: https://www.reuters.com/legal/tesla-must-face-vehicle-owners-lawsuit-over-self-driving-claims-2024-05-15/

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

I don’t give a shit whether their marketing is a lie.

I mean clearly. "Full self-driving" is marketing, and it is a lie. That's the point being made here. You don't have to care about it, but that doesn't mean it's not a lie.

I'm not not blaming the drivers. They were foolish enough to buy a Tesla and trust it with their lives for a start. But I am also blaming the marketing. Two things can be true.

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Musk was involved in marketing and lying about it, though, and his extremely prolific public image is what gave it so much credibility. He's lost a lot of that credibility now though, largely because people have spent a lot of time criticizing him. If you want him to disappear from the public eye that's great, so do I, but he's one of the most powerful men in the world, so that's not going to happen.

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

So you admit that this is in fact a lie?

"Hey, every psychopathic corporate entity that functionally runs our society lies to us all the time," is not a great sales pitch for why this psychopathic corporation should get a pass for its specific lies.

This is the depth capitalism apologists will stoop to with absolutely no self awareness.

Excrubulent , (edited )
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

You don't have to admit to anything, but you just did.

Bitch all you want about how Tesla misleads or mismarkets their products (they do, anyone with two brain cells knows that)

See? That's what I would call an "admission".

but if you’s gonna use that as an excuse to trust a car to drive 100% independently and flawlessly because they said so… it’s totally on you. Or your corpse.

I... don't? I already said that if you'd been paying attention. It also does not release Tesla and Musk from culpability for lying to people about their product, many of whom went on to become corpses as a result of their negligent and malicious lies, many of them well before Tesla and Musk lost their credibility. I would also say that if your business model relies on selling dangerous bullshit to gormless rubes, then if those gormless rubes get killed by your dangerous bullshit, then you are culpable for that dangerous bullshit by virtue of targetting the gormless rubes.

EDIT: Let's not forget the bystanders who were killed by the dangerous bullshit along with the gormless rubes. People's actions affect more than themselves. This is part of living in a society, which should actually protect its members and not leave them to the machinations of the worst psychopaths. You know, if it's going to be a society worth living in.

Scammers target the mentally infirm by deliberately making their communications extremely unprofessional and laden with grammatical errors, that doesn't mean we blame those people for being scammed.

Also if you have to invent an imaginary version of the other person - someone who drives a Tesla and believes it is actually fully self driving in this case - in order to make your point, then it's probably not a very good point.

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

The quote is right there, in your own words, and you're not even saying anything anymore.

I don't care about internet points either, but I do care about the truth. Apparently you don't.

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

but he's one of the most powerful men in the world, so that's not going to happen.

Excrubulent , (edited )
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

It could be simply obscure like you say, but the absence of a network doesn't guarantee it's that easy to hack.

They could use a checksum and your trick would invalidate the card until you figured out the correct algorithm, which would require a new visit to the laundromat for every new attempt, so basically impractical.

That or the card is just simply encrypted, which would make it impossible to interpret. It would be easy to implement too because the shared secret is between machines that are all physically controlled by the laundromat.

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Oh yeah, that's true, so you wouldn't have destroyed the card, but it's not a useful hack if they've done even the most basic security measures.

That said, I would be fascinated to know what was on that card. I'd give it pretty good odds of having absolutely no security measures whatsoever.

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Well that's the thing, you don't need a lot. You're handing out these cards and people walk out the door with them, so you can't trust they're not going to mess with them. They don't need to be walking around with a writer, you need one person to have access - either own one or have one at work or a university lab - and they can make as many cards as they want to give to their friends. Then they could use your business for years and get thousands of dollars of free service without you ever knowing.

That's the real threat here I think - a poor university student with a technical degree challenging themselves to cheat the system and help out their friends. I mean it's probably not going to happen, but a business owner who's aware of this attack vector could spend the time to get a basic encryption system going that's practically unbreakable.

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Yeah, but you'd need the algorithm. It could be a hash of some kind, and if you don't know what kind of algorithm they're using you can't replicate it.

EDIT: Oh, I see what you're saying. You mean you could simply rewrite the original card value back over it forever. That's actually quite clever, and it would work even in case the card was completely encrypted.

Actually that means this is trivial to beat I think.

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

The problem with that is that if the machines don't talk to one another then there's no way to make that system work across machines. I guess if each machine enforced it then you would eventually run out of machines that work for your hacked card.

Excrubulent , (edited )
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Yup, I've realised that's what people are saying. That's not an easy one to guard against I'm afraid.

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

No worries I've been in this thread a bunch and only just got it.

‘Only Hamas can defend us’: Israeli raids and Fatah failures boost support in West Bank ( www.theguardian.com )

Khalil, a shy 21-year-old whose name has been changed, was arrested in a pre-dawn raid last October for his allegiance to Hamas. But when Israeli forces smashed through the door of his family home, they didn’t tell him why they were detaining him. He was imprisoned for six months without charge, in conditions he described as...

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Wow repressing a population under the pretext of fighting terrorists only radicalises that population. We certainly couldn't have predicted this based on millennia of examples.

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

I'm not going to dispute your clearly superior knowledge of basketball statistics, and those are all remarkable parallels, but I think it's more likely they were referring to the helicopter crash.

streaming or torrenting today vs. 5 years ago

I've been a good boy for 5 years or so but the seas call to me. Are streaming sites the way to go now or is torrenting still a better bet for mainstream movies and tv? I'd imagine all of my accounts have been deleted on those sites so I'd be starting over.

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

And you can use it for any torrents, like games & software. It's way cheaper than any streaming site and so much more worth it.

US focused on hunting down Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar, in bid to end Gaza war ( www.middleeasteye.net )

The United States is focused on tracking down Hamas's Gaza chief, Yahya Sinwar, amid a new push by the White House to help Israel declare "total victory" so it can bring an end to the war on Gaza, US officials have told Middle East Eye....

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Are you literally Satan's maggoty cum fart?

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

You are Satan's Maggoty Cum Fart, are you not?

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Joke's on me, they were only pretending to be stupid.

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Oh wow it's really the original desert car, roll-overs and all, huh?

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

You heard 'em GET BACK IN THERE

Excrubulent , (edited )
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar
Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

You're right about the problems, but I wouldn't characterise deregulation as a mistake, it was a calculated plan that achieved its goals which were to benefit capital.

I just think it's important to understand that capitalism is set up to operate this way and will always devolve into barbarism.

Excrubulent , (edited )
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

This is going to be important for maintaining the legacy of old video games.

Like, emulators are fine, but access to recompilation makes it much easier to keep things in a generally useful format.

Honestly one of the reasons I don't play emulated games much is that the extra step of configuring and running the emulator is a hassle, and sometimes it straight up doesn't work.

Edit: Anyone who thinks access to the source code is somehow worse than the original executable code, just ask yourself, what is the legacy of say, Doom, for which we have access to the source, versus literally any other closed source game of that era that requires DOSBox to be run? Doom is a meme that "runs on anything" and has a thriving modding community, and it's hard to think of examples of DOSBox games because you never think about them. Source code is important.

Excrubulent , (edited )
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Right, but it's not just pushing a button to get the recompiled code, there's still translation work to be done. Crucially, a framerate will need to be chosen, so you can just choose to base the framerate on the processing done.

Sure, the ROM is "original" but I'd argue that accessing the source code - or an analogue to it - is a more fundamental way of archiving the original, since without that source code we don't have access to how it was originally made.

The point is not that it competes with ROMs or replaces them, but it adds to them and makes the archive that much more complete.

Also for games where emulation doesn't work or isn't practical, recompilation can allow us to maintain games that otherwise couldn't be.

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

It was 20 years ago proving they've never been any better and will never learn.

Arizona accuses Amazon of being a monopoly and deceiving consumers with “dark patterns” ( www.theverge.com )

Arizona's Attorney General, Kris Mayes, filed two lawsuits against Amazon on Wednesday for allegedly engaging in deceptive business practices and maintaining monopoly status. The first lawsuit accuses the company of using dark patterns to keep users from canceling their Amazon Prime subscriptions, violating Arizona's Consumer...

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

People should definitely learn about these, they affect an awful lot of our modern digital environment, not just in subscriptions but all the ways companies try to manipulate our behaviour.

Ever see a cookie popup and "Accept" is a big colourful button, but if you want to decline it's behind a grey "more options" button, then you have to scroll through a dozen different categories and disable them all, then the button has some ambiguous label like "confirm cookie choices" which gives the impression you're accepting them again? That's a dark pattern.

User interface design has long known how to streamline a process and communicate with a user to increase the number of people who complete a certain task, so it's a simple matter of inverting that logic to make a task hard and obscure to reduce that number.

What's honestly surprising is that this is actually illegal somewhere. I didn't realise there was any legislation about this.

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

You are conflating technology and its benefits with the owning class's misuse of that technology. Capitalist apologists love to do this because otherwise the crimes of capitalism would have to stand on their own and there would be no defending them.

It's exactly this conflation that lets people claim that the luddites were entirely anti-technology, but they weren't. Again this is a lie that has been spread by capitalists to defend their own image.

The luddites were killed and suppressed by the military and the government made industrial sabotage a capital offense, and then slandered them. Maybe if they'd won we'd live in a world where reporters weren't murdered over the Panama papers for instance.

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

What speeches? What stated aims? You need to make claims if you want me to address them.

Excrubulent , (edited )
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

E: You can scroll down to the dividing line if you want to read the history and not my condescending screed about your ignorance. I suspect you won't read much of this so I'm putting this note here at the top to let you know that if you don't read the whole comment then you'll probably sound like a fool in your reply. I mean that's already true but like... even moreso. If you don't like the way I'm talking to you, you can refer yourself to the way you just talked to me.

Okay, so I think you've fucked up here. I think that because you seem to think I'm asking you for a demonstration, ie, for sources. But if you actually read my comment carefully you would know that I asked you for a claim. This was me politely asking you to simply say what you mean instead of hiding behind insinuations and vague hand-waving.

And the reason this is a fuck-up is because anyone who actually knew how to understand and source literature on a topic like this would have immediately known the distinction between making a claim, and demonstrating a claim. I have made quite clear claims but not yet demonstrated them. You have not made a single claim that could even be demonstrated, you have just assumed that everybody already agrees with your version to the point that it does not even need to be stated.

I also know it's a fuck-up because I have heard this fact as a rebuttal of a common misconception several times from a number of trustworthy sources, and before I repeated it I quickly checked to make sure I had it right, and it does appear to be the consensus of historians; I found no evidence of a credible debate on this; nobody is replying to some other side on this; it is uncontroversial.

I said the same thing four different ways there because you do seem to have some trouble following what is being said.

I am now going to go beyond what I originally asked you for and give you some real information, and then after that, if you still feel like it would be a good idea, you can reply. I suspect you won't want to though, because if you had the information to hand you wouldn't have protested so hard against me asking for even the most basic stating of your position. You also might have read something and learned that you were wrong, but let's not expect the moon. I suspect you went so hard because you realised you had nothing and you hoped I would be cowed by your obvious confidence, but I wasn't. I was in fact somewhat invigorated by it.


If you had looked up just the first source in the wikipedia article that I linked you, titled "What the Luddites Really Fought Against" and published in the history section of the Smithsonian Magazine, you'd have found these quotes:

The label now has many meanings, but when the group protested 200 years ago, technology wasn’t really the enemy

The word “Luddite,” handed down from a British industrial protest that began 200 years ago this month, turns up in our daily language in ways that suggest we’re confused not just about technology, but also about who the original Luddites were and what being a modern one actually means.

Despite their modern reputation, the original Luddites were neither opposed to technology nor inept at using it. Many were highly skilled machine operators in the textile industry. Nor was the technology they attacked particularly new. Moreover, the idea of smashing machines as a form of industrial protest did not begin or end with them. In truth, the secret of their enduring reputation depends less on what they did than on the name under which they did it. You could say they were good at branding.

As the Industrial Revolution began, workers naturally worried about being displaced by increasingly efficient machines. But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”

Also because I can see your fingers racing to the keyboard about this: the first article on wikipedia is not the only thing I have read on this, I am simply using it because it is a good overview and starting point, and because it clearly shows just how easy it would have been for you to learn literally a single thing about this topic, but you chose virulent ignorance instead. I have in fact gone beyond wikipedia by giving you an actual source, and you aren't even there yet. By failing to even state your position, you have refused to enter the arena of discussing facts.

Now, I did mention the Panama papers, and that was a nod to the way that the rich employ violence against their detractors, and perhaps that was a stretch, but I could make the argument to someone interested. I doubt you are.

The problems the Luddites were protesting are more closely related to the modern problem of Fast Fashion, in which vast quantities of extremely poor quality transient clothing is produced and destroyed every single year. It is an economic, ecological and social disaster that ironically employs many many people in the most brutal shop conditions. The "cheap" clothing you championed as the cause of the "flourishing" is exactly the problem that the Luddites feared, and it has not been good for the planet or for people. The horrendous work conditions of the industrial revolution also led to clothing factories where children were employed to crawl under operating machines and were frequently minced by them. This is the kind of barbaric treatment of human beings that the Luddites were against and that the ruling class had them killed to maintain. This sort of thing still happens today, but in far away countries with poor populations that you don't see. Capitalism hasn't resulted in plenty, it has resulted in abject poverty for the vast majority of the world's population so that a small minority can live in luxurious comfort. I assume you don't think that's real capitalism or something, but you'd be wrong about that too.

The term Luddite did not come to have its modern meaning until the 1950's, at which point anyone who had ever known a Luddite was long dead and they were not able to protest the slander, but popular perception is often given by the ruling class, so we get people like you who apparently go off the vibes of the word you're familiar with and confuse that for actual knowledge.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • kbinchat
  • All magazines