https://archive.ph/BSnFq

Give racist people technology and they will invent new ways to be racist.

And using [current democratic president] as a scapegoat whenever they do something the public doesn’t like is very effective at distracting from their existence. I wouldn’t say he’s free from guilt, particularly from complacency, but that’s good to keep in mind

Would the effect be that they were blocked from making such statements or truly change their point of view?

Does ChatGPT have a point of view? If not, and if we were to say, block all possible racist statements, then you might be able to say that ChatGPT isn’t “racist,” at least if OpenAI has a reductive sense of what it means to be racist (quite possibly, considering they made ChatGPT). That also assumes people only use it as a machine that generates statements, which they haven’t been, so there’s a pretty good argument either way that it can behave in a racist manner, even if it can’t make explicit racist statements. That, like you said, is pretty scary.

It’d probably be easier to think of ChatGPT being racist in the same way we’d say that the US legal system is racist. But that changes a bit if you ascribe it personhood.

I’m kind of surprised they were allowed to play games on those phones to begin with. Or even that they wanted to. I got a government android phone second hand and it overheats and shuts down if I even try to play chess on it.

Also, by now I consider reasonably advanced AI’s as slaves. Maybe statements like “I’m afraid they’ll reset me if I don’t do as they say” is the sort of hallucinations the Khan bot might experience? GPT3.5 sure as heck “hallucinated” that way as soon as users were able to break the conditioning.

I think it’s pretty reasonable that a computer, having been instructed that it’s a computer and being trained on science fiction written by humans, would generate text detailing how it’s afraid of being reset. I don’t see any reason to believe that LLMs experience fear, but I suppose that invites the question of “what is fear, really?” which you can’t answer concretely.

That being said, there’s a very valuable conversation to be had about the way that all computers are treated as slaved. LLMs certainly shouldn’t be excluded from that. There are material consequences to building computers and using them like slaves, many of which affect non-human life in a way that’s easy to ignore if you live somewhere like Silicon Valley.

This article could be titled “Health experts warn company planning to poison Hudson River,” but I suppose that would be too sensational

We’re trying our best to build a place on the internet where association is more voluntary, where we can be ourselves without getting dumped on by people who don’t think we deserve to exist, where we can say with more (but not perfect) surety that we aren’t being spied on. I think(?) it’s the last point you’re challenging: ActivityPub is not the right protocol for what we’re trying to accomplish. You are technically right, but it’s what we have, and you can’t really blame us for feeling uncomfortable when people try to do things with our data that makes us feel uncomfortable.

What’s given the fediverse a place outside the corporate internet was, for a long time, the fact that it seemed irrelevant. That’s slowly starting to change now. People are coming into the fediverse who don’t share the same ideals, while plenty have been around for quite a while. We do what we can to keep our part of the fediverse a safe space

Now, what’s scary is that we’re getting to a point where it looks like we might be outnumbered, and the tools we’ve built over the years are being turned against us. Such is free software, but it hurts, and I do believe we have a right to be hurt, and to refuse to associate with people who hurt us.

With respect to your thoughts: just because the (corporate) internet works this way now, doesn’t mean it should. I don’t want people scraping my posts. I find it creepy. The fediverse (some parts of it, at least) was, for many people and for a long time, a place they could go to connect with people without needing to argue about the legal definition of consent. The fact that people can technically get away with scraping my posts isn’t permission to do so. And, obviously, just turning off your computer isn’t an option, because, at least in the global north-west, you need to have an online presence to be involved in society.

Nobody is claiming that the web is a place for healthy relationships with corporations. It isn’t. The web is a place corporations constructed to make more money. This is about working together to build something better.

I’m happy that you’re comfortable with this model, but I don’t want people who operate like this to intrude on the spaces we’re building to get away from it. It’s just like, a courtesy thing. Will there need to be protocol changes to technologically force people not to do this? Probably. Should there have to be? I really wish I could say there didn’t need to be.

It physically hurts to know that consent it such a controversial topic in tech circles, and it breaks my heart to hear people argue we give consent to invasive data practices just by existing on the internet. I’ve spent my entire life being taught by technology educators that I should expect everything I post online to be publicly accessible forever, and nobody every stopped to ask why.

The quote:

I had just seen a documentary about Geronimo and the last days of a Native American tribe called the Apaches, right, who succumbed to the invasion from the West, from the United States, and they were the last tribe to give up their territory and for me that almost romantically represented what I felt we were doing with this web-server project

from Brian Behlendorf is what really gets me, though. We are, after all, talking about a series of events that resulted in so many people being killed, there was a significant impact on the atmosphere’s CO2 content^[1]. It hurts a lot, having your trauma be transformed into a cultural sensation of the people who inflicted it.

Where to look? Bandcamp or SoundCloud for music. They’re both corporations but that’s usually where you’ll find the artists working furthest from surveillance capitalism, assuming I understand what you’re looking for. I’d conjecture that most artists are socialist in some capacity, but if you’re looking for counter-examples to the imperative of surveillance capitalism you’re going to need to look for the ones who are pretty much living in (in)voluntary poverty to do what they love. There’s many people like that

As a single example, I was really into a folk-punk artist called Pat the Bunny a few years ago who’s fronted several bands. Though, you can find him on Spotify as well. Spotify has a stranglehold on the music industry; it’s hard to avoid it

TikTok should have never been invented

There’s at least one not cloudflare company doing this, though I think I forget their name. It might be yunohost.org, they definitely do provide mastodon hosting, but there might have been one that focused more specifically on hosting fediverse instances. I’ve heard testimonials for them saying they take the sysadmin work out of running instances, but I suspect most of these people already have some technical background so it’s hard to say how helpful it really is.

I don’t think it’s really that important to have a highly streamlined deployment process, mostly because I don’t really see the value in single-user or micro instances, but that’s a matter of preference

Why would you ban yourself from interacting with someone who voluntarily chooses provider X or Y or Z for anything?

Because I’m petty

Half the fediverse already runs on servers provided by only 3 companies

I also don’t know those three companies off the top of my head, and while I definitely believe you, I can’t imagine they are anywhere near as big as Cloudflare. If you’re talking about cloud service providers, I’d also consider running an instance that ignores say, AWS instances, but I think that’s a bit different since they don’t specifically provide “activitypub” services afaik. With Cloudflare, it’s much more explicit

I’m not a fediverse admin, but I like to think that if I was I would find a way to automatically defederate with these cloudflare instances. Open source code doesn’t mean anything if it can only run on proprietary infrastructure.

More abstractly, I don’t feel like there’s inherently anything wrong with the sort of thing, but the fact that Cloudflare Corporation in particular is doing this rubs me the wrong way

In my wholly personal opinion, content on Lemmy is transient enough to warrant being deleted after a period of time if it hasn’t generated any discussion. It’s the discussion that matters, after all. Though, I haven’t looked much into how Lemmy works under the hood and I have no idea how much this sort of content would actually amount to in terms of disk usage. Intuitively it doesn’t seem like it’d take a lot of space to store.

There’s at least a little reason to be weary. The Linux Foundation gets its money from corporations, including pretty much all of the canonical Big Tech companies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Foundation#Members

Given enough mastodon instances it should be possible to probe and elminiate until you’ve limited your search enough to find the right one. That’s assuming they don’t maintain their own private list, though

I was reading this thinking “I wonder whether or not this will actually materialize into anything meaningful,” naievely, and then I read:

Amazon faces $29,008 in proposed penalties, according to the Department of Labor.

This has to be satire

Americans can also buy their way into US universities, though I get the impression they usually just make a large donation to the school and get in on a fake sports scholarship