Wouldn’t be a huge change at this point. Israel has been using AI to determine targets for drone-delivered airstrikes for over a year now.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-assisted_targeting_in_the_Gaza_Strip gives a high level overview of Gospel and Lavender, and there are news articles in the references if you want to learn more.

This is at least being positioned better than the ways Lavender and Gospel were used, but I have no doubt that it will be used to commit atrocities as well.

For now, OpenAI’s models may help operators make sense of large amounts of incoming data to support faster human decision-making in high-pressure situations.

Yep, that was how they justified Gospel and Lavender, too - “a human presses the button” (even though they’re not doing anywhere near enough due diligence).

But it’s worth pointing out that the type of AI OpenAI is best known for comes from large language models (LLMs)—sometimes called large multimodal models—that are trained on massive datasets of text, images, and audio pulled from many different sources.

Yes, OpenAI is well known for this, but they’ve also created other types of AI models (e.g., Whisper). I suspect an LLM might be part of a solution they would build but that it would not be the full solution.

What else have you tried?

Depends on your perspective. Would it be fine for Meta Threads to replace it? Threads supports ActivityPub, so in some ways it likely interacts better with the fediverse.

If we agree that Threads isn’t a suitable replacement, then clearly there’s some criteria a replacement should meet. A lot of the things that make Threads unpalatable are also true of Bluesky, particularly if your concern relates to the platform being under the control of a corporation.

On the other hand, from the perspective of “Twitter 2.0 is now a toxic, alt-right cesspool where productive conversations can’t be had,” then both Threads and Bluesky are huge improvements.

Thanks for clarifying! I’ve heard nothing but praise for Kagi from its users so that’s what I was assuming, but Searxng has also been great so I wouldn’t have been too surprised if you’d compared them and found its results to be on par or better.

By the way, if you’re self hosting Searxng, you can use add your own index. Searxng supports YaCy, which is an actively developed, open source search index and crawler that can be operated standalone or as part of a decentralized (P2P) network. Here are the Searxng docs for that engine. I can’t speak to its quality as I still haven’t set it up, though.

there is a better open source meta search engines

I already use Searxng and have never used Kagi, but I’m curious why you say that Searxng is “better.” Are you saying that because the quality of the searches is better, because it’s open source and Kagi isn’t, or for some other reason?

I gather you’re from the US.

Yes, but also the prison abolition movement is US specific. I’m not affiliated with it, to be clear - not that I oppose it or anything, but I certainly don’t speak for any of its activists.

If we “only” reduce the prison population to 5% or 1% of its current count in the process

Then why call it abolish prisons?

Have you ever heard the quote “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars?” “Abolition” is a goal, an ideal - and even if it isn’t accomplished fully, working toward that end goal and considering everything necessary to get there along the way is the point.

Along those lines, I posit that if 90% of prisons are torn down or repurposed and the remaining 10% are drastically changed - holding fewer prisoners; not being privately owned and operated; focusing on rehabilitation, like learning new job skills, when possible, and otherwise simply being more humane, then the prison abolition movement would have succeeded.

But if you disagree with the name, what would you call it? “Prison Reform” is already taken and means something drastically different.

And to be clear, for some the goal is to eliminate prisons entirely. The movement isn’t monolithic. Abolishing the “prison institution” as it exists today is a pretty common goal, though, and using “prison” to mean “the prison institution” is a pretty common literary technique called “Synecdoche,” which you likely use every day.

I see now that you’re trying trying to trigger an additional emotional response. Working on association, rather than logic.

It’s a logical association, though. If the name evokes feelings of slavery, that’s a good thing, as the situation is similar enough to slavery to warrant that.

Slavery in the US is still legal (so long as the person is in prison). Black Americans are 5 times as likely to be in prison as white Americans. A black man born in 2001 has a 20% chance of being in prison at some point in his life.

The systemic oppression of black Americans is obviously because of racism, and the parallels between slavery and the prison institution aren’t accidental. For example, here’s a quote from Slavery and the U.S. Prison System:

Gary Webb’s famous investigation revealed that the CIA was operating a gun-running and drug-smuggling operation that brought guns to the Nicaraguan contras that the U.S. was using to destabilize the popular government in that country, while bringing cocaine into the U.S. and funneling it to street-level dealers with access to black inner-city neighborhoods.  The history of black street gangs is part of the afterlife of COINTELPRO, the FBI’s counter-intelligence program that actively sabotaged black social movement throughout the long civil rights era.  Bobby Lavender, one of the founders of the Bloods in Los Angeles, explained that the COINTELPRO assassinations of black leaders, and the terrorizing of rank-and-file civil rights activists, left an organizational vacuum in many communities that youth like him filled with their “own brand of leadership.”  COINTELPRO established a pattern of law enforcement interference and sabotage of black self-determination, including gang truces, from the 1970s through to the present.

Such manipulation, especially, is something I would not want to be a part of. It’s vile.

Personally, I think the systemic sabotage of black people’s livelihood, communities, and families is vile, but you’re welcome to your opinion.

The name is important because of the parallels between slavery and modern day prisons.

At minimum, the movement is about completely rethinking our approach to dealing with crime. If we “only” reduce the prison population to 5% or 1% of its current count in the process, we won’t have abolished all prisons, but we will have succeeded in abolishing many parts of the current criminal justice system.

Feel free to argue it in court

Sadly, there are plenty of instances of drivers who killed pedestrians doing just that and succeeding. Heck, in two cases the pedestrian was on the sidewalk or inside a building.

• https://dailyprogress.com/news/local/charlottesville-driver-found-not-guilty-of-ivy-road-pedestrian-death/article_f6620862-b94d-11ed-8e8e-2bdbe8368a37.html
• https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/bus-driver-found-not-guilty-in-pedestrian-death-1.1362139
• https://www.kolotv.com/content/news/Reno-police-investigating-pedestrian-injury-accident-on-Plumb-Lane--427602243.html
• https://www.capecodtimes.com/story/news/2019/01/04/driver-found-not-guilty-in/6376784007/
• https://www.indaily.com.au/news/2022/08/18/lamborghini-driver-found-not-guilty-over-pedestrian-death
• https://globalnews.ca/video/3873815/driver-found-not-guilty-of-killing-pedestrian-on-leslieville-sidewalk

I think it happens even more when it comes to cyclists being killed by drivers

Are you thinking of something like Stack Overflow’s reputation system? See https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-reputation for a basic overview. See https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges for some examples of privileges unlocked by hitting a particular reputation level.

That system is better optimized for reputation than the threaded discussions that we participate in here, but it has its own problems. However, we could at minimum learn from the things that it does right:

• You need site (or community) staff, who are not constrained by reputation limits, to police the system
• Upvoting is disabled until you have at least a little reputation
• Downvoting is disabled until you have a decent amount of reputation and costs you reputation
• Upvotes grant more reputation than downvotes take away
• Voting fraud is a bannable offense and there are methods in place to detect it
• The system is designed to discourage reuse of content
• Not all activities can be upvoted or downvoted. For example, commenting on SO requires a minimum amount of reputation, but unless they’re reported as spam, offensive, fraudulent, etc. (which also requires a minimum reputation), they don’t impact your reputation, even if upvoted.

If you wanted to have upvoted and downvoted discourse, you could also allow people to comment on a given piece of discourse without their comment itself being part of the discourse. For example, someone might just want to say “I’m lost, can someone explain this to me?” “Nice hat,” “Where did you get that?” or something entirely off topic that they thought about in response to a topic.

You could also limit the total amount of reputation a person can bestow upon another person, and maybe increase that limit as their reputation increases. Alternatively or additionally, you could enable high rep users to grant more reputation with their upvotes (either every time or occasionally) or to transfer a portion of their rep to a user who made a comment they really liked. It makes sense that Joe Schmo endorsing me doesn’t mean much, but King Joe’s endorsement is a much bigger deal.

Reputation also makes sense to be topic specific. I could be an expert on software development but be completely misinformed about hedgehogs, but think that I’m an expert. If I have a high reputation from software development discussions, it would be misleading when I start telling someone about hedgehogs diets.

Yet another thing to consider, especially if you’re federating, is server-specific reputations with overlapping topics. Assuming you allow users to say “Don’t show this / any of my content to <other server> at all,” (e.g., if you know something is against the rules over there or is likely to be downvoted, but in your community it’s generally upvoted) there isn’t much reason to not allow a discussion to appear in two or more servers. Then users could accrue reputation on that topic from users of both servers. The staff, and later, high reputation users of one server could handle moderation of topics differently than the moderators of another, by design. This could solve disagreements about moderation style, voting etiquette, etc., by giving users alternatives to choose from.

the law has already made it clear you cannot copyright the output of an LLM.

That’s true in this context and often true generally, but it’s not completely true. The Copyright Office has made it clear that the use of AI tools has to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, to determine if a work is the result of human creativity. Refer to https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ai_policy_guidance.pdf for more details.

For example, they state that the selection and arrangement of AI outputs may be sufficient for a work to be copyrightable. And that’s without doing any post-processing of the AI’s outputs.

They don’t talk about situations like this, but I suspect that, if given a prompt like “Rewrite this paragraph from third person to first person,” where the paragraph in question is copyrighted, the output would maintain the same copyright as the input (particularly if performed faithfully and without hallucinations). Such a revision could be made with non-LLM technology, after all.

Your Passkeys have to be stored in something, but you don’t have to store them all in the same thing.

If you store them with Microsoft’s Windows Hello, Apple Keychain, or Google Password Manager, all of which are closed source, then you have to trust MS/Apple/Google. However, Keychain is end to end encrypted (according to Apple) and Windows Hello is currently not synced to the cloud, so if you trust those claims, you don’t need to trust that they won’t misuse your data. I don’t know if Google’s offering is end to end encrypted, but I wouldn’t trust it either way.

You can also store Passkeys in a password manager. Bitwarden is open source (though they did recently introduce a proprietary, source available SDK), as is KeepassXC. 1Password isn’t open source but can store Passkeys as well.

And finally, you can store Passkeys in a compatible security key, like the YubiKey 5 series keys, which can each store 100 Passkeys. This makes them basically immune to being stolen. Note that if your primary interest in Passkeys is in the phishing resistance (basically nearly perfect immunity to MitM attacks) then you can get that same benefit by using WebAuthn as a second factor. However, my experience has been that Passkey support is broader.

Revoking keys involves logging into the particular service and revoking them, just like changing your password. There isn’t a centralized way to do it as far as I’m aware. Each Passkey is only used for a single service, after all. However, in the same way that some password managers will offer to automatically change your passwords, they might develop a similar for passkeys.

Do any of the iOS or Android apps support passkeys? I looked into this a couple days ago and didn’t find any that did. (KeePassXC does.)

You have your link formatted backwards. It should be Vaultwarden, with the link in the parentheses.

a talking collar isn’t likely to help … if the cat is even willing to wear the thing at all.

“Realistically,” Quagliozzi says, “that collar would just be saying ‘get this fucking collar off me’ all the time.”

You probably just need Google One and Youtube Premium, which includes Youtube Music Premium.

Of course, if you don’t care about YouTube Premium, you could instead get a family subscription to a different music streaming service - Spotify, Tidal, and Apple Music are all leagues better than Youtube Music, in my opinion.

I don’t personally recommend Google for anything, to be clear.

So, to be clear, my opinion was about what’s reasonable to do and was informed by our culture and laws. Your objection seems to be related to what should be legal, which is different and is more complicated, as the laws have to balance restricting and potentially damaging businesses with protecting people from discrimination.

From a legal perspective, IMO larger businesses should be held to much tighter standards than small businesses. I think it would be reasonable to legally require Google or Meta to have a reason to ban someone, to have to share that explanation, and to have to allow an appeal to be unbanned to be arbitrated by a third party, without “we can ban anyone for any reason” allowed as a defense.

We also see it being abused with the allowance of a few “good ones” from said protected class to avoid discrimination claims while still discriminating against the rest of said class.

Obviously this isn’t a reasonable thing for them to do.

If a business is discriminating against a protected class and only letting in a few “good ones,” then statistically it should be able to be shown that they ban far more people in that class than outside it.

I believe there should be reasons required to ban someone.

How do you manage that, practically speaking, in a capitalist society? If a business owner thinks someone is acting suspicious and is likely to steal or break something, but they can’t ban them until they have a “valid” reason, if that person then breaks or steals something, that business owner has been damaged by the government’s policy. Is the government going to make them whole? No, of course not.

Does the reason need to be disclosed to the person being banned, or just recorded for future reference? A lot of the time people get defensive and angry when told the truth about what they did that made other people not want to deal with them. If someone’s been leering at customers, smells terrible, is loud and disruptive, or is just plain acting weird, telling them as much when you tell them they have to leave probably isn’t going to help them feel better.

Not just because you own the place and don’t want them in your place as they make you/other customers uncomfortable.

Why do you think it’s okay for a business owner and their employees to be legally forced to deal with someone that makes them uncomfortable?

Do business owners just need to be able to articulate why someone discomforts them? Is someone judging whether a reason is good enough, or do you just need any reason, or is there a list of acceptable reasons? In the last case, what sorts of reasons are acceptable?

If a business can point to measurements they’ve taken showing that when Joe shows up, they lose money - either because their clients leave, don’t come back, or stop spending money - is that a good enough reason to ban Joe? What if this is just because their clients are all racist and Joe is black?

If a business bans Joe because of a particular reason and then Jim does the same thing, is the business forced to ban Jim?

But it’s still relevant as it’s the reason homeless people

The easy solution for this is to make being homeless a protected class. Homeless people need specific protections at a federal level, because they’re discriminated against by local and even state governments. That’s not the only class that needs this, either, to be clear.

That said, all of the times I’ve seen a homeless person banned from an establishment wasn’t because they were homeless, but because of some other reason. The one I remember clearest was a woman who had started talking to me and my girlfriend (at the time) while we were sitting at a table in a coffee shop. She asked us for money or food after just a couple minutes, then went to go and talk to someone else and after a few minutes was noticed by the staff and told to leave. When I asked about it, I gathered that she’d been banned because of multiple complaints from customers about her doing just that.

“Jurisdiction” is a legal concept and the way you’re using it makes no sense unless you’re referring to restraining orders or trespassing warnings being issued by courts/police from different towns or states.

I’m assuming you’re talking about private establishments that have the legal right to refuse service to anyone for almost any reason (exceptions being if doing so is discrimination against a protected class).

If so, then here’s my opinion: If you own or manage a shop, bar, club, gym, etc., it’s reasonable to ban someone because they aren’t the sort of person you want in your establishment. Maybe they make you or your other customers uncomfortable. Maybe they don’t want their place to get a reputation for being where Bad Egg Craig, whose antics sent some folks to the ER, hangs out. Maybe they share ban lists with the owners of other establishments, either because they’re friends or for purely business reasons (if your actions have cost the owner of one establishment money, it’s more likely you’ll do the same elsewhere), the same way insurance companies protect their interests by raising premiums.

What does the Hague Convention have to do with anything? Unless it’s being enforced by the same people it’s completely irrelevant.

Synthetic media should be required to be watermarked at the source

Bit late for that (even in 2023). Best we could do now is something like public key cryptography, with cameras having secret keys that images are signed with. However:

• That would require people to purchase new cameras (though phones could likely do this without a new device, leveraging the secure enclaves to sign)
• Depending on the implementation of the signing, even applying filters to images, color grading, or cropping an image could make it stop matching. If you remove something from the background or make other overt changes, it’s definitely not going to match.
  • Adobe has a system for handling changes and attesting that no AI was used. Optimally other major photo editing tools will do something similar. However, I don’t think it’s feasible to securely sign such an attestation history locally, so all such images would need to be uploaded to be signed remotely.
• This won’t work for traditional art

For artists and photographers with old school cameras (“old school” meaning “doesn’t compute and sign a perceptual hash of the image”), something similar could still be done. Each such person can generate a public / private key pair for themselves and sign the images they’ve created manually. This depends on you trusting that specific artist, though, as opposed to trusting the manufacturer of the camera used.

This isn’t true or how it works, but there is a law being proposed that would sorta make it so: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/08/senates-no-fakes-act-hopes-to-make-unauthorized-digital-replicas-illegal/

(In the US), your likeness is protected under state laws and due to case law, rather than federal laws, and I don’t know of any such law that imposes a responsibility upon sites like Twitter to take down violations upon your report in the same way that the DMCA does. Rather, they allow you to sue the entity who used your likeness for damages in civil court. That isn’t very useful to Jane when her ex-boyfriend uploads revenge porn of her or to Kate when a random Twitter account deepfakes her face onto a nude.

However, if a picture you have copyright to (like a selfie) is used as an input into an AI, arguably you do have partial copyright to it, as the AI elements are not copyrighted and it could not have been created without your input. As such, I think it would be reasonable to issue a DMCA takedown request if someone posted a nonconsensual deepfake of you, on the grounds that you have a good faith belief that you do have copyright to it. However, if you didn’t take the picture used as an input yourself, you don’t have copyright to it and therefore don’t have partial copyright to the output, either. If it’s a deepfake face swap, then whoever owns copyright of the original scene image/video would also have partial copyright, and they could also issue a DMCA takedown request.

It’s like how they slapped ‘Smart’ on every tech product in the past decade. Even devices that are dumb as fuck are called ‘Smart’ devices.

I’m not a big fan of “Smart” as a marketing term, either, but “Automatable” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, and “Connected” doesn’t really have the same appeal. That said, “smart” was used pretty consistently to refer to devices that could be controlled as part of a “smart home.” It wasn’t supposed to refer to a device that itself was intelligent, though.

I always thought of AI as artificial consciousness, an unnatural and created-by-humans self-aware and self-thinking being.

Sounds like you’re thinking of AGI (artificial general intelligence) or that your understanding is based off sci fi as opposed to the academic discipline/field of research, which has been around since the 1950s.

And yes, marketing is often inaccurate… but almost every instance I’ve seen where they say they’re using AI, they were.

In fact stuff like ChatGPT would’ve made more sense to actually be called ‘Smart’ search engines instea of ‘AI’.

IMO “Smart” would be more misleading than “AI,” even if “Smart” didn’t have an existing, unrelated meaning. I do think we could use better words - AI is such a broad category that it doesn’t say much to call a product “AI-powered.” Stable Diffusion and Llama use completely different types of AI, for example. But people broadly recognize the term (even if they don’t understand it properly) and the same can’t be said for terms like “LLM.”

They might be technological achievements, but they’re not AI.

You’re illustrating the AI effect - “discounting of the behavior of an artificial-intelligence program as not “real” intelligence.” AI is used in a ton of different ways that you likely don’t ever think about or even notice.

I recommend reading over at least the introduction to the Artificial Intelligence article on Wikipedia before proclaiming that something that fits cleanly into the definition of AI isn’t AI.