ignirtoq

"The Constitution does not provide redress for every governmental wrongdoing,” Engelhardt said.

Why the eff not?! How are people supposed to get redress for government wrongdoing then? Is he saying there is a nonzero amount of wrongdoing the public is just supposed to accept from their government?

Good. Legitimate safety features should be opt-out rather than opt-in wherever possible.

Well specifically it melts at a lower temperature because it’s mixed with milk. The cheese part doesn’t separate from the milk due to the additive, which is called an emulsifier. That also might sound artificial, but it’s just the name for things that keep fats from separating from water and water-soluable foods. For example egg white is another emulsifier, and it’s used in making mayonnaise.

Also 100% agree with American cheese being real cheese. It’s not the best in every place you would want cheese, but that’s true of any cheese. I don’t want blue cheese on my nachos, and I don’t want American cheese in my salads. But it’s great on meat, and it’s a good complement to a lot of warm foods.

prompted questions about who bears responsibility for an AI agent that goes rogue.

That’s not a trivial question, but courts have had the concept of distributed weighted responsibility for decades. Does your company provide users with access to an AI agent you know aggressively finds illegal/unethical ways of completing prompts? Mostly the provider’s fault with small fault of the user submitting the prompt. Safer AI with a user who has crafted the prompt specifically to attempt to get the AI to break into a system? Higher weight on the fault of the user, smaller weight on the provider.

We assume that the AI boom is the result of market demand. In reality, it is the result of investment decisions made by concentrated capital, which is reshaping the economy on its own terms.

But that’s always been true under capitalism. It’s just that in the past generally large capital expenditures have gone towards things the wealthy think will get them more wealth. There have always been capitalists who spend their money directing the economy to do what they want, rather than what the “market” wants. They just haven’t had the majority of the capital being spent.

The last 50 years has seen an unprecedented concentration of wealth. The wealthy are literally a thousand times proportionately wealthier than poor people than they’ve been at any other point in human history. There’s not much wealth to squeeze out of everyone else, so the economy is even more at the vain whims of those with all the capital as they look for things to spend it on.

Tech news has been reporting for literal decades that Apple, Amazon, Google, and similar have been sitting on giant war chests of profit with nothing to spend it on. Well, they’ve found something they want to spend it on, so they’re emptying 20 years of profits in 5. They’ve now completely blown through those stores, and don’t want to slow down, so now they’re taking on unprecedented levels of debt. Something is going to give out and things are going to get bad within the next 5 years.

It’s a web app and you just showed we can do it in text with Unicode and a modern browser. This bug is a level of self-inflicted, shouldn’t-be-in-the-realm-of-possible problem I struggle to comprehend. It’s the software version of not even wrong.

After briefly pushing SpaceX’s market value close to $3 trillion, investors have begun reassessing whether the stock’s rapid advance can be justified by fundamentals.

Nothing in the stock market has been about fundamentals for a very long time. Especially regarding Musk companies.

Ok so when a dozen people all go to say the same thing, when do the other people get to speak? 36 minutes later. They get 3 minutes each. These elected officials can spend a half fucking hour listening to their citizens.

No, sales are going down because prices are going up. If you have a fixed inventory and sales go down, you lower prices to increase demand and move the product and keep your revenue stream. But in this case, they’re moving supply away from this market (consumer hardware) to a different market (AI data centers). So the supply is going down with (previously) fixed demand, driving prices up. The “motherboard sales are collapsing” headline comes from looking at the consumer hardware slice of the computing hardware market. If you look at total sales from each manufacturer, so include the AI data center sales in the analysis, they’re not having any trouble moving inventory nor keeping up their revenue stream overall.

Wholeheartedly agree. The point I’m more trying to make is that they can survive much longer without popular support than other kinds of movements. So Palantir can be very successful for a long time aligning with the regime, even if it will ultimately fall. They can (and probably plan to) jump ship before that fall, like German companies that aided the Nazis did after WWII.

Two weeks ago, we wrote about Palantir going mask-off for fascism, specifically about CEO Alex Karp’s company posting a 22-point manifesto that included some genuinely ugly stuff about how “certain cultures” are “regressive and harmful” and how pluralism is a “shallow temptation.” I argued that this kind of public ideological positioning was both morally bankrupt and strategically suicidal. The moral bankruptcy part should be obvious (if it’s not, go do some soul-searching). But doing so at a time when American-style fascism is historically unpopular basically everywhere, including within the US, just seems like you’ve bet on the losing team at a time when it’s clear they have no chance of coming back to win.

I keep seeing this logic that:

1. If a movement is unpopular it will fail in short order
2. In the US, the current fascist movement is unpopular
3. Therefore it will fail soon

That may be true of a lot of movements, but fascism doesn’t work like that. They don’t need popularity, they just need control over the levers of power. The Heritage Foundation and many, many other conservative groups have been working for decades, some since the 1950s, to seize control of those levers of power.

Palantir aligning with this fascism is not nearly the clearly failing strategy the author believes it to be. There’s a very real chance they are successful for years or even decades aligning with the current fascist regime. It has a lot of momentum, and I haven’t seen good evidence that that momentum is reliably ebbing. It’s seeing speed bumps, but I haven’t seen any kind of turning point. I really hope the midterm elections are that turning point. Either conservatives lose Congress or the public realizes they can’t stop it by working within the system anymore.

To bone and to debone both mean to remove bones from something, typically food.

For enthusiasts, AI promises to usher in something that socialists have long dreamed of: a world without scarcity in which human beings can move finally from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.

Like many problems techbros try to solve, this is a problem of politics and social organization, not technology. We have had the technology to free the entire human population from several fundamental scarcities for decades (food and housing most prominently, but also many diseases), but the groups with the resources to do so actively choose not to solve those problems. Mostly because they are antisocial psychopathic billionaires.

He’s a bit early for hurricane season.

The result of all this may be catastrophic. Should a worst-case scenario ever occur — a cyberattack, a natural disaster, an internet outage — there may be no human workers left with the skills that once kept food on the shelves.

Very nerdy of me, but this reminds me of a Stargate SG-1 episode “the Sentinel.” The team travels to a planet whose civilization relies on fully automated technology. The people don’t have to operate or maintain it (normally), so their society has completely forgotten how. In the episode, one set of antagonists comes in and sabotages their defense system, and another set sees the opportunity and invades. The protagonists have to then figure out the defense system and fix it.

We don’t live in a TV series. There aren’t benevolent outsiders who will swoop down and save our systems in the nick of time when they break down. We’re headed in a bad direction.

That’s their “safety” category in his rankings. They talk about moderation tools and risks like bad actors posting illicit content quite a bit, actually.

Bluesky is one, single platform. It stores the complete data for any given user post in its databases and provides that through its data stream and APIs. This means every different client someone writes has access to all the same data as every other client, because they’re all going through Bluesky. This also means if Bluesky doesn’t support some feature, no clients can either.

The architecture of the Fediverse is different. Forgetting ActivityPub for a moment, Mastodon is one platform and Pixelfed is another. This means each one has its own data model, internal storage architecture, and streams/APIs. Because they were built for different purposes, they support different features. I don’t use either, but I expect there are image-related features in Pixelfed that are just not possible in a Mastodon client, not because someone hasn’t written a client capable of it, but because Mastodon doesn’t have the internal data storage nor API to support it in any client.

Where ActivityPub comes in is a unified stream language. When a post pops up on a platform, that platform has the complete data and translates as much as it can into an ActivityPub message to send to other platforms. Some platforms haven’t figured out yet how to pack all of their relevant data into an ActivityPub message, so some data may be lost in the sending. And different platforms may not support storing all the data in a given ActivityPub message they receive, especially if it’s from a feature they don’t provide, so some data may be lost in the receiving.

Ultimately this means even with ActivityPub linking things together, the data flow isn’t perfect/complete. So different data is available to any even theoretical Mastodon client compared to a Pixelfed client because the backend platforms are different. Their APIs expose different data in different, often incompatible ways, so even if someone wrote an image-focused client for Mastodon, it wouldn’t be possible to do everything an image-focused client for Pixelfed could do, because the backend platforms focus on different things.

I think she’s saying she could have allocated the GPUs to Azure to game the metrics, but Microsoft chose to allocate them to internal projects, which is a form of self-investment. She’s not saying they made the wrong decision, she’s saying their decision in this longer-term investment makes the short-term metrics worse.

Yeah, I can understand that. I’m not in that space, so I wasn’t aware. A similar craze happened for removing gluten from one’s diet about 10-15 years ago, and after the hype died down a lot of the new options it spawned stuck around, which was great for people with celiac disease. Hopefully there will be a similar silver lining once this hype passes.

I want to start by saying I generally agree with the theme of the article that the average American already gets enough protein without needing to specifically target it in fast food. However, I think this is not entirely accurate:

Overall recommendations have consistently hovered between 50-70 grams [of protein] per day, depending on weight.

That sounds low to me. I’ve seen nutritionist recommended minimums in the 50-70 range depending on weight, height, gender, and age, but recommended targets are higher. Especially for older men who are at higher risk of muscle loss with age, these recommended targets can be above 90 grams.

Edit: Getting several down votes, so let’s add some sources.

0.8g per kg of weight, which comes out to about 55g per day for a 150 lb person, is a minimum, not an average: https://doi.org/10.3945/an.116.013821

Aging men may need to consume as much as 2g per kg of weight, which comes out to about 135g for a 150 lb man: https://doi.org/10.3390/nu10030360