The witch turned the creep into a woman and the spell was complete by the time she flew away. Unfortunately, like many women, the creep was born with the body of a man (she’s AMAB). Maybe the witch could have changed her body, too, but that would have made things far too easy, given that the point of the curse was to teach her empathy.

I had never heard of this show before today but what you just described makes it sound cool as fuck, I’m gonna check it out now

This is an interesting parallel, but I feel like I missed some key part of it.

In the US, at least, we historically killed off a lot of deer’s natural predators - mostly wolves - and as a result, the deer population can get out of control, causing serious problems to the ecosystem. Hunters help to remedy that. The relatively small violences that they perform on an individual basis add up to improving the overall ecosystem.

That isn’t the same as being a bigot, or a sexist, or a fascist… and I don’t know why anyone would assume that a person holds those views because they’re mean and petty. They hold those views for a variety of reasons - sometimes because they’re a child or barely an adult and that’s just what they learned, and they either don’t know any better or haven’t cared enough to think it through; sometimes because they’ve been conditioned to think that way; sometimes because they’re sociopaths who recognize that it’s easier to oppress that particular group.

It doesn’t really matter what their reason is. Either way, they’re a worse person because of it, and often they’re overall a bad person, regardless of the rest of their views, actions, and contributions.

Being a hunter, by contrast, is neutral leaning positive.

It makes sense that a rational person who loves being in nature, who loves animals, who wants their local ecosystem to be successful, would as a result want to help out in some small way, even if that means they have to kill an animal to do so. It doesn’t make sense that a rational person who loves all people, who wants their local communities to be successful, would as a result want to oppress and harm the people in already marginalized groups.

I don’t think equating being bigoted with holding unjustifiable opinions does it justice. The way we use the word opinion generally applies to things that are trivial or unimportant, that don’t ultimately matter, e.g., likes and dislikes. Being a bigot is a viewpoint; it shapes you. For many bigots, their entire perspective is warped and wrong. And there’s a common misunderstanding that you can’t argue with someone’s opinions; because it’s just how they “feel.” But being a bigot, whether you’re sexist, racist, transphobic, queerphobic, homophobic, biphobic, etc., is a belief, and it’s one that, in most cases, the bigot chooses (consciously or not) to keep believing.

If an adult with functioning cognitive abilities refuses to question their bigoted beliefs, then they’ve made a choice to be a bigot.

It’s more likely that this is being done to either:

• Evade hiring restrictions
• Interview on someone else’s behalf

If you do not understand why this is inappropriate you are the problem.

Was it inappropriate for Elon Musk’s company to not properly secure the data of its customers? I would say so. It would therefore be appropriate for anyone harmed as a result to sue Tesla - or Elon directly - for any damages they suffered.

Wasn’t the estimated delivery date much sooner when you first placed the order? Per Amazon’s stated policy, you should be eligible for refund three days after that date.

Obviously it would be preferable for you to get it even sooner, but that’s still a lot better than two months from now.

If you have an email or any record of the original estimated date, contact Amazon CS and reference that. Don’t even mention the changed delivery - that’s not your problem, as you didn’t agree to a changed delivery date; you were promised delivery three days ago and haven’t received it.

You can control that with a setting. In Settings - Privacy, turn on “Query in the page’s title.”

My instance has a magnifying glass as the favicon.

Giant squids are the bears of the ocean

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.

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?

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.

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.

Both numbers are based off market value, though