palordrolap

Yes. The institution in question is human society. We generally grant the permission to make rational decisions over our lives to other humans who know better that we do or are more skilled than we are.

Sometimes, yes, those humans turn out to have been deceitful or dishonest, but there are mechanisms in place for when that happens.

And yes, sometimes those mechanisms are wilfully avoided by the deceitful. Politicians and rich people are especially good at this.

Guess who’s pushing “AI”? The thing that has no contract with human society and cannot be held accountable. And neither will the people pushing it.

This is why we should have as little to do with it - at least as it is in its current form - as possible.

Tangential advice: Many people use YouTube (and formerly Twitch until they nixed it) as a place to store videos. As in the only copy of a video is hosted there.

If your videos are precious to you (or you think they’re going to be), make arrangements for them to be at least stored elsewhere, if not hosted. That’s not going to be cheap what with hardware prices going through the roof, personally or third-party, but it is necessary because no host is both trustworthy and permanent.

Actually not even self-storage is as trustworthy and permanent as we’d like, but it’s still better than any alternative for data retention.

Also, donate to your chosen Fediverse host(s) if you can.

Fake AGI is like fake banknotes. Some of them are really good approximations. Nigh indistinguishable. A lot of people will be fooled by it but eventually it will be discovered to be a fake and people will get hurt in some way or another.

And it won’t be the people who are pushing for “AGI”.

The people who are seeking AGI will be happy when an LLM appears clever enough to fool them, not anyone else.

They may even realise this, because they think everyone else is less clever than they are.

This is why the whole thing has been called AI in the first place.

As I’ve said before, once Linus is gone, we might well end up with splits at the kernel level rather than at the distro level. And we would be wise to avoid any one organisation’s stock kernel, even if there are some very large organisations providing a lot of code for the kernel at present.

I can see a future where, say, GNOME, start producing their own kernels to support their vision of the Linux desktop from the ground up.

And it’s all but certain that Canonical and Red Hat would be very interested in things going their (respective) way(s) when the time comes.

Any C-levels, current or former, who were in charge during the unethical behaviour should be made to pay this. Either they knew or they should have known. Seize their assets, take them back to basic income and lifestyle and only then take the remainder of the fine from the company.

Yeah, I know this is a pipe dream. These people have their arms lodged so deep in politicians it makes their mouths flap, so it’ll never happen, but it would stop this sort of behaviour right quick.

A question I am yet to see satisfactorily answered: Why would a corporation want to show ads to someone who cannot afford their product?

I was going to suggest using pro-ICE rhetoric dripping with over the top sarcasm, but there are too many sufficiently smart pro-ICE people who’d see through it and too many anti-ICE who might have trouble discerning it. And then there’s the issue of getting the tone right in a stressful and dangerous situation.

New head canon: This is where the Birthday Skeleton lives.

Scientists can and do lie. And they also make mistakes. And when their work leaks before going through peer review, gullible people think that any retraction must be some conspiracy to cover up the truth.

Consider the whole vaccines versus autism debacle.

Now we could enter into a semantic “no true scientist” argument, but again, we’ve got to consider those gullible people, who’ll take anything as undeniable truth as long as it comes from an apparent authority and it aligns with their beliefs.

You may now stab me if you wish.

Conclusion: No-one who is capable of complaint, should.

…which is utter nonsense. Complaint often brings about improvement.

Or else we should instead beat people who are complaining into a state where they are no longer capable of complaint, which seems to be a trend these days.

Not pictured: The song that autoplays immediately afterwards that smiles as it punches you in the gut.

Anyone remember a series of Korean(?) comic strips with themes like this, except the art style depicted the emotion in a more extreme way? Exaggerated facial expressions (even for a comic). Foot up on a step and staring into the distance when caused to think about their own internal contradictions.

My search skills are failing me.

Smurfs have very small feet.

… so you don’t think Mastodon is a worthy competitor?

How about Bluesky?

This rhymes if you are Australian.

How wrong would it have been to give the tongue a lisp?

My zero discrimination self says no, but my sense of humour says yes.

I think this might actually be the one I was thinking of! I had misremembered how and when he freaks out. That happens if you click on him to try to use the urinal he’s already stood at.

Makes sense in retrospect

Does anyone remember the Flash game that “taught” urinal etiquette? It would go through phases of what to do given which, if any, urinals were already occupied.

If you tried the scenario in the last panel here, the guy you stood next to would freak out, wave his arms around and look seriously annoyed. Edit: I had misremembered how and when he freaked out. See responses.

The whole thing was easy to get right on the first try, but like all good computer games, part of the fun was goofing around and doing things wrong on purpose.

Sigh. That was probably a quarter century ago now.