LLMs don’t ‘scheme’, ‘plot’, or ‘deceive’, they just string together words based on complex weighted graphs.

The fact that a so-called “AI Safety Institute” has to attempt to (actually) deceive people by falsely attributing intent or thought or awareness to LLMs is hilarious. As usual, it’s not the computers that are bad, it’s the people.

I am not Muslim, but my mother and brother are so I grew up in and around Islam. I think the problem with going the route of declaring specific types of software haram would be that whatever criteria you’d set to draw that line would likely eventually get you to a position where using computers is haram; it’s not like there are ethically-sourced microchips, or FOSS replacements for Intel Management Engine (IME) and closed-source firmware, for instance.

There is actually a now-defunct version of Ubuntu called Sabily that my brother used to use, that focused on providing ‘halal’ apps for things like azan notifications.

So I think it’s fine and even good to try at only using FOSS tools as much as possible, but I don’t think it would make sense (or be workable as a strict doctrine) to proscribe non-FOSS software.

IMO the Zip disks, Jaz disks, and MiniDiscs were the last really satisfying physical media formats (UMD was also really cool, but somehow even more niche given it was PSP-specific).

There was something about them that just made you feel like a secret agent using them. Like a prop out of a James Bond movie where the villain keeps their plans.

CDs and DVDs had nothing on them.

The Democratic Party as an apparatus is made up in large part by a bunch of neoliberal fascist-appeasers. Progressive are still a (growing) minority in the party. Leftists are nearly non-existent in it.

I wasn’t meaning that to attack you or imply it shouldn’t be posted.

I certainly will not lobby against NYT having access to freely cover the government, but I definitely will not support them in their fight, especially when their reaction to Trump’s rise was to push further rightwards. I have no confidence they are interested in using their journalistic access for holding the DoD accountable for anything, just in making money from their remaining enlightened-centrist reader-base who want to hear the administration’s pro-war stance presented as normal news.

You mean the anti-trans, pro-Israel, ‘both sides are equally valid’ New York Times?

Very cool way to conceptually structure agents.

The shitty vibe-coded desktop environment/ window manager I made over the past month has a movable taskbar.

They haven’t, they just like to feign opposition when useful for election purposes without actually structurally ceding any power.

They don’t care if there are a million Democrat protesters killed or middle eastern children bombed, but they can’t say that. But if they act like they just can’t do anything about it, their voters will accept that, because they’re a mix of unquestioning single-issue “Christians” and MAGAts who are equally okay with (Republican) state violence.

Gambling systems always play into human psychology, and are always not in your favor.

So is poker not gambling? Mahjong? When it’s 4 people playing together (not at a casino, for instance), how can it always be you who has worse odds? That’s of course rhetorical; you actual have equal odds, barring cheating or simple skill differences.

And once you make “playing a game that you are likely to lose” as the litmus test for what is gambling, why would you play any competitive games? Half of a competitive bracket has to lose more than they won, by definition.

You are conflating gambling as it happens within controlled, predatory, capitalist institutions, with Gambling as a concept. Gambling is not immoral or harmful intrinsically, but gambling institutions that intentionally exploit addiction to Gambling, are. Institutions that intentionally exploit addiction to alcohol or cigarettes or hoarding or whatever, also are. But it doesn’t make alcohol as a chemical compound itself, immoral.

And just in case it needs to be stated, merely enjoying Gambling doesn’t equate to gambling addiction.

It does, but being Google they pulled the more granular controls like screen time settings into a dedicated app: Google Family Link

The author of that piece would say you protect your code by not open sourcing it (or by using a license that grants no rights to use said source). It’s an incredibly frustrating piece to me, because it presents hampering corporations as more important than not screwing over individual FOSS users.

The reason they blame GPLv3 is because they claim the open sourcing requirements within it are so onerous that corporations just avoid it, making it so that rather than corporations contributing to that software, they often end up supplanting it with their own versions that have alternate licensing, which then not only denies the original author any benefit, but even makes the corporation ‘look good’ to people who don’t realize or care what happened.

It’s so frustrating to me because they’re doing this whole “pragmatism over idealism” claim, while also not acknowledging that FOSS as a movement is the only reason any corporation open sources anything now. They certainly didn’t used to. But the author seemingly would rather people not have any tools made with or by companies, who are benefiting from them financially, than have both corporations and individual users benefit from them. That’s ideology over pragmatism as well.

Capitalism is bad, but it’s bad because it entrenches profit over morality, via the mistaken belief/ false premise that competing interests will average out in the end. It’s not bad because every single output it creates is somehow evil incarnate, which seems to be the author’s gist.

Nah, sorry Zelensky. I understand that you want US and EU support because you’re in a war, but Trump is literally just a wannabe-Putin. He’s doing literally right now to Iran what Russia is doing to Ukraine. It’s even a ‘special-not-a-war-operation’. Hell, he’s already tried to sell Ukraine down the river multiple times now by floating Russian “peace agreements” that amounted to Ukranian surrenders.

We need to become so isolated and ostracized that these disinterested, delusional Americans stop thinking we’re “world leaders” in anything other than violent imperialism.

“sorry, I can’t deploy to Iran today, I have to wash my deck”

dryer lint fires tend to happen most often by the lint not getting cleaned out, and getting squished into the internals and coming in contact with the dryer heating elements and igniting. Lint is basically a perfect tinder material, because it burns fast and hot. You can actually save your dryer lint to use for campfires. in my experience, it’s nearly as good as char cloth.

I think the reality is that “leaders” know this already, but a lot of them just don’t care.

They want their castle populated with little laboring serfs they can see running around. Remote work is something that used to be the realm of those leaders, who came in once a week in between thousand-dollar business lunches they flew first class to, and they’ll be damned if the peons get even one of their 'special privileges '.

Next they’ll be expecting to be compensated for traveling for work, and commuting will be classified as traveling for work! What a crock, having to pay people for the things the company demands they do!

Just a way to legally grift. This isn’t even gambling, it’s just a get-rich-quick scheme, like crypto.

I don’t know where you got the idea that sports betting is the only betting with a wagered outcome, that’s basically all card or table games at a casino.

My point of mentioning casinos having more than just slot machines is to say that they are first and foremost gambling establishments. Not every game in a casino actually is gambling, either; a lot of them have regular arcade games too.

The question of whether trading cards and loot boxes are gambling from a legal perspective is down to how the laws are written, and the laws in the US currently haven’t defined them as such so far, because there is no wager on a specific outcome.

If loot boxes allowed you to pay more in order to get more good items on a ‘win’, my guess is they’d be smacked with a gambling designation instantly.

Or if trading cards allowed you to wager on the presence of specific cards in the pack, and win additional booster packs if correct, for instance.

If casinos want to say some of their games have been improperly classified as gambling because those games don’t have those characteristics, they certainly can go to the gaming commission or take them to court and argue that (and depending on the game they may even be correct), but since they have to have a license anyways for all their other games that definitely are gambling, they probably won’t care to.

And there are in fact slot machine games that aren’t gambling (e.g. CloverPit), that just simulate playing a slot machine without actually having any real monetary mechanic (apart from paying for the game), so just being a slot machine doesn’t inherently make it a gambling game.

Not to go too philosophical, but every physical item you buy is physically unique from each other one. Even with processes like Six Sigma to minimize variations, each car, table, chair etc is physically unique, and each in ways that affect its performance. You could buy 100,000 chairs of the same kind, and figure out which one is ‘best’ based on some characteristic (e.g. max weight), but that doesn’t make “buying a chair” gambling, just because you may will get a worse or better chair each time.

I’m in Germany right now, and it’s crazy how much more smoking of cigarettes there is than in the states. I hadn’t realized how much it’s disappeared in the US until coming here and smelling cigarettes everywhere

Except slot machines do allow different wagers to get different monetary returns. Also, casinos are not just slot machines, but lots of other gambling games as well.