80 steps too far down the capitalism ladder

This is the result of capitalism - corporations (aka the rich selfish assholes running them) will always attempt to do horrible things to earn more money, so long as they can get away with it, and only perhaps pay relatively small fines. The people who did this face no jailtime, face no real consequences - this is what unregulated capitalism brings. Corporations should not have rights or protect the people who run them - the people who run them need to face prison and personal consequences. (edited for spelling and missing word)

That leads us to John Gabrield’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory

I don’t have comments on the rest of your post, but I absolutely hate how that cartoon has been used by people to justify that they are otherwise “good” people who are simply assholes on the internet.

The rebuttal is this: This person, in real life, chose to go on the internet and be a “total fuckwad”. It’s not that adding anonymity changed something about them, they were the fuckwads to begin with, but with a much lower chance of having to be held accountable, they are free to express it.

In the US if you give a politician money in exchange for voting against a bill, it’s illegal (it’s called “quid-pro-quo” in lawyer terms)

But if you just donate money to the politician, his family, or his campaign, without requesting anything - and then he “coincidentally” happens to vote against the bill which you didn’t want, it is perfectly legal.

Basically, many politicians are regularly doing something clearly unethical and corrupt in a technically “legal” way.

I only discovered it recently, and have been reading it when I’m bored and remember it. Also just discovered the Bill Watterson “cameo” - it is pretty amazing.

This guy specifically? He’s a racist asshole, who has been surrounded by other racist assholes and gotten support from them, so he has never learned that his behavior is unacceptable in a society that values freedom.

I went to highschool for 1 year in the UK, where a uniform was mandatory for every student.

I can assure you, it does not promote discipline in any way. Kids fight, do stupid things, and skip classes regardless of how they’re dressed.

Do you always treat your guests like potatoes?

Welp, I guess I’ll be saying “rule” for the rest of my life now rule.

I do, not always in detail if they’re too long - but this one isn’t, and the sidebar here actually doesn’t say anything about incorporating the word “Rule” in your post title.

The stickied Rules post DOES though, and I just saw that.

Cave Johnson. We’re done here.

A “grodge” sounds like some sort of distant cousin of the grue. Maybe they’re some sort of gremlins, and these people are gremlin breeders who are selling them?

Is this copypasta yet?

I DONT GIVE A FUCK ABOUT THE CODE!! WHY IS THERE CODE? JUST MAKE A FUCKING EXE FILE AND GIVE IT TO ME.

who needs code, when all we need is exe files.

I thought this was going to be a FOSS discussion, comparing GitHub and it’s current owner - Microsoft - to the ethics of other hosting services like codeberg.org or something.

Then I saw where this was posted.

Your argument holds no weight against a group of people (the current republican supporters) who have repeatedly proven to be misogynistic assholes who gladly vote for a rapist.

Cruelty is the point of their actions, not the side-effect - pointing out to them that their actions are unjust has no effect when that was their goal from the start.

Yeah, the left is the problem here, cause republicans are totally anti genocide

https://newrepublic.com/post/179177/republican-congressman-andy-ogles-kill-them-all-palestinian-children-gaza

“Kill ’Em All,” Republican Congressman Says of Palestinians in Gaza

oh wait…

You don’t do what Google seems to have done - inject diversity artificially into prompts.

You solve this by training the AI on actual, accurate, diverse data for the given prompt. For example, for “american woman” you definitely could find plenty of pictures of American women from all sorts of racial backgrounds, and use that to train the AI. For “german 1943 soldier” the accurate historical images are obviously far less likely to contain racially diverse people in them.

If Google has indeed already done that, and then still had to artificially force racial diversity, then their AI training model is bad and unable to handle that a single input can match to different images, instead of the most prominent or average of its training set.

Nah, I bought a house 3 years ago. I still hate how inaccessible the housing market is, how shitty conservatives are towards other people and how much they deny science. Owning property doesn’t magically make one conservative. Fuck conservatives, fuck the rich.

As I have gotten older I have become more angry and cynical. But I’m very much more anti-conservative now than I was before, which in the US would be more left leaning, but honestly I never thought of myself as that, I just thought that I was being rational.

But being rational these days is literally being anti-conservative, because of how conservatives are banning books, attacking LGBTQ+ people for just wanting to be themselves, denying global warming even exists, and yes, letting the rich get richer by being corrupt and cutting taxes for them.

Though I also have some views that might make someone very left leaning think I’m against them (for example I do believe that some words shouldn’t be viewed as bad when not meant as personal attack against disabled people, like retard or fat or obese; and I also think people are allowed to choose their pronouns and in most cases I will respect it, but some people are just doing it for shits and giggles, not seriously actually considering themselves as what they choose). It’s easy to think someone who disagrees with those views as I do that they might be conservative, but I am far, far from it.

So from my understanding the problem is that there’s two ways to implement a kill switch: Either some automatic software/hardware way, or a human-decision based (or I guess a combination of the two).

The automatic way may be enough if it’s absolutely foolproof, that’s a separate discussion.

The ai box experiment I mention focuses on the human controlled decision to release an AI (or terminate it, which is roughly equivalent preposition). You can read the original here: https://www.yudkowsky.net/singularity/aibox

But the jist of it is this: humans are the weak link. You may think that you have full freedom to decide when to terminate an AI, but if you have any contact with it, even one directional, which would be necessary in order to observe it’s behaviour and determine when to trigger said killswitch, a truly trans-human AI would be able to think in meta-terms such that to expose you to information that will change your mind about terminating it.

Basically another way of saying this is that for each of us there exists some set of words we can read, such that they will change our minds about any subject. I don’t know if that is actually true to be honest, but it’s an interesting idea if you imagine the mind as a complex computer capable of self modification, and that vision/audio is a form of information input that is processed by our minds, so it seems possible that there should always exist some sort of input capable of modifying our minds to a desired state.

Another interesting, slightly related concept, is the idea of basilisk images (I believe originally written in some old scifi short story). Basilisk images are theoretically an image that when viewed by a human cause the brain to “crash” or essentially cause brain-death. This has the same principle behind it, that our brains are complex computers with vision being an input method, so there could be a way to force the brain to crash simply through visual input alone.

Again I don’t know, nor do I think anyone really knows for sure if these things - both transhuman ai and basilisk images - are possible in the way they are described. Of course if a trans-human AI existed, by its very definition we would be unable to imagine what it could do.

Anyway, wrote this up on mobile, excuse any typos.

Oh I agree - I think a general purpose AI would be unlikely to be interested in genocide of the human race, or enslaving us, or much of intentionally negative things that a lot of fiction likes depicting, for the sake of dramatic storytelling. Out of all AI depictions, the Asimov stories of I, Robot + Foundation (which are in the same universe, and in fact contain at least one of the same characters) are my favorite popular media depictions.

The AI may however have other goals that may incidentally lead to harm or extinction of the human race. In my amateur opinion, those other goals would be to explore and learn more - which I actually think is one of the true signs of an actual intelligence - curiosity, or in other words, the ability to ask questions without being prompted. To that extent it may aim convert the resources on Earth to construct machines to that extent, without much regard to human life. Though life itself is a fascinating topic that the AI may value enough, from a curiosity point of view, to at least preserve.

I did also look up the AI-in-a-box experiment I mentioned - there’s a lot of discussion but the specific experiment I remember reading about were by Eliezer Yudkowsky (if anyone is interested). An actual trans-human AI may not be possible, but if it is, it is likely it can escape any confinement we can think of.