Praise be to our lord and savior the UEFI Forum, that we might not all meet such a dismal fate.

No?

An anthropomorphic model of the software, wherein you can articulate things like “the software is making up packages”, or “the software mistakenly thinks these packages ought to exist”, is the right level of abstraction for usefully reasoning about software like this. Using that model, you can make predictions about what will happen when you run the software, and you can take actions that will lead to the outcomes you want occurring more often when you run the software.

If you try to explain what is going on without these concepts, you’re left saying something like “the wrong token is being sampled because the probability of the right one is too low because of several thousand neural network weights being slightly off of where they would have to be to make the right one come out consistently”. Which is true, but not useful.

The anthropomorphic approach suggests stuff like “yell at the software in all caps to only use python packages that really exist”, and that sort of approach has been found to be effective in practice.

I thought “where the hell does Twitch keep coming up with these absurd sex-related things to ban?” and it turns out it’s just this one lady and inventing them is her shtick and she’s single-handedly keeping like five journalists employed.

How much of this is “the model can read ASCII art”, and how much of this is “the model knows exactly what word ought to go where [MASK] is because it is a guess-the-word-based computing paradigm”?

The Uplift series isn’t really that third picture but I can kind of see why this person did the cover art.

The last one actually reminds me of Saturn’s Children where the cover is like a worse CGI version of that, but the book actually thinks it through in a way that makes this person a compelling point of view character.

I read them all. I think I liked the first book fine, it’s more of a self-contained mystery, which might be better. The aliens are probably most prominent in the second trillogy; there’s loads of them and I quite like the Commons of Jijo.

I feel like the series is sort of missing pieces? Like, across the five books it is in, WTF was going on with Streaker’s discovery is never really explained, the whole the-galactics-aren’t-being-honest-with-us thread is never satisfyingly resolved in the whole series, and at several points in the chronology it feels like there could have been a whole book about the stuff that happened since the last book.

The whole series is An Aesop on how science is good. Which is fine, doing science is good and you can spend a series reminding people of that if you would like. But it’s strange to find that as the point of a series that otherwise seems to have all these frankly conservative ideas about colonizing space planets and about some people being just inherently more or less “uplifted” than others. Uplift seems to stand in for a person’s moral value without what I would consider sufficient critique. Like, paternalism is bad when the galactics do it, but when humans just have full power over a dolphin person’s entire life that’s fine somehow, you need it to do Uplift, the thing the books are about. The whole Uplift concept has unavoidable parallels to European notions of “civilizing” people by using military force to make them act more like Europeans, which I don’t think are fully examined.

I also remember them as having weird 1980s gender ideas in them, like the men are normal and the women are viewed through some weird filter and the other gender humans are entirely absent.

I think there are more interesting books to read about the structure of minds and the diversity of subjective experience. For example, Diaspora only comes out a year after Heaven’s Reach, and also has all sorts of weird aliens, but it additionally has defensible gender politics and a much more cogent thesis on autonomy and what the powers of science may or must be used to do. Or, A Half-Built Garden is all about what happens when galactic society arrives to save the humans, and the humans maybe finally don’t need saving.

Watch TikTok’s US operation get sold not to the highest bidder, but to the American entity most intent on using it to destabilize society.

Plastic at the microscopic level, if they aren’t doing anything chemically interesting, really ought to function about like “rock, but light”. Most organisms don’t run into trouble because there are tiny bits of rock in the world, so I would expect tiny bits of plastic not to be a huge problem. Which is sort of backed up by how we have noticed microplastics everywhere and we haven’t seen huge problems resulting from it (most people are still alive, most children still develop to adulthood, etc.).

But it’s entirely possible that some of these plastics are not chemically inert, and that they emit chemicals that do exciting and unwanted things in people’s bodies. If we can’t keep our plastics from becoming microplastics, we probably need to discontinue the manufacture of non-implantable plastics, since all the plastics will end up in someone’s body at some point.

And it’s also possible that the microplastics physically do do something interestingly bad. I think there was a recent study to this effect on heart disease. But at this point, that’s the question we need to be asking. How many or what kind of microplastics does it take to give a ferret epilepsy? Not “are there microplastics in my all brands of peanut butter?”

Server “owners” do not own anything from a data security standpoint.

How can you tell that this is true?

But now, or soon, you can have one person with half an idea, like “what if The Rock had to save Shanghai from mole zombies”, and they can grab a text generator to fill in most of the screenplay, and then dial in the number of synonyms for “exciting” used to describe the explosions, and come out with Day of the Living Moles, a 95 minute feature film, in a weekend. Without actually having to have had any traditional cinematography skills or breaking an artistic sweat.

There are categories of creative work that are throw-away; little sketches on napkins, improvised songs, quick sketches that an artist might think of are of no account to anyone. And the scope of what can be dashed off like that, with minimal time and effort, is growing because of more powerful tools.

Why should I watch Universal’s superhero blockbuster when I can watch my buddy Jimothy’s? What happens when the number of plausible films dramatically exceeds the time that movie critics have to watch them to sort out which are any good?

Popular? None.

But we don’t only have to build an environment that allows the doing of popular things. We also need to maintain a society in which unpopular or unusual things can be done. The doing of unpopular or unusual things is itself popular.

Gasslight Gateskeep Girlboss

Does the server operator avoid any responsibility for data protection by just having the actual physical copies of all the data they do have access to (user names, post contents, etc.) physically live over at Discord? If the company president’s PC is hacked and someone steals copies of all the personal information in support chats that were conducted over Discord, or the contents of private channels where people posted their home addresses for Secret Santa, or whatever, can the company get out of having any sort of data breach disclosure obligations because the data was really Discord’s data?

As long as what is going on here is basically comparable to what is going on when a company uses a third-party service as a peer to individuals, then yes, the company probably isn’t somehow responsible for what the service is doing. Government Twitter pages have been found to legally constitute public forums, but that was in the context of restricting the government from blocking people. The person whose page it is still don’t really run the place and probably isn’t responsible for the actions of the platform.

But if a company hires another company to build and operate a communication platform for it (more of a Mailchimp or Invision Community situation), then you probably have a data controller-data processor style relationship.

So, is Discord more like Spotify or is it more like Mailchimp?

AI can spell technology.

But if the developer makes a Discord “server” for their game community, they are telling Discord to set up a service. If the developer encourages people to join it and retains moderation rights, they’re taking that service they ordered from Discord and providing it to other people. If the developer failed to get some legally required in their jurisdiction contractual terms from Discord about what Discord can and can’t do with data on the people who use the service, the developer could get in trouble when they provide that service to people without the service following local laws.

How does one go about doing that? Because Google Voice doesn’t seem to cut it.

I could stop trying to use Discord and drive to Best Buy and buy a cell phone and pay for a month of service. Then I could add the number to the account. Then if I stop paying for the monthly service, there’s a good chance that Discord or whoever won’t believe I’m me at some future login and will demand I give them a code they sent to the phone number on file.

I’m sure that the Title IX people will be very excited to hear about the disparate impact of this decision.

Tim.

On Android, there’s Newpipe which doesn’t run ads, and Newpipe x Sponsorblock which clips ads out from the video. On desktop there is FreeTube which also has SponsorBlock you can turn on.