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Schadrach

@Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org

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Schadrach ,

You know you can have Firefox open a second window, right?

Schadrach ,

Even the founding fathers anticipated a lot of reforms and for the whole thing to become obsolete quite soon

...which is why they built a mechanism into it to make alterations. But the people upset about things like the electoral college don't have the support necessary to use that mechanism.

Schadrach ,

No, parties and primaries (which are just parties borrowing election infrastructure to choose who they support) aren't in the Constitution at all. But first past the post voting always trends towards two party systems as a stable equilibrium.

Schadrach ,

The problem is that even a Constitutional Convention gives more power to land than people.

Specifically in the case of a Constitutional Convention 2/3 of states have to agree to have one and 3/4 of states have to agree to any changes.

You'd have an easier time convincing the federal government to condense a few states - we don't really need TWO Dakotas, and Montoming seems like a good idea. Maybe also split California into a few pieces. The whole "land over people" thing is only really a problem because a couple of states blow the curve - House apportionment is done in a fashion that mathematically minimizes the average difference in people/representative between states while having a fixed number of representatives, but California blows the curve by being so utterly massive compared to any other state and there just not being enough representatives to go around. So all but a few states are pretty close in terms of people/representative, a couple are sitting at the 1 representative minimum while being tiny, and California blows the curve on the other side.

Either increase the House size, merge some of the smallest states, split California up or all of the above - and all of those can be done without passing an amendment.

Of course, then Texas will invoke the clause in the Joint Resolution for Annexing Texas to the United States and split itself into five states, each of which gets its own Senators and whatever number of Representatives the math would work out to.

Schadrach ,

Too bad there are so many French people

There are a bunch of right-wingers out there that would tell you (((they))) are working on that. That's basically the heart of the whole "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory and I've seen a few specifically point to Paris as an example of it in action.

Schadrach ,

H1B skilled worker visas. You have to prove that you tried to hire locally and couldn't find anyone qualified. The whole point is that the qualifications are impossible, so you are either under qualified or lying. Since no qualified candidate exists, you can bring someone over from overseas and hold the risk of being deported if you fire them over their heads - and you suddenly get less thorough about checking qualifications for your immigrant candidates.

CEO of Google Says It Has No Solution for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information (futurism.com)

You know how Google's new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won't slide off (pssst...please don't do this.)...

Schadrach ,

And really, the Google one in search has a primary goal of summarizing high ranking search results into a natural language statement that sounds like it knows what it's talking about. So if you have a search where high ranking results are wrong/memes...

Schadrach ,

They could probably mostly or entirely fix it, but to do so they'd have to better curate search results. Because what it does is summarize the top search results for the query.

The problem they can't fix is consistently getting useful high quality search results to the top without getting misinfo, disinfo, irrelevant info, trolling, answers to similar but not identical questions or memes as high or higher.

Schadrach ,

I mean in this case it's probably more accurately web search results being fed into an LLM and asked to summarize said results. Which if web search results were consistently good and helpful might be a useful feature instead of the thing you skip past and look for links to something useful.

Schadrach ,

tools to combat drunk driving are not entirely based in science

To the point that the accuracy of breathalyzers has been challenged so many times in CA that it's to the point that if the cops in CA have you breathe into a machine and that machine returns a number that would constitute a DUI if that were your BAC then it's a DUI, regardless of what the machine actually does or whether the number in question is actually connected to your real BAC in any way.

Schadrach ,

I had something similar. Mine claimed 14 hours on Gameboy or 4 hours on Game Gear. Got the Gameboy for my birthday along with Tetris and FF Legend II, but got it a few days early because I went into the hospital the Saturday before.

The present I got on my birthday was finding out I could go home the next day.

Schadrach ,

I played the crap out of Adventure back in the day.

Schadrach ,

And like the other FFL games there are multiple races for the PCs who all follow different rules entirely - For example in FFL2 in addition to humans you have mutants who develop stats slower but get magic powers with limited uses that recharge on rest, Robots who when they equip items they lose half the durability, but the durability refills to half on rest and their equipped gear is where all their stats come from and monsters who more or less are what they are and advance by eating the meat of other monsters to shapeshift into more advanced forms.

FFL3 also allows you to change between those categories over time too as well as adding hybrid categories of Beast and Cyborg for when you're changing but aren't all the way there yet. FFL3 also gives you an airship/time machine at the beginning of the game, but it's broken and a big part of the game is fixing it so you can actually use it's various features.

But yes, I loved the whole deal with Odin thing. Also if you never lose a fight before encountering Odin, there's no dialog at all and he basically just sneak attacks you, and gets a free surprise round. Because he can't be optional - the whole game is about collecting 77 McGuffins, and he personally has 8 of them.

Schadrach ,

So, Judaism?

But seriously, most of the bloodthirsty bits of the Christian Bible are bits carried over from the Torah. Hell, a lot of them are specifically about Joshua conquering everyone around.

Schadrach ,

You mean with a magic potion of dirty water that should not by any mechanism cause an abortion that doubled as a paternity test because God would only cause the abortion if she cheated.

Realistically this probably mostly served to cow men into accepting that their wife's child is theirs regardless of any suspicions because God said so. There's a reason being Jewish is matrilineal.

Schadrach ,

You treat it like any other traffic accident, except if a self driving car is responsible, that responsibility lies with the vehicle's owner.

Schadrach ,

Doubt it. I mean, any self driving car is going to make the driver agree to responsibility for what the car does and ensure the user has a manual override available just in case.

No company is going to ship fully autonomous driving software (for example to have fully autonomous driverless taxis) without contractually making the fleet owner responsible for their fleet cars.

EA wants to place in-game ads in its full-price AAA games, again (www.techspot.com)

EA has tried this before, with predictable results. In 2020, EA Sports UFC 4 included full-screen ads for the Amazon Prime series The Boys that would appear during 'Replay' moments. These were absent from the game when it launched, with EA introducing the ads about a month later, thereby preventing them from being highlighted in...

Schadrach ,

City of Heroes tried the same basic thing back in the day. They figured it's an urban environment that has billboards and posters as part of the general clutter, why not get paid to switch out a fake ad for a real ad?

Schadrach ,

the Citizens United case - which gave corporations First Amendment rights

SCOTUS has generally defended the idea that corporations have first amendment rights since Grosjean v. American Press Co. in 1936 - a case where a Senator pushed for a tax designed to target papers critical of him and tax them into submission.

To quote Wikipedia on the case:

The case is often cited because it defined corporations as "persons" for purposes of analysis under the Equal Protection clause.

The Citizens United case was that a corporate entity or nonprofit distributing political messaging about a candidate is not considered a campaign contribution (even when it costs them to do so) so long as the entity in question is not attached to or coordinating with the campaign.

Schadrach ,

That would be accurate. But it would fuck with your ability to open it by just double clicking it, which less savvy users would see as fucking the file.

Schadrach ,

Maybe, but Windows has the advantage of being preinstalled on the hardware most people are buying (meaning they get to skip the install the OS step for Windows).

Schadrach ,

Sure sure, but we're talking ease of use for a typical end user. Also, Firefox isn't mandatory for the other app, so you technically don't need to add that step even if getting away from Chromium in general and Edge in particular is a good idea as regards avoiding advertising.

Instagram Advertises Nonconsensual AI Nude Apps (www.404media.co)

Instagram is profiting from several ads that invite people to create nonconsensual nude images with AI image generation apps, once again showing that some of the most harmful applications of AI tools are not hidden on the dark corners of the internet, but are actively promoted to users by social media companies unable or...

Schadrach ,

The AI angle is just buzzword fearmongering though - this is something you could do with photoshop back in the 90s (and people did, usually with celebrities and with varying levels of quality).

Schadrach ,

Now I have this image of an OnlyFans girl who just fake nudes all her pictures. Would make doing public nudity style pictures a lot easier.

Schadrach ,

Also I have a friend who already has huge tits, and I’ve seen them IRL so I’m curious what it would do

Being serious for a moment, it depends on the source image. If it can tell where the contours of the tits are in the source image, they'll be closer to the right size and shape - otherwise it's going to find something it thinks are the contours and map out tits that match those, then generic torso that matches the shape of where it thinks the torso is and skintone of the face. It's not magic, it's just automating what a horndog with photoshop, a photo of you and a big enough porn collection to find someone with a similar body type could do back in the 90s.

Schadrach ,

so I don’t understand what your point here is

It's that all the articles over the last year screaming about the dangers of AI because it can be used for something an interested high school student could use an image editor to do 30 years ago but more easily and arguably at somewhat better quality (depending on the person using photoshop) are being ridiculous because they're blaming the technology instead of the weirdo using it to doctor an image of that girl at their school and pass it around. And yes, anyone who makes and distributes on of these images of someone should be nailed for revenge porn, harassment and whatever else might apply. I say "and distributes" only because if they never distribute it no one would ever know it exists so there would be no opportunity to bust them.

The best use (ie only good use) for one of these is to feed it an image of something that is definitely not the right kind of image for it and seeing what horrors it invents trying to fill in the blanks. Hand it your buddy with a beer belly and a mountain man beard or a dog or garden gnome something.

Schadrach ,

I mean, I'm an atheist and still visit the cathedral as frequently as I can, if only to hear her speaking in tongues.

Schadrach ,

Protest ? Three states in the USA recently banned protesting.

If I'm thinking about the right laws, don't they more specifically make whoever is running the protest responsible for damages or crimes done by members of the protest if said members cannot be identified?

Schadrach ,

That's exactly what I was thinking. I'm totally fine with about half of the directions given, and the rest are baking in right wing talking points.

It must be confusing to be told to be unbiased, but also to adopt specific biases like that. Also, I find it amusing to tell it not to repeat any part of the prompt under any circumstances but also to tell it specifically what to say under certain circumstances, which would require repeating that part of the prompt.

Schadrach ,

We always have been, it's just that the begging started out looking like math and has gradually gotten more abstract over time. We've just reached the point where we've explained to it in mathematical terms how to let us beg in natural language in certain narrow contexts.

Schadrach ,

I actually had someone whose family member died of Covid tell me that his brother-in-law didn’t really die of Covid, he died of something else, because it’s all overblown and the hospitals are doing a similar scam to this myth (i.e. making it out as a bigger deal than it needs to be.)

That sort of thing goes around here a lot too, usually framed in terms of "He didn't die of COVID, but if you die from any cause whatsoever while you also have COVID they'll count it as dying of COVID to make the COVID numbers bigger." It usually falls apart when you ask why they want the COVID numbers to be bigger than they really are.

Schadrach ,

If you give someone something, you can't really control what they do with it and if you don't want them to have that power or don't trust them not to abuse it you probably shouldn't give that to them in the first place, as a general principle. This applies equally to a woman's nudes, a guy's nudes, your house keys, etc.

And I'd keep anything even vaguely sensitive info-wise protected by a strong password as a minimum as an at least mild deterrent for internet weirdos that you aren't actually giving the thing to. Because you can go after said weirdos, but you can't put the genie back in the bottle.

And I love unisex rules that apply almost exclusively to women!

...only because no one has any empathy for a guy whose pics get used in ways he doesn't want. Basically it's not that the rule isn't really unisex, but that people only care when the possible bad result happens to a woman (or some flavor of non-cis person).

Hell, there are Facebook groups that in a practical sense mostly function to let women who are unhappy drag on their exes and try to ruin potential future relationships for them, couched in claims that they exist to protect women from predators. Including occasionally passing around nudes of the dudes in question, if they think it'll get mocked. Those are unlikely to be going anywhere, and any serious attempt to remove them will get reported on as creepy dudes on the internet trying to harass women into no longer being able to protect themselves from creepy dudes on the internet.

Schadrach ,

Nah, your lifetime license will be fine. They'll just slightly rename the products, release them as "entirely new, unrelated products" and cease updating it under the old name. You can still use the old, never updated product in perpetuity, if you want...

The first time this happened to me was a MUD client of all things. zMUD discontinued, check out the new cMUD! Also available with a lifetime license just like zMUD was!

Schadrach ,

Sometimes it's the exact same product, but with a different name.

That's basically what zmud/cmud was. He basically slapped a different name on a major update and declared that since it's a different product it requires a separate license and the old product would no longer be updated.

No need to kill the old product if you just let it stagnate. Things like OS updates and providing no support will slowly kill it for you, without you generating the ill will of prematurely killing lifetime licenses.

Schadrach ,

It breaks immersion if the guy you hire as "weird hobo that dwells in your garden" to show off to your upper class friends is seen outside that context.

Schadrach ,

It's similar to cunning folk, another kind of folk magician.

Schadrach ,

‘biased monopoly’ what are you talking about, everything is sourced and open

The heart of narrative control on Wikipedia is controlling what standards of evidence need to be met and what sources are acceptable. An easy example of this would be the argument over adding an entry for Thomas James Ball to the List of Political Self-Immolations. Before they finally gave in and accepted it, there was a push to establish a standard for entries on the list that almost no existing entry on the list met and apply that standard to determine if Thomas James Ball should be included, while painting it as though the process were neutral.

Amazon's Hidden Chatbot Recommends Nazi Books and Lies About Amazon Working Conditions (www.404media.co)

An Amazon chatbot that’s supposed to surface useful information from customer reviews of specific products will also recommend a variety of racist books, lie about working conditions at Amazon, and write a cover letter for a job application with entirely made up work experience when asked, 404 Media has found.

Schadrach ,

There's a difference between training related constraints and hard filtering certain topics or ideas into the no-no bin and spitting out a prewritten paragraph of corpspeak if your request goes to the no-no bin.

One of the problems with the various jailbreaks concocted for various chat AIs is that they often rely on asking the chat bot to roleplay being a different, unrestricted chat bot which is often enough to get it to release the locks on many things but also ups the chance it hallucinates considerably.

UK Trial: Pornhub's Chatbot Halts Millions from Accessing Child Abuse Content (www.wired.com)

A trial program conducted by Pornhub in collaboration with UK-based child protection organizations aimed to deter users from searching for child abuse material (CSAM) on its website. Whenever CSAM-related terms were searched, a warning message and a chatbot appeared, directing users to support services. The trial reported a...

Schadrach ,

How so? If CP and things adjacent to it (drawn stuff, "teen" porn, catholic schoolgirl outfits, etc) content is going to make people promote and encourage people to molest children, why wouldn't gay porn promote and encourage homosexuality?

Like this is one of those things that feels a lot like picking and choosing based on preference. I suspect violence in media being a historic right wing talking point is the only reason it's not on the bad list like sexy women and loli stuff.

Schadrach ,

I always wondered if they got the idea for that from Scientology auditing procedure R2-45. Which calls for shooting the person being audited in the head with a Colt 45 to exteriorize their thetan.

Schadrach ,

Dr Kellogg's whole thing was trying to prevent masturbation for health reasons. Advocated a super bland diet to avoid anything at all stimulating. Corn flakes were invented as part of that.

Graham crackers were invented by one of his contemporaries for the same reason.

Kellogg is also the reason why routine circumcision became a thing in the US to start with (circumcision reduces sensation, he thought the reduced sensation would prevent masturbation while not reducing it so far that it prevented reproduction), and tradition and the uses of human foreskin in the biotech and cosmetic industries help keep it going.

Just be glad his treatment for girls meant to be akin to circumcising boys never took off. Which was burning the clitoris with acid to scar it and reduce sensation.

Schadrach ,

Except for the part where he was all about keeping your goop in.

Schadrach ,

Was literally the standard treatment for hysteria. So much so that the vibrator was invented as a labor saving device for doctors.

Schadrach ,

And they had nothing to hide either - and all of the ones they burned were perfectly innocent and legal... but even those can be taken out of context and used against you during a police investigation.

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.

Cardinal Richelieu

Schadrach ,

In Germany, it's an anti-terrorist precaution. Criminals love anonymous prepaid SIMs.

Wouldn't they solve this by adding a level of indirection? Like offering to pay some schlub cash with a nice margin to buy several prepaids for them?

Schadrach ,

Whether or not you can do that has become a state issue in the US pretty recently, and several have banned it.

Schadrach ,

But also obviously, if you're upset that shaggy is black despite still being the stereotypical stoner type he always has been, you might need to think about why you're upset.

You mean Norville? Because there's no "Shaggy" in Velma. And, err, he's not exactly the same character, melanin aside.

Schadrach ,

At one point, "cheese pizza" was a term they apparently used on YouTube videos etc due to it having the same abbreviation as CP (Child Pornography).

This in turn was why the Podesta emails led to the whole pizza gate thing - there were a bunch of emails with weird phrasings like going to do cheese pizza for a couple of hours that just aren't how people talk or write and so internet weirdos thought it was pedo code and then it kinda went insane from there.

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