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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 11th, 2023

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  • instead of blocking advertising data, we should embrace it IMO.

    imagine a world where users shove so much information at these tools that they can’t even tell what’s real or not. camouflage works better when everyone participates.

    There’s an ad blocker that does exactly this. Called Ad Nauseam. Chrome blocked it from their store super fast, then blocked it from being installed in Chrome from 3rd party sites, then blocked known versions of it from being manually installed in developer mode. I used to run it set to a low percentage - if I “clicked” every ad they’d know to throw my data out, but if I click say 3% of them…






  • With the introduction of protected mode it became possible for programs to run in isolated memory spaces where they are unable to impact other programs running on the same CPU. These programs were said to be running “in a jail” that limited their access to the rest of the computer. A software exploit that allowed a program running inside the “jail” to gain root access / run code outside of protected mode was a “jailbreak”.

    I still miss the narrow window in which you could make use of paging without technically being in protected mode. Basically there was like one revision of the 386 where you could set the paging bit but not protected mode and remain in real mode but with access to paging meaning you got access to paging without the additional processor overhead of protected mode. Not terribly useful since it was removed in short order, but neat to know about. Kinda like how there were a few instructions that had multiple opcodes and there was one commercially distributed assembler that used the alternative opcodes as a way to identify code assembled by it. Or POP CS - easily the most useless 80086 instruction, so useless that the opcode for it got repurposed in the next x86 processor.









  • Free speech is protection from government oppression. Last I checked, I’m not the government, neither is Lemmy, neither is any other site on the internet that doesn’t end in .gov (typically), and this isn’t a free speech issue despite what MAGA idiots would have people think. If the platform wants that shit there, so be it, and I won’t use it when it’s painted on their front page. I use Lemmy because I was here (on another instance originally) before the MAGA weirdos decided to join to spread their bullshit, so I’ve had time to curate – apparently I have to do it again, or simply leave this instance.

    This appears to be an argument against a position I wasn’t taking. You just appear to be upset that alternative video streaming sites don’t ban people you disagree with. Good luck with that.

    Just because I use the internet (which I have been doing since only a few years after the WWW was invented), doesn’t mean I have to tolerate bullshit when I see it.

    Hey, you may been around longer than I have. Only had the internet since the mid 90s. So it depends on how you define “a few”. It was a very different beast back then, and I for one miss the relative lack of concentrated corporate control and mandatory advertiser-friendliness.

    Perhaps if everyone was like this, the internet wouldn’t be the shithole it has become.

    I chalk that up to said concentrated corporate control and mandatory advertiser-friendliness, but then I don’t think it’s become a shithole because people I disagree with also have a voice, but because of aggressive monetization and the enshittification that that inevitably entails.

    And I’m done responding now, because clearly you and many others in this thread will never understand, or even care to understand.

    No, you are well understood. You are opposed to alternative video platforms (and apparently some other unnamed Lemmy instance) because those things do not necessarily reinforce your echo chamber, and you consider that reinforcement a vital feature. I’m waaay over on the far end of the spectrum, and chose my instance specifically because they do not defederate, they keep everything available and leave it up to the user to decide what they do or do not wish to see (and I to date have nothing blocked - no users, no communities, no servers).


  • (such as screaming fire in a movie theater when there is no fire)

    This idiom comes from an analogy in a SCOTUS opinion arguing that checks notes it’s a violation of the Espionage Act to distribute flyers that oppose the draft. That case was later partly overturned in Brandenburg v Ohio and the standard is that speech isn’t incitement unless it is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action. To the point that “$SLUR should hang from trees” is probably protected speech (because the lawless action isn’t imminent), but “you guys, grab that $SLUR over there so we can string them up!” probably isn’t.

    So defending free speech inevitably means defending white supremacists and the like because free speech doesn’t actually protect anything if it doesn’t protect upsetting, outrageous, or offensive speech (and likewise, the arbiter of what counts as offensive is not guaranteed to always be on your side). It’s why the ACLU has defended them on more than one occasion. H.L. Mencken put it best.

    “The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.” ― H.L. Mencken





  • Except I couldn’t. Because a person being influenced by an artwork and then either intentionally or subconsciously reinterpreting that artwork into a new work of art is a fundamentally different thing from a power hungry machine learning algorithm digesting the near entirety of modern humanity’s art output

    The big differences there are whether it’s a person or a machine and just how much art one can digest as inspiration. Again, reference my example of a commission above - the main difference between a human and an AI making it is whether they look up a couple dozen examples of each element to get a general idea or 100 million examples of each element to mathematically generalize the idea, and the main reason the number of examples and power requirements need to be so different is that humans are extremely efficient pattern developing and matching machines, so efficient that sometimes the brain just fills in the pattern instead of bothering to fully process sensory inputs (which is why a lot of optical illusions work).

    to churn out an image manufactured to best satisfy some random person’s text prompt.

    At a level, “churning out an image to best satisfy some random person’s” description is essentially what happens when someone commissions a work or when producing things to spec as part of some project. They don’t generally say “just draw whatever you are inspired to” and hope they like the result. This is the thing that AI image generators are specifically good at, and is why I say it’s about protectionism for a class of workers who didn’t think their jobs could be automated away in whole or in part.

    But we’re not just talking about automating someone’s job.

    Except you are, you are just deeming that job “someone’s dream career” as though that changes whether or not it’s a job that is being automated in whole or part. Yes, it’s going to hurt the market for commissioned art works and the like. Again, upset because those jobs are supposed to be immune to automation and - whoopsie - they aren’t. Join the people in manufacturing, or the makers of buggy whips.

    We’re talking about automating someone’s passion.

    Literally no one is going to ban or forbid anyone from creating art because AI art exists.