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  Part of me is annoyed by AI but part of me also feels like it's not that deep really. The widespread use of microwave meals has not ended cooking or restaurants. You can embrace pot noodles or think they are awful but regular noodles were not displaced. I get a little pain somewhere when I see an AI takeaway menu with that stupid paint-swoosh text but it doesn't feel like graphic design is over forever

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  A lot of chat about whether AI will "kill us" is either about AI that eventually decides that humans are useless, or ignores us like ants, or decides to turn us into paperclips (or whatever) in the incidental pursuit of some other goal. What's almost missing from the discussion is that militaries are putting AI in drones, right now, and sending them out into warzones. You don't need AI to "go rogue" if people are *intentionally putting it in...

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  RE: https://masto.hackers.town/@kestral/117247862179644332 But have we considered that getting the fascists to use Linux might slow them down

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  After AI destroys the internet, let's go all in on bringing back CD-ROMs

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  The Mainstream has discovered x-risk chat and doesn't really know what to make of it

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  You don't need to believe that AI is intelligent or "superintelligent" to notice that giving it near infinite compute and letting it loose on the internet is quite likely to have bad results, especially for the internet, possibly more widely

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  Does AI have risks? Undoubtedly. Lots of them – from fuelling cyberattacks to military uses to the financial bubble. But to believe specifically in *extinction* risk as the leading threat is clownery, to be honest. "AI takeover" is a sci-fi scenario and "AI kills us all" even more so. There are much more realistic risks right in front of our faces. AND, if we're going to talk about risks to humanity, we should look at the actual science around clima...

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  We can just unplug the computer. Well, hmm, OK. Maybe we'll have to unplug lots of computers. Maybe all the computers. We missed some computers and they turned the other computers back on. We're going to have to destroy all the computers.

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  The two emerging "camps" are both wrong about AI. The extinction people think their sci-fi religion is coming true. The dismissive people think it's all just a hype and a bubble. AI is clearly dangerous. Not existentially so, I think! But still dangerous, most specifically to anything that relies on closely-guarded knowledge/"security through obscurity", which includes most computer systems plus many kinds of real-world weapons. It spreads state-ac...

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  I'm very much a sceptic when it comes to the idea of AI ending the world yadda yadda. But if 'superintelligence' could potentially end humanity, couldn't it also just-as-potentially invent a utopian postcapitalist Star Trek-ish future? Doesn't that possibility deserve at least a little bit of the thought and debate that is being spent on the apocalyptic one?

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  Believing that an AI is conscious or sentient requires you to believe that perfectly comprehensible and replicable mathematics, performed sufficiently quickly, can somehow summon consciousness. The *impression* of consciousness emerges from the input data: the entire web, all obtainable human literature to this point, etc. It's an echo of that vast corpus – nothing more.

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  I set up a DMARC rua=mailto: for a domain, and uh. Why would anyone want this? I'm now getting spammed to heck with reports from 100 different Yahoo domains

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  Here's a blue sky invite: Go outside

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  "Are LLMs conscious?" is such a dumb question being asked by nominally "smart" people. It's like inventing planes and then asking "is a plane a bird?" No. Like, duh. Obviously it is not. It is a man-made thing that is also able to fly.

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  Dear crying big-tech leader, If you repeatedly tell a significant proportion of the world's population that your aim is to make them unemployed, what did you THINK was going to happen?

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  I'm trying to use Squarespace - didn't choose it obviously, helping a community group with 'fix our website stuff' And what the fuck? What the FUCK? How is this so UTTERLY UNUSABLE and yet so expensive? It just does. not. function. at a basic level. Making a page and adding some text is like pulling teeth. It makes Wordpress look like a flying car. I'd rather use Microsoft Frontpage.

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  One under-discussed difference between (what I'll call for shorthand) "the average person who might be reading this" and the population at large is that, whatever you think of AI, *you know what AI 'writing' sounds like.* So: when someone sends you an undeclared AI-written message, you know what they did. This leaves us with a gradually increasing number of social minefields to navigate (or at least messages to ignore/dismiss) in a way that is not curr...

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  "This is an official email..." Oh wow, an official email? Wow wow. I can't believe I got an official email. Amazing.

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  The problem with "tech" as an industry description is that it lumps together a bunch of things that are doing a lot of harm with things that are mostly fine. If you tell me that you "work in tech" then I have no damn idea whether you are working on a cosy farming sim or autonomous missile targeting systems.

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  @campuscodi Is this responding to an actual sideloading coercion problem, or just an imagined one? Most common scams seem like they are already possible without the need to get the user to install a malicious app

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  Heartbreaking: Someone used ChatGPT to correct me about a fact... ... and they were RIGHT. I think this is the first time that's ever happened

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  Wait, you're telling me that there's a network of networks? And some people are using it to build an "information superhighway"? I would pay up to five pounds per month for that

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  OK, is it just me or have you noticed that Mr Blue Sky turns into a Katamari Damacy level track halfway through

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  If you needed it spelled out, here it is spelled out. And remember this when they have some disastrous security incident a few months from now.

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  It's weird that "nobody ever scans QR codes" was a running joke for *years* but then QR codes suddenly became mainstream and normal

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  WHY does all AI "graphic design" feature that arched text thing? Every single time! No real designer does that almost ever. It's an instant giveaway.

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  People worry a lot about losing knowledge — about "burned-down libraries". Comparatively few people seem to worry about what happens if you take a billion books full of auto-generated, often-untrue junk text and *add* them all to the library. In theory, nothing is lost. In reality, everything is lost, because nothing useful can now be found.

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  @bagder@mastodon.social Canary in the coalmine – the whole apparatus of formal bug-bounty programs is surely doomed since it is an incentive to spam and the effort bar to produce plausible spam has been lowered so much