Similarly, if the Earth can't survive Exxon, it was never going to succeed in the first place.

I just have to keep on hammering this point, because it pisses me off so, so much. Many people seem to believe that, since regulatory bodies can be captured, that regulation shouldn't be done. This is called learned helplessness, and it's something malicious people inflict on people they want to exploit.

It isn't sticking your head in the sand to resist assimilation by an evil corporation.

While there are technical solutions to that problem, realistically it's only a problem if people start thinking they're celebrities. Personally I prefer a platform that lets people dunk on celebrities.

Free as in freedom has been political since, like, the 1970s. I think the more important question is, when did people come to believe that free as in beer is apolitical?

But isn't it such a weird coincidence that "apolitical" always happens to be the same as "whatever is best for moneyed interests?" Like being able to take free software and repackage it for sale?

This is a very computer sciencey view, which is why I leapt past the intermediate logic straight to its conclusion. But I'll spell it out.

There is no rules-based system that will actually stand in the way of determined, clever, malicious actors. To put it in CS-style terms, you'll never cover all the contingencies. To put it in more realistic terms, control systems only work within certain domains of the thing being controlled; partly this is because you start getting feedback and second-order effects, and partly it's because there's a ton of stuff about the world you just don't know.

If a system is used as intended, it can work out fine. If someone is determined to break a system, they will.

This is why the world is not driven by rules-based systems, but by politics. We're capable of rich and dynamic responses to problems, even unanticipated problems. Which is to say, the only actual solution to Exxon and Meta is to fight back, not to bemoan the inadequacy of systems.

Indeed, this belief in technocracy is explicitly encouraged by malicious elites, who are aware that they can subvert a technocracy.

Your post is arguing (by analogy) that we shouldn't even bother trying. But I guess you don't need a suicide note when you can just leave a copy of Atlas Shrugged by your body.

Even apart from that, it implies that a sixth grader is not only a gay furry, but he has no problem letting his teacher know he's a gay furry.

They should just start posting rules. You know, screenshots of laws, photos of stop signs, warning labels...

I think not caring about being cool only amplifies preexisting coolness. An entitled boomer isn't gonna become cool just because they're even less self-conscious about their obnoxious opinions.

Well... They are of course right about the fact that these sorts of decentralized systems don't have a lot of privacy. It's necessary to make most everything available to most everyone to be able to keep the system synchronized.

So stuff like Meta being able to profile you based on statistical demographic analysis basically can't be stopped.

It seems to me, the dangers are more like...

Meta will do the usual rage baiting on its own servers, which means that their upvotes will reflect that, and those posts will be pushed to federated instances. This will almost certainly pollute the system with tons of stupid bullshit, and will basically necessitate defederating.

It'll bring in a ton of, pardon the word, normies. Facebook became unsavory when your racist uncle started posting terrible memes, and his memes will be pushed to your Mastodon feed. This will basically necessitate defederating.

Your posts will be pushed to Meta servers, which means your racist uncle will start commenting on them. This will basically necessitate defederating.

Then yes there's EEE danger. Hopefully the Mastodon developers will resist that. On the plus side, if Meta does try to invade Lemmy, I'm pretty confident the Lemmy developers won't give them the time of day.

Sounds like an early experiment in artificial neural networks.

The castles are renovated into gaudy commercial establishments—one is a café, one is a privately-owned museum, one is a residential condominium, and one is torn down to make way for a strip mall.

I browsed 4chan /x/ earlier today, so here's where they are...

The obvious one relates to the fact that founding members of the Federal Reserve were on the Titanic, and it was intentionally sunk to (something incoherent about economics). The submarine was sunk for similar reasons.

The Titanic didn't sink, but it was some other vessel, and They had to sink the submarine so the truth wouldn't get out.

There are deep ocean aliens, and the sub had to sink to conceal that fact.

Those are the ones I could remember. In any case, it's always the Jews and the CIA.

I guess the important thing to understand about spurious output (what gets called "hallucinations") is that it's neither a bug nor a feature, it's just the nature of the program. Deep learning language models are just probabilities of co-occurrence of words; there's no meaning in that. Deep learning can't be said to generate "true" or "false" information, or rather, it can't be meaningfully said to generate information at all.

So then people say that deep learning is helping out in this or that industry. I can tell you that it's pretty useless in my industry, though people are trying. Knowing a lot about the algorithms behind deep learning, and also knowing how fucking gullible people are, I assume that—if someone tells me deep learning has ended up being useful in some field, they're either buying the hype or witnessing an odd series of coincidences.

Of course, they'd charge you $300 for having to make the effort.

As I recall, the basic differences between employee and contractor are whether the employer can dictate time, place, and manner. The problem for gig "contractors" is that they're in a much tougher spot on exercising their rights, since not many people who can afford a lawyer deliver food. And they aren't exactly in short supply, so if Uber oversteps and individual "contractors" try to push back, they'll just be fired. Which gets back to the lawyer issue.

One time someone told me that paper money is worthless, so I said, fair enough—I'll take that worthless paper off your hands.

He, uh, didn't take me up on it.

It's even more perplexing than that... One version of Web 3.0 is the crypto fantasy of being nickel-and-dimed for every single little thing. There's another, older Web 3.0 concept proposed by Tim Berners-Lee called the semantic web.

Setting aside stuff like Plan Nine and Manos and The Room and Birdemic, probably Star Trek XI, the one that JJ made. Splicing together test footage of Bela Lugosi and his chiropractor is one thing, but desecrating something beautiful is a sin.

Yes and no. I generally believe that risk-aversion is a very risky strategy. The greatest threat facing the world is bean-counting MBAs, and they're doing their damndest to destroy culture for the sake of risk minimization.

On the other hand, check this out.

The supreme court is such a degenerate institution, and I don't mean that in terms of its current makeup. It's the only branch of government that considers itself immune to checks and balances from the other branches, and the legislature and executive are too chickenshit to do anything about it.

Except for Roosevelt, the last actually good president this country has had.

No future but what we make for ourselves—and we sure have done a shit job.

Fun question, but it leads to other questions...

First, are vampires stopped at the property line, or only at the threshold of some appurtenance (e.g., a house)? After all, you're asking about real estate, and real estate is primarily concerned with land, not buildings.

This sort of matters because, are we assuming that vampire law is coincident with human law? By this I mean, if vampires were to take control of the government and abolish real estate law, would they then be able to enter any property or building, anywhere, anytime?

If vampires do observe human law, then realistically, they probably wouldn't be able to enter a leasehold without the tenant's permission. The fundamental right of tenancy is peaceful enjoyment, and in fact tenancy is a legal property right, to access the property in question and do anything, without undue burden, allowed under the terms of the lease. It would be a violation of peaceful enjoyment for a landlord to allow vampires into the unit.

The right of inspection, by the way, is explicitly carved out in real estate law. The right to let vampires into the unit is, to my knowledge, not enumerated.

I think it's better to think about what swap is, and the right answer might well be zero. If you try to allocate memory and there isn't any available, then existing stuff in memory is transferred to the swap file/partition. This is incredibly slow. If there isn't enough memory or swap available, then at least one process (one hopes the one that made the unfulfillable request for memory) is killed.

If you ever do start swapping memory to disk, your computer will grind to a halt.

Maybe someone will disagree with me, and if someone does I'm curious why, but unless you're in some sort of very high memory utilization situation, processes being killed is probably easier to deal with than the huge delays caused by swapping.

Edit: Didn't notice what community this was. Since it's a webserver, the answer requires some understanding of utilization. You might want to look into swap files rather than swap partitions, since I'm pretty sure they're easier to resize as conditions change.

I'm pretty sure this article is a really bad attempt at satire. Or if there is a point, maybe it's that... the fact that there have been things in the past that are not just fads (like SQL), that means that current things that are fads (like blockchain) are in fact not just fads?

You have to enjoy a hobby in itself, if you're too focused on results then you'll have problems with the gulf between your ability and your aspiration. Is there anything you've tried doing that you just enjoy doing? Like do you just enjoy banging on a piano or drawing or writing, regardless of the output?

At least you won't be feeling stagnant, for a while. But I'll answer your question more completely.

Various things have been discovered that have allowed a certain amount of automation in storytelling, but one thing that can't be automated is passion. By automation I'm not talking about "artificial intelligence," I'm talking about—what programmers call "tooling." Movies nowadays are almost always visually stunning, and that's because of algorithmic work in light and shading, character animation, hair simulation. Similarly, there's also a "canonical story" you can read about in a book called Invisible Ink.

The canonical story doesn't tell you how to write dialog, and not surprisingly, dialog has become incredibly weak. On one hand you have capeshit, where characters talk in quips, and on the other The Rings of Power, where everyone talks in weird, deep-sounding non sequitors.

This is what I mean by risk aversion. A lot of beautiful graphics conveying nothing. A lot of electricity used to run computers for no reason at all. This is all very expensive, and expenses have to be justified with spreadsheets.

There are still good things out there, there's still passion in the world. It's just getting harder to find.

The only thing deep learning has done is make forgery more accessible. But Stalin was airbrushing unpersons out of photos sixty years ago, so in principle this is nothing new.

When it comes to politics, there's already enough money floating around that you don't need deep learning to clog the internet with shit. So personally I'm not expecting anything different.

I feel the other thing missing from all this Discourse is, IBM made UNIX. If they want to act all proprietary, why don't they abandon Linux and return to their own operating system?

That's right, because of the enormous amount of free labor they get from the open source community.

I don't really like driving, but it is necessary. My (main) car is a 1993 Mazda Miata, which is currently being repainted bright yellow, and I'm gonna put a new top on it next. It isn't fast, but it handles extremely well and it's fun to drive. Or at least, it makes driving as fun as it can be.

I think anyone who's driven a Miata understands.

When I was looking at conspiracy theories about the submarine, this was basically the metatheory. That they've so heavily brainwashed us that we can read something like this and go, yeah that seems realistic.

The same is true of DCI Barnaby. Just remember, the copaganda is real.

It's older, but The Longest Journey is good. Unfortunately, the final game in the series kinda sucks.

While it's an ensemble, most people would agree that the main character of Final Fantasy VI is a woman—they just might disagree about which woman is the lead.

I also liked the first Xenosaga game, but again, it's a series that goes pretty badly downhill.

Does anybody here remember Vera Lynn? Remember how she said that we would meet again some sunny day? Vera, Vera, what has become of you? Does anybody else in here feel the way I do?

Ah, le fumé monsieur.

As others have noted, I don't think you can bait any relevant information from them. And this works both ways: some people are okay with homosexuality (or whatever) in the abstract but "don't think it could happen to them," if you catch my meaning; other people, love for their relatives overcomes homophobia.

Incidentally, this was part of why Pride became what it is: since it's easier to hate Someone Else than your own family, coming out en masse forces people to confront homosexuality as a tangible rather than abstract thing, in the context of people they love.

I don't have any particular advice for you. I can only say that I don't regret having come out.

Plus being small, low to the ground, and with even weight distribution, it's like driving a slow moving cloud.

Then you should head on over to 4chan.org, where you can be an obnoxious child to your heart's content.