Spyke

Replies

Comment on

Anon shares his dating preferences

Well first these are the frequent talking points of incels when they harp on what they consider “low value females”. If you find yourself constantly repeating such devaluing talking points, maybe a break from the internet would do you good. Secondly, and more generally, it is usually more attractive to talk about the things you love than the things you hate. Unless you have already established that you and the other person hate the same things, then you can bond over that too.

Comment on

Defederation from Lemmygrad.ml

I understand that they are staunchly pro-communist and also take a pro-Palestine, including some of them (many of them?) a more clearly pro-Hamas stance. And that all of this could annoy many of the centrist liberals that seem to dominate here. But from perusing the lemmygrad link I do not see clear signs of hate speech, certainly not a clear hate speech agenda as you would see with some hate groups. And judging by the comments on here many seem to be happy to be “rid of them” because they are “annoying”, or “immature”, or “tankies”, or whatever. It really reads largely like “their opinions annoy me” so I’m glad they’re gone.

There may be more to it, I don’t know, but personally I wouldn’t like lemmy.world, an otherwise fine instance by all means, to become a centrist liberal silo where no other opinion outside (mostly US-centric) liberal orthodoxy is heard. So yeah, not convinced that this was the right decision, basically because of a lack of evidence.

world

Comment on

Libya floods: Death toll rises to 11,300 in Derna, severely decomposing bodies found in the sea

The sheer scale of this is mind-blowing to me. The very same storm passed over my head (I’m in Greece) and left a trail of heavy flooding that will take years to recover from, but what happened in Libya will affect an entire generation or even generations to come. This is the kind of impact we can expect from climate change,,‘especially coupled with neglect of public infrastructure.

europe

Comment on

Europe's rental prices

I recently saw a rent affordability chart, which was much more interesting (and more sanely formatted). Some of the locations listed as cheapest are actually the most expensive when adjusted for median income.

Comment on

What kind of institutional gaslighting is this?

Reply in thread

Yeah I always thought ‘quiet quitters’ referred to people checking out of their jobs emotionally and doing just barely enough to not get fired, so actually underperforming, not because they couldn’t do better but because they stopped caring at some point. In that sense they have already quit, quietly. But now it seems that anyone who doesn’t go above and beyond can be a ‘quiet quitter’? Doesn’t make much sense to me.

Comment on

The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates

Though I am not a lawyer by training, I have been involved in such debates personally and professionally for many years. This post is unfortunately misguided. Copyright law makes concessions for education and creativity, including criticism and satire, because we recognize the value of such activities for human development. Debates over the excesses of copyright in the digital age were specifically about humans finding the application of copyright to the internet and all things digital too restrictive for their educational, creative, and yes, also their entertainment needs. So any anti-copyright arguments back then were in the spirit specifically of protecting the average person and public-interest non-profit institutions, such as digital archives and libraries, from big copyright owners who would sue and lobby for total control over every file in their catalogue, sometimes in the process severely limiting human potential.

AI’s ingesting of text and other formats is “learning” in name only, a term borrowed by computer scientists to describe a purely computational process. It does not hold the same value socially or morally as the learning that humans require to function and progress individually and collectively.

AI is not a person (unless we get definitive proof of a conscious AI, or are willing to grant every implementation of a statistical model personhood). Also AI it is not vital to human development and as such one could argue does not need special protections or special treatment to flourish. AI is a product, even more clearly so when it is proprietary and sold as a service.

Unlike past debates over copyright, this is not about protecting the little guy or organizations with a social mission from big corporate interests. It is the opposite. It is about big corporate interests turning human knowledge and creativity into a product they can then use to sell services to - and often to replace in their jobs - the very humans whose content they have ingested.

See, the tables are now turned and it is time to realize that copyright law, for all its faults, has never been only or primarily about protecting large copyright holders. It is also about protecting your average Joe from unauthorized uses of their work. More specifically uses that may cause damage, to the copyright owner or society at large. While a very imperfect mechanism, it is there for a reason, and its application need not be the end of AI. There’s a mechanism for individual copyright owners to grant rights to specific uses: it’s called licensing and should be mandatory in my view for the development of proprietary LLMs at least.

TL;DR: AI is not human, it is a product, one that may augment some tasks productively, but is also often aimed at replacing humans in their jobs - this makes all the difference in how we should balance rights and protections in law.

Comment on

Ohio

Reply in thread

People are gullible, not just right-wingers. You’re just more likely to perceive the other side as gullible and not notice the blind spots of your own. And well, we are living in a moment in history of a surge in right wing populism, which puts that side’s gullibility in full frontal display.

news

Comment on

It sure looks like Trump watches are breaking copyright law

Reply in thread

Actually no, when you go to a professional photographer to have your picture taken, you pay for it. Because they put in the work and need to be compensated for it. By that logic people would never have to pay photographers for portraits, weddings, none of that. Just because you’re in a picture doesn’t mean you don’t owe a debt to the person who took it.

games

Comment on

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 hits 500k sales in one day

Review scores for this are shockingly high for a new RPG entry from a small team. Seems very Persona/FF-like, which isn’t exactly my kind of game (I tend to find most JRPGs a little stale in the game design department), but I think I will give this one a try. I’d rather support a new effort in any case than play yet another Bethesda remaster. I know they’re different games, but I hope CO will get the attention it seemingly deserves.

Comment on

Humans can be tracked with unique 'fingerprint' based on how their bodies block Wi-Fi signals

Reply in thread

I can imagine this being initially an accidental discovery like oh every time so and so’s body interacts with the WiFi signal it’s the same pattern… until someone starts exploring this further… and then some engineer or their manager started looking for applications for this. In my experience engineering researchers especially are very good with coming up with use cases for whatever tech they’re working with, with little ethical consideration.