some people… let’s hope this mood swing lasts for a couple of months!
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some people… let’s hope this mood swing lasts for a couple of months!
Fucking Star Wars fans…
I was sure it’s Steve Jobs
I sincerely hope that is what’s going to happen and Mozilla gets severely fucked over for how they have been running their shit. Break their business and rethink from scratch how we run and finance the development of one of the most important pieces of software around. Hint: You’re not going to be competitive with big tech by copying their practices, marketing “AI” bullshit and pocket and all that crap. You can’t compete with google there, they can always outspend you.
As a Linux user, such a break would also be very timely, now that we have survived the painful surgeries of systemd and wayland. Those problems are mostly fixed, so we need another dysfunctional troublemaker - Firefox it is!
But seriously: The official story is always that google gives Mozilla the money to be the default search engine. But really, they don’t need to care. Google needs Firefox so they can pretend they don’t have a browser monopoly. For similar reasons, google used to employed 10000s of people who were doing very much non-essential stuff that is entirely irrelevant for their business. They could have fired them all long ago, and massively increased their profitability. But those would have looked obscene and raises regulators’ attention. So just hiring a bunch of expensive engineers who build google chat 23.0 and whatever makes them appear more like a “normal” company.
Not getting yelled at on the Linux kernel mailing list
You can also go to cloud 7 instead of cloud 9, which sounds like it’s closer/easier to reach
Seems like they are outta here… without spilling any evidence :(
Around here, people call it sea chicken
Does it?
Yes, in the sense that “thing moves around and does stuff” becomes more predictable if you assume a certain degree of consciousness. This is easier than “thing is at this position now, was at a different position before, was at yet another position before that”. You reduce some of the complexity and unpredictability by introducing an explanation for these changes of world state. In my world, so far I worked well with the assumption that other humans and animals have some consciousness and at least I’m not aware of any striking evidence that would raise doubt on that.
The problem with this isn’t that it’s literally unprovable
Yes, that’s a problem, but it’s relatively similar to the other one. It’s actually quite hard to “prove” anything with real world connection. However, in the case of other humans/animal consciousness, evidence suggests so (at least for me). The evidence in the case of “AI” is different, though. For example, they seem to have no awareness of time and no awareness of the world beyond the limited context of a conversation. Besides a fancy marketing term that suggests there is something similar to living beings involved, what we currently see are admittedly impressive programs that run on statistics, but I don’t need to assume any “consciousness” to explain what they do.
Welcome to radical constructivism :) The question whether other people or cats can experience emotions is in fact a problem people have been thinking about quite a lot. Answers are not very satisfactory, but one way to think about it (e.g., some constructivists would do that) is that assuming they do have a conscience simplifies your world model. In the case of “AI” though, we have good alternative explanations for their behavior and don’t need to assume they can experience anything.
The other important bit is that not assuming some phenomenon exists (e.g., “AI” can experience emotions) unless proven otherwise is the basis of modern (positivistic) science.
EFF does some good stuff elsewhere, but I don’t buy this. You can’t just break this problem down to small steps and then show for each step how this is fine when considered in isolation, while ignoring the overall effects. Simple example from a different area to make the case (came up with this in 2 minutes so it’s not perfect, but you can craft this out better):
Step 1: Writing an exploit is not a problem, because it’s necessary that e.g., security researchers can do that.
Step 2: Sending a database request is not a problem, because if we forbid it the whole internet will break
Step 3: Receiving freely available data from a database is not a problem, because otherwise the internet will break
Conclusion: We can’t say that hacking into someone else’s database is a problem.
What is especially telling about the “AI” “art” case: The major companies in the field are massively restrictive about copyright elsewhere, as long as it’s the product of their own valuable time (or stuff they bought). But if it’s someone else’s work, apparently it’s not so important to consider their take on copyright, because it’s freely available online so “it’s their own fault to upload it lol”.
Another issue is the chilling effect: I for one have become more cautious sharing some of my work on the internet, specifically because I don’t want it to be fed into "AI"s. I want to share it with other humans, but not with exploitative corporations. Do you know a way for me to achieve this goal (sharing with humans but not “AI”) in today’s internet? I don’t see a solution currently. So the EFF’s take on this prevents people (me) from freely sharing their stuff with everyone, which would otherwise be something they would encourage and I would like to do.
Meh, better approach it to assume it doesn’t understand emotion unless proven otherwise. Does a fork understand what human emotion is? A pillow? You wouldn’t assume that either I guess.
Never met that vegan everyone is talking about, but I did meet some of those linux users. More than that Mac OS users, though
Yes, unless you do it too late and then it brakes :)
(Haven’t used Arch in ~10 years, but that was my experience back then. I use Debian, btw)
GNU/Arch, sir or siresse
Hello from Japan! :)
It’s also about control where you’re being rained on. The shower gives you targeted rain, so you can wash yourself with one hand while eating a (dry) pizza with the other.
Yes, and he also makes the point quite clearly that drugs don’t make you super productive as a writer. If anything, they make your writing worse. But it’s a good excuse to live that “drugged artist” lifestyle, telling oneself that, sadly, that’s how you have to do it (while opening the next beer can).