All these stories about VR, then metverse/crypto, then ai, and now gambling. It seems like Zuckerberg is trying to recreate the early success he had in an emerging field but, at a fundamental level, does not understand that facebook was successful largely due to luck and timing.
Sometimes I think America cannot be a good place to live until the myth of the “tech genius” is thoroughly broken.
If you are just wanting to spam a bunch of copy over a network, quality wouldn’t matter. Say for example if you are running a propaganda campaign to undermine trust in the electoral system among American Conservatives quality does not matter. Just get the vibe right and spam out as much as you can.
Another obvious case is marketing. If you just need a bunch of Twitter accounts to say “B R A N D N A M E” over and over quality would not matter
This is the value proposition of llms in general. They are great if you don’t care about quality. They second quality matters their time-saving value drops off to near 0.
For some reason people have this mindset of “I must be in my car when I charge it”. I see it a lot when I go to DC fast chargers, which really only make sense on road trips. People sitting there in their car charging it up to 100%, which they do every time it needs a charge.
I’ve had conversations with people at charging stations where I explained that they should be charging at home and the reacted like it was the first time they even considered the possibility. If you only use fast chargers of course you are going ng to have a bad experience. That is a terrible way to operate an EV day to day, but it somehow became the default for a lot of people.
Whats really fun about this is Valve started investing in Linux because a bunch of changes Microsoft made to windows 8 signaled they were moving to a locked-down ecosystem to bully corporations like Valve out of the market.
The current state of Windows is a product of MS’s blind greed but the current state of the viable alternatives is, in some ways, also a product of MS’s greed.
Considering that representatives from the Trump cabinet appeared to be surprised that Iran can and did block the strait of Hormuz, I’d say you are giving too much credit.
Also, the US is a net exporter of oil. National supply concerns aren’t the issue so much as global supply shock. Restrictions anywhere lead to price hikes.
I just want to share my thought process here in the vain hope that someone else might see the light of reading past the headline.
This is what went through my head as I was reading:
Immediately, several problems jump out at the use of this database for the conclusions the substack draws.
First, the definition of serial killer given in the report is “The unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender(s), in separate events.” That is pretty broad, and would include things like a family murder (a man kills his wife, then goes to their kid’s school and kill their kid before committing suicide.), or murder for instrumental reasons (e.g. robbery). That is not usually what people think of when they think of serial killers.
Second the number of killers in the report shoots up dramatically in 1960. That coupled with the fact that the sources for the data are a hodge-podge of administrative records and reporting would make me very cautious about the database. This is what the webstite the report comes from says:
The database was created using information collected by Radford University students from a variety of sources including prison records, court transcripts, media sources, true crime books, and the Internet. Great care has been taken to ensure the accuracy of the information.
So, my guess is that the data are mostly from reporting. If that is true then the data are going to be biased towards “serial killers” that show up in news events.
So the data sources are not clear, we don’t know the distribution of legal records to news, we don’t know how records are initially identified. What is clear is that the database is not a sample of news or administrative records about violent crime. For example, the data were not collected by randomly sampling a set of judicial systems across countries then estimating counts of convictions where the offender fit the definition of “serial killer.” Rather, the data (according to a slide show on the website) “began with student serial killer timelines.” That same slide deck reports that one of the goals of the database is to provide accurate information for a forensic psychology course. That purpose suggests a focus on case studies rather than national estimates.
Since those students, along with the course and school, are in the US and since the data were collected in an ad-hoc manner relying in part (I suspect heavily) on news reporting, it is a safe bet that the reason the database has so many more US killers in it is because the folks who compiled it focused on collecting data from the US.
To wit: Why does the US have so many more serial killers? Because we spent more time measuring serial killers in the US.
The United States criminalizes poverty in ways that peer nations do not. Sex work is illegal across most of the country.
Sex work is actually illegal in many countries.
Among peer nations, the U.S. is an outlier on inequality by essentially the same margin it is an outlier on serial killing.
What? What does that even mean? How are they getting that figure?
Overall, I don’t think this is particularly credible. I hope now, that you too will be at least skeptical of the arguments put forth here.
There is a lot to hate about AI. A lot of dangers and valid criticism. But AI chatbots convincing people to kill themselves isn’t a problem with chatbots, it’s a problem with the user.
To me this seems like an obvious problem with the chat bots. These things are marketed as “PhD level experts” and so advanced that they are about to change the nature or work as we know it.
I don’t think the companies or their supporters can make these claims, then turn around and say “well obviously you shouldn’t take its output seriously” when a delusional person is tricked by one into doing something bad.
Sometimes this happens to me as well. Usually when a celebrity does something news worthy that is how I discover it. Or when sports things happen.
I will say though that, while you are probably right that only learning about news through memes is not a good way to be informed, the other extreme (obsessing over every headline) is probably bad too.
As unsolicited advice I’d recommend finding a few long form journalism sources and following them to get a better feel for the news. Doing the over time I have found that i am informed without the hysteria that often comes from 24 hour news cycles.
I can sort of understand this instinct. I am not opposed to new people using linux but I think the obsession with “growth” is the wrong way to think about software tools.
The way most companies make adoption of their software system grow is by making it more convenient to use, then exploiting network effects to force more users on to their platform. For the vast majority of people “convenient to use” means a locked down environment where they have little or no control and don’t have to make technical decisions.
Right now to use a Linux OS you are going to have to do a little bit of learning and make some decisions. The requirement that you actually think about an OS for a few minutes acts as a significant barrier for a lot of people, but removing that barrier results in a product that does not allow the user to control their software. Which I think would be bad.
Last attempt, I swear.
By digressing to abstraction, good people can and do justify building tech for immoral purposes. It is irrelevant that tech is not inherently good or bad in cases where it is built to do bad things. Talking about potential alternate uses in cases where tech is being used to do bad is just a way of avoiding the issues.
I have no problem calling flock or facebooks tech stack bad because the intentions behind the tech are immoral. The application of the tech by those organizations is for immoral purposes (making people addicted, invading their privacy etc). The tech is an extension of bad people trying to do bad things. Commentary about tech’s abstract nature is irrelevant at that point. Yeah, it could be used to do good. But it’s not. Yeah, it is not in-and of-itself good or bad. Who cares? This instantiation of the tech is immoral, because it’s purposes are immoral.
The engineers who help make immoral things possible should think about that, rather than the abstract nature of their technology. In these cases, saying technology is neutral is to invite the listener to consider a world that doesn’t exist instead of the one that does.
Saying “tech is neutral” is a dodge. People say that to avoid thinking about the ethics of what it is they are doing.
At no point in this conversation have I ever said that tech in an abstract sense is inherently good or bad. The point that I am making— and this is the last time I will make it— is that it is not interesting to talk about the ethics of some technology in an abstraction in cases where the actual tech is as it is actually implemented is clearly bad.
Saying “tech is neutral” is a dodge. People say that to avoid thinking about the ethics of what it is they are doing.
I don’t see how that is the case.
It is literally the case. People who have literally made tools to do bad things justified it by claiming that tech is neutral in an abstract sense. Find an engineer who is building a tool to do something they think is bad, they will tell you that bromide.
OpenCV is not, in itself, immoral. But openCV is, once again, actual tech that exists in the actual world. In fact, that is how I know it is not bad, I use the context of reality—rather than hypotheticals or abstractions—to assess the morality of the tech. The tech stack that makes up Flock is bad, once again I make that determination by using the actual world as a reference point. It does not matter that some of the tech could be used to do good. In the case of Flock, it is not, so it’s bad.
As I said before: In a conversation about technology as it actually exists, talking about potentials is not interesting. Yes all technology has the potential to be good or bad. The massive surveillance tech is actually bad right now in the real world
This issue with asserting that technology is neutral is it lets the people who develop it ignore the impacts of their work. The engineers that make surveillance tech make it, ultimately, for immoral purposes. When they are confronted with the effects of their work on society they avoid according with the ethics of what it is that they are doing by deploying bromides like “technology is neutral.”
Example: Building an operant conditioning feedback system into a social media app or video game is not inherently bad, you could use it to reinforce good behaviors and deploy it ethically by obtaining the consent of the people you use on. But the operant conditioning tech in social media apps and video games that actually exists is very clearly and unambiguously bad. It exists to get people addicted to a game or media app, so that they can be more easily exploited. Engineers built that tech stack out for the purpose of exploiting people. The tech, as it exists in the real world, is bad. When these folks were confronted with what they had done, they responded by claiming that tech is not inherently good or bad. (This is a real thing social media engineers really said) They ignored the tech—as it actually exists—in favor of an abstract conversation about some potential alternative tech that does not exist. The effect of which is the people doing harm built a terrible system without ever confronting what it was they were doing.
“Technology is neutral” is a bromide engineers use to avoid thinking about how their work impacts people. If you are an engineer working for flock or a similar company, you are harming people. You are doing harm through the technology you help to develop.
The massive surveillance systems that currently exist were built by engineers who advanced technology for that purpose. The scale and totality of the resulting surveillance states are simply not possible without the tech. The closest alternatives are stasi-like systems that are nowhere near as vast or continuous. In the actual world the actual tech is immoral. Because it was created for immoral purposes and because it is used for immoral purposes.
If you are in a discussion about the development and deployment of technology to facilitate a surveillance state, then saying “technology is neutral” is the least interesting thing you could possibly say on the subject.
In a completely abstract, disconnected-from-society-and-current-events sense it is correct to say technology is amoral. But we live in a world where surveillance technology is developed to make it easier for corporations and the state to invade the privacy of individuals. We live in a world where legal rights are being eroded by the use of this technology. We live in a world where this technology is profitable because it helps organizations violate individual rights. If you live in the US, as I do, then you live in a world where federal law enforcement agencies have become completely contemptuous of the law and are literally abducting innocent people off the street. They use the technology under discussion here to help them do that.
That a piece of tech might potentially be used for a not-immoral purpose is completely irrelevant to how it is actually being used in the real world.
Every day I wake up and think to myself “today is the day I will form a strong opinion about systemd” but it never happens.
I think you would struggle to find any serious Constitutional scholar who would agree with your interpretation. “Except in cases of impeachment” is clearly a limit on what cases a president has the power to issue a pardon, not a retroactive “unpardoning” of cases after a president has been impeached. In fact the retroactive nullification of a pardon seems to fly in the face of a basic judicial principle that hold decisions to be final.
This legit sounds terrible. This sound like a world without meaningful social connections where people are cocooned into isolation by convenience technologies. You should just learn people’s names. Even if it makes you a bit anxious because you are worried you will mess up details sometimes, it is better than that kind of loneliness.