Very observant

We tricked ourselves into hacking ourselves.

It’s a testament to the power of PR firms to control the narrative that everyone is talking about how terrible Ed Sheeran is for not canceling his tour to stand up to the venue owners.

It is kind of odd that the venue owners, the actual people who made the decision to blacklist Macklemore, are treated by the majority of these social media posts like they’re not important.

https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/pop-culture-news/macklemore-says-was-dropped-ed-sheeran-tour-patriots-owner-robert-kraf-rcna597736

“Ed also told me that [Robert] Kraft had rallied some of the other stadium owners and collectively they gave him an ultimatum: if Macklemore stays on the tour, you will not be allowed to play in our venues,” Macklemore wrote.

Why is Robert Kraft’s name not being mentioned at the top of the story? Ed Sheeran is bad because he didn’t stand up to who?

Robert Kraft. That’s who did this, not Ed Sheeran.

It helps when you’re both sides of the negotiation.

Just start talking to yourself like you’re on Bluetooth. “Hold on, this person is trying to talk to me, one sec”

I’m pretty sure this is a crime, you can’t ‘oopsie, it wasn’t me it was my computer’ your way out of a cybercrime.

as though using Signal means the authorities can’t read your messages.

Nobody who understands the topic thinks this.

Signal exists to prevent the contents from being read off the wire and from having the capability of compelling Signal’s parent company from turning over stored messages.

It doesn’t exist to hand hold you so you don’t get phished, or prevent you from running it on a vendor phone full of spyware. You’re responsible for making sure your hardware is secure and that you’re not socially engineered.

I think the glasses are different because they are not as easily spotted as other video recording devices.

That’s not true at all, we’ve had cheap tiny hidden bodyworn recording devices for a long time.

Instead of glasses how about a cross: https://blackpointsecurity.com/products/black-cross-necklace-hidden-spy-camera-with-dvr.html

Or maybe in a pen in your pocket: https://blackpointsecurity.com/products/mini-spy-full-hd-pen-recorder-camera.html

You could make the same argument about the glasses, I guess

I didn’t realize this was such a polarizing topic, I’ll have to reflect on that.

Yes, that is true.

But the source of murders is always a person, not the tool.

Just to be clear, I’m not making some kind of anti-gun control argument. I’m just explaining why that metaphor is flawed.

The problem at a murder scene isn’t the gun, it’s the person who used it. Nobody is mad at the gun, or worried that it will suddenly murder again.

Much like here. The problem isn’t AI, the problem is the people who are choosing to deploy AI in this way.

It’s the people

AI as it stands is a symbol of Capitalism and the problems it embodies.

I know and agree.

I’m only saying that promoting that symbol is damaging in other ways, such as to the sciences.

Some people may be expressing an opinion with that type of nuance (and I do agree with it) but, what appears to be the large majority of social media users on this topic don’t make that distinction and those people attack the sciences/non-LLM uses of the technology.

Yes, overuse of local water and power supplies is damaging, the replacement of workers is causing all kinds of economic issues, the ability for AI to enable mass surveilance and authoritarians is an urgent problem that needs to be addressed AND ALSO the people trying to fight against it are causing collateral damage to other important aspects of society, an example being that it’s making ML/AI a less popular major which will result in less researchers/slower advancement.

It’s important to point out that there have been several advances in AI that have significantly reduced the computation requirements. So, whatever the demand for AI will ultimately be, it will require an order of magnitude less datacenters because of this kind of research.

The source of the problems here are the people making the decision to deploy the technology in this way and their outsized influence on the government that should be regulating their actions.

AI is just the current topic. Outsourcing was another huge topic in the Clinton era. After that we had the post-crash bailout and the mass acquisition of housing by large capital funds in order to control the rental/real estate markets.

All of these things caused massive economic issues for the vast majority of people and were entirely done because the people that benefitted were able to influence the government and prevent their regulation.

This isn’t an AI problem. It’s a power, influence and corruption problem. AI’s destructive deployment is just the current symptom.

Nothing to jack off on

Oh you sweet summer child 😂

I was thinking things like skimming credit card numbers or some creep hearing you give you phone number to the clerk and stalking you.

Video is different, but the ability to record 24/7 has all kinds of criminal possibilities.

This is a real problem, I already see it with CS students.

AI is useful in some limited scenarios, the problem is that when you’re learning CS all of the scenarios that you’re given as exercises are almost trivial to solve and fall within AI’s capability to do for you. That completely handicaps a student in ways they don’t even understand until much later.

It isn’t until they get into more complex projects, where AI flounders, that they recognize that they have rarely had to troubleshoot an issue so they don’t have the mental framework to do so. They’re not comfortable with the tools, and they haven’t internalized the methodology so they hit a brick wall.

If you’re a student now, avoid it at all costs. It’s easier to use AI, of course, but facing the difficulty and overcoming it is probably the most important part of learning anything.

Pervert watches to complement the pervert glasses.

It’s nice to find someone on the same wavelength :P

Yes of course there are a large number of people that criticise any use of generative AI, whether it’s for good or bad. But this doesn’t mean that every criticism involving AI is a criticism of the use of AI, rather than a criticism of the way that it is being used by the person using it. You would have to be extremely inept to make that mistake of comprehension.

I can tell you, as someone who is against the capitalist orgy of datacenters while also understanding the world changing implications of neural networks, that the loudest people/bots in the anti-AI conversation do not recognize such nuance.

There is very much a real push by some people in this space to label any use of AI technology as evil. That’s a dangerous meme to spread on social media. How many future ML scientists and researchers are we losing because people swap out of the field due to this misdirected hatred being pushed in social media?

Which isn’t illegal.

What is illegal is when a person makes the decision to use a tool immorally, i.e. to murder. The problem in that scenario is the person, not the tool.

If you could magically cause every gun to disappear, there would still be murder because it’s the people who are doing the murder.

Your problem is with capitalism, not AI.

Blaming a field of machine learning because some rich assholes are exploiting it demonstrates a failure to diagnose the issue.

AI isn’t building data centers, a human being made that decision.

We need a way to jam up their ability to transmit the information back to Bezos’ house or whatever.

Lucky for us, there’s ultrasonic acoustic jamming. Science: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2667295223000272

It’s pretty short range and only affects some kinds of microphones (the most common kind/MEMS) but it’s doable.