hendrik

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? Or just the average sense of impending doom?

Yes. Though I think predictive policing is directly ethically wrong. I mean first of all there is no such thing as a thought crime. So I think you can’t make people suffer consequences before they did anything. And it comes with consequences. If you’re living in a poor neighborhood or you have darker skin color or have some records in their databases, for whatever reason… Life will become difficult. And you might not be able to live up to your potential any more. Possibly lots of people won’t. Also mistakes will happen and we have to find a way to minimize the amount of innocent people in jail. Or you might want to become politically active. But then you can’t because that’s going to mess with your job and life. And you can ask these people today how fair the system is to them.

And I’m not sure if it’s a slippery slope either. I mean we have China with a social score system. And several other countries with prevalent surveillance. And we know since Snowden that the US also keeps large databases about all of us. It’s already there.

I think it’s more a salami swindle. In the early days, the internet was relatively free, then we had a corporate takeover. And more recently governments are actually cracking down and we don’t have Pornhub in Texas anymore. The UK is also very eager to restrict freedom, porn and unwanted things. Several smaller forums hosted in the UK were killed last year by the new laws. I had occasionally used some of them. Now they’re gone. Then they want your Social media accounts at the borders these days and small amount of people get sent back home for exercising free speech. Also small things increased like someone wanting to pat me down and look inside my bag before I visit an evening show. I cant take my swiss army knife to some locations any more and 5-10years ago that thing was constantly in my bagpack. Surveillance cameras are getting more and more, and does it make crime actually go down? Or is is just a thing in itself? Private companies do the same. I can barely use a messenger these days without revealing my phone number and letting them track me forever. Google gets embedded deeper in all our devices and lifes each day and of course they don’t necessarily want a dystopia… But they definitely want to manipulate you. That’s kind of the core of advertising.

I definitely feel some of the consequences. Some of the changes happened for valid reasons. Some didn’t. And I don’t think “Predictive policing is here whether we like it or not”… It’s a choice… Just because technology exists, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to use it. That’s a fallacy as well.

And then we have Palantir and the arms industry. And I don’t think that’s much of a slippery slope anymore. These systems already decide on some abstract and intransparent intelligence if a potential terrorist is worth murdering 30 or 80 woman and children in the process, and that indeed sounds pretty dystopian to me. But nonethess, exactly that was used to kill a good amount of people fairly recently. Until they took the more wholesome approach to level the entire place… I’m not saying war is easy or there’s a right way to wage war. But I don’t think technology like that is justifiable when used like that.

I think policing is a complex issue. And the US for example has almost ten times the homicide rate of the average European country. They have a lot of gang violence, school-schootings and everything is more extreme in the USA, for the better or the worse. I’d say it’s likely a comprehensive approach. Police needs equipment and good training. They need to be staffed. They also need good guidelines and strict oversight. We can’t have bad people or power abuse. And lawmakers and courts need to facilitate an environment in which things go into the right direction. Everything from the local to the national level. Then society has to agree to pull in the same direction. And it’s kind of an investment into all kinds of things. That will certainly pay off later, big time. But includes things like invest in healtcare for mentally ill people, invest in integration with immigrants. And invest in the proper solution for online crime. And then there’s neoliberalism and our overall concept of a society we want to live in. Of course people are more likely to commit crimes if they’re miserable or hungry or don’t have anything to lose. So we need a society where everyone has some decent living conditions, also feels alright and is integrated into society in some form. And for me it also includes some fairness and individual freedom.
I’d say it’s solvable. I mean not a 100% “perfect” world, but we can have a look at different countries and see how they do things and what it does to them. And there will always be crime, and always room for improvement.

Ah, thanks. And are those people then connected to the same network and can follow each other, or are those entirely seperate? Pardon my lack of knowledge about Bluesky and ATProto.

So a lot of speculation and we don’t know much except 2 paragraphs in the FAQ… I’d like to mention though, they’ve recently stripped the Pixel devices of their status as developer devices and now push for their emulator for development. Once they follow that kind of logic, there isn’t really a reason to keep ADB working as is, at least not on real devices.

I think you can follow Peertube channels and write comments but not post videos. And you can’t access Mastodon nor Pixelfed.

Lemmy is centered on the concept of ActivityPub groups. While Mastodon etc are about individuals, they don’t use that concept (with their toots) and since following accounts isn’t implemented in Lemmy, there is no way to properly interact.

Though there are other software projects. MBin combines both. And Piefed wants to get there, eventually. They already hook into a few more things, but Mastodon or Pixelfed accounts currently aren’t properly supported either. But Mastodon people can write replies to our posts.

It’s a bit complicated. And I think ActivityPub is fairly low level and broad (I think). So it’s really down to the individual implementation and whether two projects agree to do something in a compatible way. And write code for the specifics of some content types.

Since we have Mississippi as an example… Why not just look how it turned out for the people there? Do or don’t they have a communications platform now that connects them to a network of other people? I feel that’s way more helpful than discussing what should be discussed, or talking about theoretical details.

Well, I’m not a fan of oversimplifications and ACAB is one in this context. I think the people pushing for a repressive surveillance state are politicians and lobbyists. The police force is merely executing that. Though I bet they like expensive playthings and power and control. Because that’s kind of their job.

It depends a bit on where you live. Here in Germany I think we have quite some well-trained cops who do their job well. I’ve met some of them. And those do what they’re supposed to and help citizens with all kinds of things. Of course we also have bad cops, assholes who are cops, corrupt ones and people with blood on their hands, but I certainly hope they’re far and in between. In America I’m not so sure. I’d surely never help an agency like ICE. That’s proper fascist stuff and not ethical. Though I bet there are some cops who do good all day and rescue kittens from trees, idk. I don’t think there’s an issue with helping those if you like law and order.

I think the issue with surveillance and weird oppressive power abuse is bigger than those people. Sure they’re involved and being complicit makes someone bad as well, but they’re somewhere at the bottom when they do things like in the article above. Or randomly arrest people in NYC because they have $6 billion to waste on weird tech and some AI tells them to do wrong things. I think the real issue though are the people who give them the $6b, the people who decide what dystopian shit to buy with it, the people who passed the laws to instruct them to do it. And last but not least companies like Palantir who make a fortune off of people’s misery.

So you’d need to fight those. Opposing the police in certain ways might be part of that, but it’s not going to do much.

Ahem, no. This isn’t about cancelling or silencing people. The real issue is a full-blown humanitarian crisis and a war. Muting random regular people might seem like an idea, but it’s going to do nothing for those people and the issue at hand. It’s not great that we have all opinions, but you got to deal with it. Block them, that’s why the programmers gave you that tool. And/or switch instances. And report content you deem inappropriate. And be vocal about doing the right thing.

That is for regular users. I think mods should be held to higher standards. I think we shoud discuss whether we want to keep those. Unfortunately there isn’t a good way to deal with this. There are no elections or something… That’s not how the Fediverse works. Maybe it should… Bit until then, you yourself vote by leaving those specific communities and instances. And we all do that.

Oh man, I’m a bit late to the party here.

He really believes the far-right Trump propaganda, and doesn’t understand what diversity programs do. It’s not a war between white men an all the other groups of people… It’s just that is has proven to be difficult to for example write a menstrual tracker with a 99.9% male developer base. It’s just super difficult to them to judge how that’s going to be used in real-world scenarios and what some specific challenges and nice features are. That’s why you listen to minority opinions, to deliver a product that caters to all people. And these minority opinions are notoriously difficult to attract. That’s why we do programs for that. They are task-forces to address things aside from what’s mainstream and popular. It’ll also benefit straight white men. Liteally everyone because it makes Linux into a product that does more than just whatever is popular as of today. Same thing applies to putting effort into screen readers and disabled people and whatever other minorities need.

If he just wants what is majority, I’d recommend installing Windows to him. Because that’s where we’re headed with this. That’s the popular choice, at least on the desktop. That’s what you’re supposed to use if you dislike niche.

Also his hubris… Says Debian should be free from politics. And the very next sentence he talks his politics and wants to shove his Trump anti-DEI politics into Debian… Yeah, sure dude.

I meant both sex and gender. They regularly fail to tell me a lot for my own real life. I like some people and dislike others and it’s easier for me to talk to / work with / collaborate or empathize depending on various circumstances. Personality traits, shared goals… Maybe sharing something or it’s the opposite of that. I believe gender or sex or identity is a bit overrated and so is stereotyped thinking for a lot of applications. Or the need to conform to a stereotype. Dress and identify however you like, make sure to give your children an electronics kit, a plastic excavator and a princess dress… And unless that’s really important for some niche application, don’t feel the urge to look into people’s pants and check what’s in there.

You’re welcome. I mean it’s kind of a factual question. Is gender an indicator on its own? If yes, then the rest is just how statistics and probability work… And that’s not really a controversy. Maths in itself works 🥹

I’d also welcome if we were to cut down on unrelated stuff, stereotypes and biases. Just pick what you like to optimize for and then do that. At least if you believe in the free market in that way. Of course it also has an impact on society, people etc and all of that is just complex. And then women and men aren’t really different, but at the same time they are. And statistics is more or less a tool. Highly depends on what you do with it and how you apply it. It’s like that with most tools. (And LLMs in the current form are kind of a shit tool for this if you ask me.)

Right. If it’s true that women statistically outperform men (with same application documents), it’d be logical to prefer them just on gender alone. Because they likely turn out to be better.

Issue is they probably want to pattern-recognize something like merit / ability / competence here. And ignore other factors. Which is just hard to do.

LLMs reproducing stereotypes is a well researched topic. They do that due to what they are. Stereotypes and bias in (in the training data), bias and stereotypes out. That’s what they’re meant to do. And all AI companies have entire departments to tune that, measure the biases and then fine-tune it to whatever they deem fit.

I mean the issue aren’t women or anything, it’s using AI for hiring in the first place. You do that if you want whatever stereotypes Anthropic and OpenAI gave to you.

Oh wow. 🥹 My idea: Follow the instructions in the green box.

Ah. My instance reports the last activity from lemm.ee from 45mins ago… So that’d be June 30th, 00:14 Estonian time. And the main page forwards to join-lemmy.org now. Looks like the shutdown to me.

Well… it’s 10 before midnight here. I’m pretty sure a bit east from me it’s the 30th already. Not so much in the west. But I don’t know where lemm.ee was located.

It’s 30th of June. Lemm.ee is shutting down now.

https://piefed.social/post/816659

Idk about this. I think the main issue is social media and filter bubbles. Generative AI contributes, but enough fakes news is there anyways. People will also use real riot videos from 4 years ago and claim that’s the LA riots. The Russian troll farms can do this with or without AI. Trump, too. They’ll just come up with drinking bleach is good with their own brains.

I don’t want to refute this. Generative AI accelerates it immensely and makes it easier and way more. But mind that the core of the problem is society, education and most of all social media.

Also this isn’t exactly new, we had Cambridge Analytica since 2014 or something. And manipulating elections and politics by technology is even older than that.