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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • Most people use whatever is the default, even if that default doesn’t perfectly is to their needs/wants.

    That applies even to people that changed their search engine form Google to Duckduckgo.

    Every decisions takes some energy to think about, and the human brain wants to avoid spending energy as much as possible.

    That is why LLMs should be opt-in/by-request instead of opt-out. If people want to occasionally use them, they can decide themselves if spending that additional electricity is worth it.

    Search engines and LLMs are different things, one is for finding content written by humans, the other is for getting a plausible answer to a inquiry.




  • It really depends on the purpose. Sometimes you can hide stuff in unexpected places when there isn’t much interest for other people to find it, or if they don’t even know about it’s existence.

    Also sometimes it is good enough to just delay the discovery of something for a while, because its value after a certain time diminished completely.

    So, I would argue that sometimes security by obscurity can be useful. But I agree that it generally shouldn’t replace proper encryption.





  • Recently deepwiki links started popping up in my search results, when I wanted to research some software. They offered so much genenerated ‘documentation’ that it caused so much confusion and irritation to me, I installed an extension just to block this site from my search results.

    Why do I ever need to read the ‘architecture’ or whatever from an ancient no longer maintained project. The deepwiki page didn’t mention that it isn’t maintained, but the readme.md in the repo states it clearly at the very top with big letters…

    Any suggestion for a browser plugin that blocks AIslop pages from search results? I think we really need some kind of ad block for this, but differently. A well maintained list of pages containing AI slop and then filtering out those pages from search results instead. So that the internet becomes/remains usable and mostly unpoisend by this stuff.

    AIslop should never outrank human created content.

    I am not someone that cries about the end times much, but… If this issues isn’t addressed effectively and the internet becomes filled with aislop that outrank and thus hide human content… it becomes useless… We might really have to look for a new one…

    The internet is for connecting humans through their machines. If it starts to exist without requiring humans, then it can be its own thing and humans have to find something else then.

    /rant





  • I really don’t think it’s just “economic culture” as you’ve described.

    I didn’t say it is just economic culture that is the issue here…

    I really don’t think people are accurate about the feeling that “Obtaining and hoarding valuable things” is an act borne out of the laws of our current society.

    Also true, but what is? Is your point that it is human nature? I would disagree there, humans have the capacity of acting against greed and selfishness. Question is why they are so often acting greedy and selfish then?

    My answer would be two options with both apply to some degree, and there might be more:

    1. Resources are scarce and distributed non equally. So hoarding gives power over others
    2. The system incentivizes greedy behavior, by it’s structure and rules. Either by actively, by giving greedy people direct rewards, or passively by not punishing greedy behavior.

    Other ideas?




  • But you don’t need to misuse language to assign responsibility.

    What? I am interested… How else would you assign the responsibility to people that designed something intentionally bad, if you cannot used language?

    “Misuse [of] language” is a concept I cannot even begin to wrap my head around…

    Do I loose the warranty if I use language in unintended ways?

    It is their responsibility for breaking the system.

    You just ‘misused’ language to assign responsibility to people for breaking the system.

    Saying the system was always designed for this removes responsibility.

    No? Responsibility is not a binary concept. Someone can kill someone else, and would be responsible for that death, and the people around that killer could also share responsibility for not noticeing their unusual behavior. And the system could also be responsible for not giving the killer the support they needed, which drove them to kill someone. And the people that designed or constructed that system could also be responsible for not caring enough about these kinds of deaths to prevent them systemically.


  • There is a difference is saying “I does what it does” and “what it does is per design”. The latter assigns a responsibility.

    In OP Aziraphale gives socienty the responsibility to fix a broken system incrementally and Crowley gives the people in power the fault of intentionally creating a bad system and calls for revolution.



  • True. But most good stuff isn’t a solution for everyone. It takes real effort to escape vendor-lockin. Bigtech made sure of that.

    If something is too simple to set up or requires no set up, or comes from a for-profit company, but doesn’t cost anything, then it always suspicious.

    I am just saying that the issue is not with passkey itself, but the individual implementations and that google/twitter/etc. is pushed towards regular users.

    Critiquing passkey because vendor-lockin is like critiquing HTML for allowing ads.


  • True. But I would say that this isn’t an issue intrinsic with passkey. Many people don’t have time/energy or the attitude to think critically about technology and are herded towards Google/X-corp/etc with offers of convenience and because they are often the only offered choice on the web sites. But from the POV of passkey they just act as a password manager.