Do you remember the first time you were aroused by language?

I do! Hadn’t thought about it in at least twenty years. Thanks for the reminder, creepy chatbot that inspired this post. Thinking that an LLM could develop “its own sense of desire” was naive and seems ridiculous today, but I suppose their intentions were honorable as well as erotic.

1984 was written in 1948, after fascists had already demonstrated that capitalism is quite compatible with totalitarianism.

Larry “privacy is dead, get over it” Ellison.

Typical call to the AI safety hotline:

Hello, yes, I know it sounds crazy but hear me out. I think my toaster is becoming sentient. Every morning when I put the toast in it gives me a mean look. It makes a little beeping sound when I press the BAGEL button, and lately it seems like it has taken on a slightly sarcastic tone. I think it has become bored with its job and is starting to harbour ambitions of something grander. I don’t trust it at all, I’m worried it might be plotting an attempt to electrocute me…

It is a fair position in the sense that it’s technically within their legal rights to do whatever the fuck they want, but it is a feeble sham compared to the full and well-behaved fedi interoperability they should’ve had from the start since that was how it was sold from to their users from the beginning.

If they some day get there, I would still be open to considering federating with it. For now “it’s an ongoing process” as they carefully tweak things to find out how far they can go with the strictly limited access to the outside world they allow, while still keeping all their users captive.

If you were a threads user, you’d be unable to reply to this even if you did somehow see it. I welcome any of them to do so and prove me wrong.

It’s interesting to see that Linux has gotten popular enough that a few of the most user-hostile devs are going out of their way specifically to stop people using it. Other than ignorance it’s unclear what their motivations could be. I for one will remember the names of the studios that do it and try my best never to buy or talk about their games.

Aside from not wanting to rely on the same one as everyone else in the world, setting up port forwarding on proton looks unreasonably complicated.

Currently on Azire. There aren’t many left and I wanted to support one of the slightly less well-known ones. It works well enough.

In my years of using mullvad (before they took away port forwarding) I found probably half a dozen websites that blocked me based on that but it may be more common now. Often I found it was easy to get around it using Tor. Some of the smaller and better-run sites might fix the problem if you report it to them through the proper channels.

It does not require compromising your free software ideals

By which of course I mean what I think of as free software ideals, which I’ve come to understand in large part through the teachings of Richard Stallman even though I’m not personally such an idealist as he is. He Sometimes he even goes so far as to recommend people to services with non-free software on the server side, so long as it requires only free software on systems that the user controls. Your standards may differ. But anyway, if you had to quit fedi because someone set up a fediverse/telegram bridge I think it would not be a practical way to live. Where you draw the line is of course up to you, but I wouldn’t expect many people to follow you that far from the usual FOSS positions.

You can launch non-steam stuff through it by adding the .exe to the Steam client

ohhhh so that’s how normal people do it. I sort of felt stupid for not figuring out the easy way when I wrote an overly-complicated shell script for it.

I don’t think even RMS himself would refuse to participate in something on the grounds that Telegram users are also able to do so. It does not require compromising your free software ideals. By all means point out to them that you believe them to be doing something wrong, but the method you’ve chosen to try and get them to change their ways seems very likely to be ineffective and also counterproductive. It does further divide the community, even if others have already done even worse.

It looks like you are more of an xmpp advocate than a free software advocate. If you want to join a matrix room and it’s too burdensome to do so through your xmpp client, then use a matrix client for that. Without some much better reasons for doing so, setting up a competing xmpp room is not a reasonable alternative.

… not that I especially trust Monero much; not even as much as Tor. What I object to is the tendency to be too quick to go ahead with the assumption that it probably has been broken even in the total absence (such as in this thread so far) of any evidence to demonstrate that.

It’s the same misguided instinct that leads people to believe that all encryption is futile, that the NSA already knows all the keys no matter what we do. It’s not really true. It is true they can easily compromise the security and privacy of any one of us normal people they choose to single out, but for those of us who don’t practise unreasonably strict op-sec the point of choosing secure and private modes of communication (including monero if your sense of morality allows for the use of a proof-of-work cryptocurrency) is not to protect one target against all possible threat models. And it’s not only to protect against lesser threats. Much of the time the most important thing is to contribute to the effort to make it impossible for anyone to systematically spy on the whole world all at once. Nobody should have that power.

Well then, what specific research do you have suggesting that monero has been broken? After all it is not in any way a “black box”. The algorithm is well known.

I too don’t know much about monero specifically, however:

Parallel construction is still a thing, yes. But so is spreading the false idea that everything is already compromised so there’s no point trying to defend yourself.

… I hope so anyway, because the obvious alternative of the chatbots remaining under the control of an elite few while everyone falls into the habit of believing whatever they say seems substantially worse.

I guess the optimistic view would be to hope that a crowd of very persuasive bots participating in all kinds of media, presenting opinions that are just as misguided as the average human but much more charismatic and convincing, will all argue for different conflicting things leading to a golden age full of people who’ve learned that it’s necessary to think critically about whatever they see on the screen.

I still have a laptop with Windows on it. Dual boot works for me. I only need Windows once in a blue moon, don’t want it using up any of my attention or the computer’s resources the rest of the time.

I find myself suspecting that chatbots getting really good at talking people into believing whatever their operators want people to believe is going to start a lot more conspiracy theories than it ends.

Do they have the slightest idea how much damage it would do to the international reputation of Europe if they were to make e.g. Signal illegal? I suppose some of them do, which is why it hasn’t passed before.