My main social media app is Mastodon (technically Firefish which I will soon migrate to Iceshrimp… but those details are less relevant)

I consider Lemmy less so of a “social media” and more of a link aggregator/discussion forum… but yeah otherwise I try to use Lemmy a bit too. I still browse Reddit quite a lot, but only for individual communities that don’t have equivalents on Lemmy, and I no longer post there

I never used much social media to begin with tbh… I feel pretty decent about the Fediverse. Despite all the drawbacks (blocklists, fedi drama, etc), I think people collectively managed to make an objectively better social media platforms compared to the previous corporation-dominated ones (at least by my personal metrics)

So this is a bit counter to the news article’s point, and apologies for linking to Reddit… but there has been a fairly hot post on the subreddit r/USCIS. A practicing immigration attorney was sharing some thoughts on how feasible the promises are https://www.reddit.com/r/USCIS/comments/1glflxy/so_what_now_an_immigration_attorney_perspective/. Some quotes:

IMO, no-- the economy makes way too much money from DACA folks. I do believe that they will dangle it like a carrot to appease right-wing voters. Major corporations employ DACAmented folks. The SSN from work permits have allowed more tax revenue to come in. Too much is at stake. Legally, the legal arguments at the courts surrounding DACA involve constitutional rights, which themselves aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. It’s honestly just a topic that is often talked about, but hardly understood by many.

I want to put this into perspective. There are 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US. Currently, DHS has about 92,000 officers, and ICE has about 21,000 officers. It is asinine to try to achieve this.

Let’s say it actually does begin and people are getting rounded up. Guess what? Not all undocumented folks are just undocumented-- many have TPS, pending asylum applications, pending T/U Visas, and work permits (see my point regarding #1). Unless a migrant has an expedited removal (not likely), DHS/ICE still needs to process each deportee, assign them A#s, and follow basic procedures. If they don’t? That’s a very easy way to reverse a deportation order. It’s the equivalent of convicting someone of murder using a confession made under a very obvious 4/5th amendment violation. Slam dunk case.

Oh, and you know who has to handle all of these deportation cases? Federal DHS attorneys. They’re already overworked, and they tend to exercise discretion. If no discretion, the overworked ones tend to gloss over cases and provide weak arguments. Only major attention is paid to serious crimes. You’d be surprised the amount of times DHS attorneys have gotten my clients’ names wrong or made procedurally embarrassing typos.

… assuming the administration still follows basic social contracts, that is. If the Trump administration actually uses the military to forcefully enforce mass deportations, then I feel the US is going to be fucked on so many different more levels… and there would be way more to worry than just the deportations

I looked at their individual page (https://www.darkpattern.games/pattern/4/psychological-dark-patterns.html)…

If deleting the game and starting over from scratch sounds like a horrible idea and a waste of your investment, then the game has Endowed Value for you. The more time and money that you invest in the game, the more value it has over a fresh copy of the game.

So I guess they are referring to is something more transactional… for example, if I spent $100 on a gacha game or loot boxes to get a bunch of ultra-rare SSRs. I’d be pretty compelled to keep playing since I’ve already spent so much money on it.

They are not counting, for example, that I get hooked on some weird roguelike game because I genuinely want to get better at it but can stop any time. And if I lose my save file I would still happily start from scratch again (which, hilariously, a pattern named Infinite Treadmill is marked for both Slay the Spire and Balatro… https://www.darkpattern.games/pattern/14/infinite-treadmill.html)

This again??

This time once archive.org is back online again… is it possible to get torrents of some of their popular data storage? For example I wouldn’t imagine their catalog of books with expired copyright to be very big. Would love a community way to keep the data alive if something even worse happens in the future (and their track record isn’t looking good now)

I genuinely don’t know… there doesn’t seem to be any ongoing discussion of who or why are these people targeting IA. There are other people who are trying to rescue data stored on IA

Hope this would be over soon…

So it was the physics Nobel… I see why the Nature News coverage called it “scooped” by machine learning pioneers

Since the news tried to be sensational about it… I tried to see what Hinton meant by fearing the consequences. Believe he is genuinely trying to prevent AI development without proper regulations. This is a policy paper he was involved in (https://managing-ai-risks.com/). This one did mention some genuine concerns. Quoting them:

“AI systems threaten to amplify social injustice, erode social stability, and weaken our shared understanding of reality that is foundational to society. They could also enable large-scale criminal or terrorist activities. Especially in the hands of a few powerful actors, AI could cement or exacerbate global inequities, or facilitate automated warfare, customized mass manipulation, and pervasive surveillance”

like bruh people already lost jobs because of ChatGPT, which can’t even do math properly on its own…

Also quite some irony that the preprint has the following quote: “Climate change has taken decades to be acknowledged and confronted; for AI, decades could be too long.”, considering that a serious risk of AI development is climate impacts

A bit off topic… But from my understanding, the US currently doesn’t have a single federal agency that is responsible for AI regulation… However, there is an agency for child abuse protection: the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect within Department of HHS

If AI girlfriends generating CSAM is how we get AI regulation in the US, I’d be equally surprised and appalled

I sure hope their recent heavy prosecution of the Invidious project isn’t related

I guess I forgot to take that into consideration… I’m not worried about Google banning my IP since I essentially don’t use any Google services at all and my home IP is hidden behind a wireguard tunnel, but yes that is a valid concern

But I mean someone can just spin it up on their home network so… No way 192.168.0.1:3000 can get someone into trouble right

The elites don’t want you to know but “[y]ou may be able to get Invidious working on residential IP addresses (like at home)”

Following their guide gives a local Invidious client, don’t forget to 1) copy their production compose file instead of using the one on git and 2) change “hmac_key”… from my experience setting up cron (crontab -e) to restart the docker container once per day keeps the Invidious docker healthy

Edit: here are some alternatives for popular Google services. Not in anyway related to the above (smirk

• Google itself: SearXNG (try searx.be first), one of the easiest services to self-host
• Gmail/calendar: a lot of people seem to swear by one of Proton Mail, Tutanota or Mailbox.org. Self-hosting is possible but challenging
• Google Drive: You mean Nextcloud?
• Google maps: Organic Maps is actually getting pretty good now
• Google Chrome: at the very least there is Chromium… obviously there is Firefox and Firefox forks (such as Librewolf), as well as other smaller browsers
• Google Play: F-Droid hosts a lot of FOSS stuff, and there are alternative ways to access Play (such as Aurora Store)
• Android: a bit more difficult… but there is LineageOS, GrapheneOS, and similar stuff

Oh god I also do this… See the comment below, I ran history|cut -d " " -f 5|sort|uniq -c|sort -nr|less on my personal laptop, my third most commonly used command (behind ls and cd) is just typing in nothing…

clear because apparently I am too scatterbrained to comprehend more than one full page of text in the terminal