Spiracle

I feel it might remain special with enough time between events. Once every 4+ years allows enough shift in users and internet culture to make each unique, if not as special as the first time. Allow every Reddit-“generation” to make their mark.

This one is just empty, though.

I suppose giving them a public billboard to voice their dissatisfaction is one way to tempt people back onto the site.

It’s a very difficult topic, and I don’t see any satisfying real-world solutions. Two big issues:

1. Obvious solutions are impossible. Generative AI are impossible to “undo”. Much of the basic tech, and many simpler models, are spread far and wide. Research, likewise, is spread out both globally and on varying levels from large Megacorps down to small groups of researchers. Even severe attempts at restricting it would, at most, punish the small guys.

I don’t want a world, where corporations like Adobe or Microsoft hold sole control over legal “ethically trained” generative AI. However, that is where insistence on copyright for training sets, or insistence on censored “safe” LLMs would lead us.

1. Many of the ethical and practical concerns are on sliding scales. They are also on the edge of these scales. When does machine assistance become unethical? When does imitating the specific style of an artist become wrong? Where does inspiration end and intellectual rights infringement begin? At what point does reducing racial and other biases from LLMs switch over to turning them into biased propaganda machines?

There are dozens of questions like these, and I have found no satisfying answers to any of them. Yet the answers to some of them are required in order to produce reasonable solutions.

While this news article is, apparently, not trustworthy, in general, France could demand every phone sold in the country include some kind of spyware. Many sellers already add a lot of programs by default anyway, so this would be how I image it might be implemented.

Given that 7 people were recently arrested for using privacy respecting tools like the Signal messenger and Protonmail, removing that bloatware/spyware might then be cause enough to arrest you. After all, only terrorists want to have privacy, right?

Doesn’t even have to be a “class of idiots”. It would be enough if stuff didn’t just sometimes break, seemingly randomly. (It’s not quite random, obviously.)

Recent example: I had OpenSuse TW recommended because of its reliability. First tip: install codecs, which requires adding the Packman repository. Now, simply updating threw up errors several times because Packman and the other repositories are apparently not in sync, and some dependencies would break if I updated. (Waiting a few days “fixed” it, but still shouldn’t happen.)

Depending on which update method you use (Yast/Discovery/zypper/update widget) you get different error messages, most of which are not informative. This is for an established distribution known for its reliability, and this alone would keep me from ever recommending it to normal users, even moderately tech-savvy ones.

Things are getting better, but I’m still shopping around for a distro that just works. Perhaps that new Fedora version, or one of the immutable ones, now that they are getting popular.

Don’t forget the Unofficial Subreddit Migration List, as well as any similar sites:

https://www.quippd.com/writing/2023/06/15/unofficial-subreddit-migration-list-lemmy-kbin-etc.html#1-million-subscribers