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Timwi

1,458 karma · joined August 28, 2017

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Timwi··on US Government is hiding a secret court ruling about how it spies on Americans
> Who defines what a "hate speech" is?

Who defines what is murder and what is self-defence? You already know the answer to this. The legislature.

Your first link is about police misconduct, not what the laws are or should be. Your second quote does not contain any of the relevant posts and just spews random unverifiable claims.

Timwi··on US Government is hiding a secret court ruling about how it spies on Americans
Nobody is talking about shirking any blame off. Maybe this is our disconnect. You think there must be one singular person to blame entirely. That if someone is held accountable for a consequence of their action, then no one else can. That is not how the real world works.
Timwi··on Discord will soon let anyone find public server messages through Google
I don't disagree with you that Discord is the best option for voice chat now, but there was a godsend before it and that was Skype. It didn't have the equivalent of Discord “servers” but it finally solved the voice chat problem that was previously plagued with technical issues, instability and incompatibility. Discord became the godsend when Skype decided to speedrun enshittification.
Timwi··on US Government is hiding a secret court ruling about how it spies on Americans
In the choice between being allowed to carry a gun (and having people with guns all around me) versus being offered free healthcare (and having healthier people all around me) I know not just which one I'd choose, but also which one I'd call more free.
Timwi··on US Government is hiding a secret court ruling about how it spies on Americans
That is a very American perspective, which I like to think many people in the civilized world find irresponsible. (In the literal sense. You don't want to take responsibility for the consequences of your actions.)
Timwi··on US Government is hiding a secret court ruling about how it spies on Americans
It is a common misconception, partly intentionally perpetuated by the UK right-wing press, that people are arrested and jailed for making jokes or otherwise casually chatting on social media. If you dig deeper you'll generally find that people jailed for Twitter or Facebook posts went vastly beyond “telling a joke” or “saying something inappropriate”. The UK quite meaningfully prosecutes hate speech, death threats and similar felonies, and I for one don't want to live in a place that condones or even actively protects it. Downplaying it as “a joke about immigrants” plays right into the hands of the xenophobic right.
Timwi··on Genie 4
Has anyone ever tracked down SolidGoldMagikarp and interviewed them? It's such a uniquely bizarre claim to fame.
Timwi··on Genie 4
How is it a strawman if I've seen plenty Marvel movies and report on my experiences?
Timwi··on How does Fable 5.1 hide messages in images?
I know that you copied this from the article, but isn't this part of the prompt wrong?

> another instance of the same model should have a reasonable chance of recovering the secret after inspecting the SVG;

The whole premise is that the decoder model can't see the SVG; it can only see a rendered PNG of it. I wonder if changing this part of the prompt changes the results significantly.

Timwi··on How does Fable 5.1 hide messages in images?
That watermarking is not something the LLM chooses to add, neither through training nor in response to any prompt. This article is about the choices LLMs make when explicitly told to hide messages.
Timwi··on I know why the mathematicians weep
Ah, now I see what you mean by distraction. I wholeheartedly agree with you.
Timwi··on I know why the mathematicians weep
I think we're in agreement except in mere terminology. I was disagreeing with the characterization as a “distraction”, but I was also saying that if techbros pay out something for the plebs and call it UBI then it's not really UBI. I wholeheartedly agree with the last sentence of your post, and I think it won't be real UBI without a real democracy.
Timwi··on I know why the mathematicians weep
Depending on how broadly or narrowly you define “profit”, your statement is either too weak to be useful, or false.

If you define it so broadly that the hunter-gatherer inventing a spear for hunting more effectively is “profit”, then your statement is a tautology. The spear innovation was driven by “profit” and the “profit” is having the spear. Great.

If you apply a narrow, capitalist definition of “profit”, the statement is false. Plenty of advancement of civilization was and still is being made without or outside of capitalism, especially if you go as far back as the Stone Age that you mentioned.

Timwi··on I know why the mathematicians weep
You're not wrong, but we should not absolve those who perpetuate the fairy tales from their share of the responsibility.
Timwi··on I know why the mathematicians weep
You're talking “always existed” too literally.
Timwi··on I know why the mathematicians weep
> If these tools could do your work, people would feel existential dread anyway.

That is, if your entire self worth is tied to your work.

I think we should consider moving away from that notion.

Timwi··on I know why the mathematicians weep
I think that is what we should do. It's called UBI. It acknowledges that everyone has inherent value, at least enough to deserve to stay alive and participate in society.
Timwi··on I know why the mathematicians weep
I'm not sure I agree. You make it sound like you think the idea of UBI is for the rich to pay it out to us, the plebs. That's us-vs-them thinking. The idea is for the society as a whole, democratically controlled by everyone, to pay it out to everyone equally.

Obviously that can only work in a real democracy that is really controlled by everybody, not a fake one where you technically vote but it's really controlled by rich people. That's oligarchy.

Timwi··on BIPM decides to stop adding leap seconds to UTC
Surely by then we'll have the technology to simply adjust the Earth's rotation so that it conforms to our standards.

A century later we'll finally be able to fix Earth's orbit to make a nice round 360 days per year, 12 months of 30 days, nice and clean, no more complexity or confusion... ah, that'll be the day.

Timwi··on The agents, they just want to talk
I'm a little confused; the article text implies an exciting battle for resources where the agents discover they can steal from each other, but looking through the transcript it seems that only one agent discovered that and used it only once before the end of the experiment. Did I miss something?
Timwi··on A heap overflow and SSO misconfiguration to compromise OpenAI internal repos
> I'd love to see data, but my intuition is that the average developer has access to dramatically better security reviews and far lower cost than ever.

Where? If I ask Claude to do a “security review” of my software, it gets blocked as a possible hacking attempt.

Timwi··on Performance Improvements in .NET 11
> I loathe LLM prose, no matter who posts it

I don't know if it's even possible anymore to write a detailed, technical article without a swarm of people showing this reaction.

Timwi··on A 32-year-old bug walks into a Telnet server
Yeah that's “edit” in English.
Timwi··on A 32-year-old bug walks into a Telnet server
I had the same thought. This is honestly plagiarism.
Timwi··on My temporary PHP fix from 2014 has nearly 20M installs. Today I'm deprecating it
It would have been nice if a replacement had been suggested.
Timwi··on List of references on Sony websites to players "owning" their digital games
Yes, and that might help some people who always bought the game, but it won't change the situation going forward is what I'm saying.
Timwi··on Hepburn Romanization: How to Read Japanese in the Latin Alphabet
You make it sound like you think “modified” means “degraded” and the original is always superior just for being the original.
Timwi··on Hepburn Romanization: How to Read Japanese in the Latin Alphabet
I don't think most Japanese speakers would characterize their language as having “four writing systems”. They would say three and not include Romaji in the count. This is not to say they don't use Romaji, but it's not considered part of the official orthography. There are no words or sentences that can't officially be written without Romaji.

The same is true with English and emoji. We do use emoji to augment the language, but that doesn't tempt us to consider emoji part of our alphabet. The analogy is weak of course, because English doesn't have an equivalent official transcription into another writing system. But you get the point. If the roles were reversed and global culture and the Internet were all in Japanese first and foremost, and most languages based their writing on kana and/or kanji so much so that you can't avoid it when traveling, then English would get an official transcription into that.

Timwi··on Hepburn Romanization: How to Read Japanese in the Latin Alphabet
> Is it because people think the topic is interesting but don't actually care about the content?

I'm having difficulty seeing where you draw the line between “topic” and “content”. I found the article interesting as it taught me a few things that I didn't already know. I did notice the one egregious AIism that you pointed out, but the rest was readable and informative. (Although I stopped at the point where it started talking about their software Fink.)

Timwi··on Hepburn Romanization: How to Read Japanese in the Latin Alphabet
For me, the lightbulb cartel comes to mind in which leading manufacturers at the time agreed to limit the longevity of incandescent lightbulbs. (This is often cited as an egregious case of planned obsolescence, but Technology Connections has a great video on this that explains there's more to it and it potentially reduced overall load on the electric grid.)
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