I have an Aunt who ruined her life with drug usage, so that pretty much ensured I had no interest. She had gone sober long before I was born, but her life was and is still a mess, unfortunately.

Sex talk didn’t happen until I had already bought my first pack of condoms and had used most of them. My parents seemed relieved to be able to avoid talking about it.

While I’m not against an anonymous stand for what’s “right”, that really was the tipping point for a lot of changes on 4chan.

It really fuelled the idea that anonymous should have some sort of goal of justice rather than just doing things “for the lulz”. It normalized the concept of shamelessly bringing your internet culture of choice out into the real world regardless of appropriateness (most of the protests were really just 4chan irl meetups, not really protests).

The biggest change was the sheer amount of public attention it drew to the site. That brought in a huge influx of new users who didn’t care to conform to the existing board culture (for better or worse). Things changed considerably following all that mess.

Thank you for providing me all new ways to pronounce things in horribly cursed ways, magic internet man.

How do you pronounce github? GIMP? GNU? GPU? Javascript?

Oh Geremy, it’s time to jo to the jocery store! We need some jrape gelly.

The NSA tries incredibly hard to not make public which of the many many options in their toolbox are in active use at any given time. Not sure anyone outside the org can say for sure what they are and aren’t using.

Does homeboy not know about crabcakes? All the taste, none of the pain in the ass and paying for the privilege of preparing your own food. Just get them somewhere that doesn’t use filler.

Solarwinds Orion

We don’t curse in this household.

Anyway, guessing it’s the classic “sales sold the demo of a perfectly configured setup maintained by a dedicated team, management expects you to make that happen alone on top of everything else you already do” situation? Multiple years into cleaning up the mess of that shit at my place.

That’s a combination of too simple/short in your sentences, mixed with too specific jargon with no clarification. It’s dumb as hell that people don’t know stuff like what a server is, but if they don’t you have to abstract it more.

My go to is some form of: I’m in IT, I do systems administration. I help keep all the things behind the scenes working so that everyone’s stuff works at my workplace. Less of making your email work, more of making everyone’s email work.

Obviously I work with a hell of a lot more than just email. I’m mostly scripting out custom automation jobs to bridge gaps in the integrations between different systems. But like you said, keep it simple.

Thank you. I’m getting quite tired of people posting the most fucking obvious takes about problems in the US, then going “why haven’t americans fixed this? are they stupid?”, when we have exceedingly small control over the actions of our shitass policy makers.

It’s some real “everyone is dumb except for me” energy.

So for those not familar with machine learning, which was the practical business use case for “AI” before LLMs took the world by storm, that is what they are describing as reinforcement learning. Both are valid terms for it.

It’s how you can make an AI that plays Mario Kart. You establish goals that grant points, stuff to avoid that loses points, and what actions it can take each “step”. Then you give it the first frame of a Mario Kart race, have it try literally every input it can put in that frame, then evaluate the change in points that results. You branch out from that collection of “frame 2s” and do the same thing again and again, checking more and more possible future states.

At some point you use certain rules to eliminate certain branches on this tree of potential future states, like discarding branches where it’s driving backwards. That way you can start opptimizing towards the options at any given time that get the most points im the end. Keep the amount of options being evaluated to an amount you can push through your hardware.

Eventually you try enough things enough times that you can pretty consistently use the data you gathered to make the best choice on any given frame.

The jank comes from how the points are configured. Like AI for a delivery robot could prioritize jumping off balconies if it prioritizes speed over self preservation.

Some of these pitfalls are easy to create rules around for training. Others are far more subtle and difficult to work around.

Some people in the video game TAS community (custom building a frame by frame list of the inputs needed to beat a game as fast as possible, human limits be damned) are already using this in limited capacities to automate testing approaches to particularly challenging sections of gameplay.

So it ends up coming down to complexity. Making an AI to play Pacman is relatively simple. There are only 4 options every step, the direction the joystick is held. So you have 4ⁿ states to keep track of, where n is the number of steps forward you want to look.

Trying to do that with language, and arguing that you can get reliable results with any kind of consistency, is blowing smoke. They can’t even clearly state what outcomes they are optimizing for with their “reward” function. God only knows what edge cases they’ve overlooked.

My complete out of my ass guess is that they did some analysis on response to previous gpt output, tried to distinguish between positive and negative responses (or at least distinguish against responses indicating that it was incorrect). They then used that as some sort of positive/negative points heuristic.

People have been speculating for a while that you could do that, crank up the “randomness”, have it generate multiple responses behind the scenes and then pit those “pre-responses” against each other and use that criteria to choose the best option of the “pre-responses”. They could even A/B test the responses over multiple users, and use the user responses as further “positive/negative points” reinforcement to feed back into it in a giant loop.

Again, completely pulled from my ass. Take with a boulder of salt.

OWS crumbled in ways right out of various leaked three letter agency guides to disrupting grass roots movements.

I’d love to see it get another try, with how news sources have become far more decentralized. Less opportunity for major news orgs to kill the momentum.

Full disclosure, the destruction of OWS is pretty much the one thing I allow myself to go “full tinfoil hat” over.

I would hope, but I’ve been burned enough to not assume big companies are doing things the sensible way.

Please get yourself an actual IT team. This is basic conditional access policy configuration for an Azure tennant.

Microsoft has learning materials available on this. It’s part of their free Azure Admin online learning courses.

Don’t worry, Google’s own Messages app does the same thing as iMessage, but using a different (and on paper more open) standard that isn’t compatible with iMessage (yet, I think the EU is forcing Apple’s hand).

Where? Unless you’re saying people need to pull over on the shoulder because someone wants to speed in the right hand lane.

Sorry buddy, but that capitalistic framework is where we all have to exist for the forseeable future.

Giving corporations more power is not going to help us end that.

Yes, as I already addressed. But it’s important to understand the way the other side frames this shit, and they absolutely framed it as attempts to cancel him.

They asked for an example of “cancel culture” and I gave one of the few these people cite that isn’t absolutely batshit or racist.

You’re welcome to your opinion, but I feel the bolded section is distinctly relevant.

If you want privacy, don’t admit to a crime and tell the cops where to find the evidence. Privacy starts at home with proper OPSEC.

That’s the story. It has very little to do with the specific crime committed.

The cops did as the cops do: if they are given a lead, particularly by the perp themselves, they investigate. To not do so would be to not do their job.

There was no new precedent here. This was not some brand new enforcement of a new law, and the chats were not the definitive evidence in the trial. Cops using Facebook chat transcripts were likewise not something newly established in this case.

The rest is me emphasizing that this lady was not a martyr, with the jeans comment being the least damning part of it all. Meant as a lead up to the bold.

She overwhelmingly had the ability to do what she needed to do, safely and legally. That has to mean something. And if it doesn’t mean shit to you, I know for a fact it means something to the people who want to take your reproductive rights away, or to ignore the very real dangers you’re worried about.

That said this is not the first step down that slope that you’re acting like it is, and it is not some datapoint on a downward trend towards what you are afraid of. This is a intersection of already existing problems that someone thought they could spin for clicks and emotion bait, and it overwhelmingly worked.

Stay safe, take steps to prevent ending up in that situation, only discuss dangerous shit using safe protocols, and for fuck’s sake don’t tell the cops where the evidence is.

Example: Terry Crews speaking out about his own experiences with sexual assault. Also him calling for black men to step up and be father figures in communities lacking them.

You can argue that he wasn’t truly “cancelled”, but he drew a lot or fire for those. People claiming that he was somehow taking away from womens’ experiences by speaking about his own, and people saying that his statements about a lack of father figures in the African American community was racist.

It’s not just white people wanting excuses to be racist. Just mostly that.

Uhhh… if that’s the situation that blew up on lemmy shortly after the reddit API-pocalypse, that specific one probably isn’t something you want to rally behind.

That situation occurred in Nebraska, before the messy Roe v Wade repeal. At the time, abortions were 100% legal and available until the end of the 20th week (5th month) of pregnancy, far past the point that anyone shouldn’t be aware they are pregnant.

Beyond that, fetuses are considered viable outside the womb at 24 weeks (6 months). They show clear signs of conciousness before this point.

This woman waited until week 28. Two months past the point it could have been done legally and safely by a doctor. One month past the point of being viable to survive outside the womb. No US state has ever allowed abortions that late into the pregnancy.

The way she performed the abortion was to take medicine to kill the fetus. She still had to go through the normal process of labor and delivery (of the stillborn) afterwards, without any medical assistance. She and her mother then burned the stillbirth and buried it on a farm.

At that moment, if she had had labor induced, she could have went through the same process in a safer manner, and given the resultant baby up for adoption. She had roughly two months left until she would have given birth naturally. Going through labor in the manner that she did does not sidestep any of the postpartum medical and health stuff that happens after a normal pregnancy either.

This also ignores all of the many contraceptives available to help prevent pregnancy in the first place as well.

The only change was causing extra danger to herself, two months of time, and whether or not a living baby existed at the end.

She and her mother discussed their plans at length on Facebook messenger, before Facebook implemented end to end encryption. One of the last comments is of the woman stating she couldn’t wait to wear jeans again.

When questioned by police, they admitted to their actions, and admitted to discussing it on Facebook messenger. That is the reason the cops even got the subpeona for the chat logs. They told the cops where to look for evidence of their crime, and the cops followed normal investigative protocol.

Don’t talk to cops.

Privacy is important, but that was not the narrative of some downtrodden freedom seeker’s rights being infringed upon by regressive right wing policy, the surveillance state, or anything else that a lot of people took it to be.