palordrolap

I’m not so sure about that. A mind in a machine lacks the chemical soup in the blood and tissues which drives behaviours far more than we’d perhaps like to admit.

Emulating a personality means emulating the whole human or else what you’ll get will be an approximation, and perhaps not even a very good one.

Just because these AIs are trustworthy doesn’t mean that the next ones will be. It’s always nice to be sure that what is being said is what is claimed to be being said.

A similar situation is when governments not on friendly terms, who each have a different language, each bring their own bilingual translator to the negotiating table, for each to be sure the other translator isn’t hiding something, or misunderstanding something.

It’s unlikely that a single translator would be underhanded (or misunderstood) like that, but everyone feels happier knowing that it’s even less likely with the extra safeguard.

So we’re led to believe.

It would nice to be sure though, wouldn’t it?

The Fediverse is also a sewer of both overt and covert Antisemitism

Is this a problem unique to the Fediverse, or is this a case that it’s more rampant here? Or does it only seem like it?

My feeds are fairly well curated, or perhaps you might say “blinkered”, so I don’t see a lot of it. Or maybe I don’t see what’s right in front of me, which is why I ask, since you definitely see it better than I can.

(This is not an attempt at a bad faith argument; I’m firmly anti-anti-Semitism, and I’m not saying it’s not there. Frankly, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t any. Anywhere there’s people, their prejudices generally follow.)

Children are potential workers, soldiers and slaves. Some cannot love them, especially not those of others, because to love them is to love a worker, a soldier, a slave, a thing that is necessary, a disposable thing, a means to an end, not a thing to cherish.

For people for whom means to ends are all they can conceive of, that is all other people are. And children are easily moulded into whatever the means require in both form and thinking. Adults less so. Thus they want, they need more children. Children for the machine. Means to all ends.

Now, this is a gross generalisation because there are plenty of people of all walks of life and political leaning who can and do love their own children, and these children receive, appreciate and reciprocate that love.

But the differences start showing up when you start to bring other people’s children into the mix. Especially those of strangers. Those from groups outside of their own.

Those on the right will see this as a fault in people on the left and vice versa. But it seems to me to be people who take on right-wing leanings who have fewer qualms about treating people as commodities.

When people with leftward leanings find themselves doing it, they tend to try to even out the pain across everyone that might be affected rather than concentrating it on one specific group of people. Some of this therefore lands on rightward leaning people who think that they’re being singled out. They’re not, but they are the only ones not used to it.

I kind of wandered off the point there, but yeah. Kids. Kids are malleable, and you can build armies with them. That’s why.

Well, back then it was the Soviets, and now quite a lot of what we see in the west is being guided by the hand of Putin, so it basically is the same thing happening all over again.

I can see a lot of smaller companies (and maybe one or two reasonably big ones) opting for air-gapped networks of old operating systems and older versions of Office. A fool’s errand, sure, and for a number of reasons, but it’s cheap, and upper management likes cheap.

No. They were espousing some unclear but potentially bigoted beliefs that I took to be the sentiment I parodied with the first sentence, but those were not their words. They might have even been going for sarcastic/ironic espousal of the same beliefs, I’m really not sure.

I’ve added an explanation to my original comment to try to avoid any confusion.

(Edit: The first sentence is not a quote of the original, now deleted, comment, merely a restatement of what I believed to be the same underlying sentiment. I might’ve been wrong. Kind of hard to tell.)

“Their sexuality and their conception of gender is different to mine, and I know it’s wrong to mess with kids, therefore they must be a danger to kids.”

“I like ice-cream and I don’t like the idea of punching small children in the street, therefore people who don’t like ice-cream must like punching small children in the street.”

These two sentences use the same logic.

Is “actually Earth” some idealised version of Earth where the greedy and the corrupt don’t inevitably end up ruining everything for everyone but themselves? Because otherwise “actually Earth” and Hell could well be the same damn thing.

Or if you subscribe to the Catholic fanfic that is Dante’s Inferno, we can talk about circles of hell, each one worse than the last. And where we are right now clearly isn’t the bottom one. It definitely feels like it’s dropped a layer or two in recent years, but we haven’t hit rock bottom.

I could add a “yet” to that, but for some in this wondrous circle, it definitely already feels like it, and some feel like they’re thundering towards it with no way to stop it.

But, I guess I’m feeling philosophical at the moment, because this just occurred to me: If there’s a fly in the ointment, it means we have ointment.

These words will probably ring hollow in a few days when the ointment catches fire. (I’m not sure what that means in terms of translating back from metaphor into reality, but ointment catching fire definitely feels like something that could happen.)

Just double-checked with the help manual of the one I use (PasswordSafe) and it looks like it can do it. Never actually tried it though, which is one of the reasons I didn’t mention it previously.

At the risk of sounding like an ad (I’m not affiliated, just a someone who found it in their Linux distro’s package manager), there are versions of it for pretty much any device. I definitely can’t vouch for the feature set(s) of the other versions, though.

You could probably convince a third-party password storage program to store and auto-type details like that. Preferably one that doesn’t need internet access to work.

There’s that bit in an episode of Red Dwarf, that may or may not have been a collective hallucinated memory of the crew, where they talk about a series of mechanoids (servant androids) that were “too human” looking and which unnerved customers.

The result of that was that they made their next series of mechanoids look like Kryten, with the low-poly heads on a similarly angular body.

Even if it was a false memory, the logic is absolutely sound. You want your 'bots to be at the other side of the uncanny valley, not at the bottom, creeping all horror-show-like up the side towards us.