hendrik

I suspect more hallucinations by ChatGPT. But I’m not sure. Someone could try to run it and see if it does.

Not even Star Trek Discovery goes at that pace. They give you some episodes with character development, Klingons etc before diving in to the tardigrades, mycelial network … But kind of reminds me of that.

Also: Has this been programmed by ChatGPT?

Uh, that’s definitely too much technobabble about funghi. Can you dumb that down a bit for me and describe it from a user’s perspective? How do I use this? How do I get my favorite music in? And in what form does it return recommendations to me? Do I need friends to make this useful?

Lol. Yeah I get it. Though I still think the rich companies dictate a lot of things. They do a lot of lobbying and paying people to make sure it’s not them who funds the majority of the country, they choose how much you pay for medication and everyday items, they choose to spy on everyone on the internet. Make you buy things you don’t need, make housing prices subject to speculation. Make everyone addicted to their phone and spend like several hours a day with it. Separate society into filter bubbles. I think a lot of these things aren’t liked by the people. Or are extremely unhealthy. Yet, they are a thing and never change. I think because some people will this into existance. Sure, they’re far from being almighty. But it’s enough control they have over everyone already.

And I think as they can use the internet as a tool for their interests (which had ultimately been invented to connect people), they could as well do the same with AI. I mean they train those models and choose in which ways they’re biased. What the can and can not talk about. If that’s paired with the surveillance tech, that’s already inside of each smart TV, smart appliance or Alexa… It’ll be kind of a dystopian scifi movie where someone else watches your steps all day, uses that to manipulate people… some kind of puppet master whom the bots really work for.

I’m really unsure. Sure, almost everything can be hacked. But does that really have an effect on the broader picture? Everytime I see some major hack, the next day it’s business as usual and everything keeps working as it used to.

Yeah, but at that point you’d have to be prepared to fight it to the end. And pay your own lawyer upfront. The final decision on who’s going to pay is settled either in arbitration or by the court. And you need to win. And trademark law isn’t super easy to understand, you definitely need to invest in a lawyer and optimally get that money back. The time and effort is kinda wasted, though. You won’t get that back.

Is there a recommended, shiny RSS reader for Linux and Android? Which I want to try?

Though, fighting it takes time and effort. And you’d need to make sure to know the exact point when to pay a lawyer, when ignoring it gets you in an unfavourable situation or triggers some default ruling.

Or the people who own the robots and dictate their programming (/control them). That would be my concern. Unless they’re sentient and make decisions completely on their own, they can be used to oppress people to other people’s wishes. As it’s the case with all (modern) technology. And currently AI isn’t shaped by the people, but by a rich minority and big tech companies. And I see some issues with that, specifically, in the near future.

Plus, both happens. I had content being georestricted and my access being blocked due to companies not bothering with European cookie popups. Similar to how porn sites now block southern US states. And sometimes companies just go with the stricter law and implement things so it caters for different audiences, disregarding if they could be more lax with one country.

Sure, they’re being regulated in other countries. I guess in the EU for example, it’s the Digital Services Act and other legislation which mandate moderation, cutting down on hate and disinformation. They’d need to be sanctioned if they don’t comply. Or leave the market if they don’t like the law…

Why not a linked list? Or a hash-table?

Hmmh, the network effect is the opposite side. It’s the effect that binds people to platforms. Platforms are just as useful as the network of people they connect you to. We need to overcome the network effect here.

And that’s really, really hard. I mean look at how Bluesky does it. They invest a lot of money to make it possible. They waited for the right moment and sort of caught their competition with their pants down. Furthermore, they did some marketing stunts like the invite-only period to hype their own product. And have journalists and influencers talk about it.

The product needs to be excellent. And even that’s not enough. If you’re as good as the competition, or just slightly better… There isn’t really an incentive for people to switch. Companies like Google fail at inventing a product that competes with Facebook.

Ultimately, I don’t see a good way of competing with social media platforms. People just don’t care about their privacy, so that’s not something you can win them over with. And even if their platform is operated by a bad person like Elon Musk, and has a really toxic atmosphere for better part of the last decade… The majority still doesn’t really care. It took him (Musk) to deliberately run X into a brick wall to get things going. Something like Reddit taking away user freedom, clamping down on all kinds of things, selling user data etc doesn’t do much in that context.

I’m a bit disheartened as you can tell. I’m always advocating for Free Software, more ethical alternatives and for people to care about their freedom. But in my experience that’s a niche thing. I don’t really get through to regular people. I kind of make the best of it. I have a profile on the Fediverse. If people want to talk to me, they can come here and talk to me. But yeah, that does away with my high school friends.

Edit: And by the way, are you sure Friendica posts go to the whole Fediverse all the times? They have groups and privacy features. If these features are implemented well, they shoud stop your posts from propagating to arbitrary places.

On the other hand I’ve seen a few people delete their profile regardless. Some of them very recently after the latest announcements.

Plus there is an exodus from X/Twitter currently taking place. Bluesky can do it, so it’s possible. And it has happened before. I still remember the times before Facebook and other platforms. They’re all big and inevitable. Until they’re not…

But with that said. Sure. This kind of lock-in and high switching costs are a big problem for (new) platforms. It’s called the “network effect”.

Well if it can replace senior software engineers… Wouldn’t it also be able to do almost all of the other jobs? Or are you referring to some specific future where AI advances massively, but robotics does not and handymen are still safe?

I’d say if all humans are unemployed, society would change massively. We can’t really tell how that’d work. But if machines / AI do all jobs, get food on the table… I don’t really know what other people would be doing. I think I’d relax and pursue a few hobbies and interests. Or it’d be some dystopia where humankind is oppressed by the machines and I’d fight for the resistance.

But regardless… In a world like that, money wouldn’t work the way it does now. Neither would salaries for labor mean anything.