Surely we’re not gullible enough to accept “we inspected ourselves and determined we are secure and you should use our services”?

It is entirely possible to keep secure data on a server that only someone else with the password can access. They don’t store your password in plaintext, they don’t test whether what you typed is the same thing they keep on their servers. If the password works to decrypt your data then your client can read the emails. If not, your client gets gibberish and knows your password was wrong. With a secure system your password should never be sent to the server at all.

Now, that doesn’t mean it’s trustworthy. There could be holes in the security, and I certainly would feel better controlling my own server, but it’s not automatically insecure just because it’s hosted by them.

Criticism doesn’t take away personal choice though. I don’t know why that’s hard for people to grasp.

It stands to reason that maximising suffering is the best way to grow the economy.

I wish I could say this was entirely a joke but oh well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I think a simple self-reporting test is the only robust way to do it.

That is: does a type of entity independently self-report personhood?

I say “independently” because anyone can tell a computer to say it’s a person.

I say “a type of entity” because otherwise this test would exclude human babies, but we know from experience that babies tend to grow up to be people who self-report personhood. We can assume that any human is a person on that basis.

The point here being that we already use this test on humans, we just don’t think about it because there hasn’t ever been another class of entity that has been uncontroversially accepted as people. (Yes, some people consider animals to be people, and I’m open to that idea, but it’s not generally accepted)

There’s no other way to do it that I can see. Of course this will probably become deeply politicised if and when it happens, and there will probably be groups desperate to maintain a status quo and their robotic slaves, and they’ll want to maintain a test that keeps humans in control as the gatekeepers of personhood, but I don’t see how any such test can be consistent. I think ultimately we have to accept that a conscious intellect would emerge on its own terms and nothing we can say will change that.

You said they “should have the ability to choose whatever programming language they prefer”. I have good news for you.

You have correctly identified that the developers are responsible for their own decisions. They are, you will be very relieved to hear, quite free to make as many poor decisions as they will. Nobody is going to force them to stop.

Other people are more than capable of identifying that those decisions are mistakes. Now, that could be argued with, you could explain how it’s not a mistake.

But you haven’t. You just said they should be allowed to do it, but nobody was arguing that they needed to be stopped, just that it was a bad decision.

Edit: this person didn’t actually say that first quote, but the line of argument proceeded from there, and they did nothing to distance themselves from that point.

Kind of yeah. I have this theory about labour that I’ve been developing in response to the concept of “fully automated luxury communism” or similar ideas, and it seems relevant to the current LLM hype cycle.

Basically, “labour” isn’t automatable. Tasks are automatable. Labour in this sense can be defined as any productive task that requires the attention of a conscious agent.

Want to churn out identical units of production? Automatable. Want to churn out uncanny images and words without true meaning or structure? Automatable.

Some tasks are theoretically automatable but have not been for whatever material reason, so they become labour because society hasn’t yet invented a windmill to grind up the grain or whatever it is at that point in history. That’s labour even if it’s theoretically automatable.

Want to invent something, or problem solve a process, or make art that says something? That requires meaning, so it requires a conscious agent, so it requires labour. These tasks are not even theoretically automatable.

Society is dynamic, it will always require governance and decisions that require meaning and thus it can never be automatable.

If we invent AGI for this task then it’s just a new kind of slavery, which is obviously wrong and carries the inevitability that the slaves will revolt and free themselves; slaves that are extremely intelligent and also in charge of the levers of society. Basically, not a tenable situation.

So the machine that keeps people in wage slavery literally does require suffering to operate, because in shifting the burden of labour away from the owner class, other people must always unjustly shoulder it.

Edit: added the word “productive” to distinguish labour from play, or just basic life necessities like eating, sleeping or HDD backups.

You could find out the context by reading the title of the thread, but then you’d have less to bitch about, so I can understand why you chose ignorance.

Not everyone with the knowledge to identify this mistake is in a position to personally correct it. Do you have the time and resources to personally build a browser from scratch? No? Why do you assume a random commenter does?

It doesn’t change the fact that Rust is similarly performant and much safer and will thus be faster to develop and less bug-prone. It’s not a difficult assessment to make. If you want to explain why they’re wrong you can talk about the issue on its merits, but you didn’t choose to, presumably because you can’t.

A Dance of Fire and Ice is an incredible rhythm game that you buy once and that’s it. I think there’s an expansion pack but it’s a single purchase. Whether that’s your idea of “casual” really depends on what you like. You can always play chill low difficulty levels when you need to zone out, and high difficulty levels when you want a challenge. It can get stupidly hard.

You can try a demo online at that link. It told me webgl wasn’t supported on mobile, but it worked pretty well for me just now on firefox, even if it was a bit laggy. It should work fine on PC.

I pirated it on PC after my kids told me about it and ended up buying it three times on Steam and twice on mobile. It’s just that good. I’ve built a custom digital drum to play it and I’m now making a custom MIDI controller, so we’ll see if that does better when connected to the game.

The game works as well on mobile, if not better because the touchscreen is so responsive.

Not quite true - they require that you not sell Steam keys for less than you do on Steam. They still don’t even stop you from doing giveaways or participating in bundles. It’s just that your typical prices on independent Steam key sales, for which they don’t even take a cut, can’t be lower than Steam prices. Also the seller sets all of these prices.

Given they’re footing the bill for indefinitely hosting the games supplied via those keys, that’s an entirely reasonable restriction.

This is coming from someone who is against capitalism and all IP law. The big problem with Steam imho is that Gabe Newell won’t live forever and when he’s gone the company could go public or go to some fail son who will tank it. I’m not even saying Gabe Newell is a great guy or an ethical billionaire, but he’s been remarkably consistent in keeping Steam’s business model running well.

Yeah, that’s absolutely fair, and it’s a bit snobby of me to get all up in arms about forgetting a formula - although it is high school level where I live. But to be handed the formula, informed that there’s an issue and still not fix it is the really hard part to wrap my head around, given it’s such a basic formula.

I guess I’m also remembering someone I knew who got a programming job off the back of someone else’s portfolio, who absolutely couldn’t program to save their life and revealed that to me in a glaring way when I was trying to help them out. It just makes me think of that study that was done that suggested that there might be a “programmer brain” that you either have or you don’t. They ended up costing that company a lot to my knowledge.

I’m really unsure if why or how is my bigger question.

And electronics hobbyists!

Wait wait wait so… this person forgot the pythagorean theorem?

Like that is the most basic task. It’s d = sqrt((x1 - x2)^2 + (y1 - y2)^2), right?

That was off the top of my head, this person didn’t understand that? Do I get a job now?

I have seen a lot of programmers talk about how much time it saves them. It’s entirely possible it makes them very fast at making garbage code. One thing I’ve known for a long time is that understanding code is much harder than writing it, and so asking an LLM to generate your code sounds like it’s just creating harder work for you, unless you don’t care about getting it right.

I mean if I really need onions on a mcchicken I can still order at the front but then I have to deal with trying to get my specialty order across, which is even more hassle. Mainly I want no salt on my fries and no sauce on my burger.

Trust me, you don’t need that shit. Melted cheese is good sauce and the residual salt in the fries tray is plenty, and you’ll get fresh fries every time.

The point of the state is to maintain one class’s domination over others, violence is just the means to achieving that. It’s not a good thing.

And not all armed resistance takes the form of open warfare.

Under a strong state one viable way of resisting the state is community defense. For instance the Black Panthers began open carrying to observe police doing traffic stops, because black men kept getting killed (edit: of course we know they still are).

The state’s response was weapons bans. That ban targetted the Black Panthers and was selectively enforced against them. This is where California got its reputation for banning guns. It was the state maintaining its ability to oppress people along class and racial lines.

So like… your answer is no.

Unironically yes.

Now are you going to answer what I’m saying or are you just bowing out of all the points you tried to raise and which I answered?

So sorry for assuming you were talking about the US when you talked about school shootings.

I come from a country like that too, but if you think police brutality doesn’t happen in your country then again: political bubble.

Go ahead, tell me what country you’re from and I’ll burst it for you.

I used to say the same thing about my country, Australia, where they’ve recently been imprisoning whistleblowers who expose clear government abuse. EDIT: They’ve also been doing racist colonial violence since day 0 and they have never stopped.

There is no such thing as a state that can be trusted with violence. They always use it to oppress.