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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Google destroys their own search engine by encouraging terrible SEO nonsense and then offers the solution in the form of these AI overviews, cutting results out of the picture entirely.

    You search something on the Web nowadays half the results are written by AI anyway.

    I don’t really care about the “human element” or whatever, but AI is such a hype train right now. It’s still early days for the tech, it still hallucinates a lot, and I fundamentally can’t trust it—even if I trusted the people making it, which I don’t.



  • But hey, instead of killing everyone, eugenics could lead us to a beautiful stratified future, like depicted in the aspirational sci-fi utopia of Brave New World!

    I agree with you, ultimately. My point is just that “good for humanity vs bad for humanity” isn’t a debate, there’s no “We want to ruin humanity” party. Most people see their own viewpoint as being best for humanity, unless they’re a psychopath or a nihilist.

    There are fundamental differences in political views as well as ethical beliefs, and any attempt to boil them down to “good for humanity” vs “bad for humanity” is going to be inherently political. I think “what’s best for humanity” is a good guiding metric to determine what one finds ethical, but using it to categorize others’ political beliefs is going to be divisive at best.

    In other words, it’s not comparable to the left/right axis, which may be insufficient and one-dimensional, but at least it describes something that can be somewhat objective (if controversial and ill-defined). Someone can be happy with their position on the axis. Whereas if it were good/bad, everyone would place themselves at Maximum Good, therefore it’s not really useful or comparable to the left/right paradigm.


  • I don’t think that “everyone is inherently equal” is a conclusion you can reach through logic. I’d argue that it’s more like an axiom, something you have to accept as true in order to build a foundation of a moral system.

    This may seem like an arbitrary distinction, but I think it’s important to distinguish because some people don’t accept the axiom that “everyone is inherently equal”. Some people are simply stronger (or smarter/more “fit”) than others, they’ll argue, and it’s unjust to impose arbitrary systems of “fairness” onto them.

    In fact, they may believe that it is better for humanity as a whole for those who are stronger/smarter/more fit to have positions of power over those who are not, and believe that efforts for “equality” are actually upsetting the natural way of things and thus making humanity worse off.

    People who have this way of thinking largely cannot be convinced to change through pure logical argument (just as a leftist is unlikely to be swayed by the logic of a social darwinist) because their fundamental core beliefs are different, the axioms all of their logic is built on top of.

    And it’s worth noting that while this system of morality is repugnant, it doesn’t inherently result in everyone killing each other like you claim. Even if you’re completely amoral, you won’t kill your neighbor because then the police will arrest you and put you on trial. Fascist governments also tend to have more punitive justice systems, to further discourage such behavior. And on the governmental side, they want to discourage random killing because they want their populace to be productive, not killing their own.




  • I disagree. It would be better to set a precedent that using people’s voices without permission is not okay. Even in your example, you’re suggesting that you would have a Patreon while publishing mods that contain voice clips made using AI. In this scenario, you’ve made money from these unauthorized voice recreations. It doesn’t matter if you’re hoping to one day hire the VAs themselves, in the interim you’re profiting off their work.

    Ultimately though, I don’t think it matters if you’re making money or not. I got caught up in the tech excitement of voice AI when we first started seeing it, but as we’ve had the strike and more VAs and other actors sharing their opinions on it I’ve come to be reminded of just how important consent is.

    In the OP article, Amelia Tyler isn’t saying anything about making money off her voice, she said “to actually take my voice and use it to train something without my permission, I think that should be illegal”. I think that’s a good line to draw.




  • As far as I’m aware, there’s nothing preventing a PluralKit equivalent from being made for other platforms. In fact, a quick search turned up a WIP Matrix port on github.

    So no, I don’t think this is true. Lack of PluralKit isn’t what’s preventing people from switching en masse. It’s the opposite—lack of people switching means there’s a lack of demand for a PluralKit port in the first place, so even though there is a port people don’t know it exists and thus it doesn’t get as much dev attention.

    It comes down to network effects, ultimately, and just plain inertia. If you’re already on Discord, and all your friends are on Discord, it’s hard to convince you to switch. And being more familiar with the Discord bot ecosystem (like PluralKit) is just one more thing that adds to the inertia.


  • Like other people have said, this is very similar to how the Internet already works. All you need to do to connect to the Internet is connect to a single router that’s a part of it, at least in theory. The Internet is already decentralized on the backend, it’s just that only big players get to be a part of it for the most part.

    A fundamental problem with your decentralization idea is that on a mesh network, you become reliant on your upstream(s) for your connection. You think Comcast is annoying, or your connection is slow? Imagine trying to troubleshoot your Internet connection and having to go deal with your neighbor instead, but he’s at work so you have to wait for him, but oh he’s too tired so he’ll help you tomorrow…

    Not to mention that this severely limits speeds. No longer can your connection go from your house, to the street, to the backbone, and then straight to Google’s servers, now it has to go bounce around between a number of potentially unreliable consumer connections, run by non-professionals.

    In a system like this, inevitably local organizations or companies will pop up to take the burden off individuals, which would provide massive QoL improvements, and we’d end up with ISPs again.

    That said, there’s a lot of people doing hobby network stuff out there. I know some hackerspaces have their own local hobbynets, that then connect to each other over the open Internet using VPN tunnels. This solves some of the reliability problem, plus it’s just a hobby thing so it isn’t a problem that it’s slow and kinda bad. Then there are even individuals who get their own routers (or VPSes) and plop them in datacenters to participate in the internet alongside big companies and ISPs. Neither of these require new protocols, everything can be done with TCP/IP and BGP. (Plus a splash of VPN protocols here and there.)





  • In any% runs, yeah. But they skip through all the dialogue and cutscenes anyway, so it’s barely spoilers. Most of the speedrun is just crazy hops and killing Shadowheart to stuff her corpse in a crate.

    AGDQ did an actual all acts speedrun, which does show the actual ending of the game though. And admittedly, more spoilery than a usual run because there’s a lot of commentary.