This screams FAITH (Filthy Assumptions Instead of THinking) from a distance, on multiple levels:

1. Assuming that the current machine learning development will lead to artificial general intelligence. Will it?
2. Assuming that said AGI would appear in time to reduce power consumption. Will it?
3. Assuming that lowering the future power consumption will be enough to address issues caused by the current power consumption. Will it?
4. Assuming that addressing issues from a distant future means that the whole process won’t cause harm for people in a nearer future. Will it?

Furthermore, Gates in the quote is being disingenuous:

“Let’s not go overboard on this,” he said. “Datacenters are, in the most extreme case, a 6 percent addition [to the energy load] but probably only 2 to 2.5 percent. The question is, will AI accelerate a more than 6 percent reduction? And the answer is: certainly,” Gates said.

The answer addresses something far, far more specific than the main issue.

If I may, here’s my alternative solution for the problem, in the same style as Gates’:

Kill everyone between the North Pole and the Equator.

What do you mean, it would kill 85% people in the world? Well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs, right? Nobody that I know personally lives there, so Not My Problem®. (Just keep Japan, I need my anime to watch.)

…I’m being clearly sarcastic to deliver a point here - it’s trivially easy to underestimate issues affecting humankind, and problems associated with their solutions, if you are not directly affected by either. Gates is some billionaire bubbled around rich people; this sort of problem will affect the poor first, as the rich can simply throw enough money into their problems to make them go away.

More like the straw that broke the camel’s back. And a sign that Microsoft’s behaviour is still the same as it was in IE times.

I know that this expression desensitises people to something serious, but it describes Microsoft - the “it”/corporation - perfectly: rapist mentality. It shows how eager Microsoft is to disregard consent, users saying “no, I don’t want it”, and to force itself over the users as long as it gets some benefit out of it.

Including new obnoxious advertisement slots into an already released product - one that you paid for - is only a result of that mentality.

I thought about this a while ago. My conclusion was that the simplest way to handle this would be to copy multireddits, and expand upon them.

Here’s how I see it working.

Users can create multireddits multicommunities multis as they want. What goes within a multi is up to the user; for example if you want to create a “myfavs” multi with !potatoism, !illegallysmolcats and !anime_art, you do you.

The multi owner can:

1. edit it - change name, add/remove comms to/from the multi
2. make the multi public or private
3. use the multi as their feed, instead of Subscribed/Local/All
4. use the multi to bulk subscribe, unsub, or block comms

By default a multi would be private, and available only for the user creating it. However, you can make it public if you want; this would create a link for that multi, available for everyone checking your profile. (Or you could share it directly.)

You can use someone else’s public multi as your feed or to bulk subscribe/unsub/block comms. You can also “fork” = copy it; that would create an identical multi associated with your profile, that then you can edit.

Those mistakes would be easily solved by something that doesn’t even need to think. Just add a filter of acceptable orders, or hire a low wage human who does not give a shit about the customers special orders.

That wouldn’t address the bulk of the issue, only the most egregious examples of it.

For every funny output like “I asked for 1 ice cream, it’s giving me 200 burgers”, there’s likely tens, hundreds, thousands of outputs like “I asked for 1 ice cream, it’s giving 1 burger”, that sound sensible but are still the same problem.

It’s simply the wrong tool for the job. Using LLMs here is like hammering screws, or screwdriving nails. LLMs are a decent tool for things that you can supervision (not the case here), or where a large amount of false positives+negatives is not a big deal (not the case here either).

Next on the news: “Hitler ate bread.”

I’m being cheeky, but I don’t genuinely think that “Nazi are using a tool that is being used by other people” is newsworthy.

Regarding the blue octopus, mentioned in the end of the text: when I criticise the concept of dogwhistle, it’s this sort of shit that I’m talking about. I don’t even like Thunberg; but, unless there is context justifying the association of that octopus plushy with antisemitism, it’s simply a bloody toy dammit.

I’m not currently playing the game (lots to do and, well… it’s Cracktorio, you know), but I’m wondering about the impact of those changes on my typical playstyle. It’ll be probably neutral or positive.

The key here is that I only use the fluid mechanics for short-range transportation, and even then I’m likely to force a priority system through pumps; in the mid- or long-range, I’m using barrels all the time, even for intermediates.

Perhaps those changes will force me to revaluate the role of pipes, that would be a net positive. If they don’t, the changes will be simply neutral.

By far, my biggest issue with flags in r/place and Canvas does not apply to a (like you said) 20x30. It’s stuff like this:

\

People covering and fiercely defending huge chunks of the canvas, for something that is completely unoriginal, repetitive, and boring. And yet it still gets a pass - unlike, say, The Void; everyone fights The Void.

Another additional issue that I have has to do with identity: the reason why we [people in general] “default” to a national flag, for identity, is because our media and governments bomb us with a nationalistic discourse, seeking to forge an identity that “happens” to coincide with that they want.

But, once we go past that, there are far more meaningful things out there to identify ourselves with - such as our cultures and communities, and most of the time they don’t coincide with the countries and their flags.

As such I don’t think that this is a discourse that we should promote, through the usage of the symbols associated with that discourse.

Maybe where you’re from it’s easy to separate your government flag as its own symbol that doesn’t represent real people

I think that this is more of a matter of worldview than where we’re from, given that some people in Brazil spam flags in a way that strongly resembles how they do it in USA.

I get what you’re saying; Lemmy is not Reddit, Lemmy is Lemmy.

However, I think that this mostly misses the point. The issue is not to copy neutral-to-positive features from Reddit; it’s to copy the negatives, or to fail to implement other positives.

I’m already preparing some simple art to do in the canvas. Nothing fancy, just a few (30px)² pictures. And if people make some Tux or distro logos I’m happy to help, too.

I just wish that people didn’t waste SO MUCH FUCKING SPACE with government flags in this sort of online game.

Yeah, it’s actually good. People use it even for trivial stuff nowadays; and you don’t need a pix key to send stuff, only to receive it. (And as long as your bank allows you to check the account through an actual computer, you don’t need a cell phone either.)

Perhaps the only flaw is shared with the Asian QR codes - scams are a bit of a problem, you could for example tell someone that the transaction will be a value and generate a code demanding a bigger one. But I feel like that’s less of an issue with the system and more with the customer, given that the system shows you who you’re sending money to, and how much, before confirmation.

I’m not informed on Tikkie and Klarna, besides one being Dutch and another Swedish. How do they work?

Brazil ended with a third system: Pix. It boils down to the following:

• The money receiver sends the payer either a “key” or a QR code.
• The payer opens their bank’s app and use it to either paste the key or scan the QR code.
• The payer defines the value, if the code is not dynamic (more on that later).
• Confirm the transaction. An electronic voucher is emitted.

The “key” in question can be your cell phone number, physical/juridical person registre number, e-mail, or even a random number. You can have up to five of them.

Regarding dynamic codes, it’s also possible to generate a key or QR code that applies to a single transaction. Then the value to be paid is already included.

Frankly the system surprised me. It’s actually good and practical; and that’s coming from someone who’s highly suspicious of anything coming from the federal government, and who hates cell phones. [insert old man screaming at clouds meme]

Do you mind if I address this comment alongside your other reply? Both are directly connected.

I was about to disagree, but that’s actually really interesting. Could you expand on that?

If you want to lie without getting caught, your public submission should have neither the hallucinations nor stylistic issues associated with “made by AI”. To do so, you need to consistently review the output of the generator (LLM, diffusion model, etc.) and manually fix it.

In other words, to lie without getting caught you’re getting rid of what makes the output problematic on first place. The problem was never people using AI to do the “heavy lifting” to increase their productivity by 50%; it was instead people increasing the output by 900%, and submitting ten really shitty pics or paragraphs, that look a lot like someone else’s, instead of a decent and original one. Those are the ones who’d get caught, because they’re doing what you called “dumb” (and I agree) - not proof-reading their output.

Regarding code, from your other comment: note that some Linux and *BSD distributions banned AI submissions, like Gentoo and NetBSD. I believe it to be the same deal as news or art.

Sometimes. Sometimes it’s more accurate than anyone in the village.

So does the village idiot. Or a tarot player. Or a coin toss. And you’d still need to be a fool if your writing relies on the output of those three. Or of a LLM bot.

And it’ll be reliably getting better.

You’re distorting the discussion from “now” to “the future”, and then vomiting certainty on future matters. Both things make me conclude that reading your comment further would be solely a waste of my time.

3. If you lie about it and get caught people will correctly call you a liar, ridicule you, and you lose trust. Trust is essential for content creators, so you’re spelling your doom. And if you find a way to lie without getting caught, you aren’t part of the problem anyway.

For writers, that “no AI” is not just the equivalent of “100% organic”; it’s also the equivalent as saying “we don’t let the village idiot to write our texts when he’s drunk”.

Because, even as we shed off all paranoia surrounding A"I", those text generators state things that are wrong, without a single shadow of doubt.

Think on the available e-books as a common pool, from the point of view of the people buying them: that pool is in perfect condition if all books there are DRM-free, or ruined if all books are infested with DRM.

When someone buys a book with DRM, they’re degrading that pool, as they’re telling sellers “we buy books with DRM just fine”. And yet people keep doing it, because:

• They had an easier time finding the copy with DRM than a DRM-free one.
• The copy with DRM might be cheaper.
• The copy with DRM is bought through services that they’re already used to, and registering to another service is a bother.
• If copy with DRM stops working, that might be fine, if the buyer only needed the book in the short term.
• Sharing is not a concern if the person isn’t willing to share on first place.
• They might not even know what’s the deal, so they don’t perceive the malus of DRM-infested books.

So in a lot of situations, buyers beeline towards the copy with DRM, as it’s individually more convenient, even if ruining the pool for everyone in the process. That’s why I said that it’s a tragedy of the commons.

As you correctly highlighted that model relies on the idea that the buyer is selfish; as in, they won’t care about the overall impact of their actions on the others, only on themself. That is a simplification and needs to be taken with a grain of salt, however note that people are more prone to act selfishly if being selfless takes too much effort out of them. And those businesses selling you DRM-infested copies know it - that’s why they enclose you, because leaving that enclosure to support DRM-free publishers takes effort.

I guess in the end we are talking about the same

I also think so. I’m mostly trying to dig further into the subject.

So the problem is not really consumer choice, but rather that DRM is allowed in its current form. But I admit that this is a different discussion

Even being a different discussion, I think that one leads to another.

Legislating against DRM might be an option, but easier said than done - governments are specially unruly, and they’d rather support corporations than populations.

Another option, as weird as it might sound, might be to promote that “if buying is not owning, pirating is not stealing” discourse. It tips the scale from the business’ PoV: if people would rather pirate than buy books with DRM, might as well offer them DRM-free to increase sales.

Does this mean that I need to wait until September to reply? /jk

I believe that the problem with the neolibs in this case is not the descriptive model (tragedy of the commons) that they’re using to predict a potential issue; it’s instead the “magical” solution that they prescribe for that potential issue, that “happens” to align with their economical ideology, while avoiding to address that:

• in plenty cases privatisation worsens the erosion of the common resource, due to the introduction of competition;
• the model applies specially well to businesses, that behave more like the mythical “rational agent” than individuals do;
• what you need to solve the issue is simply “agreement”. Going from “agreement” to “privatise it!!!1one” is an insane jump of logic from their part.

And while all models break if you look too hard at them, I don’t think that it does in this case - it explains well why individuals are buying DRM-stained e-books, even if this ultimately hurts them as a collective, by reducing the availability of DRM-free books.

(And it isn’t like you can privatise it, as the neolibs would eagerly propose; it is a private market already.)

I’m reading the book that you recommended (thanks for the rec, by the way!). Under a quick glance, it seems to propose self-organisation as a way to solve issues concerning common pool resources; it might work in plenty cases but certainly not here, as there’s no way to self-organise people who buy e-books.

And frankly, I don’t know a solution either. Perhaps piracy might play an important and positive role? It increases the desirability of DRM-free books (you can’t share the DRM-stained ones), and puts a check on the amount of obnoxiousness and rug-pulling that corporations can submit you to.

Lots of good suggestions there. It would be great if @barsoap@lemm.ee mentioned at least !privacy@lemmy.ca and !privacy@links.hackliberty.org in the OP.

I’m thinking that perhaps the community could/should go a step further, and create another instance to talk about open source and privacy. That would be IMO the best scenario - it would be a great counterpoint to .ml, and it would avoid centralising Lemmy around .world even further.

(I also feel like this might be better even for the devs. Administrative work isn’t exactly pleasing, and if I had to take a guess they mostly maintain that instance because they need it for the software. But that’s just a guess, don’t trust me on that.)

inb4: yes, I know - easier said than done. But I feel like it could be a good option.