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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Yeah, I don’t know why they don’t have the normal “what is this” text from their main page at least at the bottom or something.

    cock.li offers free email service with no personal info needed for signup. They’ve done this for 11 years, with no major outages to my knowledge, relying only on donations without explicitly asking for them or bugging their users.

    I think at some point they also offered paid VPS services.

    Very useful for accounts that you don’t want connected to your other “identities”, but where you’ll still need them associated with a real email for things like password resets.

    It’s also tor friendly.







  • Yup. That’s kind of the rub. It’s not a pay gap on paper anywhere in the sense of pay scales, it’s a bunch of societal biases that lead to overwhelmingly common “emergent” systemic behavior that skews women towards the lower end of the pay bands they coexist with men in while also often denying them promotions into higher positions and pay bands that are more frequently given to equal or lesser skilled men.

    Very few of the individual cogs in the system are intentionally aiming for this outcome, but it’s the combination of a shit ton of biases built up over generations about women and how they are expected to behave that all smashes together into the shitty end result of pay discrepancy along gender lines.





  • And here we have issues with the many different definitions of AI. Nvidia used machine learning to simulate countless iterations of their chip design to find the best configuration and layout (for the specific goals they set their AI to optimize for). They did not use chatGPT or anything that has textual output. It literally cannot spontaneously develop that ability.

    It is constrained by the bounds that are inherently neccessary to make it function and by the goals it is created to optimize for. It cannot just arbitrarily “choose” to go do something they aren’t pointing it at. It may do things that aren’t intended, but those are “happy accidents” related (again) to the goals it is given to optimize for. Like a delivery AI jumping off a balcony because it’s the fastest way down, since no goal weighting was given to self preservation or damaging the package.

    At the very least, until we have some way to codify the abstract concept of comprehension into a scoring system can be optimized for, none of these things are going to even approach AGI. This is due to the simple reality of how they work under the hood, and don’t for a fucking second believe the charlatans saying that we can’t understand them. We may not be able to discretely track each and every step a model takes in modifying it’s weights or each decision poiny when optimizing for specific output, but that’s a matter of storage space to store each step and drastic speed loss that would occur recording each step. It is not some inherent untracable magic in how they work.

    Computers, even quantum computers, work through billions of discrete traceable steps occurring each second. AI still needs discrete inputs, discrete goal/optimization/math to discern good output from bad, even if we choose not to track each step in between.

    Put as simply as possible: You cannot duct tape infinite speak and spells together to spontaneously create an intelligence, and that is effectively what current AI is doing in ever increasing amounts. We’re brute forcing it by throwing ever increasing amounts of resources at it, with rare and minor improvements in the underlying math occurring at far slower rates. The nvidea chip thing is just improving the ability of chips to do the math we’re already doing for this stuff even faster, so… more brute forcing.

    Edit: Also, nvidea is making more money than they ever have riding this hype train. Of course they’re going to push the idea that absurd leaps of progress are right around the corner, and that their products will get us there. They are the best in the market right now, but anything beyond that is pure conjecture to help drive sales. Their chips are not fundamentally doing anything new, just the same things but more efficiently.




  • except for flooding you with more ads between video recommendations

    That’s literally it. The advertising and marketing teams within Google have politically maneuvered themselves into running the show, and the software/product engineering teams that want to maximize the quality of the system they work on (search, youtube) are overridden by insipid metrics that advertising needs more user interaction with ads.

    They literally have been commanding that things be made more shitty to optimize their malformed metrics. You absolutely can get more people to click the sponsored search results… if you keep making them less distinct from the actual results. And advertising needs those good click through rates nooooow!

    There are email chains documenting this sort of shit going on that have become part of the public record due to various court cases.

    Wonderful article about it all here