AmbitiousProcess (they/them)

To be fair, the SEC has only really gone after cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin, which is the only major blockchain that uses the energy-intensive Proof-of-Work. The things the SEC was trying to regulate, that it considered securities, are almost entirely running on Proof-of-Stake networks, which have negligible relative energy consumption.

This will almost certainly have a lot of other negative impacts, but I doubt it will have that much on the climate.

This is very true.

I was part of the OpenAssistant project, voluntarily submitting my personal writing to train open-source LLMs without having to steal data, in the hopes it would stop these companies from stealing people’s work and make “AI” less of a black box.

After thousands of people submitting millions of prompt-response pairs, and after some researchers said it was the highest quality natural language dataset they’d seen in a while, the base model was almost always incoherent. You only got a functioning model if you just used the data to fine-tune an existing larger model, Llama at the time.

Fair enough, though I do think this can still help with any broader approach to changing their overall mentality.

A moment of consensus on its own might not be enough to sway someone, but if they hear someone try and contradict what they had recently agreed on, it can then make them feel more cognitive dissonance, and potentially make them at the bare minimum just stop and think for a second.

If someone else is later trying to sway them in some way, it’s going to be easier when that person says something, and they can think “I remember saying something similar” rather than “this is the opposite of what I already believe.”

Plus, there’s also just the sort of “exposure therapy” factor to it, as well. A lot of people are radicalized to believe that the “opposing side” is pure, limitless evil, and that they hate you and want you dead, so just interacting with them can be enough to help slowly deradicalize them.

For example, this Pew Research article states, regarding the likelihood of people to support trans people’s existence:

“Though Republicans who know a trans person are more likely than Republicans who don’t to say gender can be different from sex assigned at birth, more than eight-in-ten in both groups (83% and 88%, respectively) say gender is determined by sex at birth. Meanwhile, there are large differences between Democrats who do and do not know a transgender person. A majority of Democrats who do know a trans person (72%) say someone can be a man or a woman even if that differs from their sex assigned at birth, while those who don’t know anyone who is transgender are about evenly split (48% say gender is determined by sex assigned at birth while 51% say it can be different).”

But of course, that isn’t just limited to acceptance of people by gender. It also applies to race, social and economic status, recipients and non-recipients of welfare programs, people working in different industries, etc.

Again, not saying it’s at all some magic universal way to change someone’s mind, or that on its own it’s necessarily a factor that can override their overarching condition, (hell, that quote from before shows that it had a much smaller impact on republicans than democrats even given the same exposure) but the more and more this happens, the stronger and stronger an effect it has overall, and I’d say that alone makes it worth doing.

I’ve seen this type of tactic really well displayed in this video by SquidTips.

This man talked to a fucking Proud Boy wearing a rainbow shirt that said in large letters “GAY” on it with a button that had the hammer and sickle in trans colors, mentioned his partner was trans, and got the guy to agree with him on the fact that he should be focusing on the class war rather than the culture war.

Even Proud Boys and people on the far, far right still think that what they’re doing is good for society. You don’t have to convince them to “stop being evil, switch to being good” you just have to convince them that “this is a more effective method at making society better than what you currently believe is the best.”

Will it work for everyone? Of course not. Some people are just going to be too far gone for you to reach, but there’s a lot more people than you might think that could be swayed, despite what the flood of media coverage of the extremes of society can make you believe.

Relevant xkcd:

I think the key reason this was seen as not being terribly offensive was the fact that women are disproportionately more likely than men to be on the receiving end of tons of different negative consequences when dating, thus to a degree justifying them having more of a safe space where their comfort and safety is prioritized.

However I think a lot of people are also recognizing now that such an app has lots of downsides that come as a result of that kind of structure, like false allegations being given too much legitimacy, high amounts of sensitive data storage, negative interactions being blown out of proportion, etc. I also think that this is yet another signature case of “private market solution to systemic problem” that only kind of addresses the symptoms, but not the actual causes of these issues that are rooted more in our societal standards and expectations of the genders, upbringing, depictions in media, etc.

This feels most likely to me.

Meta doesn’t exactly want to taint their brand image with purely sexual content being generated by their base models, so it’s probably for either content classification, and/or the also likely fine-tuning of their LLMs and other generative models in reverse - that is to say, fine tuning them to not create content that is like what they’re then being fed.

“It’s such a big issue that I’m going to do absolutely nothing as a parent to stop it from happening!”

• These people, probably

There’s a lot of things that have helped me, so I guess I’ll just dump some of that here.

First of all, make sure that you keeping up to date is deliberate, and consensual. News should not unconsensually cram itself into your eyeballs. Try out an RSS reader to keep what would be newsletter subscriptions or social media feed scrolling for the news in one single app that isn’t part of your other online activities, or keep relevant news sites bookmarked rather than followed or subscribed to.

When you feel you want to be more informed about what’s currently going on, you can then chose to be so without it happening at times you’re not ready for it.

Eliminate redundant media. So much of the media we consume isn’t truly new to us, whether that’s following people you already agree with then just liking all their posts, or reading news articles about something you already know about, just because they drop a very tiny morsel of additional information in there, burying the lead, so you have to constantly come back again and again to be truly up to date.

If you’re reading an article, watching a video, or scrolling social media, and you realize that what you’re reading is something you already know, that should be a sign to stop and take a break for a while, so the news cycle can progress further, rather than you very closely following its every little step. This is something that can take some mental training before you eventually get it down, so just try to be more aware of what you’re consuming when you consume it.

A lot of the news we see can also be something that, while technically interesting or engaging, simply doesn’t matter to us or our ability to impact others around us. Like how a TV station might show you a sad story about someone who had something bad happen to them at some time in some random small town you’ve never heard of. Sure, it’s news, but do you really need to know about that? Is that keeping you sane and energized for what comes next?

And speaking of being energized: do shit. If you care about politics and there’s a local rally or protest march, go to it. If you have a local rights organization that does outreach work, volunteer. If you can phonebank for a political candidate you like, make a few phone calls in your spare time.

I particularly like this quote from Joan Baez, which is “Action is the antidote to despair.” Even if you have a healthy diet of media consumption, are up to date without feeling overwhelmed, and are generally a well-informed individual, you can always still feel that nagging feeling that things aren’t changing.

You’ve done everything you can to know what’s going on, and yet what’s going on isn’t getting any better. There’s no point being informed if it doesn’t help you, your community, or the world at all, so when you’re able to, do literally anything you can to make even the smallest difference using what you know. If someone says something you don’t agree with politically, ask them why they believe that and use what you just learned from current events to back up your opinion. Who knows, they might change their mind.

I was ecstatic when Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary in NYC, but I was even happier because after I’d informed myself about the race, his policy positions, and what prior mayors had done so terribly wrong, I had phonebanked for him, and was in a small way, somewhat responsible for that success. And can you guess how much less despair I feel when I see things in the world imploding around all of us now?

Doing anything can make you understand how much of an impact you can have just as an individual, and that makes any bad news infinitely less damaging to your mental health. That said, don’t feel bad when you can’t, we’re all people, and we have our limits and responsibilities.

And even without all that, the best advice I can give you is to just be aware of scale. We live in an age where problems well outside our control are something we’re aware of all the time. If something is a problem, sure, be aware of it, but don’t beat yourself up over how little you’re capable of doing as an individual. It’s like when recycling was proposed as a responsibility of individuals rather than corporations, and now people feel bad for throwing out the plastic waste that the corporations made.

Don’t doomscroll, reduce pointless media, take action where you can, and don’t beat yourself up when things don’t change overnight. Just do what you can. You’ve got this.

I would say the verdict is a solid yes.

(Post for anyone interested in reading more on their own)

That depends on how you interpret people as either being or not being ignorant.

If you judge it solely based on how much time is spent consuming digital media, then people would be less ignorant considering that number has more than doubled since 2008. (doesn’t take into account things like print media, but I doubt people were spending at least 3 hours reading print media every single day, then switched a whole at least 3 hours of that over to digital media)

If you base it on the amount of social relationships they have with diverse groups of people that could lead them to be less ignorant about the world around themselves, then we’ve trended towards being more ignorant in that regard, because while people are more likely to have at least 4 close friends now, they’re less likely to have a wide network (10+) by nearly 3X less.

There’s also the fact that ignorance doesn’t necessarily mean “bliss” in all circumstances.

For example, people are more likely to feel satisfied waiting for a bus (or anything, really) if they’re provided an predictable, but longer estimated arrival time, compared to an unpredictable, but shorter arrival time (to an extent). In that case, the ignorance actually makes people less happy with the experience, even if it still resulted in a faster travel time than the known alternative.

The saying “ignorance is bliss” primarily applies to ignorance of problems within one’s life or society as a whole. If someone’s not aware of the atrocities committed by their government overseas, they’ll feel less stress or anger when voting or thinking of what the future might hold. If you were told you would die in exactly 24 hours, you’d probably spend more of that 24 hours worrying than simply living normally, and would be comparably less happy at the end as a result.

It’s hard to pin down any one reason in particular, but if we want to know why people are so unhappy, maybe we should reassess how ignorant people are in the first place, and what exactly they are ignorant about.

See, there’s a trend we can see with overall dissatisfaction, and it’s heavily tied to economic factors. The more wealth and economic disparity there is in a nation, the less happy the people there seem to be. (See: the World Happiness Report)

Coincidentally, places like the US are some of the most unhappy in the developed world, and also have high levels of wealth inequality

The same WHR report even shows that the density of social connections helps a lot with making people happier. (pg. 142-144) Remember the figure I brought up before about people having smaller social networks?

I can’t even begin to break down every single possible factor that’s making people unhappy, but from reports like the WHR, I think it’s clear that a lot of the things that affect people’s happiness are things that are hard to be ignorant of.

You can probably count up about how many friends you have, know about how wealthy you are, and feel dissatisfied, even if you’re the type of person that doesn’t care about politics, which is one of the largest drivers of dissatisfaction in people who are actually aware.

Remember that people are now consuming much more politics-related media nowadays, and you’ve got a lot of people who are:

• keenly aware of their own personal problems that they simply can’t be ignorant of
• tuned in to conflicts and political drama that may not even affect them, or anyone if it’s entirely political posturing
• severely economically disadvantaged, while being repeatedly shown the lives of those with substantially more than them as a goal to aspire to (think hustle culture)

And don’t even get me started on how much the COVID-19 pandemic forced people to be alone and confront their own internal problems that they were previously ignorant of.

To boil this all down to something a bit more coherent: (apologies for the long rambling)

People aren’t necessarily ignorant of the things that can cause dissatisfaction, EVEN IF they’re ignorant of larger, important issues with the world, or even smaller issues that could still impact them. We are now more connected, economically unequal, and isolated than we have been in the past, and that will take its toll no matter how ignorant you are.

Used to?

For anyone like me that immediately assumed Gemini meant Google’s AI model by the same name, fear not, it’s a protocol, not an AI model.

Yes.

Even if it didn’t explicitly stop my biometric data from being taken and transferred to a government database every single time I fly, it would be a vote against the system itself existing. The whole reason they are allowing people to opt out right now is to test how acceptable it is to people, to hopefully make it mandatory given too little pushback from the public.

Opting out doesn’t just protect your biometric data now, it protects everyone in the future from having their biometric data taken from them without a choice if this system is allowed to spread unopposed.

I was thinking this too! Gait recognition can completely bypass facial coverings as a means of identification, but I also don’t think it’ll be much help here.

Gait recognition can be bypassed by things as simple as putting a rock in your shoe so you walk differently, so when you think about how much extra heavy gear, different shoes, and different overall movement patterns ICE agents will possibly be engaging in, it might not hold up well at tracking them down, especially since to recognize someone by gait, you’d need footage of them that you can already identify them in, to then train the model on.

In the case of fucklapd.com, this was easy because they could just get public record data for headshot photos, but there isn’t a comparable database with names directly tied to it for gait. I will say though, a lot of these undercover agents might be easier to track by gait since they’ll still generally be wearing more normal attire, and it might be more possible to associate them with who they are outside of work since it’s easier to slip up when you’re just wearing normal clothes.

This wouldn’t be an issue if Reddit always attached relevant posts, including negative ones even if those were the minority, to actually help people make a more informed judgement about an ad based on community sentiment, but I think we all know that won’t be the way this goes.

Posts will inevitably only be linked if they are positive, or at the very least neutral about the product being advertised, because that’s what would allow Reddit to sell advertisers on their higher ROI. The bandwagon effect is a real psychological effect, and Reddit knows it.

Fair enough. SEO was definitely one of the many large steps Google has taken to slowly crippling the open web, but I never truly expected it to get this bad. At least with SEO, there was still some incentive left to create quality sites, and it didn’t necessarily kill monetizability for sites.

This feels like an exponentially larger threat, and I truly hope I’m proven wrong about its potential effects, because if it does come true, we’ll be in a much worse situation than we already are now.

I’d actually found them to be better than Google for a while, but coincidentally after the AI craze started really taking off, search quality significantly degraded. Maybe that’s not so much of a coincidence after all.

Presearch is not fully decentralized.

All the services that manage advertising, staking/marketplace/rewards functionality, and unnamed “other critical Presearch services” are all “centrally managed by Presearch” according to their own documentation.

The nodes that actually help scrape and serve content are also reliant on Presearch’s centralized servers. Every search must go through Presearch’s “Node Gateway Server,” which is centrally managed by them. That removes identifying metadata and IP info.

That central server then determines where your request goes. It could be going to open nodes run by volunteers, or it could be their own personal nodes. You cannot verify this due to how the structure of the network works.

Presearch’s search index is not decentralized. It’s a frontend for other indexes. (e.g. it outsources queries to other search engines, databases, and APIs for services it’s configured to use) This means it does not actually have an index that is independent from these central services. I’ll give it a pass for this since most search engines are like this today, but many of them are developing their own indexes that are much more robust than what Presearch seems to be doing.

This node can return results to the gateway. There doesn’t seem to be any way that the gateway can verify that what it’s being provided is actually what was available on the open web. For example, the node could just send back results with links that are all affiliate links to services it thinks are vaguely relevant to the query, and the gateway would assume that these queries are valid.

For the gateway to verify these are accurate, it would have to additionally scrape these services itself, which would render the entire purpose of the nodes pointless. The docs claim it can “ensure that each node is only running trusted Presearch software,” but it does not control the root of trust, and thus it has the same pitfalls that games have had for years trying to enforce anticheat (that is to say, it’s simply impossible to guarantee unless presearch could do all the processing within a TPM module that they entirely control, which they don’t. Not to mention that it would cause a number of privacy issues)

A better model would be one where nodes are solely used for hosting to take the burden off a central server for storing the index, and chunks sent to nodes would be hashed, with the hash stored on the central server. When the central server needs a chunk of data based on a query, it sends a request, verifies the hash matches, then forwards it to the user, thus taking the storage burden off the main server and making the only cost bottleneck the bandwidth, but that’s not what Presearch is doing here.

This doesn’t make Presearch bad in itself, but it’s most definitely not decentralized. All core search functionality relies on their servers alone, and it simply adds additional risk of bad actors being able to manipulate search results.

Is there truly an audience for “I don’t want any proof, just answer my question”?

More people than I think we’d like to admit. Most people don’t spend time verifying whether or not what they’ve seen is true, they just believe what they see first, especially if it conforms to their existing beliefs.

After all, these models are quite literally plausibility machines. Their entire goal is to generate text that sounds plausibly accurate, because that’s how manual content reviewers fine-tune them. Their sole purpose is to generate whatever sounds plausible, not what’s necessarily correct, so if there’s one thing that will convince the masses that what it says is correct, it will be these “AI” models.