davehtaylor

NYT, hotdog costume: We're all trying to find out who did this!

NYT has been pouring gasoline on this fire for years. Yeah, it's great that someone there was able to publish something exposing the horrors of the Cass Report. But the NYT has no business pretending like they haven't been a party to this. They have blood on their hands, and are a large part of why trans kids have been targeted by these fucking soulless ghouls

Anyone who holds up Kim Dotcom and/or Julian Assange as political prisoners or targets of wrongful prosecution and persecution is absolutely not someone who should be trusted for any kind of opinion

This also reminds me of something that people often do that I cannot stand, and that they don't seem to understand why they shouldn't: adding scanline effects to pixel art videos/animations that are going to be shown on a CRT

SA is just 4chan in a tuxedo. Both are cesspits.

If you were a good parent that your child could trust, and you loved your child unconditionally and they knew that you accepted them for who they were no matter what, this wouldn't be an issue

You seem to not understand the scale at which these things operate. We're not talking about niche tools that only incels and creeps will use to jerk off to CP, we're talking about tools that can be used to manipulate, spread mis- and disinformation, and imitate actual people doing things they wouldn't normally do, and can do so at a scale that is exponentially greater than anything we've ever seen.

Go take a look at Facebook. Log out of YouTube and look at the front page. Try to do a Google search. Look at the absolute flood of AI generated shit. I know a lot of authors of short fiction, and the publications that they submit to that normally see a couple hundred to a couple thousands of submission per month have been flooded with hundreds of thousands of submissions per month, all AI garbage.

Now imagine it becomes so good that it's indistinguishable from the real. Pics, vids, articles. The scale and speed at which people can create society-level harm and destroy lives is incomprehensible. This is not a "think of the children" thing. This is an inflection point where you will never know if the video you just saw of a political candidate calling for the extermination of X group is real or not. But the harms and consequences will be real. You will see revenge porn not just of nudes, but of videos of people seemingly doing horrific acts, and having their lives ruined because of it. And it will happen so fast and in such a flood that nothing will be able to stop it or counter it, because no one will see the truth buried in the inundation.

Again, we could do some of this now, but not at the unimaginable scale or speed that AI generation allows for.

This is not a good thing. And if this is the world you want, then there is no reasoning with you. You are truly lost.

Hang on. Are you actually saying that making fake porn of teenagers without their consent is a good thing because it teaches valuable skills?!

This right here.

I'm so fucking sick of the "it's just a tool" or "sO YoU wANna BAn EvErYthiNG?!" bullshit. It's all bad faith garbage that people hide behind because they want the results of these "tools." They want the AI porn fakes of teenagers and celebrities (because they're pathetic creeps and incels with no concept of dignity or consent). They want to be able to rip off actual artists so they can pretend like they've done something "creative" so they can get social media clout. They're completely unserious people who can't be reasoned with. They need to be shunned and shamed.

I think one of the big things that would be great is having a shared space between 2 or more people who can all be in, and interact with, a virtual/augmented environment. Say you and I are working on a prototype of some sort. We can put a model of it in our shared space, and manipulate it together. we can see what it looks like in the real world, touch it, move it, change it, shape it, etc. Tony Stark kinda stuff. Lots of people in maker space, or engineering, design, etc. would go nuts for this I'd imagine. But I think one of the things we lack right now is physical feedback. It's really hard to wave your hands around in the air trying to manipulate something but having no feedback at all. And I don't know what it would even take to make that work. Having gloves with some sort of haptics is a start, but it's not enough.

Otherwise, why do I gaf about my spreadsheets floating in front of me? Watching a movie could be fun, but I can just watch a regular tv and not have a massive headache and feel like my eyes are being ripped out 20 mins into it. If it's just going to be another monitor, then I don't see how you're going to drive mass adoption with that

Yeah this looks like more of an alternative to Sublime

Might be neat. Might check it out. But devs really need to stop asking me to install things by curling a script and piping it into my shell. There are better ways to do this. Doing this leaves a massive possible attack surface.

On a policy level, if we are to bring about a more harmonious Internet (and civil society), we will likely have to tackle wealth inequality and make our political institutions more democratic.

Really burying the lede there.

Another big factor is a lack of moderation, as well as the things that get platformed. People sit and stew in a broth of violent, hateful rhetoric all day long because platforms not only allow that kind of content, but massively profit from it. We seriously need social media companies, podcast apps, YouTube and other video hosting sites, etc. to step the fuck up and deplatform misinformation, disinformation, bigotry, hatemongering, and ragebait. Do not give it light. Do not give it oxygen. Smother it. Ban it. And be extremely aggressive about it. You wanna cry about censorship? Go ahead. But the first amendment doesn't apply to private companies, and you are also free to setup your own website/service/app/whatever and spew your own bile there.

We further need social media companies to change their algorithms to prevent them from rewarding inflammatory posts. People want to have millions of followers and be big stars on the web, and ragebait, lies, and misinformation are perfect ways to do that. It's gets you to the top of the heap because there's no such thing as a "bad" click. You still watched it. You still replied (even if to refute it). And that gave it a boost. That shit has to stop. The entire social landscape is built on top of this inflammatory foundation.