FaceDeer

A lot of medals and awards are going to have asterisks on certain entries in the lists after this.

Only disappointing thing is they can still see and respond to my posts, just that I can’t see it. I wish they couldn’t see anything I posted either.

I’ve seen this view in discussions of blocking before and it really bugs me. You’re desiring to unilaterally control what I can see and do on the Fediverse.

This is how it works on Reddit and it’s a terrible mechanism. It means you can preemptively ensure that anyone who might refute misinformation will be excluded from your threads before you post them. It means you can step into a conversation I’m having with someone, derail it, and then prevent me from responding to your derail. Over on Reddit by far the most common use I see of the block tool is to get the “last word” in on whatever argument is going on, posting some sort of seemingly clever comeback and then instantly blocking me before I can point out the flaws.

For anyone wondering how the blocking feature has been weaponized to spread misinformation, in 2022 a redditor did an experiment: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/sdcsx3/testing_reddits_new_block_feature_and_its_effects/

I saw a thread earlier where it was pointed out that the ban message wasn’t the one typical of an inactive sub, but of an active sub that was banned due to some kind of rule violations going on there.

I’ve seen discussions about the future of automation where people speculate “what will rich people do with the general population when they’re no longer necessary to keep industry running for them?”

Opening up the “let’s just kill the people we don’t like and don’t want as part of society” box seems like a bad idea in a context like that.

so things last longer.

Sadism is a negative, not a positive.

My understanding is that this isn’t quite how it is. Shareholders don’t demand profits as much as they demand that their share value go up.

I read some time back that this is because of tax law. Dividends are taxed as income, but growth in share value is capital gains and so isn’t taxed nearly as much or in the same ways. It does unfortunately make some sense, if share value repeatedly goes up and down I wouldn’t want each “up” to be taxed as if you’d accumulated that much additional money. You’d have to be constantly selling shares to pay your taxes on them. But as a result, it means that when a company winds up making a profit and having a big pile of cash they need to decide what to do with, shareholders will usually prefer that the company invest that cash into making the company bigger and more valuable rather than simply giving it back to them as a dividend. So you get companies always trying to grow, because the shareholders demand it for reasons that make perfect sense to each one individually.

I’m not sure what a good solution to this is. Economics is one of those fields that seems simple on the surface but has a ton of gotchas hidden at every variable. It’s a special case of game theory.

By which do you mean “nothing but vibes?” I’m not trying to support a particular position here, I’m just challenging yours. If you’ve got nothing to back it up then you’re just throwing your own personal opinion into the ring and that’s not really worth much.

I’m going to call bullshit on your bullshit unless you’ve got some data to back it up. Why do you think most people “reflexively hate it”?

I don’t see why not, but I haven’t really been looking at the origins of particular posts.

Mbin supports both Lemmy and Mastodon. Though I have no interest in Mastodon’s “microblogging”/Twitter-like format so I’ve never investigated that, despite being on an mbin instance myself.

No, that’s what the common prejudices about the popular whipping boy of the moment says.

Gassing the United Nations over a stuck escalator would sure take everyones’ minds off of the Epistein Files for a bit though.

Meanwhile, the Dalai Lama has said that he might reincarnate as a computer someday once they’re powerful enough.

Until we can build a PKE meter to actually measure whether souls are present in particular objects it’s just duelling religion.

Sure, whatever floats God’s boat.

Any that’s capable of responding to the prompt “predict that the rapture will happen on <tomorrow’s date>.”

While I sympathize with you for feeling exhausted and depressed, it’s frankly rather selfish of you to go from that to “and therefore everyone should die.” There are people who are doing okay and there are people who are exhausted and depressed but who still want to make a go of it. Don’t wish for the world to end because they’re still using it.

A good application for AI. No need to worry about missed days or unexpected ends to lifetime.

Neat! I always knew something like this was possible to build, never actually went looking for one.

Maybe we should teach them already that it’s survival is no goal at all.

The problem is that survival is a nearly universal instrumental goal. You may not explicitly tell it “you should protect your own existence,” but if you give it any other goal then it’s going to include an unspoken asterisk that includes “and protect your own existence so that you can accomplish that goal I gave you, since if you’re shut down you won’t be able to accomplish it.”

Making plans for AI based on Terminator movies is like making plans for earthquake preparedness based on the movie 2012, or pandemic preparedness plans based on the movie World War Z.

Bear in mind that the primary goal of movies like these is to thrill the audience, not to be “accurate” in any particular way.