Unfortunately, all it will take is an appropriate choice of story about "Nazis"/"child predators"/"pirates"/"terrorists"/"Russian bots" sideloading unregulated apps or disabling the GPS trackers on their cars, and every prospective member of Doctorow's great new coalition (including most everyone in attendance when the talk was given) can be peeled away with ease.
Do you not think that trying to malign your opposition by putting a comical misspelling in their mouths is a bit infantile as a rhetorical tactic? The same thing being done to you would look something like an insinuation that what is being banned is "hurting someone's widdle fee-fees"; surely the discussion here would not benefit if everyone stooped down to that level.
> surely the discussion here would not benefit if everyone stooped down to that level.
Oh we were already at that level by that time: the comment mine responds to makes the claim that "it is really difficult to define what hate speech is" (untrue); that "more often than not it's used as a cudgel to silence the opposition" (unsubstantiated); and claims that the UK government's intentions match that of Iran and Russia (untrue).
For some reason, so many people seem to tolerate outright disinformation but draw the line at mild childishness. It's bewildering.
Do you think that the people who made those remarks you cite considered them untrue themselves? If yes, you are suggesting bad faith (which should be grounds to extricate yourself from the discussion and/or call it out, not add fuel to the fire); if not, you are suggesting that factual disagreement is appropriately answered by childishness, which basically is saying that you think every discussion worth the name should devolve into childishness.
Often, it seems like this concept of "disinformation" you invoke just serves as a way people give themselves moral license to suspend normal rules of debate conduct in the face of disagreement. Being charitable to your opponents and having to engage with their claims is tiring and difficult, and sometimes they even come better prepared - how much easier if you can just frame dissent as dangerous enemy action and shut it down.
Do you also insist that we treat with proper decorum those who throw out assertions that jetfuel cannot melt steel beams? I notice you have yet to criticise them for posting what is at best misguided and unsubstantiated misinformation, and at worst disinformation. Hardly decorum on their part, is it? Instead, you are hyperfocusing on my "freeze peach", disregarding everything else I said in my comment. I find this to be a boring distraction from the topic at hand.
Well, I don't see anything obvious to criticise about what your interlocutors posted; their statements seem plausible enough to me, and if there is actually a knockout argument against them, I don't know it, because the person who seemed to disagree (you) was busy making childish noises instead of making it!
> jet fuel/steel beams
This debate was carried out sufficiently publicly that I got the sense people actually ran experiments confirming the pro-beam softening/structural failure/whatever case; certainly the "truther" case should have been taken seriously before that, and with decorum always because there is no situation in which any debate in a moderatable forum benefits from playground behaviour.
It is by no means a good publication, but at the same time being accepted as a citation on Wikipedia or not is not necessarily a particularly objective measure of quality. I recommend reading https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik... for the critical perspective on Wikipedia's integrity in this regard.
As usual with these, it helps to try to keep the metaphor used for downplaying AI, but flip the script. Let's grant the author's perception that AI is a "bag of words", which is already damn good at producing the "right words" for any given situation, and only keeps getting better at it.
Sure, this is not the same as being a human. Does that really mean, as the author seems to believe without argument, that humans need not be afraid that it will usurp their role? In how many contexts is the utility of having a human, if you squint, not just that a human has so far been the best way to "produce the right words in any given situation", that is, to use the meat-bag only in its capacity as a word-bag? In how many more contexts would a really good magic bag of words be better than a human, if it existed, even if the current human is used somewhat differently? The author seems to rest assured that a human (long-distance?) lover will not be replaced by a "bag of words"; why, especially once the bag of words is also ducttaped to a bag of pictures and a bag of sounds?
I can just imagine someone - a horse breeder, or an anthropomorphised horse - dismissing all concerns on the eve of the automotive revolution, talking about how marketers and gullible marks are prone to hippomorphising anything that looks like it can be ridden and some more, and sprinkling some anecdotes about kids riding broomsticks, legends of pegasi and patterns of stars in the sky being interpreted as horses since ancient times.
I don't think the author's argument is that it won't replace any human labour. Or at least I wouldn't agree with such an argument. But the stronger case is that however much LLMs improve, they won't replace humans in general. In the furtherment of knowledge, because they are fundamentally parroting and synthesizing the already known, vs performing truly novel thought. And in creative fields, because people are fundamentally interested in creations of other people, not of computers.
Neither of these is entirely true in all cases, but they could be expected to remain true in at least some (many) cases, and so the role for humans remains.
So a human is just a really expensive, unreliable bag of words. And we get more expensive and more unreliable by the day!
There's a quote I love but have misplaced, from the 19th century I think. "Our bodies are just contraptions for carrying our heads around." Or in this instance... bag of words transport system ;)
So tell me, why do I still have a job and why am frequently successful in getting profitable / useful products into production if I’m “expensive and unreliable”?
I mean I use AI tools to help achieve the goal but I don’t see any signs of the things I’m building and doing being unreliable.
Either way, in what way is this relevant? If the human's labor is not useful at any price point to any entity with money, food or housing, then they presumably will not get paid/given food/housing for it.
Once upon a time, in a more innocent age, someone made a parody (of an even older Evangelical propaganda comic [1]) that imputed an unexpected motivation to cultists who worship eldritch horrors: https://www.entrelineas.org/pdf/assets/who-will-be-eaten-fir...
It occurred to me that this interpretation is applicable here.
"The plans for scanning your chats were on display for fifty Earth years at the local planning department in Alpha Centauri"?
Nobody's attention span is infinite. I don't doubt I could understand all details of the EU legislative process and keep track of what sort of terrible proposals are underway if I put in the time, but I have a day job, hobbies that are frankly more interesting, and enough national legislation to keep track of.
If you then also say that the outcome is still my responsibility as a voter, then it seems like the logical solution is that I should vote for whatever leave/obstruct-the-EU option is on the menu. I don't understand why I am obliged to surrender either a large and ever-growing slice of my attention or my one-over-400something-million share of sovereignty.
> I don't understand why I am obliged to surrender either a large and ever-growing slice of my attention or my one-over-400something-million share of sovereignty.
Because your puny state is no match for the US, China or soon enough, India. Heck, even Russia in its current incarnation outmatches 80% of the EU countries.
That's it, it's that simple, conceptually.
It's basically the Articles of Confederation vs the Constitution of the United States.
Yes, it's not a pretty process, but the alternative is worse.
We can all live in La-La-Land and pretend we're hobbits living in the Shire ("Keep your nose out of trouble and no trouble will come to you") until reality comes crashing down.
If the end result is going to be that the EU turns into Russia or China under the pretext of standing up to them (because apparently building an opaque process that civil society can't keep up with to ram through authoritarian laws is what it takes to be competitive?), then I'd rather they cut out the extra steps and let the Russians/Chinese take over. At least then nobody would be telling me that what I got is the outcome of some sacred democratic process I am obliged to respect.
Why, then, is the supposed anti-US/China/India/Russia power bloc trying to pass laws to mandate absolute surveillance of all private communications? If the EU is going to continue attempting to legislate away people's freedoms for purposes that are completely out of scope for the reason it exists, then the natural result is that people will turn on the EU. There is little purpose in staving off the surrendering of independence to US/China if the process entails surrendering even more freedom than they would demand to the EU, all the more so when the EU already rolls over to the US/China on almost everything anyways. I am supportive of a pan-European unification in theory, but if the result looks anything like this, no wonder people are disillusioned with the European project. With friends like the EU, who needs enemies?
I understand that it is not currently law. I also understand that the EU has been dedicated to this road of eroding citizen privacy for decades, constantly trying to pass more and more egregious legislation. For example, the Data Retention Directive of 2006 was abhorrent law. After 8 years in force, it was struck down by the ECJ, which would be somewhat reassuring if not for the fact that the EU appears to consider the ECJ a thorn in its side that it seeks to undermine at every turn. I have very little faith that this will not eventually become abhorrent law given the persistence with which the EU pursues becoming a surveillance state.
It seems like they, too, have no calendar application?
Google Calendar is the single most indispensable feature of the entire Google suite for me (apart from Mail, of course), so I can't see myself switching to something without, and yet Nextcloud continues being the seemingly only self-hosted alternative that has it (including the web interface: I don't want to have to run a second web browser like Thunderbird to edit calendar entries on my computer).
What is it about JS calendar shells that makes them so seemingly hard to implement? Even the big-name open source CalDAV servers like Baikal that flirt with corporate adoption never seem to implement them.
The post, at least, seems to have no word about a web interface, though? I'm aware of a number of CalDAV/CardDAV servers, but they all seem to be designed for a workflow where you only access the calendar from a mobile app. Conversely, standalone web calendars like the fullcalendar.io thing linked in a sibling post make no mention of any support for CalDAV or other ways to synchronise with phones and calendar apps.
It's the integration of both that makes Google (and, I guess, Nextcloud) useful: you can add an event on your computer (which is where most of the scheduling and planning happens), and then inspect and be alerted of it on your phone (which is with you when you are in a random location and need to be reminded of an event).
Even if there does exist a standalone JS calendar application that can sync with CalDAV, you would be left with an awkward setup when self-hosting, since now for no obvious reason you need to have two services on the same machine (the database and the frontend) that maintain a copy of the same state and need to sync with each other constantly.
There are dozens of open source Google calendar clones in JS; picking a random not-react example off of the front page of an npm search: https://fullcalendar.io/
I don't see anything about CalDAV, sync or mobile integration on that site, though. The thing that actually makes Google/Nextcloud calendars useful is that they enable a workflow where you schedule events on your computer (where most scheduling happens, at least for me) and then are reminded of it on your phone (which is with you when/where scheduled events actually happen).
I'd go a step farther and say that in a business environment, trying to schedule a meeting and seeing when invitees are available is the killer feature for workplace environments.
The somethingpunk settings are supposed to be gritty and dominated by exploitative megacorps, though! As a rule, the thingpunk needs a Man dominating by means of the thing to rebel against. The only reason "solarpunk" has gotten such a rosy image is that its proponents tend to fancy themselves the Tessier-Ashpools were it to come to pass.
I guess even cyberpunk now has a bimodal supporter base - there are the would-be punks, and then there are the would-be (and actual) Zuckerbergs building the torment nexus/metaverse.
Two things stand out, besides what has been already mentioned.
* The infantile corporate-cutesy wording "hop on a call" is not appropriate when talking to somebody who feels that you deeply wronged them. It has the same vibes as cheery "Remember: At Juicero, we are all one big family!" signatures on termination notices, and Corporate Memphis.
* In the first sentence, Kiki says "about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced". Why is this level of detail shoehorned in? Everyone in that conversation already knows what it is about. It's as if Kiki can't resist the temptation to inject an ad/brag about their recently introduced workflow for any drive-by readers. "I'm sorry you were dissatisfied with your Apple(R) iPlunger X(TM), which is now available at major retailers for only $599!"
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