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Technology
Hey Beeple and visitors to Beehaw: I think we need to have a discussion about !technology@beehaw.org, community culture, and moderation. First, some of the reasons that I think we need to have this conversation. 1. Technology got big *fast* and has stayed Beehaw's most active community. 1. Technology gets more reports (about double in the last month by a rough hand count) than the next highest community that I moderate (Politics, and this is during election season in a month that involved a disastrous debate, an assassination attempt on a candidate, and a major party's presumptive nominee dropping out of the race) 1. For a long time, I and other mods have felt that Technology at times isn’t living up to the Beehaw ethos. More often than I like I see comments in this community where users are being abusive or insulting toward one another, often without any provocation other than the perception that the other user’s opinion is wrong. Because of these reasons, we have decided that we may need to be a little more hands-on with our moderation of Technology. Here’s what that might mean: 1. Mods will be more actively removing comments that are unkind or abusive, that involve personal attacks, or that just have really bad vibes. a. We will always try to be fair, but you may not always agree with our moderation decisions. Please try to respect those decisions anyway. We will generally try to moderate in a way that is a) proportional, and b) gradual. b. We are more likely to respond to particularly bad behavior from off-instance users with pre-emptive bans. This is **not** because off-instance users are worse, or less valuable, but simply that we aren't able to vet users from other instances and don't interact with them with the same frequency, and other instances may have less strict sign-up policies than Beehaw, making it more difficult to play whack-a-mole. 1. We will need you to report early and often. The drawbacks of getting reports for something that doesn't require our intervention are outweighed by the benefits of us being able to get to a situation before it spirals out of control. By all means, if you’re not sure if something has risen to the level of violating our rule, say so in the report reason, but I'd personally rather get reports early than late, when a thread has spiraled into an all out flamewar. a. That said, please don't report people for *being wrong*, unless they are doing so in a way that is actually dangerous to others. It would be better for you to *kindly* disagree with them in a *nice* comment. b. Please, feel free to try and de-escalate arguments and remind one another of the humanity of the people behind the usernames. Remember to Be(e) Nice even when disagreeing with one another. Yes, *even Windows users*. 1. We will try to be more proactive in stepping in when arguments are happening and trying to remind folks to Be(e) Nice. a. This isn't always possible. Mods are all volunteers with jobs and lives, and things often get out of hand before we are aware of the problem due to the size of the community and mod team. b. This isn't always helpful, but we try to make these kinds of gentle reminders our first resort when we get to things early enough. It’s also usually useful in gauging whether someone is a good fit for Beehaw. If someone responds with abuse to a gentle nudge about their behavior, it’s generally a good indication that they either aren’t aware of or don’t care about the type of community we are trying to maintain. I know our [philosophy posts](https://docs.beehaw.org/docs/) can be long and sometimes a little meandering (personally that's why I love them) but do take the time to read them if you haven't. If you can't/won't or just need a reminder, though, I'll try to distill the parts that I think are most salient to this particular post: 1. Be(e) nice. By nice, we don't mean merely being polite, or in the surface-level "oh bless your heart" kind of way; we mean be *kind*. 1. Remember the human. The users that you interact with on Beehaw (and most likely other parts of the internet) are *people*, and *people* should be treated kindly and in good-faith whenever possible. 1. Assume good faith. Whenever possible, and until demonstrated otherwise, assume that users don't have a secret, evil agenda. If you think they might be saying or implying something you think is bad, *ask them to clarify* (kindly) and give them a chance to explain. Most likely, they've communicated themselves poorly, or you've misunderstood. After all of that, it's possible that you may disagree with them still, but we can disagree about Technology and still give one another the respect due to other humans.
(Seeing as I already posted an AI-is-dangerous article, here's one that shows the benefits of AI.) Inside a bustling unit at St. Michael's Hospital in downtown Toronto, one of Shirley Bell's patients was suffering from a cat bite and a fever, but otherwise appeared fine — until an alert from an AI-based early warning system showed he was sicker than he seemed. While the nursing team usually checked blood work around noon, the technology flagged incoming results several hours beforehand. That warning showed the patient's white blood cell count was "really, really high," recalled Bell, the clinical nurse educator for the hospital's general medicine program. The cause turned out to be cellulitis, a bacterial skin infection. Without prompt treatment, it can lead to extensive tissue damage, amputations and even death. Bell said the patient was given antibiotics quickly to avoid those worst-case scenarios, in large part thanks to the team's in-house AI technology, dubbed Chartwatch. "There's lots and lots of other scenarios where patients' conditions are flagged earlier, and the nurse is alerted earlier, and interventions are put in earlier," she said. "It's not replacing the nurse at the bedside; it's actually enhancing your nursing care."
As investors weigh OpenAI’s valuation, they might consider the humble paperclip. A cautionary tale about corporate profit maximizers building a robot that so excels in producing the office supply that it wipes out humanity might seem far-fetched. But a single-minded capitalist could make the economically rational decision to bear such a risk. As OpenAI races towards a fundraising that could value it at $150 billion, the implicit promise is that gains enormous enough to make that danger thinkable are on the horizon. That itself underscores the barriers to growth. The paperclip story goes like this. One day, engineers at ACME Office Supplies unveil a hyper-sophisticated AI machine with one goal: produce as many paperclips as possible. The incomparable silicon intellect chases this task to the furthest extreme, converting every molecule on Earth into paperclips and promptly ending all life. Profit-hungry OpenAI investors like Microsoft might be assumed, like ACME, to only value short-term gains, inviting the risk that they build their own Paperclip Maximizer. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, says that he is mindful of the risk. His company’s structure is meant to limit bad incentives, capping profit available to investors. Such protections are worth an asterisk now: a ceiling on profit [was set](https://openai.com/index/openai-lp/) in 2019 at a 100 times return for initial investors. OpenAI initially expected to lower it over time. Instead, the company's latest fundraising now hinges on changing that structure, including by removing the cap, Reuters reported.
www.voanews.com
theconversation.com
arstechnica.com
www.workingclassicists.com
A good article in which the author researched how Twitter's algorithm pushed people interested in history into alt-right content. **Quote:** "Adhering to my guidelines to follow accounts suggested by the algorithm, I clicked the “follow” button. This was the first time I was recommended content adjacent to **alt-right and "manosphere" ideology**. Prior to that, it was all history related. After “liking” approximately 100 Tweets, however, I saw that the accounts suggested to me were becoming increasingly political, and I was specifically being recommended accounts run by **internet political commentators** – as opposed to professional politicians or journalists. I cannot definitively call this observation evidence of being led down an alt-right pipeline, but it was interesting to note that those were the types of accounts suggested to me by the Twitter algorithm."
modem.io
I love how creative this is. The CSS usage in this is wild! (Please make sure you read it until the end)
cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/19278175
taylorlorenz.substack.com
I've never been on twitter, but I'm not that surprised so many of us here were driving engagement.
Alternative Invidious link without using YouTube directly: https://yt.artemislena.eu/watch?v=ihtAijebU-M Insane method to read your PCs memory, based on certain electromagnetic emissions your system makes when you write or read data to the RAM. --- Video Description: The RAMBO Attack on RAM is truly amazing. Some of the best research I've seen. covertchannels.com arxiv.org/pdf/2409.02292 wired.com/story/air-gap-researcher-mordechai-guri youtube.com/watch?v=CjpEZ2LAazM&t=0s youtube.com/watch?v=-D1gf3omRnw&t=0s
blogsystem5.substack.com
cross-posted from: https://feditown.com/post/650064
tacking on a bunch of LLMs sure is a way to "make the web more human".
www.brainfacts.org
pivot-to-ai.com
Did you know you can play Doom on a diffusion model now? It’s true, Google just announced it! Just don’t read the paper too closely.
www.theverge.com
> Enticing though they are, such arguments conceal a logical flaw. As a classic 19th-century theory known as a Jevons paradox explains, even if autonomous vehicles eventually work perfectly — an enormous “if” — they are likely to increase total emissions and crash deaths, simply because people will use them so much.
> It could also identify your voice and recognize you and your ad preferences, and those of your passengers. Why...
www.spacebar.news
