southsamurai (he/him/pronoun agnostic)

Okay, at this point I’m no longer in doubt that you mean things exactly the way you’re saying them. You’re not acting in good faith, I’m out.

Hope you have a nice rest of the day, but please do leave me out of it

For a false dichotomy to be a false dichotomy, one has to believe that there’s are more than two alternate, opposing (at least partially) possibilities.

As previously stated , I disagree that there are more than two options regarding the state of ai as it currently exists. Ergo, I don’t agree they it is a false dichotomy. It’s just a dichotomy.

You’re free to disagree, that’s okay. However, based on apparent tone, and what seems to be a misunderstanding of intent, I very much doubt that you feel the same way. It would seem I am not free to disagree with your premise. Restating that premise won’t change my mind about my original statement, or the ways I’ve rephrased it so far. Nor will repetition of “orphan crushing machine”. Which, again, you do you, but I ain’t typing that out again and will just refer to it as capitalism, assuming we keep chatting casually. Once shit gets heated, I’m out though, I got too much shit going on in meatspace for that to be even remotely the way I’ll spend my lemmy time.

Proton, being a product run by a capitalist, absolutely would not have taken a different path. It could have, but the non profit that owns a majority of proton chose their CEO, and neither stopped him, nor removed him since. So, back to the would not. They might still reverse course, engage with less problematic standpoints regarding ai (and, again repeating myself, my issue isn’t with ai per se, it’s how it’s being used and mandated by proton leadership). I very seriously doubt that will happen. It isn’t impossible, just very unlikely in light of the CEO still being in place after two different events where he put a giant piece of his foot in his mouth.

Now, regarding ai itself, it doesn’t have to produce slop. Really, it doesn’t. A sufficiently built model will be able to generate a lot of things that are fully functional. Ai isn’t magic. It’s a fancy bit of software. As long as the parameters are built well, and the people building it aren’t chasing profits instead of safe, quality results, it will eventually get to the point that it’s so much faster than and as capable as a human code expert. It isn’t there yet, but at some point it will be.

Since resources are being hogged up by capitalist driven ai, I don’t see it happening in a weedy that’s acceptable without a radical reconstruction of human society. Hence my original comment.

I also disagree with your statement that the goal of proton users is security only. O would even disagree that it’s security as a primary want. I would argue that privacy, when compared to companies like Google/alphabet is the predominant goal of users. Protonmail by itself isn’t that secure. It can’t be because it’s not able to magically make recipients able to read their encrypted email. You can’t mail from proton to gmail encrypted currently. That’s inherently insecure. It is, however, more private so long as you only email people that don’t use privacy hating providers.

Their other products, yeah, I can see those being chosen because they’re more secure. Calendars, data storage, VPN, and password management can all be done in a way that’s more secure than capitalist driven options. I would argue that whether or not proton can be considered secure should determined by their least secure, and most used services. VPN and email are those two, or were last I checked ( back when bitwarden began its flirtation with enshittification, so not long ago overall).

The VPN is up to standard overall. The email is no more or less secure than any other provider that can’t ensure recipients can decrypt messages. That’s the standard I believe is most useful in determining if “secure” is a valid adjective for proton as a company.

Since more people use them for email than anything else, if users really believe they’re more secure, and that’s why they signed up, well, I can’t do anything about that, but I would still disagree that it means the average user “want security”.

Ai was always inevitable. So long as computer science existed, it was going to happen because the entire point of computers is doing things for humans. We built them to crunch numbers faster and more reliably. ENIAC was rudimentary artificial intelligence in the broadest sense of the term. Everything since has been developing to where we are now in terms of the fundamental technology. Pong was rudimentary ai when you played against the computer. So were all the enemies in Mario brothers. So are the mobs in your preferred crpg.

Generative ai was always coming. It’s only going to go away if it is utterly wiped out, in all forms, in a way that prevents humans from being able to start over. Best we can hope for is enough of a revolution to oust the capitalists using it to fuck over everyone else.

Look, I’m not sure why you’re responding here, unless you’re an alt of the person I was responding to. There’s some degree of connection, but it’s a different main thrust.

Yeah, capitalism is the problem. But when it comes to ai, Altman is the poster boy. When it comes to Proton, Yen is literally the person running the company. It’s perfectly okay you use them as specific examples.

As far as it being a false dichotomy, I disagree. It’s the very fact of the “orphan crushing machine” that makes me believe the only way to get a do over is the forcible removal of the people in charge of said machine. Oligarchy don’t give a fuck, and they’re the ones in charge. It’s not like a shift in dominant political party will be a magic wand either; Europe, the us, the uk, and canada are all under the thumb of oligarchs in their dominant parties (with varying degrees of boots on necks) Hell, I think Australia is too, but I’m less familiar with their main parties.

There’s really nowhere in the world right now that isn’t crushed by capitalist assholes. They rule by money, even when not in office themselves. That doesn’t disappear by changing from Republicans to Democrats, or Tories to Labor, or whatever biggest parties are in power (usually entrenched in power because of that money). So I don’t see any realistic scenario that results in corporate AI being eliminated that doesn’t also eliminate the assholes doing the crushing.

Also, I’m not really obligated to cram every single facet of things into one offhand comment. I didn’t talk about fixing things because you can’t fix corporate AI. You have to start over, though from what I’ve been told some of the open source models would mean not having to start entirely from scratch. Since what I was talking about was that, why waste my time? I mean, beyond tangential conversations like this being very slightly less likely. And I say tangential because the comment you responded to was from someone else, and the context was shifted slightly because of their shitty and smug analogy.

For real, people seem to expect things to fit some predetermined format, like comment sections have to be essays or debates to be graded. I made an offhand comment that summed things up in a way that matched my level of interest. You didn’t like, that, and that’s okay. But I don’t owe anyone jack shit. I don’t have to talk about fixing things, nobody does.

If you go back to my initial comment, you may note that it contains the only path to that ending I see as realistic.

Poor analogy.

You can clean up shit. But you can’t cram it back in the dog’s ass. Well, hypothetically, but you’ll be covered in shit and have a very upset dog.

What you can’t clean up is knowledge, ideas. Where a technology to exists, and minds know if it, it can be recreated. Doesn’t matter how hard you try, it’s part of human comprehension. Ai in one form of another has been a goal for decades. You can’t erase that.

All we could do is rebuild it better. Less abusive, more regulations and controls, better planning. And I’m all for that, but it isn’t as simple as your bad analogy makes it seem

Honestly? That kind of shitty thinking is as much a problem as badly instituted ai is. You were so busy trying to pull a gotcha that you couldn’t be bothered to talk to a fellow human being with respect and decency. You know, a very similar way of thinking that makes Sam Altman and Andy Yen such horrible stewards of otherwise good software.

Idgaf about them using AI per se. It is out of the bag, and it ain’t going back in unless everyone throws a revolution to kill the people in charge and destroy every bit of knowledge on how to create it again. That just isn’t happening. And it is possible for good humans to use the technology to craft good programming.

What I do gaf about is the people in charge of proton being assholes, treatingboth their employees and customers like shit, and not even trying to hide their contempt.

Well, ever hear the story of the boy who cried wolf? That’s the origin of that one. And, as someone else already covered, the wolf in sheep’s clothing is biblical in origin, though it has been through some other usages over the years.

Your be amazed how many of Aesop’s fables are still in the consciousness of people that have never directly read them just because they’re so deeply engrained into culture.

I’m going to add to the previous responses that a token is also the billing unit used.

If you hire a lawyer, they charge a rate based on their predetermined “billable hours” arrangement. They beak down their jobs into small time segments, often much smaller than an actual hour. Similar to how a mechanic might use a predetermined labor cost based on a time estimate chart; swapping a battery takes X time, but rebuilding an engine takes Y time, with the actual number of hours and minutes not being useful in terms of billing because neither lawyers or mechanics can precisely track exactly how much of the time they’re digging working on your specific job is being spent “hands on” vs the time necessary to do all the little things that come up to interrupt the work. So they bill by the abstracted time a job takes when stripped of real world necessity.

Tokens are, as others said, chunks of data. When you enter a prompt, and get a response, those chunks get tallied up and billed for. From what I’ve read (and I’m not in the field, not even as s hobbyist/amateur; I just wanted to know exactly what you asked) the various companies bill by large chunks, usually per million tokens, or a similar chunks.

As an example, a given word might only need three tokens to process as input, and another three as output. But, because the cost of doing that work is more intensive to output (generate) a response, output costs more per unit. Now, I’m not saying the capitalist hellscape reality of that is a good thing, I’m just saying that’s the reasoning of the capitalist twats that run the companies. Anywhere other than lemmy, I might not need that disclaimer lol.

Now, why they chose token as the jargon, I’ve never looked to see if I could find an answer, but that’s just me wondering just enough to type it, but not enough to go looking ;)

Looks wise? Whatever, I’m down for oddball design.

But they don’t look like something to wear for a couple of hours just enjoying tunes.

And, unlike you, if I’m dropping 200 on headphones, I want to hear every subtlety of the music, even if it isn’t perfectly reproduced. Like, I’m fine with a degree of weakness in the lows, maybe some sibilince in the highs, but vocals damn well need to be crisp, and nothing outright hidden.

There’s cans that can be damn near perfect for less. And both fit well enough and have enough potency that anc isn’t mandatory unless you’re running heavy equipment. I have some sennheisers that almost match my wired beyers, and I can run a weedeater without having to crank the volume.

So 200? With the complaints I’ve seen about these being muddy and prone to poor connection, I’m dubious at best. I sure as hell wouldn’t buy them blind. Besides, nothing as company annoys me. That’s unrelated to any quality issues with their devices, but no way would I drop 200 on anything they make unless it was absolutely above the standard

Well, out of what I’ve used for any length of time, mullvad, nord, air, and proton were all reliable for me. Then again, ivpn was too. Ivpn was slow as hell compared to mullvad and nord for me though; as slow or slower than free tier proton. I’ve tried others, but never long term enough to feel comfortable saying anything beyond that you do get what you pay for with a VPN. The super cheap ones tend to be molasses, or have other service issues.

Which, it’s weird as hell that ivpn was so slow compared to mullvad because a lot of their exit servers are the exact same. Most of the European exits, and as near as I could tell, all of the U.S. ones were in the same data centers. Iirc, mullvad rents hardware directly, whereas ivpn does it via software? Maybe? It was a struggle finding useful information with the way search engines have turned so shitty (even the better ones).

I think I had the least problems with air and mullvad, overall. Air, my only real complaint was their clients suck. The service was flawless, but you either set things up on your own, or deal with horrible ui and ux on their clients (with the android one being worse). Mullvad, I have zero complaints about their service or clients. It’s the political shit I have issue with

I totally missed the import function, that’s a really really nice trick right there!

I missed a bunch apparently lol.

The big thing that makes me jump through hoops to keep Swype over anything else is the detection and prediction accuracy for my fumble fingers. It really is a me thing, as I’ve seen other people do way better than I can manage on others. But it keeps my arthritis fingers and dyslexic brain able to type faster than I can on a regular physical keyboard.

I’m going to try yours again when I have something lengthy to write, because that’s where a keyboard matters the most for me.

No joke though, I am very pleasantly surprised at how close yours gets to Swype. Floris is maybe a tad closer, but I’ve also spent more time with it so far, so that’s maybe a less fair comparison. I don’t know how the glide detection and prediction works under the hood, but I know that a ton of keyboards outright suck at it. Tbh, gboard has gotten worse in that regard when I’m forced to use it. So you’re out doing a giant corporation, and that’s no joke.

Yah, I’m with hubert, you gotta check out the Baker era dalek episodes. If you’re even a casual fan, there’s so much from that era that is what formed the concept of what daleks are now

That sudo has alllll the permissions, and the bugger is easy to bribe

Exactly; foot binding too, as well as the neck ring thing, etc. There’s plenty of examples, but this one still “feels” quacky lol

My thing is that, assuming it worked at all, It would take years to cause a permanent change.

I’m not confident it wouldn’t work at all though. The body can and does change with consistent pressure and/or use patterns. Braces are a perfect example.

I suspect that this might give you some temporary shifts after a few weeks of use. I think they might last a day or two. They wouldn’t be as significant as the ad makes it out, but it’s definitely possible to shift fat under the skin by applying constant pressure. You can see it when people wear overly tight clothing regularly. Cartilage can be changed in similar circumstances, though not that drastically afaik.

But, when the pressure is relieved, tissues tend to go back to where they normally would be.

I did a minor search for the general subject matter, but with the changes to the main search engines, every result is utterly useless crap about plastic surgery and injections, and I don’t have the patience to dig through bullshit to get to useful hits for this minor amount of curiosity.

That being said, I have personally seen noses and ears changed by extended pressure applied. But it was in bedbound patients unable to move on their own, and it did take a really long time to show up. Where I lack confidence is a device like this. I want to say it shouldn’t work. And that’s likely the truth, that it wouldn’t. But with long term changes happening from similar things, I can’t dismiss it out of hand either

I don’t think there’s been any significant historiography of the subject.

So you’ll have to settle for non academic anecdotal stuff. Which is the norm here on lemmy, but people seem to forget both that no community here has the ability to be as reliable as the parent sub, as well as that anecdotal information is still valuable, and valid for non academic purposes.

Yeah, Reeves being crippled^1 shook a lot of us gex-xers up. It wasn’t that anyone thought he was immortal, or had super powers for real. It was that he was not only Superman on screen, he was the first pop culture icon of our age group to get fucked up. People dying sucked, but who else that was that big a name, that represented good met that kind of brutal injury? Nobody.

Which meant that a lot of my generation had a come to jesus moment where they realized that anybody could have one bad thing fuck their life up permanently. Before him, if you didn’t experience it more directly via a loved one, or yourself, you were still young and disability hitting in a second wasn’t on your radar.

95? I was in my early twenties and had grown up when Reeve was this larger than life figure. He fell off a horse. And never moved on his own again. I was a nurse’s assistant, wiping the asses of people in the same condition, and it still hit hard. Not emotionally, it’s very rare for me to have a proper parasocial response. But in the way I thought about my own body and health. As many people said at the time: if it can happen to him, it can happen to anyone.

That fact had always been true, but damned if him breaking his neck didn’t make the point stick.

No idea about older people and George Reeves, he wasn’t on my radar. Never heard anyone from that generation talk about it though, and a lot of my patients were in that age range.

^1 I use the term cripple as a cripple. I own that word for myself.

No, really? Wouldn’t have guessed that.

Well, there’s wired over ears with anc, but they have a battery iirc.

Which I guess would be possible for iems too, just clunky as hell.

Man, I’m not defending it, just pointing out the way the system works

Your autocorrect made a booboo.

It entered priority instead of proprietary