So an interesting thing I’ve noticed people doing is basically claiming that whatever other side is being astroturfed by the “real evil”, right. “Fossil fuel is funding renewable FUD of nuclear reactors!” or “Fossil fuels is funding nuclear FUD of renewables!”. You can also see this with liberals claiming that anyone who disagrees with the DNC is a Russian bot, and with people who disagree with libs claiming that libs fund radical right-wing candidates as an election strategy and that this is one of the reasons why they are basically just as bad as those right-wingers.

The core thing you need to understand about this, as a claim, is that they can both be true. They can both be backed opposition, controlled opposition, astroturfing. Because it’s not so much that they’re funding one racehorse that they want to be their opposition, so much as they are going to fund both sides, plant bad faith actors among both sides, bad faith discourse and division, thought terminating cliches, logical fallacies, whatever, and then by fueling the division, they’ve successfully destroyed their opposition. The biggest help to the fossil fuels lobby isn’t the fact that conversations about nuclear or renewables are happening when “we should be pushing, we should be in emergency mode, everyone should agree with me or get busted” right, as part of this “emergency mode” is us having these conversations. No, the biggest help to fossil fuels lobbies is the nature of the discourse, rather than the subjects of the discourse.

Also I find it stupid that people are arguing for all in on one of the other. That’s dumb. Really, very incredibly dumb. Mostly as I see this discourse happening in a disconnected top-down vacuum separate from any real world concerns because everyone just wants to be “correct” in the largest sense of the word and then have that be it. Realistically, renewables and nuclear are contextually dependant. Renewables can be better supplemented by energy storage solutions to solve their not matching precisely the power usage curves and trends, but a lot of those proposed storage solutions require large amounts of concrete, careful consideration of environmental effects, and large amounts engineering, i.e. the same shit as nuclear. It can both be true that baseload doesn’t matter so much as things like solar can more closely match the power usage curves naturally for desert climates where large amounts of sunlight and heat will create larger needs for A/C, and it can also be true that baseload is a reality in other cases where you can’t as easily transition power needs or try to offset them without larger amounts of infrastructural investment or power losses. Can’t exactly preheat homes in the day so they stay warm at night, in a cold climate, if the r-values for your homes are ass because everyone has a disconnected suburban shithovel that they’re not recouping maintenance costs of when they pay taxes.

These calculations of cost offsets and efficiencies have to be made in context, they have to be based in reality, otherwise we’re just arguing about fucking nothing at all. Maybe I will also hold water in the debates for money not being a great indicator of what’s possible, probable, or what’s the best long term solution for humanity, too, just to put that out there. But God damn this debate infuriates me to no end because people want to have their like, universal one size fits all top down kingly decree take of, well is this good or bad, instead of just understanding a greater, more nuanced take on the subject.

If you wanna have a top-down take on what’s the best, you probably want global, big solar satellites, that beam energy down with microwave lasers.

I have this thought a lot too when people discuss things like teaching “media literacy”. I dunno. I’ve seen enough people completely abuse logical fallacies that I really wonder whether or not we’re all logically consistent conscious beings, or if we’re all just kind of flying by the emotionally charged pants seats, and making shit up later to retroactively justify it. People cry strawman, red herring, goalpost moving, when realistically people are just changing the subject to something that they think they know more on, because things aren’t formalized into a rigorous debate where everything is organized and structured and we all actually know what the definitions of things are supposed to be. It’s hard enough to get people to even agree on a definition, because people are so insulated to their little bubbles. Getting past that semantic difference and into the actual debate seems more to me like a structural problem, where people are arguing with the wrong people, than like, a problem you could solve with just raw education. Seems like a structural problem related to the death of the monoculture, and the rapid propagation of regional cultures, even regional cultures online.

Do you believe then that all the work from people here is pointless, and that people are just going to leave Lemmy for the next new shiny thing?

I mean partially, yeah. I dunno.

I think in total I kinda just don’t see the migration, for these things, as a big issue. Any sort of, more crystalized or important knowledge, is usually saved on some ancient forum somewhere, or a book, or the internet archive, something to that effect, so realistically we’re not losing a whole lot with every migration, except for the kind of, ambient fomo and depression that people tend to have whenever they experience the death of anything, even a kind of shitty internet platform. The death of possibility that it represents.

I mean it’s maybe kind of annoying, right, to see this happen repetitively, and for it to be the case that we can never have any “real progress” with any of these applications, right. Everything has to be conceived of as a totally new and independent thing, and nobody can every build on anyone else’s work. At the same time, people naturally leap to whatever the next best thing is when these services evaporate, so we usually don’t end up losing all that much in terms of technological progression. I’m also not too sure that you can really improve on Discord that much. It already has all your different chatting and video streaming needs, there’s not much more you could do without just kinda, turning it into a totally different kind of thing.

I think maybe a more pressing issue, or annoyance, for me, is those actual monopolies which crop up. Shit like youtube, that’s probably a bigger problem. They have the total power of a video sharing platform, if anything gets erased from there, it’s probably just straight gone, because everyone kind of assumes that the servers are just going to remain free and freely accessible forever. I guess you could always just save your videos, though, but maybe that presents some kind of unsung cost of like, ease of accessibility, right. There’s not a great way to sift through all of the millions of hours of video content uploaded every second anyways, so I don’t know if it ends up mattering much, most of the time.

In sum I also think it’s kind of, misguided to blame the consumer for these sorts of behaviors. They’re that way because they’ve been propagandized too, because their friends all migrate and they are powerless to stop it, etc. The real things at work here are just like, the arbitrary forces of venture capital and the market, and the market regulation that surrounds all of this.

I feel like another good point is that discord servers are generally very easy and low-rent to set up, compared to setting up and properly moderating a technical forum where everything is supposed to be well-organized. Lots of smaller open source projects would have to take away time they’d actually use to develop their tools, in order to set up a forum and keep it running. In those cases, they’re better off just using a discord server, and then hosting a quickstart guide or a commonly asked questions thing, and you can put either of those basically anywhere.

There is no way to get out of this cycle unless we start championing open source solutions, even if technically inferior at first.

The reason open source solutions never end up overtaking these stupid services that come out and then commit suicide every 7 years is because they’re always technically inferior at first, and oftentimes the open source alternative doesn’t even have anything remotely close to the paid service on the roadmap.

Maybe this is because of the issues with scaling up a dev team that’s formerly just been driven entirely by people’s free time, maybe it’s just that the ball never gets rolling to begin with, and only people who are ideologically vested in the idea of open source over even their own efficacy of use are the only people who are going to use these alternatives, who knows. Probably, it’s just that venture capital is usually willing to back the private, “presentable” company, over the open source guys, for pretty obvious reasons.

It’s just short term interest vs. long term interest. In our current economic layout, the former wins pretty consistently. I’d even go so far as to say that the former wins pretty consistently with most kinds of human planning just generally.

I do not have a good solution to this problem.

ITT: People really hate elon musk but kind of don’t know why, specifically. This tech is outpaced by EEG. This tech is the greatest technological development of all time, but I wish it was under someone else. This guy will die like the monkeys, all the monkeys and pigs died also did you guys hear about this? Did you guys hear?

I think it’s a pretty bad demo. As said, EEG is capable of the same thing, intercranial EEG is capable of the same thing, and I’m pretty sure microelectrodes have also already been capable of this for a while. I think generally we’ve been capable of this sort of stuff since like the 60’s or 70’s if I’m not mistaken, but nothing ever really comes of it in terms of the commercial market. I think the biggest thing I can think of is probably cochlear implants. I hope somebody corrects me if there’s a larger thing that I’m missing there. In any case, this doesn’t really show us anything, or provide any real reason for why this is better than your other less invasive alternatives, or even why this is a novel form of BCI. Supposedly this is supposed to be automated, smaller, and cheaper than your alternatives, but it also maybe struggles with differentiating signals, and hasn’t shown any major progress towards solving the more major technical hurdles facing the technology as it currently exists. You can’t really do a demo based on a solution to both a problem nobody asked for, and you can’t do a demo for something which is basically purely for economic and convenience gains. If that’s the use-case, it seems like kind of a misunderstanding as to where this technology currently is. BCI, broadly has the potential to do some really cool stuff, but nobody’s really solving any of the major bio-compatibility issues. I think you would find more interesting similar work done with wetware and organoids, but those are all in lab settings in highly regulated and normalized environments, so they’re still a ways off from consumer use.

Everyone’s concerned about computer viruses on these things. I think the main concern is actually regular viruses, no?

Neither should lots of short haul trucking, more specifically drayage trucking, that industry sucks. We probably need to move more towards vans and stuff.

You know I would kind of off the cuff think that probably the optimal solution would be something that prevents general accessibility for the population at large, but encourages, and makes it more easily accessible for those who already have problems with it, and then kind of, chase solutions from there. Of course, I think probably that solution would lend itself more towards a country or state that cares whether or not you’re going homeless or sleeping in your car or what have you, because it’s generally easier to keep track of less marginalized populations.

This isn’t really to advocate for a ban, but there’s definitely a kind of fine middle ground between full bans and completely free easy access. I think the thing that strikes me the most as a kind of, huge dick move, is mostly that it’s kind of a purely short term financial calculation of, oh, smokers are going to pay a lot more in taxes than in healthcare, and they die quick, so that’s economically good. But of course, you wouldn’t want a country made up entirely of smokers, and I don’t think that would be good, or pay out the best in long term societal, or even purely economic, benefits. I’m skeptical of blanket calls for total drug legalization just as I am skeptical for blanket calls for bans. Usually, there’s more nuance to the situation than that, which unfortunately tends to be the thing most leveraged to enforce the status quo or pass bad austerity legislation.

A good example of a policy that can kind of make a form of “objective” economic sense for the government to do, but is actually totally immoral, cruel, and inefficient. A good example of why governments shouldn’t be run like companies, basically.

Interjecting because this is kind of an easier comment with which to make it, but it does apply to the conversation generally: I think my willingness for this to be the case would probably be dependent on whether or not it means we have to pay more or less, both at a personal level, and a societal level. i.e. does this discourage reckless behavior enough for it to offset the potential economic drain of, say, determining liability?

The same can be asked of vaping, but with different caveats. Does it work out that it costs less over time for us to regulate vapes, regulate flavors, etc. , compared to if we chose not to regulate them, or chose to regulate them more liberally? It might be somewhat difficult to totally regulate against consumer purchase and mixing of chemical flavoring agents, and such regulation might also increase adverse health outcomes, as it would’ve been, generally, easier to enforce safety standards on the supply side. Increased taxes might lead to increased costs foisted onto the consumer which, again, might lead to a larger unregulated market developing, which can cause other problems.

I’m not saying regulation shouldn’t be done, I think it’s broadly a good thing, but I think it’s also usually the case with these sorts of things that everyone tends to form opinions, and legislate, based on mixtures of hip shooting public sentiment and whatever their “common sense” tells them, rather than creating regulations around whatever would result in the most net benefit, or, the least net negative. Most of all, people tend to shoot first with regulation, and then never even ask questions later about what the effects were, but I guess that’s all getting off a little bit into the weeds on the flaws of overly brittle political systems.

Oh, do me next, do me. Open source adversarial models trained to detect and actively label things which it detects as belonging to AI. Probably would end up looking like a browser extension or something. Ublock, but for AI, basically.

Another inherent problem with BCI is that it’s not seamless. It takes a lot more concentration to operate a mouse with your mind than it does with your body. People don’t really understand how much of their movement is handled by their spinal chord instead of the brain.

People have a hard time utilizing interactive spaces when we separate them from physical input. Which is why a lot of people struggle with VR,. When your physical senses like proprioception don’t reflect the interactions the same as our visual senses we can become physically ill.

I always got more the sense that musk was looking more for some sort of, mass adoption for this technology. Ghost in the shell, matrix type shit, that we’re still probably like, a century away from. If we don’t boil ourselves first, anyways. But that also might be marketing mumbo jumbo from him, and none of that really kind of solves any of his short term problems that he’d have, which you’ve done a good job pointing out, and are probably more relevant.

The toughness of figuring out use is definitely a good point, and it’s one you see all over the place with all manner of disabilities. It’s sort of unnatural enough to learn how to use a keyboard and mouse already, and those are relatively simple technologies, which is to say nothing of the maybe months of training it would take to learn how to use a prosthetic limb. I think maybe kids, children, could learn and pick up on stuff much faster, but I really don’t think it would be a popular decision to decide to start testing your BCI on kids, even if you were to reach a state where it was benign, useful, and guaranteed to be stable.

I also think musk probably doesn’t understand how BCI probably won’t help much for easing human-computer interface, because it sort of, puts the onus of everything on the person, as being at fault for not being able to interface with the perfect, “flawless” machine, rather than just viewing them as another kind of being, with distinct, even somewhat hardwired limitations. Humans can’t really split their attention and do dual processing, they can only focus on one thing at a time, and that strikes me as a pretty big limitation on the amount of data that you’re going to be able to extract from someone with one of these interfaces, even if it was effortless to use. If you want them to be able to walk around and still be a functional person, anyways, and not be insane and schizophrenic maybe. I think we also have been saying that we can solve a lot of those processing problems much easier on the computer side with these horrible organoids that are stitched to mice and computers and stuff. So that would be pretty neat.

In any case, to me, this would all seem to be a little bit overkill, for those intentions, when you could just get everyone to learn stenotype, if you really wanted to “increase output”. Which, again, I’m not sure would really work.

That’s also all taking musk strictly at face value on his intentions, but I’m pretty sure the guy likes rockets and electric cars because he has a retrofuturist “I’m the great man of history” kind of deal going on, so I don’t think I’d put it past him to think that having a plug that goes into your brain and puts you in the matrix would be a “cool” idea.

Whoever keeps throwing in the shit about law enforcement in these stories, which I think was actually a security officer for the embassy, drawing a gun, is doing a pretty good job of distracting from the main issue of what this guy lit himself on fire and died for. Doing a much better job than all the whinging about how he was mentally ill, and how this won’t change anything, and how there’s no clear cause, that mainstream news outlets are doing when they cover this type of stuff, if they cover it at all.

I would also like to kind of point out here, that “this won’t change anything, this guy was mentally ill, he killed himself for nothing”, is really only true if you decide it to be true. We get to decide whether or not this motivates us to do something or not. We get to decide whether or not we let this affect us. Whether or not we do something, to make sure this doesn’t happen again, you know? And that’s mostly, in my mind, the purpose of this kind of protest.

Maybe it makes the institutions think about what they’re doing, probably not, since, if they were gonna think that, they should’ve probably thought that about the 20,000 or so palestinians that have been killed. This protest is mostly engineered to get you mad, and sad, and to make you, the viewer, think about why this is happening, and think about what you can do to stop it. Not just deflecting immediately to whether or not it was effective, because by doing so, you let it not be as effective.

Brings to mind the discourse against, really any form of protest that I’ve seen. You could take the george floyd protests, for example. So, sure, the government throws in agent provocateurs, in order to turn what would otherwise be peaceful protests, which would shut down any traffic into and out of the city, and would choke off any economic activity (puts pressure on businesses, utilities, puts pressure on local government, which needs to please these people who don’t really care about the protest but want things to go back to normal).

But by doing so, right, by causing those passive forms of damage, but also by causing active forms of damage, say, burning a big box store down, right, the public showcases that, if a certain legal decision to, say, let derek chauvin off, occurs, then there will be potentially more protests and more destruction, which provides great incentive against that decision occurring.

Now, in this case, there’s not as clear of a process, because there’s not as clear of repercussions if they decide to do nothing. About the only thing that might happen is that this might happen again, which, might, by some process of media coverage, put enough pressure on politicians to cause this to stop, if it becomes a political issue. The same thing is happening with mass shootings, which aren’t a greatly impacting issue, by the numbers, right, they’re much less than that of road deaths, heart disease, other forms of gun violence.

But they are so horrifying to the american public and to really anyone of moral conscience, that they should serve as a clear marker that something is wrong, and something needs to change. Serial killers create a similar effect. It’s almost like a kind of terrorism, using that word without judgement, here. That’s the power of these protests. We’ve already seen it spread across a bunch of news media, even though it’s being reported about as poorly as you’d expect.

I’m not particularly sure that repeat incidents would do any good, and I think I’d generally be opposed to that, as should anyone, but, an instance of self-immolation is what caused the arab spring. This sort of thing isn’t ineffective, I think it does a disservice to aaron bushnell to say otherwise.

If you want to stop this sort of thing from occurring in the first place, you should really try to understand why it was happening, instead of brushing it aside.

No, typically they’re just sensors on a cranial harness.

Do you mean EEG stuff, or are you referring to like, inter-cranial implants, which I don’t know shit about?

Yes, there’s no real advantage to making it permanent other than convenience. However this convenience is imo massively outweighed by the very real possibility of meningitis. It’s crazy that they got approval to transect the blood brain barrier for an implant. Other implants do this, but that risk is being weighed against things like potentially deadly seizures, not mild convenience.

Do you mean counteracting potentially deadly seizures, or causing them? Also, there’s probably too many other problems to list about the technology generally, but since you seem like you know what you’re talking about, could you give me like, a kind of general overview on BCI, or your opinion? Maybe like, challenges, what you see as being the most promising stuff, that sort of thing?

Are other forms of BCI not permanent? I was kinda under the impression that they were, and the only upside of neuralink was the form factor, and maybe trying to bring down the costs by automating it, or whatever the idea was, but it the others aren’t permanent, that would kind of make more sense. Though, I kind think it being temporary would kind of be an upside, for the most part, since that would prevent scar tissue buildup on the brain, and other potential problems like that.

I think the best option would actually be to see how many times we can pull the scam on him, before he realizes what’s happening. Oops, oh no Elon, people are using a different instance! Look at how many users they have (they are different users we swear)! Looks like you’re gonna have to buy that one now! and so on.

It encourages violence, it desensitizes us,

We can understand why that’s like, not a very concrete justification to be against espousing violence, right? I also find it weird, right, that we’re doing this step-around thing, where you’re calling everyone out for the hypocrisy of, oh, well, people are against this violence, but they’re not against this violence? Have you maybe considered that the two forms of violence are distinct? Perhaps that the two forms of violence are actually not similar? That people have reasons for, say, wanting violence against one party, but not another?

That’s what they’re commenting about. You say “it’s either all okay or none of it’s okay” because it encourages violence, right, but, I am giving you an opportunity to show your work, when it comes to this very basic claim, upon which rests the rest of your argument.

damn, I didn’t really know it was that intense, that serious. I guess I have, once again, underestimated the furries, my greatest rivals on this god forsaken planet.

nah but fr that makes a lot of sense. I would’ve just kind of thought, you know, stereotype of wealthy furries in IT shelling out for fursuits and shit, and furries in VR, put 2 and 2 together and blam, wow, the math checks out, but yeah, I do believe there’s probably a good proportion of people for whom it’s important enough to kind of get on top of it asap.

also VR headsets are getting cheaper than I thought, so that’s another factor.

So, is VR actually good, or is it mostly just for wealthy silicon valley furries to hang out with each other in VRchat, like everyone used to do in second life? The only game that really comes to mind as being something that’s even close to a killer app is beatsaber, and that’s basically just DDR with your upper body. I really haven’t seen much support, both in the way of games, and more importantly, in the way of, say, 3d modelling apps, or something to that effect. Utility software, stuff that’s useful, but is specifically more convenient in virtual reality, stuff that might be benefited by the platform. But then, it’s not really something I’ve looked into much.

I don’t really look at it as a symptom of lack of graphics throughput, but more as a benefit of eye tracking, which is also potentially something that benefits, say, the immersion of others through portraying your facial expressions more realistically, or something to that effect. You could also use it as a kind of peripheral for games or software, and apple currently uses it as a mouse, so it’s not totally useless. But I also can’t imagine that most developers are going to be imaginative enough to make good use of it, if we can’t even think of good uses for basic shit, like haptic feedback.

Perhaps it breaks even in terms of allowing them to save money they otherwise would’ve spent on rendering, but I dunno if that’s the case, since the camera has to be pretty low latency, and you have to still dedicate hardware resources to the eye tracking and foveated rendering in order to get it to look good. Weight savings, then? I just don’t really know. I guess we’ll see, if it gets more industry adoption.