thedextriarchy.bsky.social
Senior Editor, Tech & Policy, The Verge
703 posts
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(It was easy to miss amid the pandemic but when I say the Biden White House was bad on this stuff...)
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It's not just that Brendan Carr can do what he wants more easily -- there are fewer leaders to help craft and champion (or now even vote for) fairly uncontroversial consumer protection policies and infrastructure support systems that large numbers of people rely on.
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there have always been smaller forms of media that provide information you can't get from more mainstream platforms, and that information has often trickled down in a way that amplifies its influence. *twitter* wasn't particularly big even in its heyday as a driver of discourse
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just spitballing here: have AAA devs ever considered putting some kind of repeatable series of actions in their games to draw in players? like, a "loop" of some sort? crazy idea, but maybe worth considering
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I was checking around yday and it sounded like GPUs are still an issue too, but on the other side I wonder how much more efficiently these models could be designed if that were prioritized over endlessly increasing capabilities.
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it's not a substitute for real privacy frameworks but what we're probably getting is "nothing" so why not at least try something at a technical level
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it's driving me particularly crazy because offline on-device chatbots (you know, like how software *used to work*) could mitigate a fair amount of this. i'm hoping this happens more if models get more efficient but it's incredible how little i see the possibility even raised
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it's disheartening to watch people pick over and over between "for any position an opponent takes you must do the exact opposite" and "if your interests in any way align with a political enemy's you must actually be on the same side"
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In principle, sure, but people are currently using systems that have all these problems while also posing a bunch of surveillance and corporate control issues
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If it's an open source, noncommercial project you also avoid most of the fears about deliberately encouraging compulsive use or cutting corners on safety for profit. There are still inherent questions about AI therapy but the value of mitigation at this point seems so clear.
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Doubly surprised given the basically constant user complaints about companies nerfing/rebalancing bots. I'm wondering if this *does* exist and I just haven't found it, but even the small-company services I see are overwhelmingly online.
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Right, and there's other non-copyrightable work that I have to imagine could still be 1A expression, like "written by god" books and compilations of facts/instructions, etc.
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This is why character ai was also trying to do "readers have a first amendment right to receive speech," right?
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I mean, better than *actually* nuking a hurricane, sure, but at this point we're choosing between "the guy at the top has a momentary insane idea that everyone talks him out of" and "the guy running the ground operation has the experience level of a toddler"
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trying to decide if this is better or worse than trump asking if you could nuke a hurricane
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oh i'm pretty sure i'm dating myself with the meme, honestly, it was a twitter joke and twitter doesn't even exist anymore
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i'm her editor, it's a joke format
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Implicit in this statement is that yes I have nightmares about using web browsers and honestly far fewer than I used to.
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slotkin did a times interview about how democrats need "alpha energy" and it's like jesus you can just say confidence for fuck's sake, you don't have to do this redpill shit
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I feel like I'm overpsychoanalyzing but I keep wondering how much a bunch of democrats are just personally uncomfortable with the idea they're not performing masculinity right and don't want to own up to it
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Yeah, I get the utilitarian goal, I'm just worried it's a dead end. The message "I *must* have a definition of oppositional masculinity to function" just doesn't actually lead to "I want to be a good person, which to me includes stereotypically masculine traits" imo
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Arguments like "men can't be breadwinners these days because their wives work too" don't make sense if you consider "breadwinning" to just be "providing money for your family"(which you're still doing in a two-income household); the implicit layer is "providing money *in a way that women don't*"
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The discourse about wholesome Tim Walz masculinity still hinges on the idea that things like home and car repair are "man stuff", which means the actual, objective worth of a skill or hobby doesn't matter -- if women start doing it, it no longer has value. That's not a great way to form an identity.
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they're not quite there but getting closer
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Ironically if there's an Apple strategy worth poaching it would be "forget about the iPhone for a few years and make an AI iPod". A fun non-load-bearing specialized entertainment gadget would at least be a somewhat more benign testbed for this stuff.
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The issue is that there is actually a time-consuming part of the craft I like, and I want to spend time on that part, while the goal for a lot of AI boosters seems to be a box where you type in "make me a game".
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I don't actually buy that the *idea* of labor-saving is bad, including in art, is the thing. I like making little games and while there are real arguments for rolling code from scratch, I am 100% happy to use an engine or level editor and focus on the design stuff I really like.
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I imagine some of this is a visibility problem -- nobody is going to SV CEOs for big cool art ideas, and backlash makes other people reticent to share -- but I've had a surprisingly hard time finding AI stuff that targets specific tasks instead of trying to abstract away *everything.*