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1 yr. ago

  • There’s only one way in the US, where most employment is at-will, to have a contract that prevents getting fired for a completely boneheaded reason.

    /me bursts into chorus of L’Internationale and is dragged to the gate by admins, off-key singing the entire track listing of Chumbawamba’s “English Rebel Songs 1381–1914” dopplering off into the distance as I go.

  • Not the downvoter, but possibly it was about reposting the slur tbf.

  • But what’s the point of being a trans woman in his narrative? Trans women will also be replaced by uterine replicators and sexbots! They will also be disempowered and sent to the salt mines with the cis women! That’s the part I find inexplicable.

    I can see there’s a shitty faux-feminist idea that cis women will be replaced by trans women, like an XX chromosome is inherently inferior (so feminist!) and anyone with both a superior XY genome & a nice rack will obviously be a threat. But in this case Roko’s own argument says that robots are superior to flesh, so trans women aren’t the threat.

    I realize that I’m trying to find logic in something that’s so beyond dumb it’s come out the other side into a sort of sublime form of perfection, but at least the basilisk follows some bizarre internal logic. This one is self contradictory. Is it so much to ask that I want misogynist and transphobic assholes to understand how to build a basic logical argument?!?

  • I get this is a dumb question, but if sexbots and uterine replicators will make women redundant, why am I supposed to be threatened by trans women? In Roko's framing, all women, trans and cis, will be replaced by robots. I got no problem if my secret post-andropocalypse wilderness tent at Camp Hothead Paisan is the home of both cis & trans women.

  • I'm sorry but if you put your private key in a repo at all and don't immediately scream aaaaah! what did I do! and change all the locks on everything, you're ngmi

  • I’ve had interviewers send me google docs locked to a google account, sent to my personal email which they probably assume is a redirect to Gmail in the background. And then when I write back and say, hi, thanks, could you share this a way that I don’t need a google account, they get extremely skeptical. These days I have a stub Google account I keep around specifically for places that are going to force me to use Google, but even then I have to write back and say “could you provide access to this email address and not that one“, and again, the interviewers get weird and sometimes don’t write back.

  • Even Mosaic was 2 years old already in 1995, so the web—much younger than the infrastructure—was a solidly established thing. Did he just make up the number or is that some benchmark, I wonder?

  • Oh, but you’ve provided us with statistics! Please, though, for the peer reviewers: we need the baseline measurement. How many women do you date who don’t break up with you? And are they all in Canada?

  • Wait, are we banning electrical boxes that transfer electrical energy between electrical circuits, or trucks that turn into weird little guys or sometimes are cassette tapes that turn into cats?

    I can’t tell which one is a viable replacement for men.

  • Yah, this makes sense. Community conventions can encourage good accessible content creation, and software can have affordances to do the same. Twitter, for many years, has been the opposite. Not only did it not allow alt, but the shorthand and memes and joke templates that grew up on short form Twitter was an extremely visual language. Emoji-based ascii art, gifs, animated gifs, gifs framed in emoji captioned by zalgo glitch unicode characters… there’s HTML that can make all that accessible, in theory, but the problem is more structural than that.

  • They have had hands down the best accessibility in desktop markets for 20 years, no contest. Overwhelming market share for many assistive techs. Which is why I’m absolutely livid at them now. If they break Windows I have nowhere else to go. Garbage people making garbage choices.

  • The accessibility community is pretty divided on AI hype in general and this feature is no exception. Making it easier to add alt is good. But even if the image recognition tech were good enough—and it’s not, yet—good alt is context dependent and must be human created.

    Even if it’s just OCR folks are ambivalent. Many assistive techs have native OCR they’ll do automatically, and it’s better, usually. But not all, and many AT users don’t know how to access the text recognition them when they have it.

    Personally I’d rather improve the ML functionality and UX on the assistive tech side, while improving the “create accessible content” user experiences on the authoring tool side. (Ie. Improve the braille display & screen reader ability to describe the image by putting the ML tech there, but also make it much easier for humans to craft good alt, or video captions, etc.)

  • Yeah, I’m a windows user and agree with you completely. People choose operating system, not battery life.

    I would love if they solved the problems that made windows on ARM not ready for prime time, even though I’m enough of a power user it will probably never be for me. But this is not the way.

    Part of this is still trying to make a combination full featured windows laptop that’s also a Chromebook equivalent that’s also a tablet that’s also a dessert topping, when those should be separate devices with different ecosystems. UWP Metro apps were tablet-first when they first launched, sucking on desktop. The tablet pushing in Windows 10 initially broke accessibility. 2-in-1 Surfaces are way too heavy to be good tablets, because they’re still full featured PCs.

    I do not want to mix this duck sauce with that chocolate bunny.

  • Yeah but they’ve been marketing Windows on ARM as a Macbook Air killer for a few years now. This is more of a rebrand of that effort.

  • This green bubble/blue bubble thing is so exhausting. It’s like this is the first walled garden these whiny toddlers (and the DOJ) have ever encountered. Not using gmail for personal email hurts me both socially and professionally, & has probably kept me out of the running for jobs. Back when people used Facebook, there were social events I wasn’t invited to because I wasn’t on Facebook. None is this is new, and it predates computers. (Ask a teetotaler or sober person about their dating opportunities, why don’t you?)

  • Since this isn’t really even related to GenAI at all, in our house the theory is:

    • MS has been trying and failing to push ARM in PCs for a while
    • Now they take one with an NPU and rebrand it as Copilot+™️®️ PCs
    • They have market research that says initial sales are going to be soft and they panic because early soft sales create a bad vibe
    • So, without doing any of the usual build up of exciting the tech press, without hyping trade show buzz, they rush an unfinished, insecure, unwanted product to market in the hope it will be the killer app at last for high-battery life ARM on Windows.
    • They use lot of AI hype language to capitalize off the hype cycle, even though besides the OCR it seems to be pretty limited in its relationship to anything machine learning at all.