If you build a tool and in the process of building it it causes harm, that should be on you. If some model under development hacks into another company, the developer should be held criminally and civilly liable.

If you build a tool and someone else uses it to cause harm, that person is 100% liable. It is not your responsibility to prevent your tool from being able to cause every possible harm.

If you build a tool and someone else uses it as intended, but it malfunctions and causes harm, the developer should be liable for that just like any other product liability situation.

Think of it like a riding mower. If I bypass the safety systems and point it toward my neighbor’s house and it runs over their dog, that’s on me not the manufacturer. But if I am riding along and suddenly it knocks me off the top and keeps going on to the neighbor’s yard and runs over their dog, that is on the manufacturer for building an unsafe mower.

Make a gun that can aim and fire itself and you have a much better analogy

Sadly yes you’re right. We’re at the point where we as a society have to wrap our head around the fact that images (and even video) are no longer proof of reality.

I’ve seen a few attempts at cameras which digitally sign the image as proof of reality. That may end up being the new normal.

Do you want to explain to a thirteen year old how it’s not a big deal if someone is passing around realistic nudes of them that were AI-generated?

No of course not. But how’s that different than when one of her classmates takes Photoshop 101? What do you tell the 13yo whose face is photochopped onto a porn star? Same thing.

I’m 100% with you that it sucks, and I’m not convinced generative AI has done much of anything useful to outweigh its societal and resource costs.
You could require all cloud AI to embed tracking data in each image, so when little Johnny nudify’s his classmate we can trace who made the image. But lots of cloud AI companies are outside the USA. And that won’t affect local models.

In this case ‘safety’ was being pushed by the group monitoring the AI companies, perhaps to push their own relevance.

In the middle of my backswing?!?!!?

This is absolutely right.

Our kitchen sink has a soap dispenser. It had this stupid tiny little bottle that you had to refill from the top while you couldn’t see how much was in it so I had to put a flashlight underneath and then lean over while I pour trying not to spill. Screw that.

I bought a kit on Amazon to fix it. You remove the bottle entirely, and then connect to the bottom of the pump a PVC tube with a check valve. On the other end of the hose there’s a bunch of different size lids for whatever brand of soap you have.

Now I buy the soap in bulk, stick the bulk pack under the sink with the hose stuck in it. This runs out about once a year and when it does I just buy another bulk pack and swap it out.

Worth every penny.

Another thing, for the bathroom. Get a large foaming soap dispenser. And then get the soap that comes as tablets. Fill the soap dispenser with hot water and then drop in one or two tablets. They fizz like Alka-Seltzer and when they dissolve the result is foaming soap liquid.

Honestly this seems like a waste.

If there was some free community edition of this I’d deploy it at our org. But I can promise you that I couldn’t get $1 approved for buying a browser, not when there’s plenty of free options.

The other thing- contact us for demo- I mean this with all respect but FUCK OFF WITH THAT SHIT. That’s what companies do so they don’t have to list their million-dollar price tag, and/or want to size up how much they can rip you off for before quoting you. You want people to buy this, make it transparent.

Honestly I think this whole conversation is stupid.

It’s always been possible to photoshop a celebrity’s face onto a pornstar’s naked body. That’s been a thing for decades.

So you talk about guardrails to prevent AI from doing this, and you use the word ‘safety’- I don’t think that word means what you think it means.

To me, AI ‘safety’ is not accidentally creating an AI that will find a bunch of 0day exploits and use them to destroy the Internet. Making AI not spit out spicy pics has nothing to do with ‘safety’.

So if an AI model can spit out a naked pic of someone, honestly, I really don’t care. It’s shitty for sure, but if the big companies block it (which they probably can’t) some little operator will spring up and fill the gap.

The thing that bugs me about Trump and the administration is how little planning and forethought seems to go into things of worldwide significance. Ready-Fire-Aim is a joke it should not be how the nation (formerly) leading the free world operates. And worse is the mindset it represents.

Our government employs a great many experts on Islamic extremism, and I can promise you that not one of them is too busy to meet with the Secretary of Defense.

And yet either these experts weren’t consulted, or their advice was ignored. The announcement went out anyway. And now there’s probably room fulls of experts all screaming that this will cause far more problems than it’ll solve, so there’s backpedaling.

So I ask, if I was Hegseth what would create this situation? And the most likely answer I come up with, like an awful lot of Trump decisions, is that I just assume everyone is either like me or like a stereotype and act accordingly. I don’t need to study or consult because It’s My Job To Make The Decision and I Made The Decision.
The result of that is decisions are made off the cuff, without consideration or forethought, which leads to problems that are both easily predicted and easily prevented.

Iran is another perfect example. We want to get rid of Iran, so we go in, fire a fuckton of guided missiles (which cost $1.5 million each, and apparently we have no way to replace them), blow up the leader and some buildings, then step back and do nothing to manage the resulting aftermath. The religious council naturally appoints the leader’s son as new supreme leader, and whoops seems they still have a functional military and by deploying it to a tiny patch of water can grind worldwide trade to a fucking halt. Now they’re organized again and they’re pissed, and we’re almost out of missiles so we don’t want to start another war. So we’re negotiating with the guy whose dad we just killed begging him to stop killing the global economy.

Did nobody consider this possibility ahead of time?

I’m NOT an expert on Iran. But from what little I learned on Wikipedia, I can tell you with near certainty that if you want to ‘stop’ Iran you have to kill or capture not just the supreme leader but the religious council who appoints him, and many high ranking members of the IRGC also. Do that and install a temporary puppet government with a promise of free elections in a year, or find whoever’s the current 'heir to the throne and install them as Shah under the old governmental structure. Then leave enough forces behind to keep the remainder of IRGC loyalists from causing trouble. This requires more than missiles, it requires a bunch of ‘wet work’ (think spy movies / assassinations). It requires boots on the ground. It requires putting Americans in harm’s way. Overall it will take years and cost $billions. But the result, if done correctly, could be the secularization of Iran- undoing our evils when we helped depose the Shah.
Shooting off a bunch of missiles and expecting the problem to go away doesn’t make the problem go away.

A few thoughts on this.

I’m strongly against capital punishment. Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty who deserve to die and the world is better off without. But our criminal justice system, while good, has made too many mistakes. Plus, given all the appeals and whatnot, it’s actually cheaper to keep someone in jail for life than to execute them.

The problem with our society is when it comes to violence, we live in a state of almost childlike innocence. The vast majority of Americans have NO exposure to real violence and death. The vast majority of Americans have never seen another human die, in real life or on video. The vast majority of Americans have never even seen a real dead body. We censor any death or gore on news, and call ourselves civilized.

Even our ‘violent’ movies and TV are nonsense- the bad guy gets shot, a squib goes off under his shirt, and he falls down. Meanwhile the hero is taking blow after blow that (in reality) would each cause life-altering injuries. It’s almost cartoonish.

So with this innocent ignorance, we then debate things like war, gang violence, and capital punishment as abstract academic concepts, as we have no frame of reference to ground them in reality.

Personally I think more Americans should acquaint themselves with the reality of the world we inhabit. The reality is that human bodies are fragile as hell, it doesn’t take a lot to seriously wreck one in all kinds of ways, and when that happens it’s NOT funny or pretty.

So for that reason, I would like to see at least the recordings of executions be made public. If the American people are going to discuss a policy, they should see what they are actually discussing. I suspect one video of an electric chair execution would be enough to end capital punishment in the USA for good. But even still with firing squad, I think people should see the reality of turning a living human into a dead human.

With that all said- this is NOT the place to do that.

This is not about domestic policy. This is about international peacekeeping. To the Islamic extremists, this guy is a hero. Shoot him live on TV and you turn him into a martyr. The extremist people WANT to die in service of their cause. Death is not a feared consequence, it’s the expected end of martyring themselves. You think someone who goes to shoot up a mall expects to live through to retirement? No, they understand that’s the end, they just want to take out others at the same time.
This video would not ‘strike fear in their hearts’, it would be a recruitment tool! This is something anyone with even the most basic understanding of Islamic extremism understands. I don’t understand why the so-called experts are ignoring it.

Yeah I still use Old Reddit, the day they kill that is the day I leave Reddit for good. They’re starting to- they just announced newer users won’t get access to Old Reddit. It’s all because of AI- Old Reddit is plain vanilla HTML, which is easy for a machine to parse and decode and scrape. New Reddit is a bunch of client side scripting that’s much harder to scrape.

It’s really sad to see Reddit in such decline :( It’s been a major part of my online life for a great many years (I joined before the Digg migration) and now I’m basically preparing for the day when it’s no longer a place I want to go, as that day is very visible on the horizon.

Haha when I say expensive I mean like expensive to set up the process- I can buy a bar of soap at the store for cheap, I just assumed it needed a million dollar factory to make them :P

Bubble wrap is absolutely genius :)

The soap I had was sort of like this picture, the one with the stars specifically. After 2 or 3 showers I had a white soap bar with holes and a pile of red soap bits (it wasn’t that exact one, It was a football or a dog or something but you get the idea). Frankensoap is a good way to put it :P It really did feel like two different soaps that were just stuck together.
It was as I recall from a fairly large company. With cold process vs. melt & pour is one of them considered ‘better’?

Reddit is dumb and they keep shooting themselves in the foot with this crap

Agreed. Sadly I think their management has lost the plot.

Imagine you’re a city mayor, and the more people live in your city the more you get paid. You probably start out trying to build a utopia, but then there’s a slippery slope of ‘well option A is more resident-friendly, but option B will mean more people move in’ and you start with one or two of those because nobody will notice and after a while it becomes a mindset that’s part of every decision process- ‘how will this affect our population?’

Reddit, Facebook/Meta, Twitter, Discord, TikTok, all doing it.

Okay this is actually fascinating. Since your reply I’ve been doing some Googling… I’d always thought making soap was a difficult / expensive / complex process that required a lab, special equipment, etc. Like if you look at the ingredients for any soap off the shelf there’s always a bunch of chemical stuff and I always assumed it was some complex interaction between them that makes you clean. Then you say all you need is a blender.
Turns out it’s all just some variant of ‘lye, fat, oil, dye, fragrance’. And the lye gets mixed with something else so they don’t have to call it lye. I feel I’ve been lyed to my whole life </bad pun>.

So thank you for opening my eyes to something fascinating that I didn’t know existed yesterday :) I may actually try making soap at some point.

Two questions if I may–

First- for the colors, I assume you prepare two or more batches of the soap liquid, and then layer them in the mold with a small stir. How do you get the honeycomb effect on the oatmeal/milk/honey flavor?

Second- I once was gifted a bar of ‘fancy soap’ that looked similar to yours with larger blocks of solid color, but the different colors all seemed to dissolve at slightly different rates and didn’t adhere together well. Within 2 showers it had fallen apart. How do you prevent that when making soap?

Okay here’s the primer.

Think of email. Email is based on a protocol called SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). Anyone can run their own SMTP server and thus participate in the wider world of email. Or you can use somebody else’s server- companies like Google (gmail) and Microsoft (outlook.com) and others run public email servers you can make your home on.

If you want to make your own SMTP server you don’t need anyone else’s permission to do it. Your domain name (@whatever.com) tells other servers how to connect to your server. That concept is called federation- that the email servers can talk to each other.

In contrast to that, you have something like Reddit. Reddit is a monolithic system- only Reddit Inc runs the servers. You can’t host your own Reddit server and if you could there’s no way to link it with the rest of Reddit. Same with other platforms like Facebook, Twitter/X, etc. Discord too- they call their instances ‘servers’ but in reality it’s all ran by them, you can’t host your own Discord server on your own hardware.

With that in mind, a lot of smart people looked at this and saw a problem- with monolithic systems, the entire community is essentially hostage to the whims of the host company. So if Facebook decides to sell all your data or start charging, there’s not much you can do short of leaving and then you can’t participate in Facebook anymore. OTOH, if your email host decides to get shitty, you can just move to another email host. So it is understood among many tech people that while federated systems are harder to build and maintain, they are more beneficial for the public because they avoid any single points of control.

Thus, you have Lemmy. Lemmy operates like Reddit in terms of functionality, but it operates like email. You’ll notice that every user has a domain name after their username-- like you’re @TheArtfulLlama**@lemmy.zip**. Lemmy.zip is the ‘instance’ (aka server) you happened to register on. You can choose any of them or make your own. As you can see I’m @SirEDCaLot**@lemmy.today**-- lemmy.today is the instance I registered on. I could register @siredcalot@lemmy.zip and that would be totally different than @siredcalot@lemmy.today, much in the same way that the email address DaveJones@outlook.com isn’t the same as DaveJones@gmail.com.

On the back end, each server hosts communities (aka subreddits) created by its users, and makes those communities available to all others on other servers. You posted this to the community !imadethis@lemmy.zip (that’s a community, note the ! rather than @ for the username tag). So lemmy.zip server is hosting this comment thread. When I reply here, I’ve got lemmy.today open in my browser and I see this post. So when I hit reply, my instance will send my reply to your instance. And thus it all works :)

On Lemmy, different instances have different rules and policies. For example some openly permit posting pornography and gore, others require trigger warnings on potentially triggering words. So if you’re going to create a Lemmy community, make sure it fits within the rules of your home instance. Your home instance policies DON’T apply to what you visit through them-- for example if lemmy.zip disallows porn, that doesn’t stop you from going to to a porn community on another instance.

Hope that helps!

Wait, you are making your own soap? Like in your house? I am very curious how this is done. Does it need special machinery?

Agree 100%.

It’s the same thing with undocumented immigrants in the USA. They are an easily exploited underclass, they required no rights because if there’s conflict you just report them to ICE and away they go. As such they will work in awful conditions for shit pay.

Maybe the solution is to enforce the immigration regs and penalize employers who hire undocumented people. Maybe the solution is to relax the immigration regs and encourage undocumented workers to stand up for themselves. I think the former is more likely because you’re not pushing through a cultural barrier.

Not surprising.

Let me guess- ‘temporary’ gets renewed every year for decades, right?

So three issues.

An ICE drivetrain is a certain size and shape- you have a big lump of engine under the hood, a fat cigar of a transmission under the center of the car, a gas tank in the back, etc.
An EV drivetrain has a VERY DIFFERENT size and shape- the entire battery and drive system is essentially a skateboard on top of which you can build the rest of the car.

So you can’t just take an ICE car and swap out the ICE for batteries and motor. The whole car needs a redesign. And if you’re making the car for modern, tech-savvy buyers, why would you make a boring old low-tech car?

Second- EVERY car is turning into a rolling datacenter like a smartphone. Try to buy a base model car with no screen and manual windows or whatever- it doesn’t exist anymore in many brands. Automakers go for the high profit items, and that’s NOT the base models.

Third- a lot of the tech is now mandatory. Backup cameras, and soon driver attention monitoring among other things.

Sad thing is- I think there’s a demand for it, if the price is right. If getting rid of most of the tech dropped $10-20k off the sticker price I think whoever tried it would sell millions. I’m not sure you’re allowed to anymore though.