On the bright side, once AI actually CAN answer things like this we’d have “Artificial Ethics”. A way to judge questions objectively or at least without emotional tempering for each specific case. This could solve some fundamental problems like “who watches the watchers” - we simply build the perfect watcher.

Of course we’re far away from that yet. And then we’d just ignore our perfect watcher anyway 🤣

I’ve recently read a comment saying the great Chinese firewall somehow “learns” that you are using a VPN. So people doing quick tests “yep VPN works” but then a little later it doesn’t work anymore. No clue if that is true though.

Chess pieces made out of stone. Stone is not recyclable or biodegradable or compostable. If you throw them in the landfill they will be there for millions of years. This is a pretty minor spill though.

But aren’t these key pairs generated per session and/or per contact? So once you switch to a more secure / auditable client this only matters when communicating with people on whatsapp. But they presumably have a backdoor in their app for the NSA anyway.

Even if you can just add to it, you could have some sort of journalism file system to replace or delete previous files in newer records.

I mean “federate” with whatsapp. Apparently there is a bridge https://github.com/tulir/whatsmeow

Yeah this is very stupid. But I never liked Signal anyway.

Is there a matrix protocol based app that is planning to “federate”?

Ghostery works too for me

Not sure what you mean, of course WhatsApp can disable it’s own encryption. That would be an argument for open source third party apps and interoperability.

And now… FARTS at DARTS

The velomobile (electric or manual) is the most efficient transport in energy per mile. You could easily design something like a self driving podbike, maybe a little bigger, weighing maybe 100kg.

And self driving also allows for new configurations, e.g. two seats that face each other because you don’t need a steering wheel. That means much more narrow and aerodynamic “micro cars” that could solve a lot of edge cases for people who can’t drive or not that long or fast (50kmh / 30mph). They might compete with a big bus.

Hmm 😇 The afterlife might be a good way to make it up. Have you seen “The Good Place”?

I agree somewhat with that but: only if the starting conditions were completely random. Otherwise if you set the conditions to be similar to what we know about humanity, you’d have to anticipate both cooperation and competition and parasitic behavior leading to wars and atrocities. And that also assumes that they actually have a chance to grow up for the suffering to have any meaning. If you just turn it off your science experiment at some point you have invalidated the argument.

Either way when you’re playing god you’d have to morally justify yourself. Imagine you create a universe that eventually becomes an eternal hell where trillions of sentient beings are tortured through something like “I have no mouth but I must scream”.

You’d look at things like the holocaust or million other atrocities and say “this is fine”. Also you can’t assume they’d die out naturally in 5 billion years, they might colonize other planets and go on and on and on until you pull the switch. They might have created beautiful art and things and preserved much of their history for future generation and then poof all gone. What if they would find out? Would you say “I created them, therefor I own them and can do with my toys as I please”. Really?

My main argument would be that it would be incredibly unethical. And any intelligent civilization powerful enough to create a simulation like this would be more likely than not to be ethical, and if it was this unethical it is unlikely to exist for long. Those would be two potential reasons why the “infinite regress” in simulation theory is unlikely.

The Starmaker is an interesting exploration into simulation theory.

I’ve seen this list https://join-lemmy.org/apps

But I only want browser apps, or local hosted / electron apps. I’d have easier options if I finally switched to linux of course. I wish there was a good review to compare all the options. I use the basic web app on slrpnk.net currently but I do miss a few things. For example:

• Way to selectively hide posts I’ve already seen (there is an option but it’s in settings and hard to toggle)
• A drop down menu for new inbox messages that can open in new tabs
• New messages should be smarter about when I’ve “read” them
• Collapse side bar without having to zoom to 170%
• Scale font and alter the theme
• Have images be the full width of the browser window without margins
• Merge multiple communities into one
• Endless scrolling

My dad was shocked to learn that the communists won

Even that is distorted - the Vietnamese people won under incredible hardship. Simple farmers, hundreds of thousands simply refused to bow to imperialist rule. They were helped, but they did the fighting.

But you can also argue that the US did “win” the war or at least their objectives. The objective was to stop the domino effect of socialism and they absolutely brutally devastated Vietnam for many decades. And that was their objective, to punish anyone who dares to redistribute wealth.

Hmm. It would definitely had helped if you could reply with emoticons like “lol” to classify jokes, not just with thumbs up.

Advances in AI could then also tweak the content sorting so that people are always kept in the optimal engagement mood. I mean they try to do that now.

Not sure what you’re trying to say either, but fascist speech using lies is fascist recruitment. That is why autonomous anti-fascism is right to disrupt fascist recruitment events in universities. Because the state or moderates care more about maintaining order. So you have to disrupt the recruiting by any means.

So if your argument is that “sunlight is the best disinfectant” then no, it definitely isn’t. There is historical evidence.

Ideally the AI can actually learn to differentiate unhinged vs reasonable posts. To learn if a post is progressive, libertarian or fascist. This could be used for evil of course, but it could also help stem the tide of bots or fascists brigading or Russia’s or China’s troll farms or all the special interests trying to promote their shit. Instead of tracing IPs you could have the AI actually learn how to identify networks of shitposters.

Obviously this could also be used to suppress legitimate dissenters. But the potential to use this for good on e.g. lemmy to add tags to posts and downrate them could be amazing.