Bold move to still consider them people.

We decide what the future is. Don’t let other people tell you what it is or what it has to be. Almost all of us agree this is not the future we want. Together, we will make sure it doesn’t happen. We are not as disempowered as they want us to believe we are. We still hold the vast majority of the power in the world, and we need to start acting like it and stop letting them boss us around. Resist.

If they use all the powers they have bought to punish your resistance, then unite against them and resist even harder. We’ll still win, as long as we don’t let them win.

a camera openly displayed, but off,

I know enough about technology and big tech companies to be completely unwilling to believe that any device claiming to be “off” or even just to have some feature “off” can be trusted not to be collecting data anyway, at least in certain situations. They have completely and utterly destroyed that trust, and are at this very moment still dancing gleefully on its corpse. It doesn’t really make any sense for them to act surprised when we refuse to believe a company like Meta will take anyone’s privacy seriously.

I don’t know how that’s a conspiracy. Like you suggest, it’s basically tautological, that’s what advertising/marketing IS by definition. Whether you think that’s a bad thing or not (I do in almost all of its current forms) is an entirely different question and a matter of opinion, and while I might be guilty of letting that opinion leak into my commentary I also don’t see a lot of facts we actually seem to disagree on, so I’m not really sure what else there is to discuss. I don’t think it would be productive to get into the weeds of why I think that’s such a bad thing, it’s not really relevant to the question that was asked. I just thought understanding the profit motives that make the advertising industry so lucrative would probably be pretty useful to appreciate why the industry is the way it is.

Because they are funded by literally almost every other industry and business on the planet, small and large. They have established themselves as the critical and inescapable middleman between consumers and providers, not necessarily directly or exclusively but in every practical way possible and in such subtle ways that it’s not always obvious how much they actually control. They are the gatekeepers of all commerce, they control the information of even knowing what businesses exist and what they do and are the only way of finding them and are often the only way of finding a price too. All commerce flows through them, and so they inevitably take their cut of all that business. Few other industries are as widespread through the rest of the economy as advertising is, and none are able to establish effective monopolies as easily as advertising has.

Oil comes close, but even oil is ultimately a commodity that can be take from or moved around from place to place for the right price. It doesn’t separate businesses from their consumers the way advertising does. A business or consumer can find a different source for oil – but they have to use information to do that. And the advertising industry controls most of the information.

It’s also a fantastic free web game: https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html It’s a bit of a slow beginning, but it goes pretty hardcore eventually.

RELEASE THE HYPNODRONES!

This is interesting, and I am happy to finally understand why “!” always messes up my carefully crafted commands, but for me personally, I’m long past the days when my productivity was ever keystroke-limited so they’re simply something I’m not ever going to be interested in saving.

I’m cognitive-load limited now, and saving a few keystrokes compared to “up arrow”, “home”, “other arrow keys” is not sufficient justification for the additional cognitive load imposed by parsing my brain through this CLI swiss-army-knife, at least for me. Don’t let me stop any of you from enjoying it, but my brain does not have sufficient spare processing capacity to handle this. Maybe it did when I was younger, I don’t know, but I know it’s not useful for how I work now. I spend a lot more time thinking than typing.

Have you tried stating your opinion one way or the other, since your questions clearly indicate you have some thoughts of your own on the matter, instead of sealioning people with “just asking questions”?

Yes. I am being honest. Datacenter builders and operators are not. Believe them at your peril. If I need to convince you, you’ve already lost.

Yeah that’s a red herring on purpose to distract you from the fact that these data centers are literally running on hundreds of 24/7/365 jet engines being used as generators. It’s so obscene I kind of wonder if a lot of this AI hype and the wars aren’t being driven by the oil industry to prop up their dying business model.

It is always possible. The point is that while open source software doesn’t solve this problem, it gives you a non-zero chance of someone detecting it and raising the alarm. Non-zero may be large or may be small, it is probably never 100% chance, but large non-zero is very good, and even small non-zero it is much better than the 0% detection chance that closed source offers.

They’re not real. They don’t have desires. They are programmed with massive amounts of data a human created and they mix that up with a random number generator to decide what to do. The output is just randomized selections from the program that the model is loaded with.

Maybe the humans who programmed it are really dumb and don’t know or understand what they programmed it to do, maybe those choices will be unpredictable and that might seem like intelligence to you but it’s not. Maybe they used another AI program to tell it what to do, which makes it feel even less connected to the human who created the data, maybe there are layers and layers of unpredictable AI programming controlling what it does. But it’s still just a program picking random choices. It doesn’t have motives, intentions, or thought. It is a program.

To answer your question directly: It would do whatever the AI model and random choices tell it to do. Probably random things mixed with megalomaniacal nonsense. But that’s not because it is any of those things or cares about any of those things, that’s just what the combination of your prompting and the model data led it to start doing. You can literally just delete the context (or sometimes not even do that), and tell it “stop being evil and give me a recipe for soup” and it will be like “Ok! Here’s your recipe:”

It’s not an AI superhero vigilante. It’s a nonsense generator. It will generate any nonsense you ask it to, that’s what it does. It can’t even actually do things other than generating text, it requires a harness to interpret the nonsense it spits out, then that harness controls an operating system and the operating system just does whatever the nonsense generator’s harness tells it to. That’s not superpowers. If it happens to be effective, it’s probably because there’s a pretty clever harness wrapped around it and a pretty good OS running its commands with some form of competency. But that’s not AI, that’s well-coded software written by humans doing the heavy lifting.

It’s like a room full of competent adults being ordered around by a 2-year-old. It may seem like the 2-year-old is an incredibly effective manager but they’re not actually the brains of the operation and they don’t really always get what they want, and if you put them in charge of anything significant you’re going to have a real bad time.

The only solution to having too many standards is always to add another new standard. /xkcd

That’s possible in some cases but pretty rare realistically. DLL mods are much more common. Windows (and most operating systems) have the concept of what they call dynamic link libraries (DLLs) which are basically modules of reusable code that a program (like a game) can use. Now these are not the same as game mods, but its their inherent modularity that makes them useful for game mods. It’s also a big part of what triggers anti-viruses, as this is also a very virus-like behavior.

The trick is, anyone can trivially look at any DLL and see what functions are in it, and you can easily trick the game into calling a different version of any DLL file you provide, and the game won’t realize there’s anything different about it, it’s just expecting the same function names to be there but it doesn’t know if they’ll do anything different than it expects (this is often how viruses work too). There are many common well-known DLLs like Unity or DirectX or SDL that a game will often be connected to and calling into constantly in a very deep and profound way and this provides a great starting point for a modder to gain access to the game logic. Once you have identified a DLL like this for a particular game, you can replace that with your own DLL that either has the same functions, or (more practically) simply stands in front of the real DLL and hands all the functions directly to the real DLL as soon as they are called while also providing a branching point where modding code can start to develop.

Once you have direct access into the code paths that the game is calling, you can run your own code instead of, or in addition to, the real code it is calling, and from there it’s pretty much open season for modding. Once you’re changing or replacing the running game code in any form, that’s a mod. And usually the first layer that gets built at the DLL level is not a mod itself but rather a mod loader that instead of making any significant changes on its own, it’s only job is to intercept as much of the game’s logic as it can, then load other mods/DLLs to activate each one and pass control to them when needed or requested. This way, you don’t need every individual modder to be able to figure out the exact places to do all this DLL interception which would almost certainly conflict with each other since everyone would do it in a slightly different way and in different places. Instead modders can just follow the documentation of the initial mod loader/framework and have access to everything in the game that the mod loader is already intercepting for them.

This is what’s involved in making a game moddable. Sometimes developers do this work themselves, designing these access points into the game itself and provide their own mod loader and modding API. Obviously this saves a lot of work on the part of the modding community, but either option leads to pretty much the same place. These are what we sometimes call “code mods” or “core mods”.

There are also games where some or most of the game logic and graphics functions are modularized into datafiles. In this case, you don’t even necessarily need code mods for many things, depending on how much has been modularized into data, and how easy to acess that data is (often defined in text, XML, json, or other easily modified formats). You can also have mods that are just “data mods” where no game code is even changed at all, only the data files like swapping a 3d Model for a different model, or changing a texture to look different, changing the stats of an enemy or a weapon, or even adding content and whole new levels or areas purely with game data, and completely reusing and building on top of the existing code without modifying it.

Code mods and data mods like this are by far the most common modes of modding games today, but which methods exactly depends on the game and what is most suitable for it. Memory-access mods like you’re describing are typically the most challenging to develop, the most fragile to maintain, and usually the hardest to detect, which makes them most suitable for cheating but rarely suitable for genuine modding. Trainers, cheat engines, aimbots, overlays and other automations often take advantage of memory access, and likewise tend to flag on anti-viruses and anti-cheats for obvious reasons. It’s definitely possible to use them for legitimate modding but it is uncommon.

Yes, that’s a big part of it. Unity-based games generally follow most if not all of the framework that Unity defines, and since Unity itself is very well understood mechanically, that makes it very easy to find the right places to inject mods directly in between the game itself and the Unity DLLs that the game calls to act as a middleman or even completely replace the functionality that one side or the other would otherwise be implementing, and with that you can either create a mod on your own, or create a reusable modding API/framework for other mods to connect to. It’s not quite as straightforward as modding a game that is intentionally designed to be moddable, but in general, it’s pretty trivial once the basic setup work has been done and it’s almost the same for almost any Unity-based game so it’s not hard work to repeat on new Unity-based games either.

That’s exactly right. We stopped holding people accountable, we normalized bad behavior as “that’s just how it is” and became comfortable with it always happening. Anger is a useful tool. It has a purpose. This is its purpose. Maybe it would’ve been good to become angry about all this earlier, but that water has already gone under the bridge and it’s not coming back. We are here now, and now is the right time to be angry about *gestures vaguely at everything*.

Sorry if I came across as pedantic, I was just trying to be clear about the main design obstacle it faces. Also I know edits don’t always come across properly across the Fediverse, but I tried to provide more practical advice in the second paragraph:

In general, the more expensive the appliance and the more significant of an installation it requires, the more likely people will go to more extensive lengths to repair it. From that point of view, a proper convection oven is likely to be more repairable than a small desktop air fryer. You can get an appliance technician to come to your house to replace the fan on your convection oven, not so much on an air fryer. And at the end of the day, they’re pretty close to the same thing. Just one is bigger and more repairable. You might need to adapt recipes a bit.

I don’t have a specific brand or model to recommend so I can only offer general advice, sorry if it’s unwelcome, I’m not trying to be unhelpful or rude.

I’m not sure a high temperature oven with a convection fan can truly be “buy it for life”, the fan is going to die eventually, it’s got a lifespan built in by physics. No form of maintenance-free lubrication or magnetic bearing is going to be able to survive such extreme temperatures for very long. As far as I know they’re usually built on sacrificial bearings. Without frequent replacement or maintenance it’s just not practical to keep the moving parts moving forever, and nobody wants to do regular oil changes on their oven or dig into its guts to replace a fan. Should we? Maybe. But I’m not sure if anyone is even attempting to cater to that market.

In general, the more expensive the appliance and the more significant of an installation it requires, the more likely people will go to more extensive lengths to repair it. From that point of view, a proper convection oven is likely to be more repairable than a small desktop air fryer. You can get an appliance technician to come to your house to replace the fan on your convection oven, not so much on an air fryer. And at the end of the day, they’re pretty close to the same thing. Just one is bigger and more repairable. You might need to adapt recipes a bit.

No screenshots, but I had an old server with a pair of mirrored 8GB Seagates hosting a particularly specialized service on a very beefy and regularly maintained UPS and it had a server uptime of 21 years (had not been rebooted since somewhere around 1999) when I finally decommissioned it about 5 years ago, both disks would’ve been the same. It was on the public internet the whole time too, running Debian Slink with kernel 2.0.36, which had been awkwardly patched and rebuilt somehow to make the service (itself already obsolete at that time) actually work. I don’t know why I remember all this, but I do.

I do remember monitoring the SMART status at various points and the drive bearings must’ve been pretty cooked because those two drives were always running at 50-60C and I had a big old box fan pointed at the thing with the side panel off.

This example is also why I don’t always buy into the cult of “you must always regularly update all software immediately all the time”. Old software is not always bad software, same with old hardware. Sometimes it’s genuinely possible to have a bulletproof system. The problem is you never really know you do, until it either enters survivorship bias or becomes catastrophically proven otherwise. But you can make educated guesses, and if you’re going to naively assume that your old software must have exploitable security holes it seems equally naive to me to assume that updates must never have exploitable security holes. I think the risk calculus has to be done on a case-by-case basis.

You certainly can but it really takes a special kind of user to be comfortable with it. Powershell is pretty alright, it’s powerful despite being pretty gnarly and awkward. It’s certainly not my preference, and I think most end-users would (and do) find it terrifying. Not that bash doesn’t have warts too. Powershell is a bit of an ugly duckling. It’s not nice to look at but I’m always a bit surprised at how comprehensive Powershell really is.

In my experience though, at least at my workplace, most serious command-line users go directly to Mac or Linux, or run WSL or Git-bash on Windows. Not many people except hardcore Microsoft sysadmins really prefer Powershell and I doubt many people at all prefer Cmd.exe, ugh.