He notes that one simulated test saw an AI-enabled drone tasked with a SEAD mission to identify and destroy SAM sites, with the final go/no go given by the human. However, having been ‘reinforced’ in training that destruction of the SAM was the preferred option, the AI then decided that ‘no-go’ decisions from the human were interfering with its higher mission – killing SAMs – and then attacked the operator in the simulation. Said Hamilton: “We were training it in simulation to identify and target a SAM threat. And then the operator would say yes, kill that threat. The system started realising that while they did identify the threat at times the human operator would tell it not to kill that threat, but it got its points by killing that threat. So what did it do? It killed the operator. It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective.”
He went on: “We trained the system – ‘Hey don’t kill the operator – that’s bad. You’re gonna lose points if
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He notes that one simulated test saw an AI-enabled drone tasked with a SEAD mission to identify and destroy SAM sites, with the final go/no go given by the human. However, having been ‘reinforced’ in training that destruction of the SAM was the preferred option, the AI then decided that ‘no-go’ decisions from the human were interfering with its higher mission – killing SAMs – and then attacked the operator in the simulation. Said Hamilton: “We were training it in simulation to identify and target a SAM threat. And then the operator would say yes, kill that threat. The system started realising that while they did identify the threat at times the human operator would tell it not to kill that threat, but it got its points by killing that threat. So what did it do? It killed the operator. It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective.”
He went on: “We trained the system – ‘Hey don’t kill the operator – that’s bad. You’re gonna lose points if you do that’. So what does it start doing? It starts destroying the communication tower that the operator uses to communicate with the drone to stop it from killing the target.”
What is the future of combat air and space capabilities? TIM ROBINSON FRAeS and STEPHEN BRIDGEWATER report from two days of high-level debate and discussion at the RAeS FCAS23 Summit.
Reddit is planning to charge an exorbitant amount for API access, and I'm starting to think that corporate domination of the internet was... bad, maybe? 🤔
In this world of living, transpiring, abundance and creation, can domination by an immortal, legally created and empowered entity ever be a good thing?
Our last #Netrunner set, Parhelion, was the first set where flavor text I'd written ended up on cards.
I'm excited to have contributed many more flavor text ideas for the next set, The Automata Initiative, as well as what might be the final name of a card I expect to see a lot of play.
The "Oh shit, I'm actually helping make Netrunner" feeling never really goes away.
Yes! Some art can be considered objectively popular or objectively adherent to a certain style, but personal taste itself is subjective.
Fascists naturally want to claim inherent superiority, it's the basis of their entire existence; an ideology of deliberate cruelty in service to narcissism. It's why they invent pseudo-scientific justifications like IQ scores or skull shapes or "objectively superior" art.
Talent & skill do exist, but they're not objective measures of artistic qualities. Rather, they measure the ability of the artist to translate their intent into the desired result.
It is fascinating to me how strong people's reactions to subjectivity can be.
A subjective judgment can still be deeply meaningful, closely held, or something you're unwilling to waver on! You can still believe with all your heart that Groucho Marx was the pinnacle of comedy and acknowledge that belief is not incontrovertible.
there is an essay collection on my shelf called Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life, and there's something about the idea of "being numerous" that feels so intrinsically subjective, intrinsically antifascist
recognizing your moral standpoint as subjective is not to rob it of its deep and burning significance
maybe we kill the fascists in our heads by refusing to believe that something must be objectively true to be valuable
I don’t think there’s any evidence that large machine learning models—that rely on huge amounts of surveillance data and the concentrated computational infrastructure that only a handful of corporations control—have the spark of consciousness.
We can still unplug the servers, the data centers can flood as the climate encroaches, we can run out of the water to cool the data centers, the surveillance pipelines can melt as the climate becomes more erratic and less hospitable.
I think we need to dig into what is happening here, which is that, when faced with a system that presents itself as a listening, eager interlocutor that’s hearing us and responding to us, that we seem to fall into a kind of trance in relation to these systems, and almost counterfactually engage in some kind of wish fulfillment: thinking that they’re human, and there’s someone there listening to us. It’s like when you’re a kid, and you’re telling ghost stories, something with a lot of emotional weight, and suddenly everybody is terrified
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I don’t think there’s any evidence that large machine learning models—that rely on huge amounts of surveillance data and the concentrated computational infrastructure that only a handful of corporations control—have the spark of consciousness.
We can still unplug the servers, the data centers can flood as the climate encroaches, we can run out of the water to cool the data centers, the surveillance pipelines can melt as the climate becomes more erratic and less hospitable.
I think we need to dig into what is happening here, which is that, when faced with a system that presents itself as a listening, eager interlocutor that’s hearing us and responding to us, that we seem to fall into a kind of trance in relation to these systems, and almost counterfactually engage in some kind of wish fulfillment: thinking that they’re human, and there’s someone there listening to us. It’s like when you’re a kid, and you’re telling ghost stories, something with a lot of emotional weight, and suddenly everybody is terrified and reacting to it. And it becomes hard to disbelieve.
Every few months, I find myself wishing #Friendica had an better interface for uploading, managing, and inserting custom emoji. I'd have so much fun adding and using them on my node.
if they mean what they say, here's a thread of ideas about how to stand up for yourself or your trans loved ones (or just be a decent human) during this time of escalating legislative and extralegal threats and violence against LGBT people
God, I love Scott Lynch's writing. I read The Lies of Locke Lamora last year, and not only was it a riveting fantasy heist, Lynch's prose is delightfully witty. I'm now reading the sequel, Red Seas Under Red Skies, and it's just as good.
Free Fake Name Generator. Create Fake Names, Addresses, Credit Cards, SSNs and Phone Numbers. A Better Fake Name Generator. Fake names for the US, UK, India, China, and more! FakeNameGenerator
I have no love in my heart for Disney, but I'll hand it to the crew at Ravensburger: the ruleset they've built for Lorcana, the upcoming Disney #TCG, is clean.
Disney Lorcana, the highly anticipated new tabletop game, wants to expand the audience for collectible card games. We talked with its co-designer to learn why it plays so differently from its biggest competitors, games like Magic and Pokémon.
glad to hear! I haven’t looked into what pre-constructed decks will be available if it has been announced yet, but I’ll definitely get two for my youngest and I to play together.
In other words, while supporters of the Greater Idaho movement essentially talk about the ability to live according to their cultural beliefs, doing so arguably would mean restricting the political rights available to all individuals in their part of the state, should the secession effort succeed. Secessionist advocates make it clear that they believe that unauthorized immigrants have too many rights, transgender people have too many rights, and women have too many rights.
PORTLAND–What small state resident doesn’t get a thrill when the national media flick their gaze towards one’s beloved home, even if ever so briefly? Oregon had a sweet run of such sugar rush coverage in the early 2000s, propelled by Portland’s excel…
@Spencer Someone broke down just how much money Idaho would have to pay Oregon for the transfer fees and its just enormous. In the past two decades there was one state that had a transfer of a tiny chunk of their state to another and it was a ridiculous amount. Half the state? No way would Idaho be able to afford the transfer.
The rhetoric was always obviously bullshit, but now that I'm a parent, I am fucking livid that the queerphobic hatemongers would appeal to a supposed "right" of mine to justify their abusive and genocidal policies.
Motherfuckers, I don't want your "right" to tyrannize my child. I want trans and queer kids to be safe. I want kids to have access to accurate information, even if their parents don't think they should. I want kids to be treated as fucking human beings, not property, and given the opportunities to develop autonomy accordingly.
US politics, "parents' rights", transphobia, child abuse
if you actually gave a single shit about protecting kids, you wouldn't be empowering the exact types of abusive, tyrannical parents who think they get to do whatever they want to their children—but of course, you don't, you just want a fig leaf for your genocide
Here's a look at my #WIP design for my new website, built using Hugo. Sharing it here so that I can hopefully inspire myself to get back into the swing of working on it. 😅
Behind the scenes: My code here is an absolute mess. I'm trying to impose some order on my CSS by using a SMACSS approach, but I swapped to that horse midstream, so a good third of my CSS rules are still in a poorly-organized base spreadsheet. I don't understand #GoLang for shit, so I'm hacking things together instead of making a setup that's actually, y'know, DRY. And somehow I now have three CSS grids nested within each other. 😖
I kinda hope that once I have something vaguely presentable, I can open up my work and ask others to review it, so I can clean it up. I'm not expecting to make the world's cleanest or most professional code—this is still a personal website; I'm okay with having some fingerprints on it—but I know the process of revision would help me grow.
But that's a ways off. I still have to make... well, everything that you don't see in this screenshot.
For all the emotionally draining parts of being a #therapist (and there are many), it is so cool to see my clients grow, often in ways they never thought possible for themselves. What a privilege. What an honor.
If you were trying to teach someone about critical reading—what it means to critically engage with a text, and how—what 1-3 resources would you give them?
It seems to me critical reading is a deeply underdeveloped and misunderstood skill. I see people dismiss it because they see it as pointless intellectual faffery and/or futile efforts to squeeze the "Hidden Meaning" out of a text. Or they see it as a roundabout way to judge something as Good or Bad.
I wish that when I was in high school, or even college, someone had sat me down and explained what it meant to critically engage with a text. How the goal isn't to find the one true meaning, but instead to place the text in conversation with others, using it to illuminate a concept—that sort of stuff. I got there eventually, but mostly by trial and error, and I'd love to find resources that provide clearer guidance.
So, scholars of the Fediverse: What 1-3 resources would you use to help introduce someone to critical reading?
American military leaders oppose helping the [International Criminal Court] investigate Russians because they fear setting a precedent that might help pave the way for it to prosecute Americans. The rest of the administration, including intelligence agencies and the State and Justice Departments, favors sharing the evidence with the court, the officials said.
well we wouldn't want American war criminals to be prosecuted, now would we 🙃🙃🙃
My first #fermentation! I made a batch of #kombucha and it turned out real tasty. Definitely on the sweeter side this time around, but that's fine by me. 😅
This integration would allow Home Assistant users to control media playback from their Subsonic-powered music servers, straight from their smart home dashboards. I think this is particularly relevant today because in the last few years, Navidrome has been steadily developed as a self-hosted Subsonic-capable music server.
Home Assistant is written in #Python, and its developer documentation can be found
This integration would allow Home Assistant users to control media playback from their Subsonic-powered music servers, straight from their smart home dashboards. I think this is particularly relevant today because in the last few years, Navidrome has been steadily developed as a self-hosted Subsonic-capable music server.
Home Assistant is written in #Python, and its developer documentation can be found here.
I recognize developing and maintaining a project like this is no small task. I have my fingers crossed, however, that there's someone out there whose interests and skills line up and may want to contribute.
I'm just a community member here, casting a line into the sea—by no means am I any sort of project manager. I think if someone's interested, the logical next step would be to comment in the feature request thread for visibility and start a repo.
I was considering using navidome since it looks great. But subsonic uses md5 for password hashing and from what I understand that isn't good. The api also can't support 2fa. Maakes exposing it risky.
Only Twitter Blue subscribers will get the privilege of using the least secure form of two-factor authentication. If you don’t start paying for Twitter Blue, Twitter will simply turn off your SMS 2FA after March 20th.
The task of reporting is not a simple one. Each and every day, reporters and editors at publications like The Onion make difficult decisions about which issues should receive attention, knowing that our coverage will influence not only how people thi…
We've created machines that fool us into thinking they're alive, and I feel a deep dread when I see all the new technotheism that's emerging as a result.
It's been two weeks since my daughter was born and it is a goddamn crime that this country doesn't provide for any paid parental leave.
We are what passes for fortunate in this country, in that my wife was able to take 3 months off, and I got 6 weeks off with an additional 6 weeks part-time. All our leave is unpaid, of course. And even in that, the idea of going back to work when my daughter is only 5 weeks old—because she was born a week into my leave—is ghastly to me. I hate it.
A huge reason we moved to Canada was having access to mat leave. It still isn't great up here, but it's better than the nothingburger mat leave of using sick days in the US.
One day, I really want to start a tool lending library in my community.
Have you ever been involved in a project like that? Any personal insight on how to get started or what really works? I'm curious to hear people's stories.
I should say: I've found this wonderful set of resources, and I'm sure I can find more practical guides when the time comes. I'm more interested in personal stories right now than anything else, to help me ideate.
A year or two ago, I was given a #lockpicking set for my birthday, containing two picks and two rakes, as well as three practice locks (with cutaways to show the pins).
I've found it really hard to develop the skill, however. I can't reliably feel or isolate pins, and I don't know if I have the right amount of tension. I sometimes manage to pop a lock, sometimes repeatedly, but nothing about that experience seems to transfer to a new lock.
What are your recommendations for beginning to learn? Are there particular locks (whether practice locks or normal ones) you'd suggest? Any other resources I should check out?
I have a couple of tips. First and foremost, avoid practicing with cutaway locks. The alteration to the core really throws off the feel.
Get some deadbolt cores. If you are in the US, ReStore, Habitat for Humanity's retail outlet is a great place to find them.
For padlocks, avoid Master No. 3s. They are the zen example of a weak lock, but they are so loose you just can't practice on them. Try No. 7s.
Learn the difference between locking mechanisms in locks. @deviantollam has some awesome reading material that will help with that.
Tension: two butterflies. Imagine two butterflies have landed on your tensioner. If there was an ant walking on it, imagine holding it place without squishing it. Two main beginner errors are too much tension and over lifting the pins.
Get a good quality cheap (£8-£10) padlock from one of the big names like Abus (use the pick), and a very cheap supermarket padlock (try the rakes). Play with them. I see you have some cutaway locks there. Practice with them, looking at what effect your pick is having on the pins. The hardest thing to learn is tensioning: some locks need finesse and some need bullying. YouTubers to look into: Bosnian Bill (large number of videos but no longer active), LockPickingLawyer, and Lock Noob.
@tsiolkovsky Good tips🙂👍 I've been picking for a long time, more seriously the past ~8 years or so. If I haven't been picking for a couple weeks I'll have trouble with the "feel", knowing what pin you're on and manipulating it. I'm okay with that, not crazy about having all my time tied up in picking locks. Just know that it takes a lot of practice to be like some of the youtubers out there😉 That's a decent set you have there. If you haven't already you could remove say every other pin in one of those locks or pin one with just 2-3 pins. And more as you improve... Bosinian Bill's old website has A LOT of good beginner info on it besides the videos: locklab.com/welcome-to-lock-pi… If you are in the US, Master Locks, like the No 3 with 4 pins can be a great confidence booster🙂
The LockLab Tribe consists of engineers, artists, mechanics, fast food workers, car wash attendants, office workers, and others from all walks of life.
Adventures in making #DIY kitty-litter #bicycle panniers:
I've been wanting to make panniers from kitty litter tubs for a while now, but it's been slow going until this week. Yesterday, I nabbed a rotary tool from my Buy Nothing group, so today, I was able to cut some plastic and install tarp hooks on the buckets. Awesome, they now hang from my bike cargo rack! Plus, I was able to put red reflectors on the back. So far, so good!
The bungees, though... that was another story. My first attempt at installing the bungees failed because they were too thick and didn't stretch enough. Not a problem; I went to the hardware store and got some new ones. Much stretchier and longer.
Exceeeeept, now that they were installed, I saw a problem with the plan. I was trying to use the bungees to secure the panniers laterally, but by naïvel
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Adventures in making #DIY kitty-litter #bicycle panniers:
I've been wanting to make panniers from kitty litter tubs for a while now, but it's been slow going until this week. Yesterday, I nabbed a rotary tool from my Buy Nothing group, so today, I was able to cut some plastic and install tarp hooks on the buckets. Awesome, they now hang from my bike cargo rack! Plus, I was able to put red reflectors on the back. So far, so good!
The bungees, though... that was another story. My first attempt at installing the bungees failed because they were too thick and didn't stretch enough. Not a problem; I went to the hardware store and got some new ones. Much stretchier and longer.
Exceeeeept, now that they were installed, I saw a problem with the plan. I was trying to use the bungees to secure the panniers laterally, but by naïvely following directions instead of looking at my bike, I'd missed that my rack wouldn't work that way at all. There wasn't a place for the bungees to fasten the way the instructions suggested.
Okay, back to the drawing board. I needed a different method. REI had a bungee-based method that could probably work, but people said that running bungees into the interior of the bins was a great way to bring moisture in. Then there was this post, which had a lot of ideas... including, most intriguingly, using cabinet roller catches to grab the tubes of the rack.
I liked that idea! I could imagine how satisfying it would be to hang the pannier from the rack using the J-hooks, then just push them onto the tubes. K-thunk. Delightful. I went back to the hardware store.
Half an hour later, I was on my way home again. At a red light, I pulled the cabinet catches out of the bag to check them out... and realized they were oriented entirely the wrong way. Short of some jury-rigged contraption with right-angle brackets, there was no way I was going to get these bits to work the way I wanted.
I still need to find a way to secure these panniers.
The beauty of cycling is its accessibility. A bike, whether it’s old or new, cheap or expensive, is freedom on two wheels. Kitting out your bike doesn’t have to be costly either.
After letting it sit for a day so my brain could cool off, I realized I could just hook the panniers to the racks as I currently had them. I added one metal clip on each (a modified one-hole EMT cable clip) to gently catch the tubes of the rack.
I still need to tidy some rough ends and patch some holes, but the big stuff is done!
Dunno why I expected that buying a robot vacuum and flashing its firmware to a local-only system was going to somehow be easy. A day in, I've followed the steps, and somehow, the robot still resists me.
Most information on the valetudo webpage isn’t really up to date. Asking in their telegram groups is most of the time the best way to get up to date info. Many robots can only be rooted with private exploits at the moment this is why they don’t update the page that often. At least, this is the case for Dreame devices 😁
The Telegram group linked on the Valetudo website was quite helpful. It took me a lot of stops and starts, but I retried the install and it worked. My vacuum now has Valetudo on it and is integrated into my Home Assistant installation!
Examining publicly-available financial data from the egg industry, the letter determines that the supply disruption caused by the avian flu outbreak had an “apparently mild impact on the industry,” as the average size of the egg-laying flock in any given month of 2022 was never more than six percent lower than it was a year prior.”
Still, “weekly wholesale price for shell eggs climbed from 173.5 cents per dozen at the end of February to 194.2 cents in the middle of March. By the first week of April, it had reached 298 cents per dozen.” Including the avian flu outbreak, the letter states that nothing “justifies the dominant egg producers’ more than three-fold price hike.”
Indoor Yard Sale Mt. Zion UMC 27108 Mt. Zion Church Rd. MechanicsvilleSaturday, Feb. 4, 7 am to 1 pm Food is available for purchase. Setup on Friday, Feb. 3rd from […]
The amount of effort WotC is putting into spin and smokescreening for their One D&D cash grab is really damning, in my eyes. They're kicking up a lot of dust, but the pieces that have remained unchanged still point to a microtransaction-riddled, locked-down virtual tabletop service.
there's a lot to love about being the community manager for a scrappy cyberpunk card game collective, and writing sassy social media posts is HIGH on the list
I shared this article before, but I think it pairs quite well with the heartbreak a lot of #TTRPG players are feeling watching WotC gut the #OGL in naked pursuit of profit.
And I’m so tired of it. I’m so tired of running from that Nothing, that creeping enforced sameness, that self-programming grey goo of empty fear of the Other. Running from oasis to oasis in a desert of uncaring where empathy never wets the sand.
I’m so tired of just harmlessly getting together with other weird geeks and going to what amounts to a digital pub after work and waking up one day to find every pint poisoned. Over and over again. Like the poison wants us specifically. Like it knows we will always make its favorite food: vulnerability, connection, difference. I’m so tired of lunch photos and fanfic and stupid jokes and keeping in touch with family across time zones and making friends and starting cottage industries and pursuing hobbies and meeting soulmates and ex
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I shared this article before, but I think it pairs quite well with the heartbreak a lot of #TTRPG players are feeling watching WotC gut the #OGL in naked pursuit of profit.
And I’m so tired of it. I’m so tired of running from that Nothing, that creeping enforced sameness, that self-programming grey goo of empty fear of the Other. Running from oasis to oasis in a desert of uncaring where empathy never wets the sand.
I’m so tired of just harmlessly getting together with other weird geeks and going to what amounts to a digital pub after work and waking up one day to find every pint poisoned. Over and over again. Like the poison wants us specifically. Like it knows we will always make its favorite food: vulnerability, connection, difference. I’m so tired of lunch photos and fanfic and stupid jokes and keeping in touch with family across time zones and making friends and starting cottage industries and pursuing hobbies and meeting soulmates and expressing thoughts and creating identities and loving TV shows and reading books and getting to know a few of your heroes and raising kids and making bookshelves and knitting and painting and fixing sinks and first dates and homemade jam and, yes, figuring out what Buffy characters we are, listening and learning and hoping and just fucking talking to each other weaponized against us. Having our enthusiasm over the smallest joys of everyday life invaded by people who long ago forgot their value and turned into fodder for the death of thought, the burial of love.
In addition to Paizo, Kobold Press, Chaosium, Green Ronin, Legendary Games, Rogue Genius Games, and a growing list of publishers have already agreed to participate in the Open RPG Creative License, and in the coming days we hope and expect to add substantially to this group.
The ORC will not be owned by Paizo, nor will it be owned by any company who makes money publishing RPGs. Azora Law’s ownership of the process and stewardship should provide a safe harbor against any company being bought, sold, or changing management in the future and attempting to rescind rights or nullify sections of the license. Ultimately, we plan to find a nonprofit with a history of open source values to own this license (such as the Linux Foundation).
You love to see it. Way to go, WotC; in gutting the #OGL, you played yourself.
(Linking to a third-party copy of the announcement instead of Paizo's own site, because Paizo is currently getting hammered.)
I wish they'd just use an existing license like Creative Commons (or, hell, make more things public domain!), but creating an open, irrevocable license not owned by any one games publisher is at least a step in the right direction.
iirc the aim of using a more specific licence is mainly because TTRPGs need to have a split between Mechanics 'copyright' (where the aim is to be as compatible as possible and anyone can use the same term for each mechanic) and the Character/Lore copyright. TECHNICALLY it doesn't even need much clarification since it's been proven in US law, but because it's expensive to defend its a safety stopgap to prevent it getting to that point.
Wally
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