I’m sorry that this is the case. You deserve someone who loves and respects you enough to put in the work to understand what makes you feel loved and appreciated.

People like you help to make the internet a better place — which matters a lot to me, because one of my most desperately held beliefs is that it is possible to take the hopefulness of the early internet and combine it with the wisdom of the last few decades to produce a more robust kind of hope

Cory Doctorow actually goes more in depth on the radiologist example in a post from last year:

'If my Kaiser hospital bought some AI radiology tools and told its radiologists: “Hey folks, here’s the deal. Today, you’re processing about 100 x-rays per day. From now on, we’re going to get an instantaneous second opinion from the AI, and if the AI thinks you’ve missed a tumor, we want you to go back and have another look, even if that means you’re only processing 98 x-rays per day. That’s fine, we just care about finding all those tumors.”

If that’s what they said, I’d be delighted. But no one is investing hundreds of billions in AI companies because they think AI will make radiology more expensive, not even if that also makes radiology more accurate. The market’s bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: "Look, you fire 9/10s of your radiologists, saving $20m/year, you give us $10m/year, and you net $10m/year, and the remaining radiologists’ job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed, and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it’s catastrophically wrong.

“And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist’s fault, because they are the ‘human in the loop.’ It’s their signature on the diagnosis.”

This is a reverse centaur, and it’s a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it’s what Dan Davies calls an “accountability sink.” The radiologist’s job isn’t really to oversee the AI’s work, it’s to take the blame for the AI’s mistakes.’

In short, we definitely could (and indeed should) be using tools like tumor detecting machine vision as something that helps humans build a better world for humans. But we’ve seen time and time again, across countless fields that it never works out that way.

That’s because this isn’t a problem with the technology of AI, but the fucked up sociotechnical and economic systems that govern how this tech is used, who gets to use it, who it gets used on, whose consent is required for those uses and most significant of all: who gets to profit?

!Not us, that’s for sure!<

I like wearable fidget toys. I have an enamel pin of centrifuge tubes, which actually spins^[1]

I also have a couple of cool interactive pins from AtelierEumori (currently on break). I have this social battery pin and this TTRPG dice pin

There’s a couple of rings that I have long been coveting, such as this one, this one, or this one^[2]. I don’t own any of these, because they’re super expensive, but they’ve inspired me to learn how to make stuff like this — I’ve been learning how to use a jeweller’s lathe.

I like wearable stuff because otherwise I will forget them or lose then. I do have some begleri, which are as much as a skill toy as a fidget toy. This aspect of skill is why I like them — I like the feeling of practicing stuff. For this reason, a standard deck of cards is also something I like to fiddle with. Unfortunately, I tend to forget to take them with me, so I’m not actually very good at this stuff.

[1]: From dorbitalgames, but out of stock

Most of my understanding of the horrors of white phosphorus comes from the game Spec Ops: The Line, a game that initially presents itself as a generic FPS in which you’re a valiant hero, but later forces you to confront the effects of the war crimes you commit in the game.

That’s what’s going through my head right now when reading this. White phosphorus is an abhorrent munition to use, even if there were no civilians in the blast area.

Marmite is really good for this. Some of the other go-to “umami bomb” condiments aren’t vegetarian, but Marmite works well for vegetarians

I’ve found that I actually seem to use more em-dashes since they became understood to be associated with AI — it’s a defiance thing. I mostly type on my phone, and to type an em dash, I just need to long press on the dash.

I didn’t know that about Framework HiDPI displays

I agree, but like others have said, it bodes well that they’re open about this in the article

Thanks for sharing that talk, it’s pretty good.

I always find his talks interesting, because it often feels like it’s the same core talk each time, but changed through iterative refining of his ideas and rhetoric due to how often he gets the chance to talk about these issues.

Even though I’ve seen many of his talks before, I am surprised at how skillfully he is able to weave in new angles and themes. I mean, he has been doing this stuff for literal decades, but still, it’s impressive.

For his sake, I really hope he did do it. I mean, being imprisoned as he is would suck regardless, but it would suck extra hard if he didn’t do it

I’ve never been in a scenario where there was an emergency situation where I was on hand when someone needed to urgently take action to avoid a dire outcome, but I can only hope that I would have the courage that this guy had. Mad respect

“Most of us have been in your shoes, with the same amount of fear, confusion and helpless feelings. So…uh…welcome to our little club. We get together sometimes and hang out (mostly virtually, admittedly).”

This exactly. I felt such an overwhelming sense of solidarity when reading this post because I have been in this position so many times before. Hell, I still occasionally get like this — although I am way more confident in solving most of my technical problems nowadays, that additional knowledge just makes it all the more frustrating when I run into something that makes me feel confused and overwhelmed.

I’m not going to give you any technical advice because there’s already a lot of suggestions already. I just wanted to leave a comment in solidarity.

I am the techiest person in my fairly techy group of friends, and even I often end up making silly mistakes that mess up my system sometimes. It’s easy to get overwhelmed, especially when there seems to be solutions to my problems that I’m not able to understand.

Trust me when I say that you’re not stupid for not getting this. This shit is difficult. I have been in your position so so many times before — right down to the despair making me feel suicidal. It’s hard when you desperately need to fix a thing, but the more you throw yourself at the problem, the harder it gets. Take as much of a break as you need to, and come back to some of the answers that sound promising, but you’re struggling to understand, and ask questions. You’re not dumb for not understanding — you’re new at this, and that’s okay.

I can’t speak for other people in this thread, but I know that when I’m giving technical advice to people, it often feels like I’m getting practice at communicating things in an accessible way. I want more people to be able to participate in this hobby that I enjoy, but I’ve been steeping in this environment for so long that sometimes, the advice that I give is overly dense, or it assumes knowledge that the person needing help doesn’t have. That’s an unfortunate mistake to make, because it makes the person reading my reply feel stupid, and that’s the last thing I want. I’ve found that giving technical advice online is often a mutual learning process — the person I’m helping is learning the tech stuff, and I’m learning how to communicate better. If you revisit some of the comments in this thread, bear that in mind — it’s not all on you.

On the topic of wishing you were stronger, I can relate to that — like I said, I’m pretty prone to getting myself into a spiral of shame when I don’t understand a thing and everything I do keeps getting worse. For what it’s worth, I think that asking for help as you have done here is something that requires a lot of strength; it’s hard to be vulnerable when you feel like you’re messing things up. It also takes strength to recognise that you’re getting overwhelmed enough that you need to take a step away. It’s valid to want to be stronger than you are now, but I hope you’re able to recognise your small achievements.

Finally, a small bit of practical advice that I’d give is that if you’re entering terminal commands or changing settings to try fix this, it’s super useful to make a note of what you’re doing. Sometimes when I have a complex problem and I try one potential solution that doesn’t end up working, the changes made in that solution can conflict with steps involved in attempting a second solution. It can make it easier to keep track of what you’ve tried so far, especially if you have to undo stuff later. It’s okay if you haven’t done this so far, but it can help going forward. I find that when I’m panicking and desperate for a solution, that makes me more likely to just attempt basically everything, and those are the times when keeping track of what I’ve done is especially important.

Don’t feel guilty for asking for help, or for needing clarifications. We’re all here of our own free will. Many of us have been in your position before, and only got to the point where we are now because of the patient help of kind online nerds. That’s a big part of why I try to chip in when I find someone with a problem I can help with — it feels like giving back to the community that helped me to learn back when I was new to this.

I know it doesn’t feel like it, but you’re doing well. Keep trying, and I promise things will get easier. Don’t beat yourself up for needing to take breaks, or for feeling overwhelmed. How you’re feeling right now is within the range of what’s normal for new people running into a difficult technical problem like this. You’re not stupid, this stuff is just hard.

Piggybacking off this to add more lightbulb jokes.

The best joke I’ve ever heard was delivered by a German friend with an incredible deadpan delivery

How many Germans does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

!“One. We are a very efficient people”!<

Another one!

How many emos does it take to change a lightbulb?

!None. They all just sit in the dark crying.!<

(I should clarify that I find this one funny because when I first heard it, it very much applied to me. I felt mildly attacked, but not in a hurtful way)

Piggybacking off your comment to leave a pirate joke of my own.

“What’s a pirate’s favourite letter?”

(Ideally, the audience will reply “Arrr!” this this. It works best if you prime them for this by doing a bad pirate impression earlier in the conversation, or tell a joke such as “What’s a pirate’s favourite animal? An aardevark!”)

“You might think so, but a pirate’s true love be the C (sea)”

Bonus joke! What’s a pirate’s least favourite letter?

!Dear Sir or Madam, your IP address has been recorded downloading infringing copyrighted material on…!<

Movie dialogue tries to be verisimilitudinous, rather than realistic.

I’m mostly making this comment because “verisimilitudinous” is an excellent word that I love getting the opportunity to use.

The datasets they are trained on do in fact include CSAM. These datasets are so huge that it easily slips through the cracks. It’s usually removed whenever it’s found, but I don’t know how this actually affects the AI models that have already been trained on that data — to my knowledge, it’s not possible to selectively “untrain” models, and they would need to be retrained from scratch. Plus I occasionally see it crop up in the news about how new CSAM keeps being found in the training data.

It’s one of the many, many problems with generative AI

Thanks for sharing this. This bolstered my spirit.

I liked the bit where it discusses how, regardless of the effectiveness of whistles in deterring ICE, they have proven to be helpful in regular people feeling less alone.

The idea of copyright is to protect the financial rights of creatives, thus incentivising people to make more stuff, right?

Well even before AI, it wasn’t doing its job very well on that front. The only ones with the power and money to be able to leverage copyright to protect their rights are those who are already so powerful that they don’t need those protections — big music labels and the like. Individual creatives were already being fucked over by the system long before AI.

If you haven’t read the article, I’d encourage you to give it a try. Or perhaps this one, which goes into depth on the intrinsic tensions within copyright law.