Oof, yeah, those vibes are rancid. The website is covered in shady looking links and they want you to download an exe, which you don’t need for a simple registry edit which can be done with a text file.

This link shows you how to make the .reg file: https://www.windowscentral.com/how-take-ownership-files-using-right-click-context-menu-windows-10

For my money that’s way easier than doing it manually through the registry editor yourself, and you can inspect the code to see what it’s doing.

If you want to see the manual steps to take ownership without the registry entry, it looks like this: https://www.windowscentral.com/how-take-ownership-files-and-folders-windows-10

If that isn’t a dark pattern then I don’t know what is. They do not want you to have control over your machine, at all.

The way I do it is I have a script that adds an entry in file explorer called “Take Ownership”. I don’t have to use it often but when I do it’s a life saver, and it doesn’t blanket take ownership of the whole disk.

Obviously an elevated super user like linux has would be much more secure, but it’s windows, they’re not interested in security if it isn’t about their share price.

I’m just perusing my old comments and came across this, 7 months later. This is an amazing article, thank you.

He proposed a moon cannon. The moon cannon was wrong, as wrong as thinking an LLM can have any fidelity whatsoever. That’s all that’s needed for my analogy to make the point I want to make. Whether rockets count as artillery or not really doesn’t change that.

Cannons are not rockets. LLMs are not thinking machines.

Being occasionally right like a stopped clock is not what “fidelity” means in this context. Fidelity implies some level of adherence to a model of the world, but the LLM simply has no model, so it has zero fidelity.

Interesting article, but you have to be aware of the flipside: “people said flight was impossible”, “people said the earth didn’t revolve around the sun”, “people said the internet was a fad, and now people think AI is a fad”.

It’s cherry-picking. They’re taking the relatively rare examples of transformative technology and projecting that level of impact and prestige onto their new favoured fad.

And here’s the thing, the “information superhighway” was a fad that also happened to be an important technology.

Also the rock argument vanishes the moment anyone arrives with actual reasoning that goes beyond the heuristic. So here’s some actual reasoning:

GenAI is interesting, but it has zero fidelity. Information without fidelity is just noise, so a system that can’t solve the fidelity problem can’t do information work. Information work requires fidelity.

And “fidelity” is just a fancy way of saying “truth”, or maybe “meaning”. Even as conscious beings we haven’t really cracked that issue, and I don’t think you can make a machine that understands meaning without creating AGI.

Saying we can solve the fidelity problem is like Jules Verne in 1867 saying we could get to the moon with a cannon because of “what progress artillery science has made during the last few years”. We’re just not there yet, and until we are, the cannon might have some uses, but it’s not space technology.

Interestingly, artillery science had its role in getting us to the moon, but that was because it gave us the rotating workpiece lathe for making smooth bore holes, which gave us efficient steam engines, which gave us the industrial revolution. Verne didn’t know it, but that critical development had already happened nearly a century prior. Cannons weren’t really a factor in space beyond that.

Edit: actually metallurgy and solid fuel propellants were crucial for space too, and cannons had a lot to do with that as well. This is all beside the point.

Most commercially produced media is slop. Porn isn’t special in that regard.

That doesn’t mean porn is somehow specially devoid of artistic merit. Done well it can be beautiful and meaningful.

You’ve got a stereotype in your head that was put there by a misogynistic culture, but that’s not inherent to the genre.

Right but there was still the need in the moment to get it made, and presumably the programmer could tell it was functioning when they were testing it, and if they were let go and the system was abandoned, that kind of proves that they were necessary to make the system work.

That’s different to having a job as a box ticker, where you write reports all day that don’t ever get read, and you know they don’t get read, and you’re paid to do it anyway.

I think a lot of those jobs could be replaced with AI without anybody noticing right away. Although losing that expertise probably will have long term effects. I’m not saying they’re useless, I’m saying they know as they work that it won’t be paid attention to. That’s what I meant.

You’re not wrong that there’s a lot of waste, but even if what you’re doing is inconsequential if done right, it still carries the potential to set everything on fire if you do it wrong.

Who was that? I said sex is about interpersonal connection. I didn’t learn that from porn, I learned it from sex.

I trusted the audience to understand that good porn or erotica in general should be about portraying that connection in some form, which is what is actually hot about sex, but maybe I gave you too much credit.

But hey, if sexuality to you is really that shallow, you’re free to pity me, because I put absolutely no stock in your opinion.

Of all the desk jobs, programmers are least likely to be doing bullshit jobs that it doesn’t matter if it’s done by a glorified random number generator.

Like I never heard a programmer bemoan that they do all this work and it just vanishes into a void where nobody interacts with it.

The main complaint is that if they make one tiny mistake suddenly everybody is angry and it’s your fault.

Some managers are going to have some rude awakenings.

I’d suggest that if you think AI porn is anywhere near the real thing, that’s probably because you think porn is already slop in the same way that these AI bros think of code or creative writing or whatever other information-based thing you already know AI can’t do well.

Porn isn’t slop, people aren’t just interestingly-shaped slabs of meat. Sex is fundamentally about interpersonal connection. It might be one of the things that LLMs and robots are the worst at.

You are not worth talking to.

People are being miseducated about what they can achieve by charlatans looking to make a quick buck before the hype bubble implodes, and the tech is helping cook the planet.

It’s not “fine”.

Which is also not a real use-case. Like, just check your work, you don’t need a tool for that.

Hell I don’t even use spell-check because it’s just distracting, and it’s a fundamentally wrong way to think about language.

I don’t remember those being particularly emphasised traits of his.

I’m not going to get a meaningful exchange with you, I can already tell. I think I made that pretty clear, as well as my reasons. Your reply is empty of anything but a very unsubtle attempt at emotional manipulation, so I’d say I’ve made the right call.

It’s not about force or having authority to define something, this is about being able to have a real conversation, and you left the main term undefined except in your own mind, and then when I asked you for it you gave an absolutely wild definition that makes no sense and which I can’t find anybody else using, and yet you still called it “the” definition and not “your” definition.

If nothing else that means you’re not someone it’s worth trying to talk to, because you’re not even trying to communicate effectively. I don’t care if you have your reasons, they’re not good reasons but I feel like in the spirit of this conversation I just shouldn’t fucking bother to explain why, because based on precedent you’ll just insist I’m wrong for your own inscrutable reasons and carry on as you were, and if I try to wrest those reasons out of you they’ll be nonsensical. Also you’re not worth trying to convince because you’re not somebody anyone else will listen to for long before they realise you’re completely full of shit.

Goodbye.

That definition of authority is so immediately, obviously wrong that I don’t even know where to start dealing with it.

It’s so uselessly broad. I literally said at the start that authority isn’t just any inqeuality, and you didn’t address it. You should have if you thought that was wrong, because that’s literally the definition of the thing that we’re talking about.

I would like to see you justify this incrsdibly broad definition. If you want to see my justification for my definition, I would invite you to look it up in any dictionary.

I need you to define the word “authority” in that case. I’ve given my definition, so what is yours and how does it differ, please? Because I already addressed the fact that an imbalance doesn’t create a hierarchy, and your description of imbalance does not fit my definition of authority.

Power imbalance doesn’t automatically create the conditions for domination. For that you would need both expertise and monopoly.

And the solution to a misunderstanding isn’t to concede the definition of the word “state” but to educate. The state is any entity that has a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence in a region. That applies regardless of the system of government that rules it.

Your definition isn’t a definition, it’s just a collection of categories that gives no useful information.

We don’t need to be dominated in order to clean up our garbage. And the state is often really bad at collecting garbage, so just teach people that.

I honestly hate the concept of “bootmaker authority”, because it’s exactly the same wrong conflation that Engels makes. Not every inequality is a form of authority. Expertise is not authority, it is expertise.

Authority is the socially-recognised power to dominate. Getting a bootmaker to advise on or perform bootmaking tasks is not domination. The bootmaker can’t hold you at gunpoint and command you to wear a certain kind of boot, nobody would allow that. There aren’t bootmaking cops.

Like what exactly does the bootmaker’s “authority” entail in this theory? Giving consent does not confer authority. Authority operates regardless of consent, that’s what makes it bad.