In 1962 Phillip K Dick put out a book called “Man in the High Castle.” In it there was a scene that stuck out to me, and seems more and more relevant as this AI wave continues.

In it a man has two identical lighters. Each made in the same year by the same manufacturer. But one was priceless and one was worthless.

The priceless one was owned by Abraham Lincoln and was in his pocket on the night he was assassinated. He had a letter of certification as such, and could trace the ownership all the way back to that night.

And he takes them both and mixes them up and asks which is the one with value. If you can no longer discern the one with “historicity,” then where is it’s value?

And every time I see an article like this I can’t help but think about that. If I tell you about the life and hardship of an artist, and then present you two poems, one that he wrote and one that was spit out by an LLM, and you cannot determine which has the true hardship and emotion tied to it, then which has value? What if I killed the artist before he could reveal which one was the “true” poem? How do you know which is a powerful expression of the artist’s oppression, and which is worthless, randomly generated swill?

I loved FFSend. When it died, I ended up standing up a GOKAPI server, as it was the closest alternative I could find at the time: https://github.com/Forceu/Gokapi

Definitely not as nice as FFSend though. I may have to give that fork a try instead.

It doesn’t have to not hit pedestrians. It just has to hit less pedestrians than the average human driver.

That is what we’re debating, yes.

If it could be conclusively proven that a system like this has saved a child’s life, would that benefit outweigh the misuse?

If not, how many children’s lives would it need to save for it to outweigh the misuse?

Sure, maybe, but I’d also say you shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Yes, we should absolutely have better mental healthcare safety nets. Yes, false positives are probably a pretty common prank.

But this isn’t a zero sum game. This can work on tandem with a therapist/counsellor to try and identify someone before they shoot up a school and get them help. This might let the staff know a kid is struggling with suicidal ideation before they find the kid OD’d on moms sleeping pills.

In an ideal world would this be unnecessary? Absolutely. But we don’t live in that ideal world.

That argument could be expanded to any tool though.

People run people over with cars or drive drunk. Ban cars?

People use computers to distribute CP. Ban computers?

People use baseball bats to bludgeon people to death. Ban baseball?

The question of if a tool should be banned is driven by if its utility is outweighed by the negative externalities of use by bad actors.

The answer is wildly more nuanced than “if it can hurt someone it must be banned.”

You say “the last time this happened” as if this wasn’t a generalized trend across all schooling for the past decade or so.

Out of the tens of thousands of schools implementing systems like this, I’m not surprised that one had some letch who was spying on kids via webcam.

And I’m all for having increased forms of oversight and protection to prevent that kind of abuse.

But this argument is just as much of a “won’t someone think of the children” as the opposite. Just cause one school out of thousands did a bad thing, doesn’t mean the tech is worthless or bad.

This article feels pretty disingenuous to me.

It glosses over the fact that this is surveillance on computers that the school owns. This isn’t them spying on kids personal laptops or phones. This is them exercising reasonable and appropriate oversight of school equipment.

This is the same as complaining that my job puts a filter on my work computer that lets them know if I’m googling porn at work. You can cry big brother all you want, but I think most people are fine with the idea that the corporation I work for has a reasonable case for putting monitoring software on the computer they gave me.

The article also makes the point that, while the companies claim they’ve stopped many school shootings before they’ve happened, you can’t prove they would have happened without intervention.

And sure. That’s technically true. But the article then goes on to treat that assertion as if it’s proof that the product is worthless and has never prevented a school shooting, and that’s just bad logic.

It’s like saying that your alarm clock has woken you up 100 days in a row, and then being like, “well, there’s no proof that you wouldn’t have woken up on time anyway, even if the alarm wasn’t there.” Yeah, sure. You can’t prove a negative. Maybe I would usually wake up without it. I’ve got a pretty good sleep schedule after all. But the idea that all 100 are false positives seems a little asinine, no? We don’t think it was effective even once?

Lack of good examples of countries that are successful without being capitalist?

Pretty ubiquitously non-capitalist countries have a pretty poor track record.

I often hear the phrase, capitalism is terrible, but it’s the least bad of the terrible options.

As an aside, I’m arguing here for capitalism, not billionaires. Supporting capitalism isn’t an endorsement of a complete lack of controls and safeguards.

Well, not every metric. I bet the computers generated them way faster, lol. :P

To be clear, harassment and defamation are crimes in the US as well. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean that you can harm people with your speech with impunity. It’s a prohibition on the government from meddling with political speech, especially that of people who are detractors of the government.

I think the issue is that, while a country is certainly allowed to write it’s own laws, the idea that it is deeply fundamentally immoral for the government to prevent someone from saying something (or compel them to say something) is very deeply baked into the American zeitgeist (of which I am a part.)

So in the same way that a country is perfectly within its sovereign rights to pass a law that women are property or minorities don’t have the right to vote, I can still say that it feels wrong of them to do so.

And I would also decry a country that kicks out a company that chooses to employ women or minorities in violation of such a law, even if that is technically their sovereign right to do so.

Printing Nazi propaganda isn’t illegal in the US.

And I realize this isn’t in the US, obviously. But I think that the idea that the government shouldn’t be able to ban people from saying things, or compel them to say things, is so baked into the American zeitgeist (of which I am a member), that it feels wrong in a fundamental moral sense when it happens.

It’s the old, “I don’t agree with anything that man says, but I’ll defend to the death his right to say it,” thing.

I can see both sides on this one I think?

Out of curiosity, would you feel differently about this if it had been a print newsletter or physical book publisher that was printing Nazi propaganda that got shutdown because they refused to stop printing Nazi propaganda?

If so, what’s the substantive difference? If not, are you affirming banning people from publishing books based on ideological grounds?

Obviously banning books is bad, but obviously Nazis are bad, and that’s a hard square to circle.

I think he was talking about some of the questionable representation of the tribal peoples in the film.

A few I’ve been big on lately:

The Meat and Dairy Network Podcast - A British humor surrealist comedy podcast about the inner workings of the meat and dairy industry.

The Horror Virgin - A guy who hates scary movies has two friends who make him watch them.

The League of Ultimate Questing - High production actual play DnD podcast. Very funny with some fun hooks.

Midway Games stock is gonna shoot through the roof selling all the extra copies to make this system work. :P

I don’t understand why you think that guy was conflating communism and socialism. He claimed communism is moneyless, and in your response you said “neither is moneyless.” What’s being conflated?

And it’s worth noting that most definitions include, if not expressly the word “moneyless,” clauses about all property being held in common. And if there is no property, then there is equally no money, by definition (as money is simply a system for the valuation and exchange of property).

Yeah, it can for sure. Definitely worth mentioning. Gotta watch what interface is set as the default router, or you’re bound to have a bad time. That said, the same is true with his originally proposed solution of pushing a trunk port to the VM, so it’s not any worse in that regard.

But yeah, full agreement on the correct solution. Keep it simple.

I wouldn’t let every VM have an interface into your management network, regardless of how you implement this. Your management network should be segregated with the ability to route to all the other VLANs with an appropriate firewall setup that only allows “related/established” connections back into it.

As for your services, having them on separate VLANs is fine, but it seems like you would benefit from having a reverse proxy to forward things to the appropriate VLAN, to reduce your management overhead.

But in general, having multiple interfaces per VM is fine. There shouldn’t be any performance hit or anything. But remember that if you have a compromised VM, it’ll be on any networks you give it an interface in, so minimizing that is key for security purposes. Ideally it would live in a VLAN that only has Internet access and/or direct access to your reverse proxy.