“Thank you for your attention to this matter and not the other matter.”

I’d get a whole bunch of these and keep a different book on each one, so you could just pick it up and read it. But it’ll never work, it’s too much trouble to keep them all charged.

What would be great is if some of the major newspapers ran a headline like:

The redactions put it beyond reasonable doubt: ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ was ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ children on ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ island. The president is a ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ and everybody knows it.

What seems really off to me is that Firefox has one standout feature that people really love: extensions. You can customize your browser however you want. So it makes sense that if they wanted to integrate AI into their design that it should be done via extensions. They could produce a mozilla-approved pack of extensions which add whatever AI features they want to offer. That way any AI functionality is opt-in, and transparent in the sense that you have a specific feature set for each extension so you kind-of know what you’re buying into, rather than having a built-in set of opt-out features that are ill-defined and constantly changing. Such a radical and unnecessary change of their whole design philosophy seems very suspect to me.

At the least it would be nice if there were a swing in consumerism towards AI-free simple products that just do that one thing we bought them for. And are advertised as such. Somehow I doubt it though. Looking at Lemmy it looks like that’s what people want, but I fear that may be a small bubble in a big sea of idiocy.

I thought you were kidding but I just had to know lol. Like to make a case for Papyrus being racist you’d firstly have to say who it’s being racist towards, and it’s just a bit… vague… for that. Na’vi maybe?

OK I love that fonts stir up such strong feelings in people… but racist? How tf is papyrus racist?

That’s fine for Mad Max style extended chases where you want to board other vehicles, but in a head-on collision a wedge is going to win every time. Taller vehicles are just easier to flip.

We need to see more cars with a wedge shape, extremely tough body, and explosive flipping mechanism.

You sound like you consider all linguistic evolution to be a bad thing. I’m not saying there shouldn’t be opposition to change, indeed opposition helps to filter out pointless change, while worthwhile change will tend to overcome that opposition. So go ahead and be that opposition if you will, but it just seems like a limited perspective to me.

It reminds me of my English teachers at school who impressed upon me that it’s incorrect to use the pronouns “they/them” in a singular, non-gender-specific context. So you had to go with the traditional but sexist “he” or an awkwardly pseudo-random distribution of “he” and “she”, despite the fact that “they” was in common use colloquially. Perhaps my teachers’ fervent opposition was only fueled by the fact that it was a language problem which popular usage had already solved. They were fighting a valiant rearguard action against common sense, and I’m glad they lost.

Still, I think that what you often see in Europe is almost complete indifference to European identity, and there’s a huge amount of middle ground between that and the ludicrously excessive blind nationalism that you see in the USA. I personally think it would be a good thing if we embraced an identity as Europeans a little more. Being proud of European identity, and even waving a flag once in a while, isn’t a bad thing. Patriotism gives you something to fight for. A common identity is needed for people to achieve more collectively. The important thing is to not be blind or arrogant. You have to base that identity on reality, and work to make sure that identity stands for something good, rather than assuming it will automatically be so. Too much success and empire building causes rot to set in, but the EU is uniquely positioned to be a post-imperial entity. What comes after empire building is up to us.

So I can outnumber my enemies

I just don’t think this is a problem in the current stage of technological development. Modern AI is a cute little magic act, but humans (collectively) are very good at piercing the veil and then spreading around the discrepancies they’ve discovered.

In its current stage, no. But it’s come a long way in a short time, and I don’t think we’re so far from having machines that pass the Turing test 100%. But rather than being a proof of consciousness, all this really shows is that you can’t judge consciousness from the outside looking in. We know it’s a big illusion just because its entire development has been focused on building that illusion. When it says it feels something, or cares deeply about something, it’s saying that because that’s the kind of thing a human would say.

Because all the development has been focused on fakery rather than understanding and replicating consciousness, we’re close to the point where we can have a fake consciousness that would fool anyone. It’s a worrying prospect, and not just because I won’t become immortal by having a machine imitate my behaviour. There’s bad actors working to exploit this situation. Elon Musk’s attempts to turn Grok into his own personally controlled overseer of truth and narrative seem to backfire in the most comical ways, but that’s teething troubles, and in time this will turn into a very subtle and pervasive problem for humankind. The intrinsic fakeness of it is a concerning aspect. It’s like we’re getting a puppet show version of what AI could have been.

Well, that’s why we need clones with mind transfer, and to be unconscious during the process. When you wake up you won’t know whether you’re the original or the copy so why worry

People used to talk about the idea of uploading your consciousness to a computer to achieve immortality. But nowadays I don’t think anyone would trust it. You could tell me my consciousness was uploaded and show me a version of me that was indistinguishable from myself in every way, but I still wouldn’t believe it experiences or feels anything as I do, even though it claims to do so. Especially if it’s based on an LLM, since they are superficial imitations by design.

You know, maybe that’s not so bad, there would be real world links between users rather than the random collection of absolute strangers you get now. Oh wait no that’s just facebook again

Femicide is a type of murder. Not a different crime. Just a subset of the many possible motives there could be for murder. Unless there is some substantial difference in establishing guilt or sentencing, inventing a “new crime” of femicide doesn’t change anything. Culpability is an important factor in murder cases, that doesn’t change here. What I’m trying to argue is that this isn’t functional legislation, it’s empty virtue signalling, from a government that is actively reversing social progress and making matters worse for women.

OK, bye. Love you! _shit

Yes, I really don’t understand why killing a woman is not murder, partly because you have failed to make any case for it. It makes sense to frame such murders in the context of a hate crime, to ensure severe sentencing, but saying it’s a different crime from murder, but with the same sentence, makes no sense to me. The proposition that killing a woman is different from murder implies that women are somehow different from human beings, which is the kind of thinking that’s causing femicide to be a significant trend in the first place.

To pick up on something you said eariler:

Yes, the system also should and is focusing on education.

The Italian government is indeed focusing on education. They are actively working to oppose sexual and emotional education in schools, proposing a law to require explicit parental consent for such education, while banning it altogether in elementary school, thus ensuring it does not reach the children who need it the most. The new crime of “femicide” provides a token gesture which accomplishes nothing, while effective and easily available measures to reduce violence against women are being obstructed.

Infanticide law is generally used to reduce what might otherwise be a murder charge, to make allowance for the mental stress of recent childbirth. It typically carries a lesser sentence. So it has a purpose and an effect.

But that’s not the case with femicide. I’m not convinced that this law has any purpose other than making an empty gesture. Do you think anyone contemplating the killing of a woman is going to think twice because they might be tried for femicide instead of plain old murder? If not, it won’t prevent a single killing.