I was thinking about this a while back, once AI is able to analyze video, images and text and do so cheap & efficiently. It's game over for privacy, like completely. Right now massive corps have tons of data on us, but they can't really piece it together and understand everything. With powerful AI every aspect of your digital life can be understood. The potential here is insane, it can be used for so many different things good and bad. But I bet it will be used to sell more targeted goods and services.
What happens if it's a datamining third party bot? That can check your social media accounts, create an in-depth profile on you, every image, video, post you've made has been recorded and understood. It knows everything about you, every product you use, where you have been, what you like, what you hate, everything packaged and ready to be sold to an advertiser, or the government, etc.
Laws, and more specifically their penalties, are precisely for fixing incentives. It's just a matter of setting a penalty that outweighs the natural incentive you want to override. e.g., Is it more expensive to respect privacy, or pay the fine for not doing so? PII could, and should, be made radioactive by privacy regulations and their associated penalties.
It's not a complete fix but I'm sure a law with teeth can make a big difference. There's a big difference in being data mined by a big corp with the law on its side and a criminal organisation or their customers that has to cover their tracks to not get multi million dollar fines.
Is it true or more of a myth? Based on my online read, Europe has "think of the children" narrative as common if not more than other parts of the world. They tried hard to ban encryption in apps many times.[1]
Democratic governance is complicated. It’s never black and white and it’s perfectly possible for parts of the EU to be working to end encryption while another part works toward enhancing citizen privacy rights. Often they’re not even supported by the same politicians, but since it’s not a winners takes all sort of thing, it can all happen simultaneously and sometimes they can even come up with some “interesting” proposals that directly interfere with each other.
That being said there is a difference between the US and the EU in regards to how these things are approached. Where the US is more likely to let private companies destroy privacy while keeping public agencies leashed it’s the opposite in Europe. Truth be told, it’s not like the US initiatives are really working since agencies like the NSA seem to blatantly ignore all laws anyway, which cause some scandals here in Europe as well. In Denmark our Secret Police isn’t allowed to spy on us without warrants, but our changing governments has had different secret agreements with the US to let the US monitor our internet traffic. Which is sort of how it is, and the scandal isn’t so much that, it’s how our Secret Police is allowed to get information about Danish citizens from the NSA without warrants, letting our secret police spy on us by getting the data they aren’t allowed to gather themselves from the NSA who are allowed to gather it.
Anyway, it’s a complicated mess, and you have so many branches of the bureaucracy and so many NGOs pulling in different directions that you can’t say that the EU is pro or anti privacy the way you want to. Because it’s both of those things and many more at the same time.
I think the only thing the EU unanimously agrees on (sort of) is to limit private companies access to citizen privacy data. Especially non-EU organisations. Which is very hard to enforce because most of the used platforms and even software isn’t European.
I am fine with private company using my data for showing me better ads. They can't affect my life significantly.
I am not fine with government using the data to police me. Already in most countries, governments are putting people in jail because of things like hate speech where are the laws are really vague.
To me this sounds like an opinion that would be common in the US, mostly because of where the trust and fears seem to be (private companies versus government).
I think everybody (private companies, government, individuals) will try to influence and will affect your personal life. What I am worried about is who has the most efficient way to influence a lot the average person - because that entity can control on long term a lot more.
My impression is that in the European Union - due partially to a complex system - is harder for any particular actor to do much on its own (even the example with Denmark secret service asking NSA for data about citizens - I guess it is harder for them to do that rather than just get directly the data).
So what I am afraid is focused and efficient entities having the data, hence I am more afraid of private companies (which are focused and sometimes efficient) rather than governments.
Can we please argue on the thing being discussed rather than where it is common?
Are you saying influencing life through ads and putting me in jail have similar effect on me? If you combine all laws of my country I am pretty sure I would have broken few unintentionally. If government wants to just put me in jail they could retroactively find any of my past instance if they have the data. This is not some theoretical thing, but something the thing that happens with political dissidents all the time.
The "thing being discussed" is the efficacy of privacy laws. They work well, and the fact that you haven't been put on trial for your 'crimes' yet is tacit evidence.
In the real world, both corporations and governments are your enemy. You're mistakenly looking at it as a relativist comparison; the people influencing your life through advertising work with the people who put you in jail. They aggregate and sell data to Palantir which is used by dozens of well-meaning intelligence agencies to scrutinize their citizens. They threaten Apple and Google unless they turn over personally-identifying data and account details. Some of them even demand that corporate data is stored on state-owned servers.
So, what you actually want is to use the power of the "putting me in jail" people against your oppressors. If the law says that companies can't collect data unconditionally, then neither the corporation or the state can justly implicate you.
But everything is relativist. There is and can't be any absolute privacy. We need to find the biggest gain we can have in privacy with minimal impact to economy. And making laws for online ads is the worst in terms of ROI. It impacts economy and millions of people could work because of ads and it offers very low benefit.
> you haven't been put on trial for your 'crimes' yet
I know someone who has been put to trial.
> They aggregate and sell data to Palantir
See here we are going to speculative domain. If there are companies who I trust not to do that, it would be big tech not because they are good, but because they know the value of data and are the ones which can extract highest value. And in any case it would require breaking TOS as companies list out their partners. And if we are entering illegal, anyways laws won't help with this.
See this[1]. Most sampled countries have laws against hate speech. Certainly most of the ones western world care about. Also see [2] for examples of arrest.
Not Europe, just Von der Leyen and the like. Germany put her down multiple times on this bullshit now because it violates our constitution. But she tries again and again and again.
This + everything is about consent (cookie banner and all)
So if your job means you use a specific OS with a specific Office Suite in the cloud and that office suite in the cloud incorporate AI and you only get half the features available if you don't consent, you as an employee end up kind of forced to consent anyway, GPDR or not.
> I bet it will be used to sell more targeted goods and services.
Plenty of companies have been shoving all the unstructured data they have about you and your friends into a big neural net to predict which ad you're most likely to click for a decade now...
yes including images and video. It's been basically standard practice to take each piece of user data and turn it into an embedding vector, then combine all the vectors with some time/relevancy weighting or neural net, then use the resulting vector to predict user click through rates for ads. (which effectively determines which ad the user will see).
You nailed it on the head. People dismissing this because it isn't perfectly accurate are missing the point. For the purposes of analytics and surveillance, it doesn't need to be perfectly accurate as long as you have enough raw data to filter out the noise. The Four have already mastered the "collecting data" part, and nobody in North America with the power to rein in that situation seems interested in doing so (this isn't to say the GDPR is perfect, but at least Europe is trying).
It's depressing that the most extraordinary technologies of our age are used almost exclusively to make you buy shit.
would it be more or less depressing if it came out that in addition to trying to get you to buy stuff, it was being used to, either make you dumber to make you easier to control, or get you to study harder and be a better worker?
Perfect blend of nostalgia, aesthetics, gameplay, simplicity not to mention that id software releasing everything open source at the end has continued development and created a massive amount of third party content, mods, etc. The same applies to Doom, Duke Nukem and to a lesser extent a few other older fps games.
Ooh, thanks for mentioning that, I’m ready to re-visit!
I wonder if jungle1 and teamjungle are ported? Those were the first maps I made for any game (and I had no idea what I was doing).
I fondly remember a conversation with a random person in a bar, about a decade ago. Somehow, they brought AQ2 into the conversation, pointing to my creations as their favorite maps (without knowing I made them).
In my opinion, if consciousness turns out to be anti-material meaning after years and years we cannot replicate or find any model to explain it. Then we have to assume that it is contained outside of the "system" which could only mean that the world is built around consciousness and everything else is a dream or simulation.
However I don't actually believe this, just an idea. I think consciousness is probably much more simpler than we think, if you look at evolution it developed very quickly compared to other things.
I think for consciousness you need a sophisticated mental model of the world, but also a sophisticated mental model of other intentional agents and their mental processes. You need to be able to reason about the knowledge, beliefs and likely actions of others.
When this is generalised to enable modelling and reasoning about our own knowledge, beliefs and intentions, that’s consciousness. We literally become aware of ourselves in ways we can reason about.
I actually don’t think most living things, even animals, are conscious. Mammals and some other higher animals possibly.
Simple organisms have simple sense/response nervous systems. Their reactions are mostly automatic, but can learn basic patterns of stimuli.
> I think for consciousness you need a sophisticated mental model of the world, but also a sophisticated mental model of other intentional agents and their mental processes.
A random find[1] that I found interesting. Some quotes:
A growing set of experiments therefore appears to establish a key prediction of [Attention Schema Theory]: without consciousness of an item, attention on the item is still possible, but the control of attention with respect to that item almost entirely breaks down. The relationship is not “consciousness is attention”; instead, it is “consciousness is necessary for the control of attention.”
AST also predicts that people construct models of other people’s attention [...]. Ample evidence confirms that this is so.
Activity in at least some subregions of the [temporoparietal junction] has also been found in association with one’s own attention. Moreover, TPJ activity is associated with the interaction between attention and reported consciousness. A recent study argued that this activity is consistent with error correction of a predictive model of attention.
You could say the exact same thing about the "soul".
I just do not understand why we can't take the idea that consciousness doesn't exist seriously. The word practically has no meaning.
"We know consciousness exists because we are conscious" is as circular reasoning as it gets.
It is so strange to me that we can't even be bothered to explore if this question is the 21st century version of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
There has to be so many things that we currently believe to be true that are utter nonsense. When we believe something exists but we can't even define what the word means that is probably a good place to look for nonsense.
I think there's a legit line of inquiry in trying to develop a "top down" picture of reality rather than "bottom up". Eg instead of taking the physical laws and objects as fundamental and ourselves as something that can be constructed within it, what if we instead recognize that whatever argument you make is in fact made to convince myself and others, and therefore the existence of myself and other conscious entities is an irrefutable axiom of the argumentation based reasoning we use.
Given just conversational conscious entities and the words they pass around as the only a priori existent things, can we use these as tools to construct a picture of the familiar physical sort of reality. In other words, failing constructing consciousness from the bottom up, can we construct our picture of the physical from the top down?
I think it is possible to build up a rational case for an objective universe starting with just perception. Firstly if the only thing that exists is conscious awareness, where does the informational content of the world you perceive come from? It doesn't come from your awareness, because you are not aware of it until you perceive it. You can say it comes from the subconscious, but the subconscious is not part of your conscious awareness. It's external to it, in the same way that your hand is external to your conscious awareness. There has to be an origin for perceptions that is external to conscious awareness of those perceptions.
From there we observe that these perceptions are of a consistent and persistent form, so it’s rational to conclude that they have an origin in a consistent and persistent source. From there, and taking into account our ability to test our perceptions through action, we can build up knowledge about the world of our experiences.
As for trusting logic and rationality, does it give consistent and useful results? Test it and see if it continues to work reliably over time. If applying logic provides random, contradictory or unreliable results that’s a problem, but maybe you can correct that by modifying how you reason about things and trying again. That’s learning. So I think we do have the cognitive tools we need to build up a robust account of reality starting from base perception.
We didn’t start off human society and civilisation with scientific laws as our founding axioms. We inferred them from sense data, including the process of physically testing our ideas in the world.
It's such a cursed term that the thing some people mean by it does exist, like the ability to sense things around you, communicate on a human level, and have an operant short term memory of at least 5 minutes.
When I see someone use "consciousness", I'm assuming they mean something grander akin to a soul, like a special, immutable self that they feel like they possess, which I think is just embellishing an illusion the mind creates for itself. Some people do mean it that way, but some not.
It should be scrapped from our vocabulary since it just scrambles communication.
This is a fundamentally different situation, because it's very possible that consciousness is the only thing that we can or will ever experience directly. I agree that things like UFOs cannot be explained in that way, because those experiences are products of our sense-making, but consciousness is the act of sense-making itself which is hard to deny.
I don’t buy this at all. We have experiences. It’s the one brute fact we are sure of, but it’s enough to build from that a coherent materialist model of the world that is consistent and testable. Everything we think and know is built up from the foundation of our conscious experiences though.
I’m no solipsist, I’m a thoroughgoing materialist, but if we don’t accept the evidential nature of our conscious experiences as being real phenomena, we have nothing.
You could just reference the philosophical literature. Qualia is the technical term for sensations of color, sound, smell, taste, tactile sensations and any other bodily sensation. It's very strange for someone to talk about consciousness not existing. You don't experience color, sound or pain? What about inner dialog, imagination or dreams?
The soul has nothing to do with this in the modern philosophical debate.
Tend to agree. Consciousness is a social fact evidenced by it's plurality of grounding, single cultural origin, and memetic propagation. The idea itself is barely 500 years old. If it is a fundamental aspect of the human experience, why wouldn't it have origins stretching back to prehistory?
We have cultural artefacts of people reporting first person experiences going back as long as we have writing, and longer from oral traditions. These are in the form of narratives, poetry, songs, etc. What is the story of Narcissus about if not the immediate visceral stimulation of visual experience?
We can also infer it. I find it hard to see why cultures would produce representative art if they had no experience of seeing it. In a world without first person experience it’s hard for me to imagine what function representational art would have.
At the same time, we have philologists who agree that Descartes was the first to use "conscientia" in a way that doesn't match the historical use of conscientia and instead matches our use of the word "consciousness" and John Locke was the first to use of the word "consciousness" in the same way we use it today.
Additionally we can point to Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind as a theory that doesn't assume a historical consciousness (or at least in the same what).
So it seems like the argument is that consciousness didn’t exist because we didn’t have a word for it and the guy wrote a book and built a career with that as a premise.
Honestly, can I even be bothered? Oh, alright then, just for fun.
Yes I know I simplify above, but honestly not by all that much. There’s a history of the development of styles of literature. Sure. But that doesn’t mean the world, or people, changed because ways of describing or creating narratives about them changed.
At the root of this seems to be the idea that we can’t have a thing such a consciousness without the idea of the thing, and other examples given in evidence are baseball and money. This is flat out wrong.
Nobody sits down with a blank piece of paper and invents a new ball game from scratch. All the ball games we have were developed by playing with balls. You just have done this. A bunch of kids get together and start messing with a ball, they appropriate objects in their environment into the game such as sticks and posts and such, make up rules as they go. Over time things happen in the game they didn’t expect and they invent new rules to cover those circumstances. Eventually they have a great game they love, they give it a name and then free inventing the game they write down the rules.
It’s the same with money, it started off as tokens representing goods, then they established the lowest value object as the basic rate of exchange such as a chicken or a bag of grain, then they work out exchange rates between different tokens such as 5 chickens equals one sheep, then they mark the tokens with symbols, etc, etc. Eventually you get money. Nobody looked at a market and deduced you know what, we need to invent money. The concept emerges from the practice.
My wife has Aphantasia, which means she doesn’t subvocalise. She doesn’t hear an inner voice when she reads, and can’t imagine what that’s like. She also cannot imagine visual images, yet she reports the same first person experience the rest of us have. So the idea that language creates consciousness seems to fail right there. We also have reports from people that don’t learn language until late in childhood of first person conscious experience from before they learned language.
So I’m sorry, it’s bunk. There never was any actual evidence for it, the chain of reasoning inserts conclusions that don’t follow from its arguments, and there’s clear evidence that contradicts its assumptions.
There's also things that don't exist until people have words for them, where the very act of speaking it brings about its existence. It seems equally likely that consciousness wouldn't have been self-evident without someone being primed to perceive it as a category.
I’m my view I think the early emergence of consciousness says that it’s more complicated not less. My reasoning is that it must mean the framework for consciousness is embedded in the basic building blocks of life. If that’s the case then our understanding of how those basic building blocks work still has a long way to go. To make a physics analogy it’s like we have a good understanding of mechanics but haven’t yet learned what electromagnetism is.
That's cool, but I feel like .zip might get caught by spam protection so not the best choice for sending in discord/email/chat etc
Speaking of domain names, what is the best option for the cheapest possible domain tld (including renewal), maybe something you can even get for 10 years and save a ton? Also would be nice if it had free whois? Extension doesn't matter as this would be for personal use. Is it still xyz or ovh?
Check if your country has something similar:
> A natural person with the domicile in Latvia has the right to register one domain name under generic second-level domain .id.lv for free.
Last year, .stream was only $30 or $40 for a 10-year registration on Pork Bun. I have no idea if it's still an active price. They also sent me an e-mail about deeply-discounted domains, but I've hoarded enough domains I don't use and haven't looked at it. No clue if the prices are 1st year only or if you can buy a 10-year registration for the cheap price. Registars have a habit of giving a 95% off 1st year pricing and then charging $100 for renewal.
I've also heard .in is a good place for 10-year registrations (at another registrar I don't remember). However, .in domains do not have WHOIS privacy.
.tk and .ml. It doesn't get cheaper than free and .ml is a great typo squatting TLD for .nl which nobody seems to realise yet so a lot of domains are still available. Educational purposes only!!
I believe .tk and .ml are currently closed for registration after financial concerns and lawsuits about malicious domains. I'm working on a project that offers free subdomains under the condition that they are routed to private IP ranges. I believe this will reduce malicious use while still helping people use Let's Encrypt and other domain verified certificates.
A while back I noticed that .biz specifically has its own checkbox in the o365 spam controls. And sure enough I don't think I've ever done legitimate business on a .biz. I wonder what the heck happened to it.
The only .biz I've ever interacted with is Minimus.biz, and it looks like they've barely touched their site since 2006. Just the way I like it, honestly.
Sending a .biz link in an SMS will be blocked by Google, and the sender won't be informed the message was not sent. Cheap domains are cheap for spammers too.
Thanks for the suggestion, but I feel like the free domains are unreliable and have weird conditions. I also I think it's been said before some of the sites offering them are suspect: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27951785
I was just thinking for personal projects & game servers, would be nice to have a bunch of cheap domains one could use.
Well, $70 is a whole another deal, thats like a good time in a bar.. for 1 time.
Formatting prob sucks, on mobilr, sorry:
cheapestdomainame.xyz$1.99
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cheapestdomainame.lol$1.99
MULTI-YEAR SALE
cheapestdomainame.org$8.99
cheapestdomainame.me
The connection to the central registry is busy. Please try again later
cheapestdomainame.pro$3.85
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cheapestdomainame.one$14.99
cheapestdomainame.sucks$249.99
