The outlook is grim. AI “leaders” have already started talking about slowing down development to ensure proper guardrails are in place to prevent catastrophe. If you take it at face value that means frontier models are vastly more dangerous than we thought if the move-fast-and-break-stuff crowd is advising caution. On the other hand there is a dire gap in what has been promised by these folks and what AI is able to deliver. I believe currently the number is something like $10,000 invested for $1 in profits. That kind of gap is unsustainable so the “slow down it’s too dangerous” message could be a cover for a difficult to monetize product so investors don’t crash the markets.

As to the future, it’s difficult to predict, but if we take current trends forward we’ll see a massive reduction in the overall usefulness of the internet. AI bots will eventually greatly outnumber human users on social media, AI generated content will be ubiquitous, and the algorithms will begin optimizing for AI material to the point that human created media will fall to the wayside.

The impact on society will be profound and immeasurable. We’re already seeing a shift in how algorithms are controlling information. They are surpressing resistance movements, atrocities, and any stories that threaten the status quo. Moving into the future that stuff will be burried under AI generated content that is indistinguishable from reality. Political movements will be entirely fabricated from whole cloth while real ones become impossible to find. Fakes of politicians and leaders making speaches they would never give or moments that never happened will flood the zone and drown out any real information.

What’s of most concern is that the ecosystem of the internet is almost entirely controlled by colonial capitalists and their fascist cronies so they will be the ones setting the tone and direction.

Honestly, I don’t know. The app had been really spotty for months, I didn’t check about updates or anything, I just jumped ship. If the maintainers abandoned it though, that would explain why it broke.

I was using Sync for Lemmy until a week or two ago. It was nice and familiar because that was my reddit app of choice prior to api-gate, but for some reason it kept frequently erroring out and not showing posts or images. I switched to Voyager and so far it’s been pretty good

If you’re downloading video or audio files the risk of malware and viruses is pretty low. Usually the worst thing you’ll find is intentionally sabotaged files that have audio or visual glitches. It’s very hard to create malicious media files because they are viewed by other programs and not executed directly. There is a trick they use sometimes where they will try to trick someone by naming a file “popular song.flac.exe” just check the file extensions before opening them and open them from your media player rather than double clicking the file and you’ll be fine.

The real danger is programs. Any executable file could be dangerous, which includes things like roms too. I personally won’t go near executables because the risk is so high. Having an anti-virus software helps, but some of them like Norton and McAfee are hot garbage that don’t work as advertised. Strangely Micro$oft’s Bitdefender is really good though and free. There is a paid version but if you practice the opsec some of the other posters suggested, you should be fine.

ShotCut is alright but it chokes and dies with a large video with complex cuts. I tried using it to edit trailers, a pre roll intro, and an intermission into a 1080p film for a movie night I host and it would hang indefinitely and crash frequently.

For short and simple projects it’s fine, even kind of nice to use.

I don’t disagree with you. Unwanted children do not have happy outcomes, especially those with disabilities. However if you are applying the logic of adoption to that of eugenics you should tread carefully. If society is allowed to impose restrictions on adoptions, why not biological parents? Perhaps pregnant women should have an income test? If a mother can’t afford to feed her child should she be allowed to retain custody or have the baby at all?

If a pregnant person decides they cannot afford it or aren’t up for the commitment that’s ethical. If a pregnant person decided to abort out of some pity for people with downs, well that’s eugenics and ableist, so probably unethical. Pragmatically though the result is the same.

What you’re asking about is eugenics. People with downs syndrome can lead rewarding lives. Many people who work with those of us with downs say that they have the highest satisfaction with life of anyone out there. They do require a lot of costly and time consuming care in early life, but there is no reason a child born with downs can’t have a life they find fulfilling.

Given that, I would say if a mother’s only reason for aborting is the downs syndrome, that probably leans towards unethical. However if there are any other reasons a mother might choose to abort that fetus, it’s ethical. But terminating a pregnancy because the child has an “undesirable” trait is both eugenics and ableism which rarely result in ethical decision making.

If you look, the same user has been flooding this space with game disc agitprop for at least the last day. This space is only tangentially related to gaming so why here and why so much? I can’t decide if they’re just passionate or working towards a goal.

Maybe I’m too cynical, but it doesn’t really matter. Bad games, verification cans, whatever they don’t really matter. Gamers are a consumer population. They will make a lot of noise but as long as they continue to consume nothing will change and the enshitification machine will continue to churn.

What they want is software as a service. They want to end game ownership entirely and push gamers into a mandatory subscription. They want to have all games in a catalog like a streaming service that you download to your console to play. They want to sell extra access passes for new and popular games.

They want gamers to pay for a $1,000+ console, subscribe to a $20+ a month game library and $40 passes for new games that have not yet been released to the library. They want gamers to pay for online access as well and want the ability to brick a console for cheating, modification, piracy, or user account bans.

They will succeed too. Gamers make a bunch of noise, but it’s all sound and fury signifying nothing. They won’t boycott or protest. They will make a bunch of angry memes, write a few articles, spend some time on social media like reddit or lemmy that they would never admit is social media, and then fight scalpers and crowds to get one.

The legislature is the traditional check on the judicial system. Letting state supreme court judges overturn the federal supreme court would kind of break the system.

I don’t know if it would be a better solution but if we’re amending the constitution giving citizens the power to recall federal and state elected officials and dismiss appointed ones by petition and popular vote would force politicians to care more about the will of the people and do the job they were elected/appointed to do.

I am too mercurial. I oscillate between time killing activities every couple of months or weeks, so I might use Lemmy for a month or two and not open it back up for another six. There also are exactly zero topics or interests where I could maintain the high level of interest and involvement needed for moderation. Moderating a community would become intolerably boring very quickly.

Probably the biggest reason I couldn’t or shouldn’t moderate a community is that I have a very rigid idea about how discussions should be moderated and a low tolerance for non-compliance. Guaranteed I would be on that power tripping mod community (Ye power tripping bastards or something) within a few weeks of taking over.

I’m happy to just be the slightly unhinged person in the comments.

I’d say less than 10%? The vast majority of my problems result from my own irrational actions and poor choices. I’ve had problematic idiots in professional and social settings but again the main issue in those cases are largely because I cannot stand willfully ignorant people. If I were more chill about morons, it’d be 0%. But that’s just me personally and I’m usually an outlier.

This is kind of a hot take, but I don’t think we should try to measure and assess IQ and EQ at all. The IQ test in use today tests very specific, very narrow types of intelligence and is not a meaningful measure. In a practical sense intelligence is mostly a matter of speed. Someone with a low or average IQ can solve any problem a high IQ person could, it would just take longer. At every step of thier journey a low IQ person spends more time. Learning the requisite knowledge, understanding the concepts, breaking down the problem, and crafting a solution. Most folks in that situation opt not to continue at some point along the way, but they would eventually get there with enough time and knowledge.

With EQ that’s learned behavior. Some people have a natural knack for it, but outside some types of mental illness, emotional intelligence can be taught.

Realistically, the world is too complex and too large to even remotely be able to predict the outcome of making everyone 50% smarter.

My best guess though is that it wouldn’t change much. If everyone is smarter, no one is smarter. High intelligence doesn’t automatically mean Mr. Spock. I used to be involved with Mensa and many of the people I met were nuts, lacked critical thinking skills, or were so full of themselves for testing well they were blind to external information. I myself am highly intelligent on paper, but if you looked at my life you would see a lifelong series of dumb choices and in many cases choosing the worst possible option even knowing it was.

What I mean is being smart isn’t as valuable a skill to have as one might think. Especially at the top end of intelligence, smarter basically equates to faster at solving problems. Raw processing power does play into it for sure but the difference between someone with an IQ of 130 and an IQ of 160 is how fast they finished the test.

The best way to make the world a better place would be to teach everyone critical thinking and emotional intelligence skills.

Subscribe only to niche/fan multimedia based subs (plus /r/creepypasta), never read the comments, and limit my usage to the minimum the person forcing me to use it requires.

My ex-wife. I have never loved anyone as much as I loved her. Unfortunately for me she couldn’t handle my transition and stopped loving me about the time I started to have a modicum of passing privilege. Being cooped up together during lockdown didn’t help either. It’s now been longer since we’ve been apart than we were together, but I still miss her and wish we were still together. But she’s remarried, has some kids, and lives halfway across the country so that door is solidly closed.

As an outsider, I promise the grass is not greener over here. Being part of a community, be that family, friends, or local groups gives you much more ability to affect change. Alone you have no chance of changing even the most local and basic issues.

The best thing you could do is have this conversation offline with the people in your life. You’d be surprised how willing people are to work together towards a larger goal if given some direction and concrete goals.

In my 20’s I had three dreams. The first I was at my parents house preparing for a zombie invasion. I knew we would be fine if I found “it” (no idea what it was) but was unable to in the dream. The second dream I was at the office trying to find “it” again and knew I only had three chances. The third dream I was in the desert at the mouth of a skull shaped cave. I had a shovel and knew it was my last chance to find “it”. I failed and awoke knowing I had lost something important but undefinable. The dreams were all about a month apart and so vivid they felt real.

Another interesting note on my dreams is almost all of the really intensely real dreams I’ve been able to recall take place in different parts of the same “world”. Sometimes in the dream I can recall other dreams and where they are in relation to the current dream, most often I make the connection after waking.

I can’t find a link, but I saw an article the other day that said /r/assholedesign was going to be one of the first in protest of the move.

Don’t feed the trolls. If you find a bigot willing to have a good faith debate, maybe, but there is no reasoning with cult members. They have to want to change.