volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@lauren yeah, the solution isn't to try to make AI safe. That's an exercise in futility.

The solution is to let people know AI isn't safe, and to respond accordingly.

It's the exact same as accepting that Wikipedia will not be authoritative and therefore to treat it with skepticism. Exactly the same with AI.

Heck, it's like talking about making alcohol safe. Nope: it's toxic and altering. It is not safe and cannot be made safe. Therefore, treat it as an unsafe element.

@panos the problem is that the ActivityPub design and protocol doesn't really lend itself to chat.

The fundamental design is more like email, with messages queued in inboxes and outboxes as they're to be shuffled around instances in bursts as resources are available.

It's kind of just the wrong infrastructure to support chat.

@isAutonomous

@MisuseCase well no.

Government is specifically and actively set up such that nobody has such control, no such ability to decide such things unilaterally.

That's just not how government operates, fundamentally.

@kvaks the answer is because so many analyses like these kind of miss the cause and effect of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin doesn't require anywhere near that much electricity. You could run Bitcoin entirely on a car battery and a solar cell if you wanted.

But people decided for themselves that Bitcoin was so valuable that they'd bid up the price, exchanging more energy for BTC because it was simply worth that much to them.

Bitcoin hasn't collapsed by being economically unsustainable because those economic actors have found it to be economically worth those costs.

@digiconomist

@PeterLudemann I want to joke that Americans don't even understand how to set up a successful America, much less a successful public company :)

The half-joke is that Americans are so poorly informed about the US government and so poorly educated in matters of basic civics that setting up a successful public company becomes an advanced topic far out of reach of large swaths of the population.

One of the things I have to wryly laugh at (or I'd cry) is he number of friends who every four years stop and ask, How do presidential elections work again?

So many Americans literally don't even know how the head of the executive branch is elected--if they even know there's an executive branch at all--that it's completely unsurprising that they wouldn't know how to set up a successful public company.

But that's just the state of the US these days.
@lauren

@marynelson8 the article was unfortunately silent on where this income came from.

@lauren ::shrug:: it is governments' roles to provide public service as best the leaders that we empower see to do that.

If they seek to provide public service by outsourcing to corporations, then that's still a government decision. If it's bad government policy, then for goodness sake let's stop reelecting the same clowns making those decisions.

But we need to emphasize that it is their decision, because that way we can hold them accountable and maybe stop reelecting them.

That government looks to corporations to provide services doesn't mean it's not government looking and deciding and executing government policy.

@bedirthan you're referring to only one Bluesky installation and ignoring the rest of the system.

That's akin to talking as if Fediverse was only a single instance.

It's not an accurate description of the platform.

@darnell @fediversereport

@darnell it's still in early days... yes, it's moving surprisingly slowly, but for whatever reason Bluesky is still just beginning its implementation.

@bedirthan @fediversereport

@lauren well... right.

I have always though it foolish to rely on corporations for public service or look to them for moral leadership.

That a corporation is amoral is a feature, as the alternative opens us up to being caught behind someone else's sense of morality that can go REAL BAD for us.

If we would rather pay AT&T for crypto services than for telecom--if crypto was more valuable to us than phones--then goodness they SHOULD switch over, to better provide what we collectively want.

Safety, security, etc, is the role of government, not corporations.

@simon_brooke

The trade I'm referring to is person to person, my having something you need and you having something I need, so we exchange for mutual benefit.

I'm not referring to anything that requires anything society-wide.

And that's not even getting into, people do a ton of stuff that's outlawed.

Trade is inevitable. Even if you outlaw it, it will still happen. Heck, an authority probably has to engage in trade to enforce their law.

So, since trade is inevitable, the question becomes one of how to make it as least-bad as possible.

Money is part of making trade less resource intensive.

@Eceni

@Cymphoni_Fantastique

So the question is, what do we do about the people you describe as lost? Do you really believe they are so completely beyond redemption, and if so, what do we do with that conclusion?
@genoforprez @taylorlorenz

@TheGymNerd I didn't see it, but I imagine if you describe it as dark then it was too dark for the YA vibe they were promoting.

The selling point of that genre is to be superficial so there isn't any real depth or substance to distract from dumb teenage drama.

The lack of a good story is a sellingpoint to that genre. Otherwise a person would be distracted from emoting with the emo figures on the screen.

@simon_brooke

I generally agree that gifts come without overhead, but that's not what I was talking about.

People WILL trade, and that's what I was referring to.

Given that people will trade, because they will, the question becomes, do they do it in a more efficient way or a less efficient way?

Do they do it in a way that leaves them with more that they can later gift, or less, so they can't gift even when they want to?

Money makes trade more efficient. In a way, money helps enable generosity as people are left with more after they trade.

Because they WILL trade, whether money exists or not.

@Eceni

@OrionFed@mas.to at some point it becomes up to the voters to stop reelecting doofuses.

But on the other hand, keep in mind that constrained budgets also means less ability to hire that unqualified nephew.

Heck, it even gives excuses to the individuals involved: "Sorry, brother, I can't hire your son because the money just isn't in the budget for it."

But yeah, I'm happy to be realistic all day long. In the end, I'm quite frustrated with voters who vote for obviously corrupt officials who've already shown they can't do the job anyway.

@taylorlorenz calling it a witch hunt seems to misidentify the issue.

Generally, witch hunts wrap people up in searches for evils that are only imagined, not real. The problem is, in this case it sounds like they're intentionally going after people who say the wrong things.

In other words, the problem is that instead of this being tragic collateral damage, this is the stuff they're intentionally choosing to target.

It requires a different response.

@genoforprez honestly, everything I've been seeing for decades tells me that MAGA attitudes were a result of such disenfranchisement with the normal institutions of society.

Trump didn't create that. The distrust and bitterness was already there, and it created him.

This is a social trend that has gone unaddressed for too long, and we keep getting angry about the effect without addressing the cause.

... which all too often even feeds back into the cause, making the effects even worse, and repeat.

@taylorlorenz

@DrPen looks like it's been about six hours and I'm having the same not found error as @laurenshof