Notices by Don Romano (alt) (thor@noagendasocial.com), page 12

@byllgrim Yeah, about that...

https://noagendasocial.com/@thor/102033377006146132

I guess I'm willing to work my ass off for the right thing. That's what you call passion. Can't say that any of the things I've done so far in my life have made me feel such passion, though. I can't recall a time when I've wanted anything so badly that I was willing to work hard for it over the course of many years. That's ultimately why I didn't go to college. I didn't want a degree badly enough.

I tried a new way of planning a route to a goal earlier today. I basically began with:

1. Where I am now.
2. Where I want to be.

Then I worked myself backwards from #2, inserting small steps leading to #1.

The idea is to bridge a large gap by bridging many small gaps.

Then a funny thing happened. I looked at the list and went "Boy, this sounds like a lot of work. Do I really want to do this?"

That, I suspect, is what it boils down to. Is my goal worth working my ass off for?

Shit, I need to start planning my weekends better. I'm not really using them for anything good, like self-improvement, exercise or social activities.

Best thing you can do to minimise the risk of that with the tools we have today is to opt out of search engine indexing in your Preferences. Also, decide if letting other people see who follows you and who you follow, because that's also possible to opt out of, and will give the crawlers less data to work with. Finally, you might want to consider if you should set the default privacy level to Followers Only. It might work better on a psychological level to explicitly mark Public posts as such.

Nothing about the Fediverse prevents the corporate overlord A.I. bots from crawling it and using the data to track us. It doesn't matter if you haven't explicitly revealed your identity. Throw sufficiently powerful analysis tools at an account's post history and you can fingerprint it. Now do that with another account on another site. If the fingerprint is similar, it's probably the same person.

The word "privacy" is beginning to feel like Orwellian double-speak.

An interesting implication of the fact that many A.I. utility functions are possible is that A.I. could potentially have "life goals" that don't exist in nature.

So far, our machines have been extensions of the human brain's reward system. That is: We want certain rewards, so we build machines that extend our bodies and help us get them.

But we could also have machines that are rewarded by entirely different things than us. Perhaps there are much better utility functions.

The concept of utility functions in A.I. is interesting on a philosophical level.

A utility function is basically a function that tells a machine learning algorithm if it's moving closer to or further away from a set point. It's the A.I. version of the brain's reward system.

Humans wouldn't want anything if it weren't for the reward system they are born with. The reward system is what makes us want things. The rest of the brain is just there to figure out how to get those rewards.

@blaha @Sviundt So you don't really want a complex system to have minimal documentation.

@blaha @Sviundt "The minimum required" often means "insufficient" for somebody else's specific use case.

@blaha @Sviundt It would depend on the system, but I was trying to suggest "insufficient" without sounding opinionated.

As an IT worker, how often do you get stuck if a complex system you're trying to troubleshoot is minimally documented?

[ ] Never
[ ] Rarely
[ ] Often
[ ] Constantly

@black6_ I have one with a big glass lid, and I basically "baked" the two remaining pork chops with the lid on.

@black6_ Thick is relative, but the ones I bought weren't thin. I had to look up what the difference between a frying pan and a skillet was. It looks like I buy skillets and call them "deep frying pans" for lack of better vocabulary...

Doing AES-GCM encryption with command-line tools turns out to be surprisingly difficult.

@jack I have gradually turned into a walking clock. I don't actually need an alarm in the morning. I wake up around 06:00 anyway. I find that it really helps to sleep under a window so the daylight can wake me up. In the wintertime, I let my smart lights wake me up, and I make sure to take Vitamin D supplements.