• 1 Post
  • 21 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
Cake day: August 29th, 2024
  • mirrorwitch@awful.systemstoSneerClub@awful.systems•The predictably grievous harms of Effective AltruismEnglish
    7·
    1 month ago

    I got some very intense, frequent bullying in 90s Latin America for being perceived as queer, before even understanding myself that I was actually queer.

    I don’t think there was ever anything like the jocks from US movies. Bullies tended to be troubled kids from difficult backgrounds, the kind of kid who would be themself exposed to violence and abuse at home or in their neighbourhood. A handful were from religious fundamentalist families.

    There was some hostility towards children who took school too seriously or were perceived as teacher’s pets, but I don’t think that in itself would have inspired “slapped every day” levels of bullying. I don’t remember bullying due to what today are called fandoms or geeky interests; they were just much less known.

  • mirrorwitch@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 15 September 2024English
    15·
    3 months ago

    I find the polygraph to be a fascinating artifact. most on account of how it doesn’t work. it’s not that it kinda works, that it more or less works, or that if we just iron out a few kinks the next model will do what polygraphs claims to do. the assumptions behind the technology are wrong. lying is not physiological; a polygraph cannot and will never work. you might as well hire me to read the tarot of the suspects, my rate of success would be as high or higher.

    yet the establishment pretends that it works, that it means something. because the State desperately wants to believe that there is a path to absolute surveillance, a way to make even one’s deepest subjectivity legible to the State, amenable to central planning (cp. the inefficacy of torture). they want to believe it so much, they want this technology to exist so much, that they throw reality out of the window, ignore not just every researcher ever but the evidence of their own eyes and minds, and pretend very hard, pretend deliberately, willfully, desperately, that the technology does what it cannot do and will never do. just the other day some guy way condemned to use a polygraph in every statement for the rest of his life. again, this is no better than flipping a coin to decide if he’s saying the truth, but here’s the entire System, the courts the judge the State itself, solemnly condemning the man to the whims of imaginary oracles.

    I think this is how “AI” works, but on a larger scale.

  • mirrorwitch@awful.systemstoFreeAssembly@awful.systems•Random Positivity Thread: Happy Computer Memories
    7·
    3 months ago

    I don’t have many good memories but I recall having a 486 or Pentium 1 in 2001 when it was already old, in my college dorm room, running NetBSD to serve my and my roommate’s personal blog.

    One problem we had is that periodically the ADSL modem would stop responding and nothing could fix it but a hard reset. If nobody was using the Internet (which used to be a thing back then!! not looking at the Internet 24/7!!) it could go hours without us noticing that the blog was down. I couldn’t program or access the modem in anyway, it was a black box, so my workaround was as follows. NetBSD had a /dev/speaker device which could play notes on the buzzer like “echo ‘ABC#’ > /dev/speaker”. I made a little script that output small, random 7-note melodies to /dev/speaker (in pentatonic so that they sound “musical”, and in the lower octaves so it wasn’t grating). A watchdog service periodically pinged the modem; if the modem was blanking out, the PC would bleep-bloop cute little computer songs until somebody turned the modem on and off.

    in retrospect I found computing in this era significantly healthier and more rewarding than the current Internet.