rtechnology thread that could get dramatic

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31932202

For those of you who are yet unfamiliar, an Investor is a person whose soul has collapsed into a black hole, rendering them functionally unable to think or respond like a normal human. They are exceedingly dangerous and they rule the lives of every person with a job. As they prefer to work through intermediaries, you are unlikely to meet them directly. (Even their intermediaries can be deeply unsettling. Have you ever seen the end result of a mind scooped out of the skull of a twenty-year-old man? They prefer their servitors young enough to believe stupid things when they wish to deceive you.)

But we live in a world of moral greys, certainly some are faced with the difficult task of societal resource allocation.

What's offensive about Investors is they don't understand the degree to which the desire for profits warps their worldview and their business models.

Witness: Substack. A wordpress clone. See the problem Substack tries to solve is a real problem. The solution they came up with is optimized for making money. These are comical absurdities.

Take the comments system. They understood that they needed niche politics, they understood niche politics thrives on communities. Their comment system is utter trash. They just didn't get it right.

Take the talent acquisition. In theory 'get a bunch of niche writers on your platform by paying them' is a good strategy. In practice when anyone intelligent can get their own domain running any of a number of blog software, the only people who want to write there are 1) political laymen, which is to say, wackadoodles, 2) tech bros with uninteresting opinions, and 3) a small subset of good writers who nevertheless saturate the readership of substack quickly.

Substack isn't a good enough blogging platform to let you use your own domain and if you did you would just use other, better software. Readers have no loyalty to substack.

The bottom line is: why pay money to Investors instead of the content creator?

Substack inserts itself as a middleman no one wanted, creates a product as that middleman inferior to the competition, and will ultimately want more of a cut of these authors' livelihoods than the value they offer in the form of that readership.

I've tried to like their platform but just couldn't get away from the fact that Wordpress's free offering works better and allows payments with the flip of a switch.

And all of this is without getting into the fact that if you write for money you're probably being scammed. Write for free: it's the only way you know you're not colonized.

sorry if i broke things not sorry i need to finish the rewrite of rdrama.net's frontend someday because its shit to theme

trying to make it look more like hackernews... how did i do?

This could be good for dramacoin, but

ngl I don’t even really know what a graphics card is, but this was a very fun article with this nerd just btfoing other nerds

warning: long

A whole new world of AI awaits

Imagine being 5 years old, dreaming of new adventures for Pikachu and Aladdin, and turning those tales into a cartoon right in front of your eyes... (Perhaps even with you as the main character!) What kinds of new storybook experiences could GPT-3 and DALL-E enable?

My own kindergartener, Noah, loves new bedtime stories, so let's find out.

GPT-3 Story Generation

First, I asked Noah what story he wanted. In his slightly paraphrased words: "I want a story about Ash and Pikachu commanding an army of Pokemon. They're attacking Team Rocket and enemy Pokemon from the land and ocean."

I then asked GPT-3 to flesh out the story:

GPT-3 fleshes out a story about Ash and Pikachu vs. Team Rocket

It was a dark and stormy night, and Ash and Pikachu were leading their army of Pokemon into battle against Team Rocket and their enemy Pokemon. From the land came the sound of thundering footsteps and from the sea came the sound of crashing waves. The two sides met in the middle of the battlefield, and the battle began.

Pikachu and his army of electric-type Pokemon struck first, blasting the enemy with powerful thunderbolts. Team Rocket's Pokemon were no match for the might of Pikachu and his friends, and they soon began to retreat.

But the enemy Pokemon from the sea were not so easily defeated. They launched a counterattack with water-type moves, drenching Ash and Pikachu's army.

But Ash and Pikachu would not give up. They rallied their troops and fought back with everything they had. In the end, they emerged victorious, and the enemy was defeated.

Roald Dahl, watch out.

DALL-E Illustrations

Next, DALL-E generated visuals for the story. Inputting the raw sentences themselves didn't work so well, so I tweaked them to improve the illustrations.

SHOW MORE

Orange site discussion

lol

This will 100% flop

Funny how this article was getting downmarseyd on /r/technology lol.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) warns of increasing complaints that cybercriminals are using Americans' stolen Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and deepfakes to apply for remote work positions.

Deepfakes (digital content like images, video, or audio) are sometimes generated using artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML) technologies and are difficult to distinguish from authentic materials.

Such synthetic content has been previously used to spread fake news and create revenge porn, but the lack of ethical limitations regarding their use has always been a source of controversy and concern.

The public service announcement, published on the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) today, adds that the deepfakes used to apply for positions in online interviews include convincingly altered videos or images.

The targeted remote jobs include positions in the tech field that would allow the malicious actors to gain access to company and customer confidential information after being hired.

"The remote work or work-from-home positions identified in these reports include information technology and computer programming, database, and software-related job functions," the FBI said.

"Notably, some reported positions include access to customer PII, financial data, corporate IT databases and/or proprietary information."

Video deepfakes are easier to detect

While some of the deepfake recordings used are convincing enough, others can be easily detected due to various sync mismatches, mainly spoofing the applicants' voices.

"Complaints report the use of voice spoofing, or potentially voice deepfakes, during online interviews of the potential applicants," the US federal law enforcement agency added.

"In these interviews, the actions and lip movement of the person seen interviewed on-camera do not completely coordinate with the audio of the person speaking. At times, actions such as coughing, sneezing, or other auditory actions are not aligned with what is presented visually."

Some victims who reported to the FBI that their stolen PII was used to apply for a remote job also said pre-employment background checks information was utilized with other applicants' profiles.

The FBI asked victims (including companies who have received deepfakes during the interview process) to report this activity via the IC3 platform and to include information that would help identify the crooks behind the attempts (e.g., IP or email addresses, phone numbers, or names).

In March 2021, the FBI also warned in a Private Industry Notification (PIN) [PDF] that deepfakes (including high-quality generated or manipulated video, images, text, or audio) are getting more sophisticated by the day and will likely be leveraged broadly by foreign adversaries in "cyber and foreign influence operations."

Europol also warned in April 2022, that deepfakes could soon become a tool that cybercrime organizations will use on a regular basis in CEO fraud, to tamper with evidence, and to create non-consensual pornography.

First vids of active testing of drone swarms that I am aware of were from 2017. https://youtube.com/watch?v=DjUdVxJH6yI . It's been five years since then. They are now capable of even avoiding crashes in dense forests. . One month old video. In some of the combat videos from Ukraine there are one or two videos of individual Ukrainian drones looking for and dropping grenades on individual troops. So drones can already be used to hunt individuals. Taking all these factors into account I would assume we are at most another 5 years away from common use of drones in US military application. i.e. Every squad or unit gets one drone each.

In a similar vein how long before military squads have transportation robots or additional robot troops. The LS3 robot was tested but the project got shelved by 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legged_Squad_Support_System . Was there any project after that which is still viable to fill a similar role or have they given up on robot animal equivalents for military usage? The humanoid robots got stuck at the ad level as far as I am aware. Drones will likely fill that niche.

US soldier exosuit developments have made genuine advancements over the years and I can bet my right nut that they have active exosuit usage for their specialized troops, off the record. I believe this because in Japan industrial workers were already using exosuits by 2017.

In a similar vein I think the bio mechanical insect project likely succeeded but had to be shelved because of the level of biodiversity loss around human habitations made them unviable. They instead filled that niche at government level with mandatory chips for dogs.

In addition, fun fact, the F 35B jet can vertically takeoff. The F35 series of jets have been active since 2006. So we already had this sci fi shit developed 16 years ago.

Night vision is already as good as science fiction grade, able to give you vision as clear as the day.

So after sharing all these links i come to my primary point, what else do you think is going to be the big new future warfare upgrade in the next one or two decades and how long is the stuff that's in prototype mode right now take to come out. The more specifics with links the better.