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9 files changed, 12 insertions, 12 deletions
diff --git a/content/entry/article-you-should-be-using-an-old-computer.md b/content/entry/article-you-should-be-using-an-old-computer.md index 9c1c81d..178305a 100644 --- a/content/entry/article-you-should-be-using-an-old-computer.md +++ b/content/entry/article-you-should-be-using-an-old-computer.md @@ -35,7 +35,7 @@ What does it say about society that the only way to get a non-backdoored laptop Further, what you have to realize is there is a war being waged on general-purpose computing. Every year manufacturers come up with new ways to make your computer harder to repair thereby increasing e-waste. Every year software companies make their ecosystems more locked down giving you less and less control over your own devices. To not use an old Thinkpad is to be on the wrong side of this war. I do not want to live in a world where I don't have control over what I buy and cannot repair it. -Most people living in 1st world countries today are far too complacent. I can't emphasize this enough. So when people ask me why I care so much, why I've given up so much, I look at them in bewilderment. Why don't they? If people like them don't start caring soon we're going to live in a dark world where computer users are totally subjugated. The 13 year old Thinkpads suffice for 95% of use cases for now but that won't always be true. Proprietary threats are looming. Change needs to happen now, not 10 years from now. So use a free laptop even if it's inconvenient because it's not getting any easier. +Most people living in 1st world countries today are far too complacent. I can't emphasize this enough. So when people ask me why I care so much, why I've given up so much, I look at them in bewilderment. Why don't they? If people like them don't start caring soon we're going to live in a dark world where computer users are totally subjugated. The 13-year-old Thinkpads suffice for 95% of use cases for now but that won't always be true. Proprietary threats are looming. Change needs to happen now, not 10 years from now. So use a free laptop even if it's inconvenient because it's not getting any easier. # Privacy There's also the whole privacy issue of having a potentially backdoored laptop. A college professor once told me privacy is dead. As if it were just a fact of the modern era and I hadn't realized it yet. As long as there are people like me are around privacy is not dead. I will never accept a world without privacy. I will resist backdoors into my computer. I'll tell you another thing. It wasn't all the free software people that inspired this in me. It was the haters. Those who said it didn't matter, privacy is dead, it's unwinnable, I should just give up so my life is easier, etc. So please tell me any of those things. The naysayers keep me motivated. I don't waste my time wondering whether free software is a fight we can win. It's a fight we must win. As long as there's any chance of winning, and even if it seems like there's not, we must try. diff --git a/content/entry/automation-bullshit-jobs-and-work.md b/content/entry/automation-bullshit-jobs-and-work.md index 6a4529c..fc9ddc7 100644 --- a/content/entry/automation-bullshit-jobs-and-work.md +++ b/content/entry/automation-bullshit-jobs-and-work.md @@ -46,7 +46,7 @@ Again, I can't contest the fact that pointless work creates jobs people survive In a sane economic system, less jobs would be good news. It would mean there's less work to be done which would mean more leasure time for everybody. Only in today's backwards economy do people worry about not having enough work, even if that work is pointless. -It doesn't seem to add up that after rapid technological progress which automated much of the labor humans used to perform, here we still are with a forty hour work week. Predictions a hundred years ago said we'd have a fifteen hour work week. So what's preventing this? +It doesn't seem to add up that after rapid technological progress which automated much of the labor humans used to perform, here we still are with a forty-hour work week. Predictions a hundred years ago said we'd have a fifteen-hour work week. So what's preventing this? According to Graeber, the reason we're not working less is basically because the ruling class has figured out that a happy, productive population with free time goes against their interests. They want people financially enslaved so they don't have time to pose a threat. diff --git a/content/entry/businesses-should-be-required-to-accept-cash.md b/content/entry/businesses-should-be-required-to-accept-cash.md index ab7afce..e52c9f8 100644 --- a/content/entry/businesses-should-be-required-to-accept-cash.md +++ b/content/entry/businesses-should-be-required-to-accept-cash.md @@ -29,7 +29,7 @@ Now if you're a young person, this next point might not seem like a big deal. Bu And remember, the elderly vote. So if they get the idea that Taler is going to be replacing cash, they might resist Taler as a form of payment whereas if Taler is presented as just another payment option, they'll be indifferent. -Getting rid of cash would hinder the financial independence of a segment of the population. Imagine your local grocery store at peak volume with 10 people waiting in line, an 80 year old man holding up the line trying to remember where his granddaughter showed him the GNU Taler app was, barely able to read the small text on his phone. The clerk has to come around the counter to help him figure it out. Now she's tech support too. Multiply that across every supermarket. +Getting rid of cash would hinder the financial independence of a segment of the population. Imagine your local grocery store at peak volume with 10 people waiting in line, an 80-year-old man holding up the line trying to remember where his granddaughter showed him the GNU Taler app was, barely able to read the small text on his phone. The clerk has to come around the counter to help him figure it out. Now she's tech support too. Multiply that across every supermarket. # Conclusion So, in conclusion, businesses should be mandated to accept cash as a form of payment. As for online stores, we should adopt GNU Taler for private digital cash. There may need to be extra considerations or even exceptions to accepting cash for stores in areas with rampant crime, but most stores won't have any major problems taking cash. diff --git a/content/entry/stupid-laws-regarding-teen-sexting-and-child-pornography.md b/content/entry/stupid-laws-regarding-teen-sexting-and-child-pornography.md index 750dbd5..3dcea1f 100644 --- a/content/entry/stupid-laws-regarding-teen-sexting-and-child-pornography.md +++ b/content/entry/stupid-laws-regarding-teen-sexting-and-child-pornography.md @@ -5,7 +5,7 @@ draft: false --- ## Teen Sexting -The majority of teen sexting goes unpunished even if police end up finding out somehow. That's because police are usually reasonable enough to see, for example, in places where the age of consent is 18, that a 17-year-old and 19-year old sexting consensually harms nobody and neither deserve to be charged with a crime or suffer the stigma of being labelled a sex offender forever. +The majority of teen sexting goes unpunished even if police end up finding out somehow. That's because police are usually reasonable enough to see, for example, in places where the age of consent is 18, that a 17-year-old and 19-year-old sexting consensually harms nobody and neither deserve to be charged with a crime or suffer the stigma of being labelled a sex offender forever. However, some teen sexting cases are prosecuted as possession of child pornography, leaving teens with a criminal record. This is a completely over-zealous and senseless application of criminal law. If the images are being coerced in some way, that's different. But I'm talking about cases where police are punishing completely victimless and consensual behavior. @@ -17,7 +17,7 @@ Furthermore, teens have been prosecuted for child pornography for merely possess "But what if the nude pictures end up in the hands of pedophiles?" -If a 51 year-old-man man solicits nude pictures from a 13-year-old girl, that's obviously a problem because consent becomes very questionable with that big of an age gap. In other words, it's likely that the girl is being manipulated. But suppose the 51-year-old man just goes online and downloads nudes of a 13-year-old girl that were leaked by somebody else. Is that harmful? +If a 51-year-old man man solicits nude pictures from a 13-year-old girl, that's obviously a problem because consent becomes very questionable with that big of an age gap. In other words, it's likely that the girl is being manipulated. But suppose the 51-year-old man just goes online and downloads nudes of a 13-year-old girl that were leaked by somebody else. Is that harmful? ## Child Pornography diff --git a/content/entry/the-privacy-implications-of-weak-ai.md b/content/entry/the-privacy-implications-of-weak-ai.md index fcaf2ee..e4b89f0 100644 --- a/content/entry/the-privacy-implications-of-weak-ai.md +++ b/content/entry/the-privacy-implications-of-weak-ai.md @@ -5,7 +5,7 @@ tags: ['computing'] draft: false --- # Introduction -So a few days ago I started writing this entry titled "Societal Implications of Weak AI". Over the course of the next few days, I found out just how broad of a topic that is. I kept thinking of more topics and subtopics. With weak AI, there's so much to discuss. Eventually the entry ballooned to an unmanageable 30+ minute read. I couldn't figure out how to organize all the topics. So I just decided it would be best to split it up into separate, more digestible entries. +So a few days ago I started writing this entry titled "Societal Implications of Weak AI". Over the course of the next few days, I found out just how broad of a topic that is. I kept thinking of more topics and subtopics. With weak AI, there's so much to discuss. Eventually the entry ballooned to an unmanageable 30-minute read. I couldn't figure out how to organize all the topics. So I just decided it would be best to split it up into separate, more digestible entries. I've chosen to limit the scope of this entry to weak AI only. I'm purposely omitting AGI because it warrants its own discussion. AGI, or general artificial intelligence, is AI with intelligence equal to or far exceeding human intelligence in every way that matters. Weak AI by contrast only handles narrowly-defined, limited tasks. But make no mistake. Just because it's limited doesn't mean it's not dangerous. This entry is all about how weak AI threatens our privacy and what we can do about it. @@ -16,7 +16,7 @@ The 'nothing to hide' people don't understand this, but privacy is important for AI is already destroying our privacy in numerous ways. Just have a look at [awful-ai](https://github.com/daviddao/awful-ai), a git repo tracking scary usages of AI. AI can be used to infer criminality from a picture of a person's face. It can recreate a person's face from their voice alone. Everybody already knows about facial recognition which is a privacy disaster. Big retailers use it for tracking. China uses it to surveil Muslims. Any time you see 'AI' and 'privacy' in the same sentence, it's always bad news. # AI Will Become a Worse Privacy Disaster -AI is already very bad for privacy and getting worse all the time. The most worrisome thing is we have no idea how good weak AI can get at privacy-invading use cases. The only limit in sight is how much personal information can theoretically be derived from input data. Can AI accurately predict the time frame when someone last had sex based on a 1 minute video of that person? What about how they've been feeling for the past week? It's hard to say what future AI will be able to predict given some data. +AI is already very bad for privacy and getting worse all the time. The most worrisome thing is we have no idea how good weak AI can get at privacy-invading use cases. The only limit in sight is how much personal information can theoretically be derived from input data. Can AI accurately predict the time frame when someone last had sex based on a 1-minute video of that person? What about how they've been feeling for the past week? It's hard to say what future AI will be able to predict given some data. You may be publicly sharing information about yourself online now, knowingly or unknowingly, which a future AI Sherlock Holmes (just a metaphor) can use to derive information about you that you don't want anyone to know. Not only that, but it will be able to derive information about you that you don't even know. How much information will future AI be able to derive about me from these journal entries? What will it learn about me from my style of writing, what I write about, when I write about it, etc? I don't know. Just imagine what inferences future AI will be able to derive about someone given all the data from intelligence agencies and big tech. Imagine how that could be weaponized. diff --git a/content/entry/the-self.md b/content/entry/the-self.md index 2000c0e..c51de2e 100644 --- a/content/entry/the-self.md +++ b/content/entry/the-self.md @@ -26,7 +26,7 @@ Meditation is a practice that can help you experience this oneness, but it takes Getting behind yourself a second time could mean that you notice the observer of your thoughts. To recap, level one is observing your thoughts and sensations. You are not behind your eyes, in your head as a matter of experience. You are the self that notices the feeling of having a head, the feeling of being behind your eyes, but you are not in your head behind your eyes. You are the noticer. Level two means that you notice the self that notices the feeling of having a head. What the ultimate goal here is, is trying to find the self that is doing the searching. You are trying to pay attention to your attention itself. I can call this level one and level two for clarity, but I think it's more of a continuous spectrum of awareness without clearly defined "levels". -Think about a dog chasing its own tail. Puppies might not realize that what they're chasing is their own tail. But once they catch it and bite down, they know. Perhaps it's better explained as a game of hide and go seek. You forget who you really are as you grow up. Others give you a name and assign adjectives to you as if that's who you really are. You are told you are John, the clever thirty year old quirky accomplished artist and you better not think you're anything else. To use the words of Alan Watts, you are an isolated ego inside a "bag of skin". Life is like playing a game of hide and go seek where you are both the one hiding and the one seeking. And meditation is a technique for looking in the mirror and finding out the hider and seeker are the same person. Except the seeker goes by the name of "I" and the one hiding goes by the name of "the environment". And when I say "the environment", I don't mean just the physical environment. I mean the thoughts inside your head including the feeling of having a head. +Think about a dog chasing its own tail. Puppies might not realize that what they're chasing is their own tail. But once they catch it and bite down, they know. Perhaps it's better explained as a game of hide and go seek. You forget who you really are as you grow up. Others give you a name and assign adjectives to you as if that's who you really are. You are told you are John, the clever thirty-year-old quirky accomplished artist and you better not think you're anything else. To use the words of Alan Watts, you are an isolated ego inside a "bag of skin". Life is like playing a game of hide and go seek where you are both the one hiding and the one seeking. And meditation is a technique for looking in the mirror and finding out the hider and seeker are the same person. Except the seeker goes by the name of "I" and the one hiding goes by the name of "the environment". And when I say "the environment", I don't mean just the physical environment. I mean the thoughts inside your head including the feeling of having a head. ## Conceptual Understanding of Self Versus Experience If you get what I'm saying about the self so far, that's great. You have a conceptual understanding of it. But to only have a conceptual understanding is to miss the point. It's like if a person were blind from birth. They can learn every fact there is to know about color. They can learn the cultural significance. For example, in American culture, blue means calmness and security. Black means darkness. Purple represents mystery. The blind person can learn the wavelengths that produce every color. They can know what colors go well together and what art styles are used with what color. But they have never actually seen color. So we would still say they lack perhaps the most important thing there is to know about color. The experience. The experience of color can't be replaced by knowing facts about it. diff --git a/content/entry/there-is-nothing-wrong-with-incest.md b/content/entry/there-is-nothing-wrong-with-incest.md index b05fe3c..1d910ad 100644 --- a/content/entry/there-is-nothing-wrong-with-incest.md +++ b/content/entry/there-is-nothing-wrong-with-incest.md @@ -8,9 +8,9 @@ Some online articles use the term "incest survivor" when referring to survivors # Pedophilia First, there's pedophilia. Pedophilia is often perpetrated by a family member, making it easy to mix up pedophilia and incest. But incest without pedophilia isn't morally wrong. Two adults engaging in incest doesn't necessarily pose any concerns related to their ability to consent. -Incest between adults and teenagers can be consensual as well. If 16 and 18 year old siblings have sex, there isn't necessarily a victim even though age of consent laws might make it a crime. If the age gap is large and there are power imbalances in the relationship, say a 17 year old son and 40 year old mother, then that's more morally gray and may warrant legal action. It depends on if the 17 year old fully understood and agreed with what happened. +Incest between adults and teenagers can be consensual as well. If 16 and 18-year-old siblings have sex, there isn't necessarily a victim even though age of consent laws might make it a crime. If the age gap is large and there are power imbalances in the relationship, say a 17-year-old son and 40-year-old mother, then that's more morally gray and may warrant legal action. It depends on if the 17-year-old fully understood and agreed with what happened. -Past the cutoff age of adulthood, people should legally be allowed to have sex with any other consenting adult. If a 20 year old has sex with their 50 year old relative, that should not concern the legal system. Although there is a 30 year age gap, a healthy 20 year old is mature enough to make that decision without it necessarily being coerced or manipulated. +Past the cutoff age of adulthood, people should legally be allowed to have sex with any other consenting adult. If a 20-year-old has sex with their 50-year-old relative, that should not concern the legal system. Although there is a 30-year age gap, a healthy 20-year-old is mature enough to make that decision without it necessarily being coerced or manipulated. # Inbreeding The second issue often brought up in conversations about incest is inbreeding. Inbreeding with immediate family members is bad for two reasons. For one, [breeding right now is bad for the planet](/2021/09/05/antinatalism/). For two, inbreeding with immediate family members causes a high chance of genetic abnormalities in offspring. diff --git a/content/entry/thoughts-on-blogging.md b/content/entry/thoughts-on-blogging.md index 97a8381..328b551 100644 --- a/content/entry/thoughts-on-blogging.md +++ b/content/entry/thoughts-on-blogging.md @@ -14,7 +14,7 @@ I'm not advocating for self-censorship. I'm also not advocating avoiding controv With all that said, it's also true that the internet has made us less able to forgive. Memory plays a huge role in forgiveness. Before the internet and smartphones, when you did something foolish or said something regrettable, the people that saw or heard it would forget about it. The memory would fade away. Even if they shared your mistake with someone else, that someone couldn't really "relive" the experience. It was just their recollection of events transmitted via spoken words. -With the internet, your mistakes are permanent. Anything you do or say can be recorded and stored forever, and you can never take it back. It's also harder for others to forgive and forget because your mistake is digitally preserved in video, audio, text and other formats. It can be easily shared with an unlimited number of people. To see the full impact of this, all you have to do is look at [the high-profile suicide of Amanda Todd](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Amanda_Todd). She was a 15-year old Canadian student that was cyberbullied with nude pictures of herself that got screen captured. Those pictures followed her ultimately driving her to suicide. +With the internet, your mistakes are permanent. Anything you do or say can be recorded and stored forever, and you can never take it back. It's also harder for others to forgive and forget because your mistake is digitally preserved in video, audio, text and other formats. It can be easily shared with an unlimited number of people. To see the full impact of this, all you have to do is look at [the high-profile suicide of Amanda Todd](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Amanda_Todd). She was a 15-year-old Canadian student that was cyberbullied with nude pictures of herself that got screen captured. Those pictures followed her ultimately driving her to suicide. ## The Importance of Forgiveness My point is, if someone says or does something regrettable and it gets digitally captured and put on the internet, whether or not they meant to upload it, it doesn't make sense to judge them by that forever. Amanda Todd is an extreme case and I'm not equivocating her suicide with intentionally publishing content in blogging. I'm just pointing out that the internet is an unforgiving place when it comes to making mistakes whether that is a mistake on your blog or leaked nude photos. diff --git a/content/entry/thoughts-on-logic.md b/content/entry/thoughts-on-logic.md index b5dc22b..999df5d 100644 --- a/content/entry/thoughts-on-logic.md +++ b/content/entry/thoughts-on-logic.md @@ -78,6 +78,6 @@ I've said that for an argument to be valid, the premises must be true. But how d In the early 1920's, famous German mathematician [David Hilbert](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hilbert) put forward a proposal calling for the axiomatization of mathematics. He wanted to make all mathematical truths reducible to an agreed upon set of axioms such that all true statements could be proved, but no false statements could be proved. In 1931, one of the most significant logicians in history, [Kurt Gödel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_G%C3%B6del), showed that no set of axioms is capable of proving all truths about the arithmetic of natural numbers. See [Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems](https://stopa.io/post/269). Gödel used mathematical logic to show that there are some places mathematical logic cannot go. Boiled down, he proved that logic cannot prove everything. This is also true in computing. See [The Halting Problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem). The essence of the trick seems to be, no matter which logic you're talking about, to find a way to encode [the liar paradox](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Liar_paradox) in the system. A prerequisite for that is somehow getting the logical system to talk about itself. Gödel found a very fascinating theorem and I would recommend for anyone interested to look more in depth at it. # Conclusion -That's all I've got for this post. I think I've packed in a lot of information and good examples to research. Even if you never learn logic, I believe by reading this post you get a sense of what logic is all about and how to at least recognize some common informal fallacies and misunderstandings. I tried to include plenty of useful external links. This post is barely scratching the surface though. For some readers, just scratching the surface is good enough. But for all I know, the next Gödel might be reading this. In 2011, [a 25-year old math problem about superpermutations was solved by an anonymous 4chan user](https://yewtu.be/embed/OZzIvl1tbPo?local=true). If that doesn't show that cleverness can come from anywhere, I don't what does. +That's all I've got for this post. I think I've packed in a lot of information and good examples to research. Even if you never learn logic, I believe by reading this post you get a sense of what logic is all about and how to at least recognize some common informal fallacies and misunderstandings. I tried to include plenty of useful external links. This post is barely scratching the surface though. For some readers, just scratching the surface is good enough. But for all I know, the next Gödel might be reading this. In 2011, [a 25-year-old math problem about superpermutations was solved by an anonymous 4chan user](https://yewtu.be/embed/OZzIvl1tbPo?local=true). If that doesn't show that cleverness can come from anywhere, I don't what does. I hope you enjoyed the post. If there's anything that you think I should have covered in this post or that I should talk in the future, [let me know about it](mailto:nick@nicholasjohnson.ch). |