A number of years ago, the cybersecurity office I worked for had a case come through where a 3.5" floppy was found in a drawer in an area which should not have contained any writable media. The investigator on the case had a hell of a time tracking down a drive to read the disk. He got lucky that someone in the organization just happened to have a USB based 3.5" floppy drive which worked. I can’t imagine what we would have done with a 5.25" or 8" floppy. And such disks were known to exist at the site.

The other thing they don’t mention in the article is tapes. A couple decades back I was a sysadmin at a site where we were required to store data archives for 10 years. Given the age of some of the data, it had been archived to DAT tapes and put in storage. The problem was the drive to read those tapes was just as old and had a SCSI interface from about the same time period. So, we also had a vintage SCSI controller for the drive. That controller was for an ISA bus slot. And this was at a time where ISA was just about fully phased out. By the time I left, I don’t think we had a motherboard which could have accepted the controller. We might have been able to source a SCSI controller which used PCI and was the right generation of SCSI to interface with the drive. Then we would have had to hope that Symantec’s Backup Exec would still be able to read the tapes. Given Backup Exec’s propensity to just silently declare, “fuck your backups” this was not something I was hopeful for.

It’s really cool that these folks are doing this work. There are a lot of hidden difficulties but saving that data can be very important.

immediately lost my $20, never entered a casino again.

You didn’t lose it, you paid $20 for an education in why gambling in a casino is a bad idea. It could have been much, much worse.

As a species, homo sapiens have managed to adapt to every environment on Earth. We are the first species to have any measure of control over the natural forces which have wiped out countless other species. Diseases which once ravaged our populations are now gone or minor inconveniences and we continue to find new ways to mitigate the worst effect of many diseases. Should a large asteroid be heading our way, we are the only species which may stand any chance of diverting it or mitigating the long term impacts when it does hit us. While it was certainly not a “choice”, the evolution of higher cognition, problem solving and intra-species communications has put our species in a unique position of having a high degree of control over out fate. Sure, it has its downsides (we are the only species which might be able to end all life on Earth), but it’s been a pretty amazing run for us. On the balance, I think we’re in a much better position to keep going as a species than our ancestors or cousins (homo erectus, homo hablis, neanderthal, great apes, chimpanzees, etc).

So, was it a “mistake”, I think the current state of evidence is against that. While it may result in a really shit deal for individuals of the species from time to time, as a species I think it would be silly to consider it a mistake.

RSS is a nice was to get a centralized list of things you want to know about, it’s not a full content delivery platform. I think one of the best examples of using RSS was way back when FireFox allowed you to have RSS bookmarks (seriously, fuck whoever made the decision to kill that feature). You could have a “folder” which was the current RSS feed from the site and if anything looked worth reading, you could click on it and go to the full article. It is also pull based, meaning that you get to decide what ends up in your list and what doesn’t. No algorithms,no intrusive client side scripts/programs, just you pulling data from the source. Granted, an RSS feed might have an algorithm behind it, but it’s up to you to decide to subscribe to such.

From the perspective of the sites providing the RSS feed, it’s a way to drive traffic to their site without that content being scraped and presented somewhere that doesn’t give them the ad impressions and user engagement statistics which they get if you visit their site (and don’t have a plethora of ad-blocking in place). If they simply delivered the whole article in the RSS feed, they would lose that revenue source and any incentive to use it. So ya, you’re going to have to actually go to the site to read/see the full thing.

It’s helpful to treat RSS as a way to know about stuff you are interested in. Actually viewing that stuff should happen in the appropriate app, be that a browser or dedicated app.

Short answer, no.

Long answer: We are a long way off from having anything close to the movie villain level of AI. Maybe we’re getting close to the paperclip manufacturing AI problem, but I’d argue that even that is often way overblown. The reason I say this is that such arguments are quite hand-wavy about leaps in capability which would be required for those things to become a problem. The most obvious of which is making the leap from controlling the devices an AI is intentionally hooked up to, to devices it’s not. And it also needs to make that jump without anyone noticing and asking, “hey, what’s all this then?” As someone who works in cybersecurity for a company which does physical manufacturing, I can see how it would get missed for a while (companies love to under-spend on cybersecurity). But eventually enough odd behavior gets picked up. And the routers and firewalls between manufacturing and anything else do tend to be the one place companies actually spend on cybersecurity. When your manufacturing downtime losses are measured in millions per hour, getting a few million a year for NDR tends to go over much better. And no, I don’t expect the AI to hack the cybersecurity, it first needs to develop that capability. AI training processes require a lot of time failing at doing something, that training is going to get noticed. AI isn’t magically good at anything, and while the learning process can be much faster, that speed is going to lead to a shit-ton of noise on the network. And guess what, we have AI and automation running on our behalf as well. And those are trained to shutdown rogue devices attacking the cybersecurity infrastructure.

“Oh wait, but the AI would be sneaky, slow and stealty!” Why would it? What would it have in it’s currently existing model which would say “be slow and sneaky”? It wouldn’t, you don’t train AI models to do things which you don’t need them to do. A paperclip optimizing AI wouldn’t be trained on using network penetration tools. That’s so far outside the need of the model that the only thing it could introduce is more hallucinations and problems. And given all the Frankenstein’s Monster stories we have built and are going to build around AI, as soon as we see anything resembling an AI reaching out for abilities we consider dangerous, it’s going to get turned off. And that will happen long before it has a chance to learn about alternative power sources. It’s much like zombie outbreaks in movies, for them to move much beyond patient zero requires either something really, really special about the “disease” or comically bad management of the outbreak. Sure, we’re going to have problems as we learn what guardrails to put around AI, but the doom and gloom version of only needing one mistake is way overblown. There are so many stopping points along the way from single function AI to world dominating AI that it’s kinda funny. And many of those stopping points are the same, “the attacker (humans) only need to get lucky once” situation. So no, I don’t believe that the paperclip optimizer AI problem is all that real.

That does take us to the question of a real general purpose AI being let loose on the internet to consume all human knowledge and become good at everything, which then decides to control everything. And maybe this might be a problem, if we ever get there. Right now, that sort of thing is so firmly in the realm of sci-fi that I don’t think we can meaningfully analyze it. What we have today, fancy neural networks, LLMs and classifiers, puts us in the same ballpark as Jules Verne writing about space travel. Sure, he might have nailed one or two of the details; but, the whole this was so much more fantastically complex and difficult than he had any ability to conceive. Once we are closer to it, I expect we’re going to see that it’s not anything like we currently expect it to be. The computing power requirements may also limit it’s early deployment to only large universities and government projects, keeping it’s processing power well centralized. General purpose AI may well have the same decapitation problems humans do. They can have fantastical abilities, but they need really powerful data centers to run it. And those bring all the power, cooling and not getting blown the fuck up with a JDAM problems of current AI data centers. Again, we could go back and forth making up ways for AI to techno-magic it’s way around those problems, but it’s all just baseless speculation at this point. And that speculation will also inform the guardrails we build in at the time. It would boil down to the same game children play where they shoot each other with imaginary guns, and have imaginary shields. And they each keep re-imagining their guns and shields to defeat the other’s. So ya, it might be fun for a while, but it’s ultimately pointless.

For someone who spends a lot of time alone and on a computer this will seem anathema, but go find some sort of physical activity (sport) and start engaging in it a few times a week. Not only does this get you out of the house, it creates opportunities to engage with people socially and it is good for your health.

I am very much a stay at home, be in front of my computer type hermit. I was this way most of my life and even being married didn’t help much as my wife is the same. A good Friday night for us currently involves playing Baldur’s Gate 3 until much too late. We have a very small circle of friends and don’t get out much at all. However, now in my late 40’s I am having some health issues and that finally gave me the push to get out of my gaming chair and get my body moving. I took up climbing at an indoor rock climbing gym and I really enjoy it. The regularly changing routes on the walls mean that I get to engage the puzzle solving part of my brain, and I am pushed physically as I try to get better. In between climbs I’m near other people with an obvious shared interest and can practice talking to other people by discussing the routes (social skills are like all skills, they take practice). And the exercise has made my doctor visits a lot less “you’re going to die horribly” and more “we’ve got things pretty well controlled”. I also just feel better.

So ya, go out and find some sort of physical activity you enjoy. Don’t be afraid to try new things, you’ll suck at them but that’s to be expected. The first step in being good at anything is sucking at it. Use that suckage to engage with other people and learn how to suck less. This will help you suck less at socializing. I won’t say that any of this is easy, it’s not. I know there is the hermit piece if me which always wants to fall back into just hiding out in my basement (literally, my office is in my basement). But, I’ve also made a habit of climbing 2-3 times a week and 3 years into doing that I am now looking forward to that time. I get excited when I walk into the gym and see one of the walls changed and now get to solve a new set of climbing routes. I still kinda suck, but not anywhere near as much as I did on my first day.

They actually did replace the CEO which seemed like the least they could do. Whether or not the culture of “eh, who needs all these bolts?” has changed is still an open question. I for one still feel a bit better when I see an Airbus or Embraer jet roll up to the gate I’m boarding at.

I’ll admit, I hadn’t tracked it that closely and didn’t know the details. I was just being glib. Thanks for the info.

And nothing of value was lost. Sure EA has published a few gems in recent years, but as a developer it’s all sports games and Battlefield. The talent isn’t at EA, it’s at the developers they have been supporting. If we’re lucky, the leveraged buyout will result in anything good owned by EA being sold off for parts and the worthless husk of EA saddled with the debt and left to go bankrupt.

Who know, maybe the license to make Star Wars games will go somewhere that isn’t dead set on fucking it up as hard as possible to meet the Christmas season deadline.

Harm was going to happen no matter what you do in the trolley problem. There is no situation where harm does not happen, but there is a situation where you directly are causing harm.

Yes, exactly. By taking no action some amount of harm occurs, had you taken action that harm would not have occurred but other harm would have. Ultimately, this is analyzing the extent to which a person is willing to allow harm via inaction versus cause harm through direct action.

Almost none of them actually having a real world application…

Like many thought experiments, the Trolley Problem is an artificial situation intended to isolate certain decision making points so that they can be analyzed. Yes, reality is messy and we often have more than two options. But having this sort of analysis ahead of time can make the real problems less complex to consider. It is also useful for looking at our philosophical frameworks and where they break down.

Personally, if I could go the rest of my life without hearing about the trolley problem that’d be great actually.

The Trolley Problem is a tool for examining our beliefs. Throwing it away because it is imperfect and uncomfortable only leads to a blindness of self.

One of the issues the Trolley Problem explores is people’s differing willingness to allow harm versus cause it. And that can hold even when the level of harm caused by inaction is significantly higher than what is caused by taking action. E.g. If your personal philosophy dictates that killing someone is always wrong, does it hold if your inaction causes 5 deaths, 10, 50? What if we start tinkering with the people dying? Would you kill a 90 year old man to save a train full of children? The Trolley Problem is really just a starting point to examine that dichotomy between causing harm and allowing harm and just how permeable the line between them can be when you start changing the conditions. Attaching other moral choices to the problem is one way to use the problem to explore a set of beliefs.

That’s the point. Lottery tickets are a tax on people who are bad at math.

Dead is dead, parts is parts, dead guys is parts.

A face full of alien wing-wong

Choosing not to act is still making a choice and may still result in a negative outcome. It’s the classic trolley problem. While you may not cause harm through an active choice, your inaction can still lead directly to a negative outcome.

I know that, during my own move from Windows to Linux, I found that the USB drive tended to lag under heavy read/write operations. I did not experienced that with Linux directly loaded on a SATA SSD. I also had some issues dealing with my storage drive (NVMe SSD) still using an NTFS file system. Once I went full Linux and ext4, it’s been nothing but smooth sailing.

As @MagicShel@lemmy.zip pointed out, performance will depend heavily on the generation of USB device and port. I was using a USB 3.1 device and a USB 3.1 port (no idea on the generation). So, speeds were ok-ish. By comparison, SATA 2 can have a transfer rate of 2 GB/s. And while the SSD itself may not have saturated that bandwidth, it almost certainly blew the transfer rate of my USB device out of the water. When I later upgraded to an NVMe drive, things just got better.

Overall, load times from the USB drive is the one place I wouldn’t trust testing Linux on USB. It’s going to be slower and have lag compared to an SSD. Read/Write performance should be comparable to Windows. Though, taking the precaution of either dual booting or backing up your Windows install can certainly make sense to test things out.

Well, to me, it seems pretty paradoxical, almost in the same Rousseauesque line of “I’m forced to be free”.

That’s fair, but it’s either we force all people to exist or no one ever has the opportunity to make a choice. An unfortunate fact of life is that a lot of things will happen to you, without you having a choice. Some of that will suck, some of it will be fantastic, much of it will be somewhere in between. You will never get to choose everything which happens to you, all you can choose is how you react to it. Pain and suffering is valid, but so is joy. If you choose to focus on pain and suffering, that’s up to you. But ya, that’s kinda the response of the angsty teenager.

Sorry but you distorted my words. In no moment I said “everyone needs to die”, and I challenge anyone accusing me of that to point out where I said this.

Fair enough, that was me getting absurd.

What I’ve been saying throughout this Lemmy thread is how humans are inherently evil (as per Hobbesian philosophy, not out of hatred misanthropy)

This one would be fun to expand one. Though, fair warning, I tend to dive into moral relativism and will put Hobbe’s philosophy up as an appeal to authority and his idea of some “state of nature” as just a “noble savage myth” wrapped in fancy language. Speaking of “noble savage” style myths…

No other lifeforms developed nuclear warheads, no other lifeforms shrug off when children starve.

Ok ya, we have fancier ways to kill each other, but the idea that animals don’t is complete bullshit. Wild animals which have too many young will kill or abandon the extra young to conserve resources. If you’re an old enough fart, you might recall people quoting Planet of the Apes (the one without CGI), “ape don’t kill ape”. Except, that ya, they do. Primates are known to kill and eat other groups of primates, even within the same species. Competition for resources and all the brutality that entails predates modern humans and it predates cities and agriculture by a long way. Sure, we have absolutely raised it a to terrifying scale. But, we really aren’t that different from our stick wielding forebearers.

Even Earth herself isn’t eternal, for the Sun will engulf the Earth as part of its transformation to Giant Red.

Speaking of things we have no choice about, this is one of them. Given the vast expanses of interstellar space, there’s a good chance that this really will spell the end for humanity. On the upshot, we’ve got a few million years (maybe a billion or two) before the Sun gets hot enough to make Earth uninhabitable (assuming we don’t speed that one up ourselves). If we figure nothing out in that time, we’ll be long dead before the Sun goes Red Giant. At the same time, humanity went from the first powered flight at Kittyhawk to humans walking on the Moon in the span of a single human life. We’re a clever bunch and might just sort something out. I like our chances and would love to give us a shot.

Yes. Then, Science was hijacked by capitalism, becoming something sponsored by capital goals, one which sees people as cogs in the machine because “profit must go up”.

Science has always been beholden to economics and war. Capitalism didn’t change that. Again, you’ve latched on to a mythical past. It didn’t exist. Leonardo Da Vinci invented a lot of stuff, much of it was designing better ways for one idiot with an upgraded stick to kill another idiot with a less upgraded stick. Even early hominids were working on better ways to gather resources and kill each other. It’d be great if we can ever change this, but until we sort out some sort of technological singularity (probably itself just a utopian myth), scientific work will take resources which means it’s part of whatever economic theory is currently being used. Economics is always trying to find a way to distribute finite resources in a world of infinite wants. Every economic system has advantages and disadvantages. Capitalism is just getting its opportunity to display its disadvantages at the moment.

Yes. And, on one hand, this improved quality of life (= less physical suffering). On the other hand, it empowered capitalism so people became increasingly reliant on a system that seeks to perpetuate their slavery (= ontological, invisible suffering).

Given what came before (feudalism), I’ll take capitalism and it’s “slavery” (so edgy) any day of the week. Seriously, for anyone in a first world country, sit back and look at the embarrassment of choices and riches you have available to you today. Go to a grocery store, buy a pineapple and eat it. You have now done something that would have been considered the height of indulgence in the 18th Century. Go to your bathroom, take a shit, flush. This would have blown the minds of most of humanity prior to the 19th Century (some really rich Romans wouldn’t have been all that impressed). To me, this exemplifies the weakness in your philosophy, you are quick to validate suffering but refuse to validate progress, joy or anything positive about existence. There are many, many good things in life but you refuse to recognize them, or seek to minimize them. The philosophy is so caught up in the negative, it fails to recognize the good, only calling it “less physical suffering”. And I call that bullshit. The good things in life are good, not a reduction in suffering. The default state is not suffering, you only see it that way because you choose to.

Improving human condition also means avoiding suffering from future generations: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7422788/

I’ll have to apologize, I’ve only made it to the end of Section 4 of the linked paper. It’s getting late and I’m getting pretty deep in my cups (one of humanity’s best, early inventions, booze). I do plan to pick it up in the morning, it’s an interesting read. But this is starting to sound suspiciously like the eugenicist movement of the early 20th Century. The authors also seem to recognize this and are doing a lot of “no really, we’re not those people”:

More troublesome is the realization that, as mentioned, many folks view any efforts to contain population growth as homicide, etc.

Ya, let’s have a critical look at China’s One Child Policy and then come back and tell me how great your policy is. Or, you know, what Eugenicists got up to in the early 20th Century. It might just be that the reason “many folks view any efforts to contain population growth as homicide” is because it always seems to turn out that way. But who knows, maybe the authors really do have A Brave New World planned and I just haven’t read that far yet.

Population growth is already slowing (something the paper mentions). Access to education and birth control already started bending that curve. In fact, most first world countries are already facing shrinking populations. No fancy “don’t have kids” push needed. The economic consequences of this are going to be a “fun” ride and may lead to the sort of suffering the authors are hoping to avoid. Or not, managing a shrinking population may not be an insurmountable economic problem. Japan is kinda doing OK, after all. But, so far is seems that the most effective method for long term population control is less eugenics and more first world development.

To try and sum this all up, I’d note that you seem to be arguing less about anti-natalism and more about the harms of unconstrained capitalism. I’m all on board with the latter, less so the former. We need more socialism (at least in the US). Modern capitalism is broken and that’s only going to be solved via higher taxes and greater wealth redistribution. Even people who believe wholeheartedly in capitalism should recognize that the level of wealth accumulation, rent seeking and regulatory capture have created distortions in the market which are not healthy for capitalism. We’ve entered a new Guilded Age and it’s time to break out the monopoly busting hammer. But, let’s leave the Eugenics in the dustbin of history, it wasn’t good the last time, it won’t be good this time.

Before I was born, there’s this… nothingness. No fleeting happiness, but also no suffering. There was no pain, no angst, nothing but the nothingness. Then I was pulled, without the ability to choose positively or negatively… now the blame is on me: “you really feel that existence is that horrible, there’s a solution for that at your nearest tall bridge”. Why should a person have to go through the painful to opt-out, risking failure?

Because there is no other way to determine what that choice would be. If you don’t exist, you cannot opt-in. So, the only way to give people any choice is to force them into life and let them opt out. Sure, it’s not a perfect solution, but it’s the only one which provides a choice.

Were/Are David Benatar, Philipp Mainländer, among other thinkers who extensively wrote about this subject, eternal “teenagers”?

Yup, I’m willing to stand behind that statement. It’s entirely possible to be well educated and still be stuck in teenage angst.

Are the scientists who’ve been tirelessly reporting on how human activity is endangering all lifeforms, and/or those who reported about microplastics everywhere, and/or those who tried to report about the consequences of Industrial Revolution, driven by “teenager angst”?

Ah going for the absurd now? Pointing out problems is very different from the edgy “everyone needs to die” philosophy. Quite the opposite, really. Fixing problems requires identifying them. If the goal is complete human eradication, identifying problems and putting forward solutions is counter productive. Scientific advancement is the reason we have so many people on the planet. Prior to the late 19th Century, diseases like small pox and bacterial infections were doing a bang up job of suppressing the human population. And then we came up with the germ theory of diseases and vaccines. So no, I won’t put scientists down as full of “teenager angst”. Maybe some of them are, I certainly don’t know them all. But, working hard to improve the human condition seems a pretty far cry from “why don’t we all just die?”

Oh, found the nerve. You’re sitting around dressed in black on black listening to some “edgy” band I’ve never heard of, right?

And yes I’m ignoring the folks who commit suicide. They aren’t the people arguing for others to not have children or for the end of all humanity. They are completely beside the argument about anti-natalism. We’re talking about your philosophy here, do keep up. If you’re arguing that humanity should be ended, then you really have two logic options:

1. Go on a mass murder spree, reducing the population as fast and as much as possible.
2. Go find that bridge. At least your suffering will be over and you will have reduce the human population by one.

Hanging about for some misguided sense of “I need to convert the masses” is just the same sort of messianic bullshit every cult leader engages in. Convince the dupes to follow your bullshit, while never actually following it yourself. And much like the crap from cult leaders, the philosophy is bullshit. There may be some nuggets of truth and useful ideas buried inside it, but it’s wrapped up in enough shit to render the whole worthless. Its a philosophy which has latched on to the same thinking as the guy on the corner with “The End is Nigh!” written in large, dark letters on a sign, ranting about whatever form of doom is en vogue. Those guys have been hanging about for millennia, none of them have been right. But hey, maybe the next one will be the ticket.

Yup, the world’s got problems. If your solution is “give up” then you’re part of the problem. The world gets better when people choose to fix it. But that’s hard, usually slow (including moving backwards on occasion) and requires effort. Giving up is easy. The hardest part is maintaining the flexibility in your shoulders to keep patting yourself on the back. And that’s all this philosophy is, it’s giving up with excuses to justify it to yourself. it’s a short-sighted view of the world, hyper-focused on the things which are bad.

If you really feel that things are that bad, instead of giving up or killing yourself (seriously, don’t do that. It improves nothing), find a small corner of the world which you can make better and go do it. Plant a tree, at least the world has one more tree now. Help troubled children, the fact that you are able to waste time arguing on the internet with idiots like me proves that you live an absolutely charmed life compared to many, many people, go make one of their lives a bit better. Go create something, the world needs more art. The time you just wasted on my trolling could have been far better spent on learning to paint or just rubbing one out. I mean, I get it, arguing with idiots on the internet is like masturbation, it’s fun at first but really you’re just screwing yourself. At least with real masturbation you get a refractory period to go do something useful with a clear mind. Give up on giving up, and make the hard choice to make the world better. Sure, you’ll fail a lot. That’s part of what makes it hard. But the successes are worth the effort.

you have a bit of teenage angst of your own left unresolved.

Seriously? You can do better than that. At least try to put more effort into the insult than “no, you”. Something like “brain-washed” or “child-pilled”. Or is that “natal-pilled”, what is the appropriate “-pilled” insult here? Even “neo-lib sheep” would have shown some imagination. Also, I’ve pretty much set you up for a whole host of insults over my masturbatory habits and things being “hard”, let’s see you really pound something out here.

I see the whole thing as what happens when people fail to move beyond teenage angst. Having children or not is a a very big, very personal choice. And I fully respect someone who chooses not to, whether their reasons are personal, economic, religious or whatever. You do you. Turning that outward to the argument that humans are horrible, life is suffering and no one should ever have children is taking that sort of thing to the point of hypocritical religious zealotry. No, you didn’t get to consent to being born. Until you were born, you didn’t have the capacity. But, once you are an adult you have your full faculties and can make choices for yourself. If you really feel that existence is that horrible, there’s a solution for that at your nearest tall bridge. Except, these folks never actually follow through. They want the attention that suicide brings, without that whole dying bit.

So ya, I fully understand that someone may choose not to have children. There are many valid reasons for making that choice. The whole argument that life is so terrible that we should work to off ourselves as a species, isn’t valid. It’s a cry for attention and the folks feeling that way should seek professional help.