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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
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completely blind computer geek, lover of science fiction and fantasy (especially LitRPG). I work in accessibility, but my opinions are my own, not that of my employer. Fandoms: Harry Potter, Discworld, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Buffy, Dead Like Me, Glee, and I'll read fanfic of pretty much anything that crosses over with one of those.
keyoxide: aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ
Location Ottawa
Birthday 1987-12-20
Pronouns he/him (EN)
xmpp fastfinge@im.interfree.ca
keyoxide aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@knwmoon It's better in the same way a small town is better. Everyone is friendly, and many of us know each other. But that also means gossip, drama, cliques, and insane arguments and grudges that have been simmering for 20 years.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@quanin @dhamlinmusic @lynessence @mcourcel Exactly. That's why climate change won't be solved. Because for humanity to survive, we need to start doing things, right now, that a lot of people would not survive and many others would think would make life not worth living.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@dhamlinmusic @lynessence @quanin @mcourcel The long and short of it is: to have any hope of making the effects of climate change survivable (even if we cut all pollution right this second by magic, the temperature is still going up by at least 1.5 C), we would need to cut the overall resource usage of humanity to something like a fifth of what it is today.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@quanin @dhamlinmusic @lynessence @mcourcel I think you're underestimating the impacts of hour long commutes, twice a day, in rush hour. In a car designed to fit four or five people, but with only one person in it. But you're correct that the most damaging form of travel is flights. We would, I would think, have to mandate no flying anywhere unless it's a medical emergency, and probably strictly ration travel via ships and trains. And stop shipping a lot of goods. Either produce it locally or don't have it.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@Rosalyn @jscholes @modulux I have the key clicks on. It's something about my fingers just hitting a flat screen, without any downward pressing motion, that throws me right off. It actually took me quite some time to get used to the Braille Lite when I first got it; I wanted to slam the keys like I would a manual Brailler. But I managed to adjust to that just fine in a few months. But an unmoving screen seems to be my limit.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@quanin @dhamlinmusic @lynessence @mcourcel "still need to be able to do the traveling". No, see, that's my point. Meaningful action on climate change means completely re-architecting society so we do not, in fact, need to do the traveling. Working from home was a tiny step. But return to office policies put an end to even that. As long as we insist on having grapes shipped in from France and computers shipped in from China, climate change cannot be solved.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@Rosalyn @jscholes @modulux I tried for months to get on with BSI. I'm still faster on the on-screen keyboard than I am with BSI. Brailling without some kind of mechanical feedback just doesn't work for me at all.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@quanin @dhamlinmusic @lynessence @mcourcel Hense why I said "meaningful". Meaningful would require giving up cars entirely. That won't happen.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@quanin @dhamlinmusic @lynessence @mcourcel Depends on where you live. In Canada, sure. In the US...well, for now. In North Korea? The chance is already zero. And the longer climate change goes on, the more the chances trend towards zero for everyone, everywhere. And I would say that there is a zero percent chance that human society is going to do anything meaningful about climate change in time.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@quanin @dhamlinmusic @lynessence @mcourcel But if we don't end up in a situation where AI is in control, things will be the same as they are now, until we're all dead. All revolutions do is kick one set of corrupt humans out, and put another in. AI could be our only chance at real, meaningful change. And it might suck. But what we've got now sucks pretty bad.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@quanin @dhamlinmusic @lynessence @mcourcel I don't. The wealthy have no interest in anything beyond the next quarter. I suspect we'd be better off rolling the AI dice.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@quanin @dhamlinmusic @lynessence @mcourcel Sure, and then you get inflation, and nobody has any money, so my lack of it becomes irrelevant. I think I can boil down what you mistakenly call my "optimism" to this: climate change means that humanity is extinct within the next 250 years or so. AI either makes no change, makes our remaining 250 years better, makes our remaining 250 years worse, solves climate change, or ends us early. If it ends humanity early, we're no longer around to care. All other options are either good or neutral. So I'm just not worried about AI.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@modulux @dhamlinmusic @lynessence @quanin @mcourcel This seems to say that 7-zip is a smarter system than any human. It can compress data a lot better than I can! I'm not seeing how this definition could be useful in any conversation about the results or effects of intelligence.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@quanin @dhamlinmusic @lynessence @mcourcel And a functional AI that could do that would also be smart enough to understand that if every company does that, no company can exist, because nobody will have the money to buy products. So if its goal is shareholder value, forever, it would realize it has to do something different. In a way humans do not.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@quanin @dhamlinmusic @lynessence @mcourcel And "some of them are dead" is, at this point, better than the situation we have now. Even if AI decides to end all of humanity...climate change was heading us in that direction anyway. AI could make things a lot better, or make the worse things happen faster. I'd happily toss the dice.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@quanin @dhamlinmusic @lynessence @mcourcel Also, remember that the AI bigwigs are okay with a health emergency bankrupting you because they get your interest payments, and you become a debt slave for life. Look at Henry Ford: he was a terrible, awful man. But even he recognized that he had to pay people so they'd have the money to buy his cars! Current capitalists don't understand that. But any functional AI would have to, if it's not just a bunch of code they run and control.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@lynessence @dhamlinmusic @quanin @mcourcel In order to escape our control, it would have to evolve beyond us. Because I can't see us willingly giving up control.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@quanin @dhamlinmusic @lynessence @mcourcel Sure, sounds cool. But it's fantasy, not science fiction. Because again, "AI" is just a kind of magic, and always will be until we can define what we mean by intelligence. and we can't make prognostications about what magic can, or will, do.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@quanin @dhamlinmusic @lynessence @mcourcel Right, but as long as they're just systems we control, they're not "AI" the way you seem to mean it. A system that's smart enough to escape our control is smart enough to do something else. Any other system is just us, using a tool to do the same things we've always done.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@lynessence @dhamlinmusic @quanin @mcourcel The reason communism never works is because the people at the top are always crooked. If you had a mythical perfectly fair AI, it'd work fine. But AI is created by humans, so unless it's both magic and smarter than us, it won't be fair, either, because we still control it.