Last word: you’re the one who brought up murdering criminals - I just suggested you needed to equate them to animals in your head so you could justify caging them like animals.

Criminals commit murder, about 400,000 officially recognized / classified murders per year, much higher than that in reality of course, but 400K/8B is 1/20,000 per year, more like 1/400 lifetime, average, globally, just the official ones not the overlooked ones in war zones or lawless / uninvestigated situations. It’s not a problem that can be ignored or written off as insignificant.

Yep. I’m saying that the models I work with through Cursor and Claude Code include those user instructions that are pre-fed into every session. I tell mine to “act like my job title” and it will occasionally pull out some job title related stuff that’s applicable to the situation.

Of course “behind the scenes” the model vendors can pre-load anything they like, and some of what they pre-load are these so-called “guard rails” that lessen the odds that the model will engage in a chat to assist a suicide, or perpetrate a mass shooting, or fraud, or hacking, or, or, or… the list is long and the success rate is less than 100%, but it does shape the output somewhat in the desired direction.

Grok famously started calling itself “MechHitler” after one particular update, not hard to guess where that came from.

Great, so these people who you’re not okay with putting in cages, the ones that go out and kill other people (for drama’s sake), or just really grief society with constant home burglaries, maybe some drug addictions driving that, maybe assaulting people to avoid arrest, maybe “accidentally” killing someone with that gun they use to threaten the cashiers - no cages for them, either? I 100% agree, they’re still people, they deserve the best possible shot at becoming better integrated members of society, rehab programs instead of incarceration when appropriate and all that, but even with the amazing money saving rehabilitation rate of psych counselling for drug convictions (which a friend of ours does for a living), they’re still far from 100%. Our courts throw too many under the jail for no good reason, wasting their lives and costing the community far more money than the shot at rehab they deserve, but at some point, rehab isn’t working for some of them - then what?

Of course there are literally thousands of other “common” anti-social behaviors that eventually rise to the level of incarceration as well…

Freedom is responsibility

Yes, it is. And responsibility is the opportunity to fail to live up to that responsibility, and then what?

I get you: tell yourself they’re “just animals” so you can cage them without a guilty conscious.

There are a lot of flaws in the U.S. foundational documents, but “Life, LIBERTY, and the pursuit of happiness for all” is a concept I think worth defending.

Biochar is good stuff, if you’ve got a renewable supply.

And I am going to repeat my real-politik question to you explicitly:

What’s your grand non-punishment solution for members of society who actively harm other members of society? What to do with those who are non-compliant with “freedom requires and demands constraint”?

A society that simply represses or discards individuals because they engaged in destructive behaviour is not doing anything to in fact solve a problem.

I considered it to be implicit that society would do everything reasonable and appropriate to “solve” the problems of individuals engaged in destructive behavior, but experience has shown: the best efforts in these areas still fail to achieve 100% success. Certainly current societies all over the world (the U.S. especially) could try harder and do better, but 100% success has been historically elusive all over the world.

And a society that so simply and easily opts by fractioning itself just to allow more (blatantly artificial) freedom to its elements is not a society.

And should the entire human race be confined to a single society? Irrespective of our present predicament of cheap instant global communication I would submit: no, there is no one answer for how people should live in society. The one “basic human right” I would proffer to a universal collection of human societies is that: when someone wants to leave one society, they should be free to do so into any other society which is willing to accept them. No society should be under obligation to accept all applicants, but all societies should be required to let people leave whenever they want to, to wherever will willingly accept them.

The inherent problem with freedom in a society is when one person’s exercise of their freedom takes away from another person’s freedom. Absolute freedom only exists in a society of one person (and, by extension: the more people we have in a resource/space constrained society, the less free we all must be to share the common resources and space.)

If you don’t “get rid” of the problematic - what’s your option? Just shrug and ignore them when they rape, murder, pillage and destroy? If you “rehabilitate” the problematic, how is that respecting their freedom?

Back in “the Australia Project” (Manna story) - the development of the overall project was kind of vague, but implied access to a lot more “space” in which people could choose to live with others in ways that each group chose to be “acceptable society.” If you are more at home in one society than another, you are free to migrate. If a particular society chose to cap its size at 200, or 2000, or however many members, you were free to organize another modeled on it… The key aspect of behavior was: respect. Whatever the size of your social interaction: 2 million down to 2 people - respect the others in that society within the boundaries of local societal norms. The availability of virtual reality expanded the available “living space” many orders of magnitude.

There’s no shortage of people. If the “real world” people all get along with reasonable consensus on what “individual freedoms” mean, and some (hopefully small) percentage of those people decide they’d rather live in an alternate reality where they trample the rights of others, instead of incarceration / punishment / inadequate efforts at rehabilitation, transferring those people’s consciousness to a virtual reality where they can “be themselves” would seem to me to be a far better use of their individual spirit than trying to break it or simply terminating it. Maybe most of them never rehabilitate - that’s o.k. Of course, this is feeding right into a prequel for Star Trek II - The Wrath of Khan.

we need to stop tolerating the kinds of selfish behaviors that prove detrimental to every society that permits them.

The “why would we need it” question was intended as rhetorical.

I feel that as society grows orders of magnitude larger, these overall detrimental selfish behaviors keep resurfacing as advantages in special niches where they flourish, with the potential as you say to strangle us in the crib.

There’s also the looming spectre of mandatory birth control, if the magically predicted end of population growth doesn’t happen we’re going to have to do something to lessen our resource demands on the planet, because we’re already significantly degrading it far more than previous generations with 1/4th and less of our current population which simultaneously made much lower per-capita resource demands…

Crypto isn’t inherently bad, but boy did it get super maligned by any left-leaning space.

Crypto isn’t inherently bad, deceptive pump and dump / Ponzi schemes generally are considered to be bad by those not on the receiving end of the bulk of the funds.

At its outset, I thought it was the left-leaning (non-conservative) spaces that were religiously championing crypto for its’ subversion of the financial industry. Of course it wasn’t long before the financial industry and traditional grifters learned how to turn Crypto to their usual tricks as a new source of income…

Do we really want to cede the further development of social media to malignant dickheads

If you haven’t noticed, a lot of people who have a lot of money/power are malignant dickheads, and putting SM-A backed by their type up against SM-B promoted by the “fairness to all, don’t hurt anybody” crowd, which one do you think is going to corner 90%+ of the market share: A or B? B just doesn’t have the promotional juice (cash) to compete for mindshare.

If open forums on the internet don’t have some filtering / steering they all too easily degenerate into YouTube comment sections, or worse. Lemmy seems to mostly be administered with a light touch, but I believe it - even more than Reddit - is sub-moderator driven in terms of what gets removed, what gets allowed.

You can join the Lemmy / ActivityPub developers’ meetings via video chat anytime you like. I’m not “into” that level of things but I dropped in a few times just to see what’s up - there’s a definite axe or two they’re grinding, not that they’re bad people or out to hurt others at all, but if you don’t detect some agenda basis from that crew, you need to think a layer deeper about what those people have been through and why they’re doing something to make the world a better place in the future.

See: Manna by Marshall Brain. In his Australia project they simply install a centrally controlled “cutoff switch” - when people are out of line their conscious brain gets switched over to a virtual reality where they can live out their fantasies while their bodies report to detention until their brain decides it wants to join “the real world” again.

But where’s the motivation? How do you join the $10B club “doing so much good”? That would take soooo much longer than just being evil, evil is easy, evil is profitable, and evil can masquerade as good long enough to cash out to a level where you can hire lawyers good enough to never worry about being prosecuted for being evil.

Where’s the structural societal incentive to “do so much good”, and why would we need it? We are social animals, most of us are hardwired for altruism, we’ll do good without expectation of compensation, so our “great society” has chosen to just use those base human instincts to “do good enough” and meanwhile reward the rare psychopaths with wealth and power - because: it’s a dog eat dog world out there, if our dogs aren’t eating theirs, theirs will eat ours.

The models I have worked with have user configurable base instructions, so you can “train” your AI to answer like Ghandi crossed with Martin Luther King, or to channel MechaHitler.

Yeah, I remember in the 1980s seeing a briefcase sized “laser gyro” INS system, it was definitely better than no INS, but just couldn’t hold a candle to GPS.

It’s definitely cool - just not one of my top 100 cool projects on the list so after having made it work for 5 minutes I got the old ADHD onset and haven’t looked back at it for a couple of years.

Yeah, I did that about 20 months ago (wonder why?) and the problem is, there it sits but I forget where on my LAN I stored it, how to access it - I suppose, were I absolutely desperate, I could launch a several hours research project and find it, maybe even figure out how to access (I believe I stored README with it about how to do all that), but… why? And, even worse, one why? might be to see how articles have drifted over time, which I guarantee they have and continue to do, Wikipedia is actually quite fluid, but does knowing how current articles compare to the ones you archived in 2024 do anything of greater value for you than the negative value of being pissed off at how the world is lying to itself (same as it ever has…)?

Vastly oversimplifying: They’re not intelligent, they’re pattern matchers - when you give them “tricks” they find the best match in their training set, but if you’re the least bit creative you’ll just get matches to other similar tricks which usually are different.

Put another way: I have a couple of hand saws, I can cut limbs with them, even cut down whole trees, but a chainsaw is faster. Just because a chainsaw can also cut off my leg doesn’t mean it’s an uncontrollable dangerous evil tool, it means you need to be more careful with it than a handsaw. It also means something that would be 20 minutes of exhausting saw work can be done in 20 seconds (or less) with a properly setup chainsaw.

Two issues I have with the presentation:

A magnetic field is an external signal - the Earth’s magnetic field is actually incredibly weak…

10x better performance than GNSS … positioning accuracy of 1 nautical mile. Cheap old school handheld GPS out in the woods was accurate better than 10 feet most of the time, so what in this performance is 10x better? 10x more resistant to jamming? Seems like it should be completely impervious to jamming. 1 nm accuracy is useful, but hardly better performance.