A buddy of mine works for a fortune 500 company that started giving out MacBooks as the standard hardware this year. Apparently you need to jump through a bunch of hoops if you want to run Windows. I was shocked to hear it but Microsoft deserves to be humbled.

Bro I think you might need a T break.

You didn’t need to say cannabis was good, you suggested that it was better that we think of the plant smoked as cannabis than tobacco as to warn people about the societal ills of tobacco use.

I’m not going to do a lit review of all of the studies about cannabis risk for you, I just picked an article that cited the one you provided with a different conclusion. The point is that there is no academic consensus on this and we don’t need to revise LOTR because of your feelings about tobacco.

You’re not wrong, smoking things is bad for your health. I’m not saying that the risk is exactly equal, but if you could lay out an easily understood framework for how to assess the impact of smoking a single cigarette vs a single joint, I would be impressed.

All I’m saying is that Tolkien wrote the books with tobacco in mind, which was way more popular during his time, and we don’t need to pretend that they were smoking cannabis instead as some sort of some great societal PSA against the dangers of tobacco.

If we want to get really nitpicky, you don’t even inhale pipe tobacco smoke, whereas you’d never do the same with cannabis or you’d miss out on the effects. Obviously there’s a risk factor for mouth, nose, and throat cancer, but most western societies agree that adults should be informed of risks and allowed to make their own mistakes. Same goes for alcohol, mountaineering, and owning weapons.

Look, I can find academic papers that support my claim and cite them too, but the fact is that there isn’t nearly enough data on cannabis consumption to reach a scientific consensus. We know that putting toxins in your lungs is bad for your health overall, but I don’t agree that we can, in the same sentence, say “cannabis good, tobacco bad”. They’re both bad for you, and adults should be allowed to make their own decisions about when and how to use them.

Here, I’m not paying for full access to this paper, but it cites the paper you linked to and this one has itself been cited more often.

Marijuana use and risk of lung cancer: a 40-year cohort study

Russell C Callaghan, Peter Allebeck, Anna Sidorchuk

Cancer Causes & Control 24 (10), 1811-1820, 2013

Purpose

Cannabis (marijuana) smoke and tobacco smoke contain many of the same potent carcinogens, but a critical—yet unresolved—medical and public-health issue is whether cannabis smoking might facilitate the development of lung cancer. The current study aimed to assess the risk of lung cancer among young marijuana users.

Conclusion

Our primary finding provides initial longitudinal evidence that cannabis use might elevate the risk of lung cancer. In light of the widespread use of marijuana, especially among adolescents and young adults, our study provides important data for informing the risk–benefit calculus of marijuana smoking in medical, public-health, and drug-policy settings.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=946268550444709876&as_sdt=5%2C30&sciodt=0%2C30&hl=en#d=gs_qabs&t=1762525435931&u=%23p%3D9kkM3NKxiJUJ

This make it sound like you’re under the impression that tobacco is big cancer and cannabis is completely harmless?

Do you think it’s the nicotine that does the cancer and THC actually cures you? Because while I hate to be the one to bear that bad news for you, it’s the byproducts of combustion that cause the cancer, regardless of whether it’s cannabis or tobacco.

Basically, stop gatekeeping and let people, halflings, elves, dwarves, and ainur enjoy tobacco if they want. We’re all here for a limited amount of time, let me enjoy some pipe tobacco or a cigar without turning it into a moral panic requiring the redaction of one of the best stories of all time.

Also yes 10/10 for LOTR while stoned.

Literally everything you said is just dumb hater bullshit. You added nothing to the discussion.

It’s too bad there isn’t a way to use something like a flipper zero to compromise the cameras and simply disable them, or insert malicious video files into their network…

Oh I agree that you won’t be able to fire your shotgun in a large urban area, but if you’re someplace less densely populated I can imagine being able to drive up from behind in the middle of the night…

It’s too bad there isn’t an easier way to deal with this problem, especially in the instances where the cameras are being installed without consent.

Akin to having foreign adversaries set up a spy network within our borders, and instead of being punished for it, many law enforcement agencies are choosing to buy the subscription plan!

Anyone have any intel on how well these cameras hold up against buckshot?

Lovely, thanks for the reminder on massgrave. I made the switch to Linux and haven’t looked back, but there are some games that require root kits that I’d like to play so I was considering virtualizing Windows and this would be perfect.

Discord… Still isn’t public?

They’re certainly talking about it but they haven’t announced a date yet.

Having said that, element and matrix are both more privacy respecting so I do agree with the recommendation in general.

No. I want to make my voice loud enough for me to stop at a red light and ask the guy behind me if there is a proctology emergency or if they could stop riding my ass, and savor their expression as it dawns on them what is happening.

Yeah this is exactly what I have in mind. I want to feel like Smokey the Bandit calling people out for bad behavior with a receiver that has a coiled cable attached to it, at a minimum.

Since we’re all throwing random ideas out here, I want to equip my vehicle with an annoyingly loud external speaker so that when someone near me does something dumb, I can personally shame them.

Okay Verstappen calm down there

Great article, thanks for sharing it OP.

For example, the Anthropic researchers who located the concept of the Golden Gate Bridge within Claude didn’t just identify the regions of the model that lit up when the bridge was on Claude’s mind. They took a profound next step: They tweaked the model so that the weights in those regions were 10 times stronger than they’d been before. This form of “clamping” the model weights meant that even if the Golden Gate Bridge was not mentioned in a given prompt, or was not somehow a natural answer to a user’s question on the basis of its regular training and tuning, the activations of those regions would always be high.

The result? Clamping those weights enough made Claude obsess about the Golden Gate Bridge. As Anthropic described it:

If you ask this “Golden Gate Claude” how to spend $10, it will recommend using it to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge and pay the toll. If you ask it to write a love story, it’ll tell you a tale of a car who can’t wait to cross its beloved bridge on a foggy day. If you ask it what it imagines it looks like, it will likely tell you that it imagines it looks like the Golden Gate Bridge.

Okay, now imagine you’re Elon Musk and you really want to change hearts and minds on the topic of, for example, white supremacy. AI chatbots have the potential to fundamentally change how a wide swath of people perceive reality.

If we think the reality distortion bubble is bad now (MAGAsphere, etc), how bad will things get when people implicitly trust the output from these models and the underlying process by which the model decides how to present information is weighted towards particular ideologies? Considering the rest of the article, which explores the way in which chatbots attempt to create a profile for the user and serve different content based on that profile, now it will be even easier to identify those most susceptible to mis/disinformation and deliver it with a cheery tone.

How might we, as a society, create a process for conducting oversight for these “tools”? We need a cohesive approach that can be explained to policymakers in a way that will call them to action on this issue.

on device

scam detection

I know I’ll be downvoted into oblivion as I can hardly believe I’ve formed this opinion myself, but tbh this is a good application for some of this AI tech.

Anecdotally, a friend of mine grew up well-off; from an immigrant family but their parents were educated and in a lucrative profession so he always went to private schools etc. Fast forward to about 10 years after all the kids moved out; the parents had divorced amicably and his mom had a sizeable retirement along with the payout she had from the divorce. In the 7 figures - she never had to worry about money.

Anywho, mom ran into some medical issues so the kids had to get involved with her finances again, as she couldn’t do it herself. Turns out that over the course of months or years, mom had been getting scammed to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars at a time, to the point where she had actually taken out a mortgage on the home she previously owned outright. They’re still sorting things out but the number he has tossed out in the past is ~$1.4M that got wired overseas and is just… gone now.

So yes, I probably won’t turn this feature on myself, but for the tens of millions of uneducated and inept people out there, this could genuinely make a difference in avoiding some catastrophic outcomes. It certainly isn’t a perfect solution, but I suspect my friend would rate it as much better than nothing, and I would argue that this falls short of being “strictly evil”.

Yes, the continued consolidation of the economy into everything “Big” is the problem. Survival of the fittest only works as a core component of the economic philosophy if we allow firms to be out-competed and for market shifts to occur.

Ever-increasing profit is not a problem if a consummate increase in service or product quality comes along for the ride. This is how an economy expands. We all want this, even if it creates turbulence at the individual or community level.

Consolidating into entities that are too big to fail is a problem. Give me Zuck Prime. This is literally why we are all on Lemmy, is it not?

I was in a similar boat and have found modern Linux to be somewhere between Windows XP and Windows 10 in terms of convenience and having it “just work”. However, I reckon I’ve spent less time troubleshooting than I would spend raging at the bullshit Microsoft keeps trying to shove down your throat in Windows. On balance I’m counting it as a win, and I suspect you will too.

Arguably the only potential PHI is the association between provider names and individuals, but with the current clown show running HHS, I’m not going to hold my breath and wait for accountability here.