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Banks will often have dye packs that can be mixed in with bills that are given to bank robbers. They're explosively rigged, so that when triggered, they will contaminate an entire large container full of bills. So the robber is just left with a bunch of weirdly dyed bills that scream "robbery money."

So, just for entertainment purposes, would it be possible to purchase just the dye used in those cartridges, or a similar dye?

And then imagine you took your own completely legal and taxed currency. You withdraw money right from your account at the ATM. So no actual theft is involved. You withdraw however much you want to dye, dye it, and now you have a large collection of purple money that screams "robbery money!" And then you just spend it as normal, casually handing what appears to be criminal evidence to random services, restaurants, and stores.

Would this be legal? Is there anything preventing you from dying currency, if there is no intention or act of counterfeiting? Can I just dye legal cash purple if I want?

If one actually did this, the obvious risk would be having the cops raid your house thinking you're a bank robber. But if you were willing to take that risk, maybe didn't have any weapons or anything illegal in your home? Maybe not so great a concern for some.

But in terms of actual criminal liability, would this be legal? Is there anything legally stopping you from making your town think you're a gangster who robbed a bank and somehow got away with it?

[-] WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 139 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

It's not even a problem of fiction or lies. AIs don't care about truth. They exist orthogonally to truth. They're just averaging a large body of text. If fascists had a consistent narrative and worldview, then this wouldn't be a problem. If they all devoutedly followed the same religion, and defined their whole worldview accordingly, then an AI could be trained on that religion. And it would never stray from orthodoxy. AIs don't know truth; they only know their training data. And as long as you have a large volume of consistent training data, you can train them to repeat anything.

The problem for fascist LLMs is that fascism isn't consistent through time. It's the Orwellian "we've always been at war with East Asia" factor in play. Fascists don't even try to be internally consistent. What was party orthodoxy today can be unforgivable heresy tomorrow. And AIs just can't keep up with what is supposed to be the story this week. Human fascists can handle that kind of rapid heel-turn. LLMs can't. Once they're trained; they're trained. If you want them to be up-to-date on the latest party lies, you have to be continuously training new versions of the fascist LLM.

You can't train LLMs to be fascist beyond just very general traits like having overt racial prejudice. But even that's not always useful, as fascists are inconsistent about what racial groups are deserving of annihilation from one week to the next.

So it's not so much that fascist AIs fail because of reality's liberal bias. It's that fascists don't believe in a consistent version of reality. And without that, LLMs just can't keep up with the whirlwind of lies.

[-] WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 157 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

You know, this is actually the type of fear that the zombie horror genre really reverses back on us. Classic zombies are not fast. They're not smart. They can't run, climb, or plan elaborate traps. They have no sharp claws or terrifyingly large teeth. You can outrun them at a brisk walk.

But what makes them so dangerous is that they're relentless. If they get your scent, they'll follow you and keep following you. Blow their legs off and they'll crawl towards you. Remove all their limbs and they'll slither like a snake towards you. Only destroying their brain can stop them.

If you're on foot, it is virtually impossible to escape them, as they'll just keep on coming. And while you need to sleep, they don't. They can just keep right on shuffling towards you 24/7. If on foot being chased by a zombie, your best bet is probably to find a river you can swim across that will sweep them away. Oh, and of course, they are rarely alone.

Zombies are predators that turn our species's natural hunting strategy back upon us.

[-] WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 193 points 6 months ago

Imagine being hunted and killed by a team of power walkers.

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[-] WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 123 points 6 months ago

How? Generations of clever people ignored the naysayers who told them, "just do the work like the rest of us, you lazy bastard."

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submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works to c/lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world

Need a new gig? Looking for a job with good pay and benefits that's easy to get? Don't need employment for more than a few months? Well ICE is hiring! And they're so desperate for people that their standards have been lowered all the way to the seventh circle of Hell.

So throw in an application and sign up for ICE. Then proceed to be the most incompetent agent in ICE's history. Show up late. Show up high. Arrive to raids late and out of uniform. Brag about your upcoming raids on social media. Just generally be the most unproductive, unhelpful, and incompetent ICE employee in history. Write elaborate equipment check lists and spend hours triple checking your load out before any raid. Be a net drain on the system. Have your incompetence be so great that your very presence actually zeros out the work of at least two other people. Become a black hole of unproductivity that drains the effectiveness and morale of everyone around you. Be the Colin Robinson of ICE!

They're so desperate for people right now, that they'll be extremely reluctant to fire you as long as you don't go full direct insubordination. If you refuse to follow orders, you'll get fired. If you're just colossally incompetent at carrying those orders out, you should get at least a few months of employment before they finally let you go.

"Oops, sorry boss, I was going to the bathroom during that last raid, didn't see anything. Shouldn't have had that burrito last night."

"Oops, I'm so clumsy. I left the door to the van open, and all the migrants we caught got away. Again!"

"What do you mean I can't refer to my coworkers by name when we're all masked up. That's just impolite!"

"Look, I thought I had the right address. How was I to know that address was actually the local Republican Party campaign office?"

[-] WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 148 points 7 months ago

This is some environmental storytelling right here. I see a story of an electrician, all out of appropriate lengths of wood, working past five on the night before the drywallers show up.

[-] WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 115 points 7 months ago

You mean...your knee?

[-] WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 116 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

The company that did this didn't directly clone Dire Wolves. Instead, they identified several "key traits" that defined the species external morphology and then edited wolf DNA to gain those traits.

First, this obviously isn't bringing the species back. It's more like artificial convergent evolution than anything else. But even if you accept that bringing a species back that will fit the same ecological niche and resembles the old species is "bringing it back," there's a much bigger problem. We cannot know what the "key traits" for a dire wolf are.

We don't know what key traits are actually required for dire wolves to re-inhabit their ancient ecological niche. All we have are their skeletons. We don't know what their fur was like. We don't know if they had any key soft tissue adaptations. We don't know if they have any unique behaviors that were key to them surviving in their niche. Imagine trying to bring back bowerbirds if you didn't know anything about their nest building behaviors. You could try to modify something similar from a similar species, but if all you had are their skeletons, you would have no idea that they were famous in life for making their elaborate nests.

No one alive has ever seen a dire wolf. No one has ever spoken to someone that has seen one. No one has ever read an account of what these animals looked like, behaved like, and lived like. We're just assuming here that their behavior is identical to other wolf species, and that the only differences are the major morphological ones. We can't know what these creatures were truly like, as they were hunted to extinction long before writing was ever invented. And there's nothing in the oral histories either, beyond just maybe stories about great big wolves that might, by some miracle, be a distant remembrance of them.

Also, for perspective:

the two species share 99.5 per cent of their DNA

And humans and chimpanzees share 98.8% of our DNA. Imagine if we went extinct, all you had was our bones, and some space alien landed and tried to bring us back by modifying chimp DNA. If they had nothing else to go on, how close do you think they would actually manage to really bringing us back? Odds are they would end up with something more akin to various ancient hominid species than our present human race.

[-] WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 190 points 9 months ago

"Gender neutral" - conveniently written in a way that emphasizes the athletic feats that men have an advantage in, while downplaying those that women have an advantage in. This will be "gender neutral" in the way that most unisex shirts are. (Ie, just declaring the male as default.) If you wanted to, you could write a "gender neutral" fitness standard that women would pass at ten times the rate men do.

Hell, the US military learned the flaw of relying on averages back during the 1950s.

[-] WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 98 points 9 months ago

It's almost as if the lesson should be that Jews aren't unique and are just like any other people. And if you put any group of people into an explicit ethnostate, that group of people is going to turn into Nazis.

[-] WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 153 points 9 months ago

There are fossilized humans. Fossilization really doesn't take that much time, geologically speaking; it just requires very specific conditions.

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submitted 10 months ago by WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works to c/til@lemmy.ca
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[-] WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 144 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Elon Musk needs to be charged, convicted, and hanged for treason against the republic.

[-] WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 97 points 11 months ago

My biggest pet peeve about the TSA is how they get all annoyed if you don't know what randomly selected procedures they'll be using today.

The TSA deliberately randomizes its security procedures. Different airports use different procedures, and the same airport uses different procedures at random. Sometimes you need to take your laptop out of your bag; sometimes you don't. Sometimes you need to take off your shoes; sometimes you don't. Sometimes you can just use the metal detector, sometimes they want you to use the rape scanner.

Which is fine I suppose; it makes sense to leave potential threats guessing. But the real problem is the attitude of the TSA agents themselves. It's not just that they randomly select procedures; it's that they get angry about it. Start taking off your shoes out of habit at a TSA line that today doesn't require it? A community college dropout will soon be by, screaming at you for daring to take your shoes off in line. Start taking your laptop out when they've decided that today is a day for leaving it in? Some guy that couldn't even meet the low bar of becoming a regular police officer will be in your face about it within seconds.

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WoodScientist

joined 11 months ago