Huge Study

*Looks inside

this latest study examined the chat logs of 19 real users of chatbots — primarily OpenAI’s ChatGPT — who reported experiencing psychological harm as a result of their chatbot use.

Pretty small sample size despite being a large dataset that they pulled from, its still the dataset of just 19 people.

AI sucks in a lot of ways sure, but this feels like fud.

It also needs to factor in a threat models. Maybe this is important for governments or giant conglomerates, but an average hacker isn’t going to have their hands on a quantum computing rig to just use. Until its use becomes widespread on a consumer level it will be mostly used by corporations and governments. I think it will be a while before a criminal organization has one, but maybe I am wrong.

Unexpected !achievers@piefed.social

real and based

Ha, it’s very easy to have strong principles when you’re a weird shut-in who spends all their time online ( definitely not me /s ). It’s not exactly as demanding to be here as so many make it out to be. Unless you’re running your own instance, it’s just making an account on someone else’s server, you just get a little choice in what kind of server you sign up for and where its hosted n such.

It’s not like making an impact on your bills like committing to only eating organically grown vegetables as well as ethically farmed chicken, beef, and pork because you’re against pesticides hurting insect populations and only want animals who aren’t in industrial farm hell. You have plan where to shop for foods matching your principles of minimal harm to animals and ecosystems, and the cost may be significantly higher than non-organic or factory-farm produced food. There is a larger buy-in on your principles in this example, a larger impact on your daily life and routines.

Making an account on a relatively niche set of sites on the internet is more like just being a stubborn nerd. Not to say our reasons aren’t often valuable principles in themselves, just that standing by those principles is often easier and cheaper to do online than very impactful real life principles. It’s easy to talk big game online and be a bum in real life. It’s easy to make an account once and then its as easy as typing in your username and password.

All you need to be principled out here is a halfway functioning old laptop running Linux (“I use Arch btw” -Lemmy probably) and an internet connection fast enough to load a website. It’s not big stakes.

Further, there’s a gap between being principled, and having good principles while being a regretful fuckup because you didn’t live up to your own principles. I’d wager there’s a lot more of us in the latter group of regretful fuckups.

I was able to get my mom a “new” computer for free because a friend was upgrading from his 2020 mac mini. Probably the newest computer she has had since the 90s. That has felt nice. She already had a cheap refurbished iPhone and iPad so it felt nice to give her the full Apple experience with a newish mac with an M1 processor. Bonus: my first chance to play around on Apple silicon while getting it prepped for her. We are both poor so this is a pretty big deal for us both. (My sister, who is doing a little better than us, had bought her the phone and iPad.)

If only we could have warned ourselves that, really, go for it, it’s the 90s, and probably the last time in your life before numerous “once in a lifetime” economic crises destroy your life and the lives of those around you.

Njalla

“Humans are the real monsters ackshually” is a near-endlessly repeated theme in media, especially for example, a show like The Walking Dead where the real danger always seems to be other humans and the zombies are mostly an ancillary danger that humans learned to live/survive with in the world. It’s not that “humans are the real monsters” isn’t a valid and worthwhile position to take in your media, but there should be more interesting ideas that one can plumb out of horror, or at least that’s my opinion on it. Just seems like low hanging fruit type story to me.

“Step-Operating-System what are you doing!?”

Sure looks like it.

How Valve sounds right now: “It’s totally cool to rip off kids with blind box stuff and get them addicted to gambling mechanics!”

I’m with you OP, we need to stop it in physical games as well. Just because Magic the Gathering does is and Labubu does it doesn’t make it okay. It actually just creates artificial scarcity and pushes children and the families providing them the money to gamble ever harder to get the rare drops, on the off chance that those are valuable.

Even Beanie Babies never stooped that low.

Livin la vida Linux full-time since 2024, dual-booted from about 2020.

We are God’s unwanted children.

Security through obscurity isn’t security.

There goes my excuse for not giving up and just paying for Unraid.

The last time I even remember private trackers being taken down was in the days of Oink.UK and What.CD.

Oink was shut down in 2007 and What was shut down in 2016, both mostly because they had grown so big they were hard to ignore. A lot of modern sites keep an upper limit on the accounts they allow to prevent too much growth and attracting attention.

Hell, I remember baconBits having an upper limit of less than 10,000 accounts. Once that limit was reached, you couldn’t even send out invites.

Also, public trackers that were huge like RARBG survived until finances shut them down, via COVID and the war in Ukraine, they were never taken down forcibly, and they were massive and widely used.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQBWGo7pef8

This is where I first remember hearing this tale, in this old Schoolhouse Rock parody that was in protest of the War in Iraq.

Precedent only applies equally if we are able to prove the same in court as Meta did. Are you going to need petabytes of pirated data to train your AI? Can you afford a team of top quality lawyers to fight your case and prove you were training a small locally-hosted AI at home? Do you think Meta, of all companies, really is fighting for you to be able to do the same as them? You will still get taken to court, you will still have to fight your case, “precedent” isn’t an automatic get out of jail free card. Do you have the money to fight massive copyright holders with endless money? Of course you don’t, none of us do.

Just fuckin with ya. Those are all valid gripes. I guess I got in on the scene way early through invites from friends and so I’ve hardly ever had to go through any interview process. I think the only place I “interviewed” was baconbits and it wasn’t really an interview since I mostly just shared evidence of good ratio on other trackers with long-lived accounts. I’ve had an account in good standing on Cinemageddon for… 18 years as of next month. Getting over that initial hump made it pretty easy to get in with good standing, and most decent trackers aren’t that hard to get good ratio on.