PendingKetchup's recent activity
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Comment on Can I turn a closed Windows 11 laptop on and off? in ~comp
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Comment on I hate the new internet. I hate the new tech world. I hate it all. I want out, and I can't be the only one. in ~tech
PendingKetchup I don't actually think a teacher ought to quit just because their job now contains computers. It is often better to stay and fight than to bail. I wanted to start a conversation about the...I don't actually think a teacher ought to quit just because their job now contains computers. It is often better to stay and fight than to bail. I wanted to start a conversation about the rhetorical move and why bailing (or even fighting to the point where it creates a Problem) should more often be considered a legitimate option that people should be assumed to have by default.
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Comment on I hate the new internet. I hate the new tech world. I hate it all. I want out, and I can't be the only one. in ~tech
PendingKetchup One thing that a lot of the old stuff had in common is that it was built by individuals or small groups. The online games that are lootbox casino-fests are also made by teams of thousands. No one...One thing that a lot of the old stuff had in common is that it was built by individuals or small groups. The online games that are lootbox casino-fests are also made by teams of thousands. No one artist would make something with such little respect for its audience.
So there is something you can do about it besides look for alternatives: you can construct alternatives. There's that guy trying to build ActivityPub competitors to Instagram, TikTok, and now I hear Tumblr, all at the same time. Will every quixotic project like this succeed? Of course not. But are you capable of, say, publishing a number of high-quality book reviews? Joining a webring about one of your hobbies? Drawing a scribble in MS Paint? Absolutely.
The worst thing about the current Internet is it silences users. If you're posting things fishing for likes and re-whatevers, and scrolling through an infinite number of other posts with more of each than you seem to get, you stop talking.
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Comment on I hate the new internet. I hate the new tech world. I hate it all. I want out, and I can't be the only one. in ~tech
PendingKetchup Do the people who are so constrained that they cannot take essentially any action need to feature in the discourse as prominently as they do? And when they do feature, should they be placed like...Do the people who are so constrained that they cannot take essentially any action need to feature in the discourse as prominently as they do? And when they do feature, should they be placed like this as a sort of rebuttal or necessary caveat to proposals that people do things? Or do they belong in the other conversational turn, as evidence that things must be done?
One can also say: You don't need to be a teacher. You can Just Walk Out and do something else instead. This is a risk for anyone to do, and for some people that risk would be so great that they could not rationally, or even irrationally-but-sanely, choose that course of action. This is additional evidence that all those who can, should, in order to damage whatever system is causing the problem that motivates people to leave.
The civil rights fight involved a lot of boycotting busses by those least well-positioned to do so. It actually worked really well.
If, say, network effects are trapping the sex workers on Twitter, the correct response seems less like acknowledging that some people can't quit Twitter as if "people who can't quit Twitter" are themselves a minoritized group, and more like advocating that people quit Twitter even harder.
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Comment on What's your take on capital and corporal punishment? in ~talk
PendingKetchup Have you tried asking people why they're committing crimes? If you found yourself doing those crimes, with roughly the same system of values, strength of character, and sense of common decency...- Exemplary
Have you tried asking people why they're committing crimes? If you found yourself doing those crimes, with roughly the same system of values, strength of character, and sense of common decency that you have now, what would have had to have happened to you?
People don't generally take up shop lifting or drug dealing for fun or over other plausible options for what they could be doing. Armed robbery is not a good time for anyone involved. These are things people do for lack of alternatives. The world is getting worse for the people committing the crimes, and leaving them with no good legitimate options.
Punishments in general make this problem worse. If you were struggling to make rent with your bad job before you went to prison, when you get out you now have no house and no job to make rent with. Is a person you cut the hand off of more or less likely to get a job than they were before? Is threatening to maybe break the arm of someone who will not eat or who cannot advance unless they do the thing you do not like actually going to change behavior?
(Also, among adults, punishments as a concept are inappropriate. The state is not your real dad.)
I think you are applying the terrible social welfare system statistics to the wrong model. People aren't weirdly lazy, causing use of the social welfare system, and also weirdly evil, causing a lot of crime. People are poor, which causes both use of the social welfare system (which is what it's for), and also crime (because it doesn't properly solve the problem).
To implement social decency back into a deprived area, stop depriving the area.
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Comment on Honey did nothing wrong in ~tech
PendingKetchup But in your example you postulated that what Business H is doing is making a genuine claim, and that that claim is received by the shop, and that that claim is fraudulent, as givens. It's trivial...But in your example you postulated that what Business H is doing is making a genuine claim, and that that claim is received by the shop, and that that claim is fraudulent, as givens. It's trivial to figure out why that's fraud, because I can just point to where it says that in your premises.
I am trying to figure out why I disagree with you about whether those premises describe the situation here.
Say it doesn' t benefit me. If I send you a referral link in which I have embedded some unrelated third party's referral code I found, and get you to click it, am I lying to the shop by making a statement that that third party referred you to them instead of me?
I don't think so; I don't think these codes carry the same sort of "I am saying this and I believe it to be true" pragmatic content as you would get from writing out "I was referred by so-and-so" in English. As I understand it,
referrer=123
is a command to set the value of a query parameter, not a statement of fact about the physical world. A link to a product on a shop's web site is fundamentally a name, not something that can be true or false when spoken or transmitted. At least the way I see it.But if you see it as a statement of fact, and Honey's browser code as acting as them instead of as the user, then Honey would indeed be telling lies to shops.
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Comment on What is China’s DeepSeek and why is it freaking out the AI world? in ~tech
PendingKetchup I guess this makes sense if you thing there is a set level of capability beyond which you don't really want more improvements (or you don't have the data to drive them), and it isn't just "how...I guess this makes sense if you thing there is a set level of capability beyond which you don't really want more improvements (or you don't have the data to drive them), and it isn't just "how much vram will Nvidia sell me before they start raising the price to performance curve to tell me to stop". Maybe I need a model equivalent to Llama 3 70b for some reason but the same sort of thing at what was previously 405b's capability level won't help?
I guess I don't really understand what people think they're going to do with these in general, so I think the same vague hype-based justifications can be used to sell models of arbitrary power as a thing worth buying for some reason.
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Comment on What is China’s DeepSeek and why is it freaking out the AI world? in ~tech
PendingKetchup Why should the news that NVIDIA's products are able to be used more effectively make them less valuable? Do we think people are likely to prefer "good-enough" models and that we are already there...Why should the news that NVIDIA's products are able to be used more effectively make them less valuable? Do we think people are likely to prefer "good-enough" models and that we are already there with current hardware?
If one 5090 or whatever can now replace an OpenAI subscription, I feel like people then would want it more.
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Comment on Are LLMs making Stack Overflow irrelevant? in ~tech
PendingKetchup What do you think is the nature of understanding?What do you think is the nature of understanding?
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Comment on Honey did nothing wrong in ~tech
PendingKetchup I just don't have the same intuition that this obviously counts as theft that you seem to have, I think because I don't really feel like the referral money properly belongs to anyone in advance.I just don't have the same intuition that this obviously counts as theft that you seem to have, I think because I don't really feel like the referral money properly belongs to anyone in advance.
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Comment on Honey did nothing wrong in ~tech
PendingKetchup My understanding of civil liability is that it still has to have some kind of basis in a law prohibiting or requiring something. If we sign a contract and I promise to deliver 100 widgets by...My understanding of civil liability is that it still has to have some kind of basis in a law prohibiting or requiring something. If we sign a contract and I promise to deliver 100 widgets by Tuesday and don't provide them until Friday, and you lose out on a big sale because of it, that's not a crime and there's no possible way for it to result in me going to jail. But it does create civil liability, and you could sue me for damages, because somewhere there's a law on the books (or maybe in a precedent-setting decision, or part of the Restatement of Torts that is somehow incorporated into the set of active laws by reference) that says that breach of contract is a thing people aren't allowed to do.
Whereas if I make your widget delivery late because I was driving to work and formed part of a traffic jam, not because I breached a contract, I don't have to worry about being civilly liable for those consequences because there's no law against being stuck in traffic.
And if I make your widget delivery late by robbing the truck driver, I am in criminal trouble for the robbery and in civil trouble for its knock-on effects.
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Comment on Honey did nothing wrong in ~tech
PendingKetchup I would actually quite like businesses to not be allowed to arbitrarily harm third parties. Then we'd have legal tools to address things like climate change: by emitting CO2, which wasn't actually...I would actually quite like businesses to not be allowed to arbitrarily harm third parties. Then we'd have legal tools to address things like climate change: by emitting CO2, which wasn't actually forbidden, you damaged the environment and therefore have to pay to clean it up.
As far as I know we don't actually run the legal system like that: you are only responsible for the negative effects of your actions if you did at least one forbidden thing. If you poke someone with an eggshell skull without permission and it kills them, you get in trouble. If you greet them and it turns out they had eggshell eardrums and their head explodes from this, my understanding is that you don't.
A pure consequentialist legal system where you are in trouble whenever anything you do causes problems for anyone else is a system in which you can never determine that you are safe to do something, especially something unusual where all the results can't be known in advance. Nor can you do things like out-compete a rival firm so they lose sales or go out of business. I don't think that that would be a much better model of actual ethics. It's wrong to by many apparently fine steps destroy the climate, or starve someone, and it's wrong to walk into someone's house and steal a million dollars from them, but I don't think it's wrong to, by many apparently fine steps, cause you to have a million dollars and someone else not.
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Comment on Honey did nothing wrong in ~tech
PendingKetchup If Honey is going to the shops and saying "we were responsible for sending those users to your shop, please dispense the payout," they are absolutely doing fraud. If they are saying "those users...If Honey is going to the shops and saying "we were responsible for sending those users to your shop, please dispense the payout," they are absolutely doing fraud.
If they are saying "those users made purchases using affiliate coupon codes issued to us", they are telling the truth. That did actually happen.
Which one they're really doing for a given shop is going to depend heavily on the particular terms of that shop's affiliate program contracts. Which programs are set up as abstracted code-for-cash games, and which are set up as "by sending us a message with your code via a user's browser, you assert that you actually convinced the user to come to our shop and didn't just open a popup or some other nonsense"?
Lying to a business associate is fraudulent, while smart-ass strategies in formalized abstract systems are acceptable, even when they negatively impact others.
I have been assuming that Honey, as a relatively large outfit, actually had their lawyers read those affiliate program contracts that were one of their major sources of revenue, and that they didn't just blatantly ignore them. (If they did just not follow them, I would have expected the stores to be suing them, not the other affiliates. Presumably we will have the stores as witnesses: if your legal complaint is "You lied to Tina who paid you instead of me", one might expect Tina's opinion to matter quite a bit.)
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Comment on Are LLMs making Stack Overflow irrelevant? in ~tech
PendingKetchup How can we measure the difference between a system that is fundamentally incapable of understanding but presents a 50% convincing illusion of understanding, and one that is fundamentally capable...How can we measure the difference between a system that is fundamentally incapable of understanding but presents a 50% convincing illusion of understanding, and one that is fundamentally capable of understanding but has a 50% strength capacity to do it?
To me, there's no difference between understanding an idea and the ability to apply it to other ideas. There are a lot of ideas you can take and hand to an LLM and make it bang them against other ideas and tell you what happens. It's not always completely accurate, but to me that's disputing the accuracy of an understanding rather than the existence. (And to some extent the samplers guarantee it will always make mistakes at some frequency, because it's always rolling for the next word. You try generating accurate text by ranking words and then hearing back which one you actually said.)
I asked Mixstral 8x7b about banging a cat and a cactus together, and I got back a complaint that that was a bad idea, as "Cats and cacti are both living things that can experience pain and distress". Then I asked about a car and a carpet, and I was informed that "it's unlikely that a carpet would cause any significant damage to a car, as cars are designed to be much more durable than household items like carpets".
Does a system that alleges that cacti can feel pain have as good an understanding of cacti as you or I do? No. But I don't understand how a system that can take two ideas and bang them together and, more often than not, approximate the right answer, is well-described as having actual zero "understanding" of any of the ideas in question. It's so much better than the null model that there's a qualitative difference.
I also think that you can deduce from first principles using language, either natural language or more formal symbolic systems. You might need to bolt on some grammar constraints and maybe a calculator, but I could see an LLM forming the core of a system that you could point at and say "This is capable of deduction from first principles". After all, the GOFAI Lisp machines could do deduction, they just lacked direction in terms of what was worth deducing and when the formal model importantly diverged from the real world. A language model can provide a common-sense-in-a-box and a collection of biases to steer a theorem prover.
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Comment on Honey did nothing wrong in ~tech
PendingKetchup I can try. Part of it is that I blame the "marketing-industrial complex", as it were, for ruining the Internet. Everything is riven with advertising, and the surveillance necessary to match people...I can try.
Part of it is that I blame the "marketing-industrial complex", as it were, for ruining the Internet. Everything is riven with advertising, and the surveillance necessary to match people with the ads most likely to affect them, and the surveillance necessary to find out if the treatment was effective and the person's behavior was in fact altered, which then feeds back into the development of more effective stimuli to more reliably provoke the desired response.
I see it as a kind of wholesale mind control, or psychological malware. Sure, nobody actually feels that the Pepsi ad physically compelled them to buy a soft drink they did not otherwise want, but if 10 people in the control group and 15 people in the experimental group bought the product, those 15 people who think they were not caused to act by someone else are 33% wrong.
But if it were just billboards and turbo digital surveillance banner ad billboards, it wouldn't be such a problem. Maybe there's some things you can't say because they're "not advertiser friendly", but if you have to say "unalived" and can't say "Palestine" you can still attempt to get your message across.
The real problems arise when the editorial wall comes down and the desires and interests of advertisers start to affect the message and structure of what they advertise beside. Communications tools are restructured into addictive slot machines by the invisible hand of the market, to increase the amount that their users can be exposed to advertisements, in order to alter their behavior for the benefit of advertisers. A series of YouTube video first develops locations for commercials to be inserted, then more pervasive sponsor integrations, "activations", and projects conceived and shaped entirely around something a sponsor wants to sell. Did you ever see that season of Linus Tech Tips' "Scrapyard Wars" where, as they traveled around from compute shop to computer shop, they were accompanied by an actor silently fidgeting with a device wrapped in their sponsor's product, who had no other reason to be there? Advertising exerts a force that restructures and cheapens culture.
And affiliate marketing is one of the easiest ways to blow holes in that editorial wall between advertisements and whatever someone is ostensibly trying to publish to help their audience. It directly rewards authors based on the actions taken by their audience members, encouraging them to themselves lace their messages with techniques designed to alter human behavior. It creates a conflict of interest: when an author creates something, it ought to be for the purpose of improving the life of their reader for having read it. Maybe it uses the latest in persuasive science to increase the rate of grass touching and water drinking among its readership by 55%. That's fine. But if the author stands to profit when their audience takes particular actions or buys particular products, they have an incentive to encourage that action over what's best for the reader. This makes it impossible to trust almost anything you hear from someone who has another hat as an affiliate marketer: are they saying that because it's true, or because I need to hear it, or are they saying it to convince me to buy whatever it is so they get paid?
You can see the effect of this in the state of blogs. Amateur efforts where people write their genuine opinions and experiences are now extremely rare. Instead, there are professional outlets that seem to start with Amazon affiliate links vaguely related to a topic and surround them with text sufficient to catch a search spider. The result is coordinated inauthentic behavior across an entire medium. Is the most important thing I need to know about painting a wall really that I can get cheap paint rollers and drop cloths on Amazon? Are those really the top ten flashlights of 2025, or are they the ones available on your affiliate-supporting sales platform of choice? Why does this review in a formerly reputable outlet insist that each product on its list is "best for" at least one thing? Why is the made-up "Prime Day" front-page news whenever it is held? Indeed, why are so many human problems written about in the collective consciousness as if they are best solved with the quick application of a product available with 2-day shipping?
I feel that the people who "legitimately" use affiliate links have been lying to me personally and to everyone I know at cultural scale for years, as a direct result of using them, so I have little sympathy for the argument that this system is being disrupted and must be protected.
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Comment on Honey did nothing wrong in ~tech
PendingKetchup Here I think is what I was alluding to with the "dangerous to let people convince you otherwise" line. It might be that the legal system finds that Honey stole something it wants to protect. But I...Here I think is what I was alluding to with the "dangerous to let people convince you otherwise" line. It might be that the legal system finds that Honey stole something it wants to protect. But I think it would be wrong for it to do so.
The legal system can operate to protect established business interests against people doing weird new things that make formerly money-making schemes not make money anymore. Honey is definitely guilty of Felony Contempt of Business Model. But that is a dangerous category of crimes to have on the books, and we should not encourage their deployment.
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Comment on Honey did nothing wrong in ~tech
PendingKetchup I think you are right about the sniff test. The worst thing they have done here is acting on the user's behalf without getting real informed consent, leaning on only contractual consent.I think you are right about the sniff test. The worst thing they have done here is acting on the user's behalf without getting real informed consent, leaning on only contractual consent.
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Comment on Honey did nothing wrong in ~tech
PendingKetchup Do you mean the bakery example? I think it's a good example and can't really be refuted: if someone did that, it would be wrong, and plausibly fraudulent. So I'm arguing that it is not a good fit...Do you mean the bakery example? I think it's a good example and can't really be refuted: if someone did that, it would be wrong, and plausibly fraudulent.
So I'm arguing that it is not a good fit for what is happening in Honey's case, because I think Honey's case lacks the piece where Honey and the store communicate and Honey sends a false statement that they referred someone to the store. Instead, Honey tells the user to include something like
&affiliateCode=HONEY123
in their message, and that's harder to see as a lie.I think the situation is instead more like, they're standing outside the bakery that people have come to holding coupons from various places, and they're offering to exchange those coupons for coupons marked "Honey", which might or might not give better deals. They might even offer some people additional coupons, in exchange for agreeing to always swap all their coupons for Honey coupons at the shop door.
If the arrangement with the store is "Only give these coupons to people who don't already have other coupons, and we'll pay you when people use them", then this would still be wrong because it breaks an agreement with the store. If the arrangement with the store is "We'll pay you when people use your coupons and there are no other relevant terms", then it's not wrong, it's just clever.
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Comment on Honey did nothing wrong in ~tech
PendingKetchup (edited )Link ParentI don't think that's true. It's more like the user speaks only Elbonian and has brought their guide (the browser) along to help them do business, and has told their guide to listen to Honey, and...when the customer comes in, I ask them "did anyone refer you?" then Honey randomly jumps in and answers for them.
I don't think that's true. It's more like the user speaks only Elbonian and has brought their guide (the browser) along to help them do business, and has told their guide to listen to Honey, and the store asks the guide who referred them, and Honey tells the guide to say it was Honey.
You have a possible principal/agent problem here (does the user really know and approve of what Honey is doing?). But Honey is not, say, sending unsolicited UDP packets to inject themselves into a conversation and steal referrer credit for random people who have never heard of them. They have permission to be involved in the process, and might technically, by virtue of a TOS with the user, have the user's permission to do exactly this, even if they do not have the user's actual knowledge.
And while an affiliate code might be useful for tracking which affiliates refer which users to the store, I don't think the codes all have the semantic meaning of "this person told me to come here" when the user presents them. They can be more like coupons: this one says I get 5% off, but that one says I get 10% off, and if I learn about the second one waiting in line for the checkout it's not really a false statement to present the better code at checkout.
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Comment on Honey did nothing wrong in ~tech
PendingKetchup I guess it could be that some precedent exists that makes this clearly "count". But the complaint didn't direct my attention to any as far as I could tell. Maybe they want to save that for the trial?I guess it could be that some precedent exists that makes this clearly "count". But the complaint didn't direct my attention to any as far as I could tell. Maybe they want to save that for the trial?
You can get USB keyboards that have power buttons on them which the computer's firmware might support. You can also sometimes do a key combo on the keyboard if the computer supports it. So there's probably a way to turn it on when it's closed, but you need to check in the firmware to see what that laptop supports.
And you also might need to change the Windows power settings to not just immediately sleep when the lid is closed.