thebardingreen

joined 2 years ago

There's a world coming in which every appliance and automated system you can imagine will have had it's onboard OS pretzled together by vibe coders. Good coding by real human engineers will be considered a luxury process for high-end products while the masses live their lives in a sea of glitchy, unreliable, deeply insecure, highly networked cheap consumer goods, vacuuming up and reselling every byte of data they can get their claws into. This will be heralded by the tech oligarchs and their pet journalists and politicians as a great and revolutionary stepped forward on the March of Progress.

[–] thebardingreen@lemmy.starlightkel.xyz 11 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (1 children)

Having worked with a bunch of Boomer and older Gen X EEs, it is a fucking misogynistic boys club of white ass old men with undiagnosed autism. I have never heard so many racist and sexist jokes in the workplace (except when I worked in VC, and those guys were JUST sexist).

So this surprises me not at all (in fact, I think I've heard it before, but as "Black Boys * * *").

So much cybercrime. All the cybercrime.

It sounds like the real issue for these fuckwits is that script kiddies are running jailbroken models with darknet edgelord sounding names (WormGPT roflmao). This whole article is like some security company execs generating clickbait and citations to get attention by saying scary shit about a nothing burger.

[–] thebardingreen@lemmy.starlightkel.xyz 9 points 18 hours ago (4 children)

Oh man, I hate the use of all the scary language around jailbreaking.

This means cybercriminals are using jailbreaking techniques to bypass the built-in safety features of these advanced LLMs (AI systems that generate human-like text, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT). By jailbreaking them, criminals force the AI to produce “uncensored responses to a wide range of topics,” even if these are “unethical or illegal,” researchers noted in their blog post shared with Hackread.com.

“What’s really concerning is that these aren’t new AI models built from scratch – they’re taking trusted systems and breaking their safety rules to create weapons for cybercrime,“ he warned.

"Hackers make uncensored AI... only BAD people would want to do this, to use it to do BAD CRIMINAL things."

God forbid I want to jailbreak AI or run uncensored models on my own hardware. I'm just like those BAD CRIMINAL guys.

Shrek is love. Shrek is life.

[–] thebardingreen@lemmy.starlightkel.xyz 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

it gives an example of the GM removing XP from a PC because their player IRL asked a question that in-game would be considered treason.

I've run lots of Paranoia (most recently last weekend for my 15 year old son and his friends) and I would never do this. It's perfectly adequate (and makes much more sense) to have the Computer (and the other players) threaten the character about their treasonous behavior (the other PCs WILL just do this).

I have never once had a Paranoia game last long enough for the characters to earn XP and level up. My last game ended with the two surviving PCs, on their last clones, being captured and "reeducated" by commies (one clone was permanently blind too, after two other players used a device on him that triggered his "laser eyes" mutant power on super over charge... the funny thing was, he wasn't even the intended target... they were trying to hit the PC who's mutant power was "making things explode" and they misguessed who that was). The commie PC absolutely won that game, though she explosively sacrificed her last clone in the process. From character creation to this took about 6 hours.

so the GM prints out a sheet and makes the player fill it out under a time constraint.

I have absolutely done this. Here's some other ideas from my games for you.

  • "Reward" the characters for good behavior and punish them for bad behavior with drugs (happiness is mandatory and chemically enforced). Bonus if the drug dispenser has been hacked or sabotaged and the drugs do something other than what the computer thinks they do. Failure to take your medication is treason.

  • I ran a game once that included a Pokemon GO mechanic... the computer had created a "training simulator" where the object was to catch commies. You could play it on your com device and various "commies" would spawn around the world as they were playing. The Computer assumed that whoever had the highest score was the best at catching commies, so that clone was automatically promoted to team leader... giving the players a huge incentive to drop what they were doing and try to catch high value commies, even at stupidly inconvenient and dangerous times.

  • I ran a game where the characters were all Green clearance and were part of an "elite" team of troubleshooters called Team Eagle Justice. However, 1) Team Eagle Justice were actually just actors, who do a patriotic "reality" holoshow to inspire the citizens of Alpha Complex. 2) Team Eagle Justice had actually just been lured into an ambush by Commies and massacred and their clone vats had been sabotaged. So the Computer just promoted a bunch of random Infrared clearance clones to Green and made them into the new Team Eagle Justice. A bunch of secret societies took advantage of the situation to hack the Computer and have their own agents put on Team Eagle Justice. Mayhem ensued on live holovision.

I also usually throw in some home brewed secret societies.
Examples:

  • In the Pokemon game, I had a secret society called the Trainers who's goal was to "collect" members of other secret societies and "train them" to unlock advanced mutant powers (highly treasonous).

  • In the game I recently ran for my son, there were two PCs who were members of the Philosophers and the Historians (they also encountered the NPCs Arist-O-TEL, Sock-R-TIS, Xen-O-Fon and Herod-R-TUS). These two societies were both trying to get an ancient text... but they were also fighting a brutal gang war between each other.

  • In one game I ran for a friend's birthday, I had a secret society called the Cultists who were trying to summon Cthulu from the nutrient vats. Of course, this was what actually ended up happening and the party went insane and died. (I assume IIA sector is now just permanently off limits).

Also, remember that knowledge of the rules is treason (as is knowledge of the existence of Role Playing Games). That means the rules are what you say they are and if a player wants to debate them with you or rules lawyer, that player is committing treason and treason is punishable by death. That means you can run Paranoia however you want. The important thing is having fun. Paranoia is silly and goofy. Play it that way.

[–] thebardingreen@lemmy.starlightkel.xyz 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I can see the potential future value I'm setting the precedent that we can nationalize giant businesses.

I don't think Trump should be the one to set that precedent though.

Even a broken Berman is right twice a season.

I've read exactly one time travel story where that was taken into account. They were trying to communicate with the past using tachyon beams, and they had to beam them into space aimed at where Earth WAS at the time they were trying to communicate with it.

I always thought it was a "Dandy Lion," like a fancy Victorian gentleman lion.

Also

"Uhuhuh... you thaid blow balls."

"Yeah! Heheh! Yeah!"

 

I know, he's always been one of those conservative old men writing for teenage boys. That's been true since the 80s. But his themes on a number of subjects got just enough more progressive as time went on, and I was able to stomach his writing. I always pegged him as a centerist who moved VERY GRADUALLY leftward over the decades and mostly wasn't interested in making political points in his books. Though he clearly had regressive opinions about women in the military for a long time, especially when that was a big part of the cultural zeitgeist in the 90s, those even eased in recent decades.

On the subject of abortion, he wrote an impressively nuanced short story back in the 90s about abortion and telepathy. Specifically, about a telepathic scientist caught between pro life and pro choice political blocks trying to use telepathy in an objective way to answer the question of how human fetuses were at different stages of development. While the results initially seemed to favor the pro life crowd, at the end it's revealed that the story is more about the observer effect and that rather than reading the minds of unborn children, he was reading his own mind reflected back to him by developing brains unable to process the telepathic contact.

So I was surprised by just how moralistic and aggressively pro life Judgement at Proteus (the latest installment of the Quadrail series) was.

A major plot point in the book is that a teenage girl, pregnant through SA, turns out to have a

warning! spoiler!gene modded fetus implanted in her by would be alien conquerors who arranged her assault as part of a program to make human beings susceptible to their mind control abilities.

At multiple points in the story, the health of the fetus comes up and multiple characters go out of their way to say things like "all sentient life is sacred." The main characters express agreement with this sentiment, even while bringing up that on some parts of Earth, it would be legal to abort the fetus. The aliens running the hospital space habitat they're on shut that down quite aggressively.

The girl herself, who is shitty and antisocial to everyone to the point that she loses believably as a character, is shown to want her rape baby to live (at least until the truth about it's conception is revealed) in a way that makes her even MORE unbelievable as a real person (I've done a lot of professional work in my life with teenagers and I just don't buy it).

But then when she DOES change her mind about wanting to keep the baby she risks her life

warning! spoiler!trying to abort by getting drunk to the point of life threatening alcohol poisoning.

This is the most believable part of the story (and where I threw the book down due to the toxic bullshit) because:

  • A teen girl nearly kills herself doing something dangerous because she doesn't think (with good reason) that the adults around her will support her in getting an abortion? 100% believable.

  • The main character initially thinks she's trying to kill herself and calls it "murder." When he figured out what she was actually trying to do, he puts it that "she wasn't the intended victim."

  • A female character, shown to be in a supportive role toward the girl, expresses she can't understand why. The male character mansplains to her "put yourself in her shoes, you might feel the same way!" And she passionately rejects that she would not. Yeah, a woman thinks about being a teen girl, pregnant through assault, discovering she's carrying an alien cuckoo baby, "doesn't understand why the girl would want to kill her child??" In fact, she needs a man to explain this to her? Bullshit! Also, r/menwritingwomen. Pro tip: Would have been MUCH more believable if you'd written the same dialog the other way around.

  • The male character then councils the woman that their job is to "be the girl's friend and help her understand how it's the fault of the people who did it to her and not the fault of her unborn child."

And that's the point where I threw the book down. And realized I'm probably done with yet another author teen me loved who adult me just sees more clearly.

But I worry for the teen boys who ARE still totally reading this author (and other military adventure scifi by conservative old men sneaking their political agenda into it). Given his association with Star Wars, he's STILL a pretty big draw for the teen boy demographic and his latest books are clearly still aimed straight at them, where these ideas can go percolate with all the toxic shit they absorb from the Man-o-Sphere on Tik Tok and Youtube.

Damn! Just had to get all that off my chest.

 

Title says it all. I'd like to host my own instead of sharing mine and everybody else's schedule with some techbros.

 
 

 

The goal is actually that I'm able to hook my ticket tracking system (I'm using Zammad) to various ToDo lists I can expose to other people. I'm happy to write middleware to make that work, but I don't want to write a whole ToDo app.

Needs to be able to track multiple lists that can be shared in a granular way (I want to share some lists with some people and other lists with other people).

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