4 ms·

Tell HN: The only thing certain in life

6 points by graderjs 4y ago

Death, taxes and being banned from social media by artificially (un)intelligent censorship mistakes Today I read about an astrologer a lady from Sydney Australia with a popular online astrology blog and business who was basically banned from Facebook because she posted an illustration of the planet Saturn which was picked up by their AI pornography detection algorithms as being pornographic even though it contained no humans or animals or anything inside it was just an illustration of saturn. But it was flesh colored and that was enough to trigger the bureaucratic kafka-esque nightmare for her to reapply for her Facebook account. In the end she decided it was too much hassle and didn't bother I always thought it was only controversial opinion pundits going against the dominant narrative who would get picked up on spurious trumped-up misinformation charges to be deplatformed by these ridiculous AI monstrosities but it seems like it can happen to anyone. So I'm proposing this new theory the third pillar of certainties in life behind death and taxes is accidental suppression by our not so benevolent AI overlords wielded pretty f*** irresponsibly by massive companies Who nevertheless pretend they're all about the positive vibes y'all and helping humanity stay open connected organized and accessible But it seems to me really we're like the f*** Lab rats that they can ab test their AI-fuelled money printing machines on So f** that stay aware be informed and I hope you can somehow avoid the deplatforming yourselves

jjgreen 4y ago
The only winning move is not to play
- graderjs 4y ago
  What game should I pick up instead?
  - jjgreen 4y ago
    How about a nice game of chess?
    - graderjs 4y ago
      Ugh...
sebastianconcpt 4y ago
Sounds exaggerated but I see the point you're trying to make. You need to consider that the underlying thing for these censorship machines, is an automaton of algebraic optimizations (I refuse to call that AI intentionally as they are not intelligence) trained to mimic judgments by people with ideologies. These ideologies form a cosmovision of life, the universe and everything and judge everything based on it. When they are stupid, they impose the judgment making their stupidity mandatory. PS: your last two sentences are highly accurate, and note that a big problem resides in the part were you say you can somehow avoid the deplatforming because for most people, that means adapting themselves to obey the madatory stupidity of these machines, treating them as peer pressure and molding our behavior. But do they deserve that obedience? Why are we giving it to them? Is this the beginning of a slippery slope that ends up making in the future imposible to organics to disobey artificials? (great for SiFi movie plots BTW)
- graderjs 4y ago
  The story itself is not exaggerated at all. It's the facts. Maybe you meant the tone, etc. That's how I feel about it, hope I expressed that, think I did. I think you got that...But I wouldn't say the tone is exaggerated at all, this is a f** nightmare this kind of thing. And I think I've accurately expressed the nature of it, I'm pretty f** happy with these words actually Maybe I wouldn't have felt this way until I'd actually come across someone I considered outside the dragnet for this type of chaos, dragged into it. So maybe that was the tipping point for me to express this and craft this wordful expression The fundamental wrong: why should someone have to pay you (a company) anything (time, money, stress) for your stupid f*** mistake? At least, company should own the f*** mistake, and never ever put someone through bureaucratic bs to right it. it's just f*** abusive. I don't accept that this is a necessary consequence of required automation at scale...you just have to f*** do it better. the issue is there's no metric / incentive. inside the orgs a lack of moral fibre means people don't intrinsically incentivize preventing these bads, outside the orgs the lack of gov regulation means they have no external consequences for fucking people over. this shit must end
- sp332 4y ago
  I don't know about that case, but a2_4am was locked out of his Twitter account until he agreed yo delete a video of a computer booting up, because it was flagged as porn. This went through a lot of appeals and internal escalation at Twitter, but there was no recourse. https://mobile.twitter.com/textfiles/status/1536378776094908422 https://mobile.twitter.com/textfiles/status/1536378776094908... Another recent case https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32202481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32202481
ksaj 4y ago
In the 90's, when it was discovered that NSA was filtering Internet traffic for specific keywords, people creatively did things like write network drivers that padded packets with words from the trigger list. I'm a fan of this kind of activism, because it hurts no one but those who are filtering your words as if you are pre-guilty of something you probably have never thought about, just because you used a word from their list. Semi-related story: in the early Y2Ks I started to write a Netscape plugin called Cookie Toss that would treat tracking cookies in a similar way - trade the tracking cookies on your system for other random ones that other people have traded from. That way the tracking continues, but the results are utterly meaningless to the ones doing the tracking. The more often the tracking cookies got swapped with random people around the globe, the less useful they become. I got a stern speaking-to from a legal agency that really amounted to "You're going to go broke fighting us if you release this project, and it affects our client in any way" (and it totally would have) so I never did. The idea is still out there for anyone who has more funds to take it on than I have.
hotpotamus 4y ago
I'm curious to see this sexy Saturn picture.

6 points by graderjs 4y ago

jjgreen 4y ago

The only winning move is not to play

graderjs 4y ago
What game should I pick up instead?
- jjgreen 4y ago
  How about a nice game of chess?
  - graderjs 4y ago
    Ugh...

sebastianconcpt 4y ago

Sounds exaggerated but I see the point you're trying to make. You need to consider that the underlying thing for these censorship machines, is an automaton of algebraic optimizations (I refuse to call that AI intentionally as they are not intelligence) trained to mimic judgments by people with ideologies. These ideologies form a cosmovision of life, the universe and everything and judge everything based on it. When they are stupid, they impose the judgment making their stupidity mandatory. PS: your last two sentences are highly accurate, and note that a big problem resides in the part were you say you can somehow avoid the deplatforming because for most people, that means adapting themselves to obey the madatory stupidity of these machines, treating them as peer pressure and molding our behavior. But do they deserve that obedience? Why are we giving it to them? Is this the beginning of a slippery slope that ends up making in the future imposible to organics to disobey artificials? (great for SiFi movie plots BTW)

graderjs 4y ago
The story itself is not exaggerated at all. It's the facts. Maybe you meant the tone, etc. That's how I feel about it, hope I expressed that, think I did. I think you got that...But I wouldn't say the tone is exaggerated at all, this is a f** nightmare this kind of thing. And I think I've accurately expressed the nature of it, I'm pretty f** happy with these words actually Maybe I wouldn't have felt this way until I'd actually come across someone I considered outside the dragnet for this type of chaos, dragged into it. So maybe that was the tipping point for me to express this and craft this wordful expression The fundamental wrong: why should someone have to pay you (a company) anything (time, money, stress) for your stupid f*** mistake? At least, company should own the f*** mistake, and never ever put someone through bureaucratic bs to right it. it's just f*** abusive. I don't accept that this is a necessary consequence of required automation at scale...you just have to f*** do it better. the issue is there's no metric / incentive. inside the orgs a lack of moral fibre means people don't intrinsically incentivize preventing these bads, outside the orgs the lack of gov regulation means they have no external consequences for fucking people over. this shit must end
sp332 4y ago
I don't know about that case, but a2_4am was locked out of his Twitter account until he agreed yo delete a video of a computer booting up, because it was flagged as porn. This went through a lot of appeals and internal escalation at Twitter, but there was no recourse. https://mobile.twitter.com/textfiles/status/1536378776094908422 https://mobile.twitter.com/textfiles/status/1536378776094908... Another recent case https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32202481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32202481

ksaj 4y ago

In the 90's, when it was discovered that NSA was filtering Internet traffic for specific keywords, people creatively did things like write network drivers that padded packets with words from the trigger list. I'm a fan of this kind of activism, because it hurts no one but those who are filtering your words as if you are pre-guilty of something you probably have never thought about, just because you used a word from their list. Semi-related story: in the early Y2Ks I started to write a Netscape plugin called Cookie Toss that would treat tracking cookies in a similar way - trade the tracking cookies on your system for other random ones that other people have traded from. That way the tracking continues, but the results are utterly meaningless to the ones doing the tracking. The more often the tracking cookies got swapped with random people around the globe, the less useful they become. I got a stern speaking-to from a legal agency that really amounted to "You're going to go broke fighting us if you release this project, and it affects our client in any way" (and it totally would have) so I never did. The idea is still out there for anyone who has more funds to take it on than I have.

hotpotamus 4y ago

I'm curious to see this sexy Saturn picture.