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Schools are using AI to spy on students and some are getting arrested for misinterpreted jokes and private conversations

Technology
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  • Human nature dictates we do things before we discuss if we should do things.

    To me it starts getting into a philosophical discussion but unfortunately I don't think as a species we are mature enough yet to have these discussions.

    A good real world example of this is in Canada the separation movement by Quebec vs. Alberta. In Quebec there have been years of open public discussion before they ultimately took a vote. They were painfully away of all the nuance that came from leaving Canada. They did it right to a large extent. Compare that to Daniella Smith in Alberta and she's hammering through the mechanisms for a vote to happen meanwhile the public has absolutely no understanding of the ramifications of if they do vote to leave Canada. They're doing it wrong.

    Human nature by default seems to want to change the front tyre while doing 120 on the highway. This needs to change.

    Imagine it's 1995 and you're an average person. You don't know all that much about separation, you just know that the coming referendum is about it and you don't want to separate. You likely are not a college/university graduate and a significant amount of the people you know haven't even graduated high school. You probably don't have a personal computer or internet access even if you do. Your primary news source is likely the odd updates you get on the radio while driving to or from work, and you haven't been following and aren't familiar with how people talk about separation. You show up to vote and you get this question:

    Do you agree that Quebec should become sovereign after having made a formal offer to Canada for a new economic and political partnership within the scope of the bill respecting the future of Quebec and of the agreement signed on June 12, 1995?
    French:
    Acceptez-vous que le Québec devienne souverain, après avoir offert formellement au Canada un nouveau partenariat économique et politique, dans le cadre du projet de loi sur l'avenir du Québec et de l'entente signée le 12 juin 1995?

    What the hell are you even voting for or against here?

    The Québec referendum on separation was so confusing people remarked they didn't actually know what they were voting for. The situation resulted in a law (Clarity Act) that forced all secession votes to pass some tests to be considered valid, and also indicated that a secession requires amendment of the Constitution of Canada, which makes it incredibly difficult to actually do.

    I really don't want to give Québec undeserved credit on this, they handled it quite poorly tbh and the whole thing felt like it was exploiting the ignorance and anger of a minority population that had even less education and literacy than the average Canadian at the time. That said, Canada has since devolved further into being a neoliberal anglosohere shithole so perhaps they were on to something.

  • I can't say for certain because I wasn't given one but I can't imagine me and my friends would have been willing to communicate with each other on devices provided by our school. Even in the early 00s it would have been filled with spyware.

    I cannot possibly imagine trusting a school issued device.

  • The cops for arresting an 8th-grader

    This is America, that's what they do. They love overreacting to small problems.

    I was arrested for self-defence in a highschool fight, the actual bully who attack me did not get in any sort of trouble. If I didn't have citizenship, there was a chance that incident could've led to my deportation, even tho I was a minor. (USCIS can see all your arrests, including those that did not led to a conviction, or even expunged or pardoned offences, and they could retroactively revoke your legal status if they find out you lied.) But luckily charges were dropped because of couse they don't have the evidence to prove it and I have a clean record so they didn't bother prosecuting.

    There is probably an alternate timeline somewhere out there in the multiverse where I got deported and had to learn another language that I haven't spoken for over a decade. Depressing to think about.

    (Well that is still technically a possibility, all they have to do is make up some bullshit about "being a spy" and put me in gitmo)

    I'm in Canada and it's only marginally better with respect to police under/overreaction. A friend and I once got the "don't go to school on X day" message and we went immediately to local, provincial, and federal police. No one took us seriously. We had a friend working at CSIS (American analogue would be CIA) look into it and later that week we saw the article in a local paper.

    Police investigated the home and found:

    • 5000 rounds of ammunition
    • body armor
    • explosives
    • only thing he couldn't get was legal firearms because of his history of mental illness, but he had been working on connections to acquire illegal ones

    Point being we couldn't get the police to lift a finger to check out what we believed to be a credible threat (this guy never even joked about that stuff), but boy were they willing to burn rubber racing to my school when I committed the crime of defending myself in a "normal" school fight and one of my bullies claimed they felt threatened by me. This event set off a whole series of events, like requiring me to get a full evaluation at a psychiatric facility, before being allowed back in school. Our system is broken.

  • You know what really grinds my gears? This shitty dystopia completely eschews any potentially cool aspect of invasive exploitative authoritarianism. The (not so) secret police is patching together their own "uniforms" by browsing the bargain bins at the local tacti-cool mall-ninja outfitters. Where's the black leather trench coats, stylish sunglasses worn after dark and slicked back hair? If they're going to ask me for 'ze papers' all the time, the least they can do is look cool doing it, godamnit. At least get Hugo Boss to design your attire; that's just about the only thing that worked out well for the last bunch of pricks.

    I mean, where's the towering brutalist architecture? Where's my mandatory daily dose of SOMA? Or my idiotically wirelessly hackable cyberware? Hell, they can't even do bread and circuses right anymore. The bread is CO2-pumped flour glue and the circuses is an endless stream of more Marvel projects and Disney violations of Star Wars.

    And don't get me started on the quality of our dictators these days. They sure don't make them like they used to.

    I mean, where's the towering brutalist architecture?

    I think China is doing a good job at that.

  • What is sad is that an environment like this ruins someone’s mental health and ironically increasing the overall risk of violence.

  • The whole trend of teens rejecting phones for dumbphones is making sense now. If you can't fight big mainstream technology, then fuck big mainstream technology!

  • To the gut? It doesn't matter what the round is. You're going to the ICU. A .22 isn't as non-lethal as the memes like to make it out to be, and your gut is a bunch of very critical soft tissue.

    If it's to the arm or something, fine. Anywhere in the torso, you're going to the ICU most likely.

    It’s not all or nothing. Each case is individual. Sometimes the bullet is intact and sometimes it’s in pieces. Sometimes trauma repairs minor injuries to the intestine, pulls the bullet, and they go to a post surgical floor like any other GI surgery. Sometimes trauma pops the spleen and the bullet and the patient still goes to med/surg. It depends on what a bullet hits and how, and how it lands is ruled by chaos and statistics. Sometimes it doesn’t puncture an artery but lodges next to it creating a future potential aneurysm that is monitored in ICU for 24h and then they’re off to med/surg, and the potential aneurysm goes on “continue to monitor” mode outpatient.

    In reality, a person ignoring diverticulitis (then perfing) can sometimes spend more time in ICU than a bullet wound. And sometimes the bullet kills outright. It’s so variable. But that’s adults. Tiny bodies have far worse odds on any hit.

    I’m not making light. I’m emphasizing how chaotic it is.

  • that defeatist attitude is helping no one and is not how a resilient democracy survives

    We're way past a resilient democracy buddy.

  • We're way past a resilient democracy buddy.

    with this attitude certainly, buddy

    but seriously, yes it's scary what is happening around the world right now but that means we as citizens need to organize and resist. This is how every social and moral good that we enjoy today was won. Freedom from oppression is a constant fight and always has been

  • LOL the land of the free.

    "... Whoever told you that is your enemy"

  • Thought control

  • "... Whoever told you that is your enemy"

    Think it's the same people that talk about our glorious western democratic values™️.
    You know, keeping those pesky refugees out, supporting genocide and wars.

  • I am an average person, and my GPU is running a chatbot which currently gives me a course in Regular Expressions. My GPU also generates images for me from time to time when i need an image, because i am crappy at drawing. There are a lot of uses for the technology.

    Okay so you could have just looked up one of dozens of resources on regex. The images you "need" are likely bad copies of images that already exist, or they're weird collages of copied subject matter.

    My point isn't that there's nothing they can do at all, it's that nothing they can do is worth the energy cost. You're spending tons of energy to effectively chew up information already on the web and have it vomited back to you in a slightly different form, when you could have just looked up the information directly. It doesn't save time, because you have to double check everything. The images are also plagiarized, and you could be paying an artist if they're something important, or improving your artistic abilities if they aren't. I struggle to think of many cases where one of those options is unfeasible, it's just the "easy" way out (because the energy costs are obfuscated) to have a machine crunch up some existing art to get a approximation of what you want.

  • scraping the web to create a dataset isn't plagiarism, same with training a model on said scraped data, and calculating which words should come in what order isn't plagiarism too. I agree that datasets should be ethically sourced, but scraping the web is something that allowed such things as the search engine to be created, which made the web a lot more useful. Was creating google irresponsible?

    This is a wild take. You can get chatbots to vomit out entire paragraphs of published works verbatim. There is functionally no mechanism to a chatbot other than looking at a bunch existing texts, picking one randomly, and copying the next word from it. There's no internal processing or logic that you could call creative, it's just sticking one Lego at a time onto a tower, and every Lego is someone's unpaid intellectual property.

    There is no definition of plagiarism or copyright that LLMs don't bite extremely hard. They're just getting away with it because of the billions of dollars of capital pushing the tech. I am hypothetically very much for the complete abolition of copyright and free usage of information, but a) that means everyone can copy stuff freely, instead of just AI companies, and b) it first requires an actually functional society that provides for the needs of its citizens so they can have the time to do stuff like create art without needing to make a livable profit at it. And even if that were the case, I would still think the current implementation of AI is pretty shitty if it's burning the same ludicrous amounts of energy to do its parlor tricks.

  • Holy shit, the amount of surveillance the teens are under is ungodly and people blame the chatbot? And there wasn't even a human kind enough to speak with the girl before calling the fucking cops? I see a lot of blame to place here, but it's not the chatbot who is to blame.

    • The kids for bullying her for her tan
    • The school boards implementing the surveillance
    • The parents who allowed such surveillance in the first place
    • The person screening what was flagged for not sending the school counselor to talk with the kid
    • The person calling the cops
    • The cops for arresting an 8th-grader and DOING A STRIP SEARCH AND KEEPING HER OVERNIGHT WTF instead of handing her over to her parents

    Everyone of them failed a 13 year old girl. All of them should be ashamed.

    The kids for bullying her for her tan

    To me it didn't sound like she was being bullied, it seemed like her friends made a stupid joke and then she responded with another stupid joke. Which makes it even stupider that she got arrested. Literally just kids being kids.

  • Government goes for all it can get… until people start revolting

  • Talking about online privacy has become the “safe sex talk” of the last decade or so. You have to keep reminding kids so that it sticks. Nothing you say online is private, it can all be copied/screengrabbed/recorded/photographed and shared by the recipient. What you say, any images you post, etc. On school or work devices they can essentially see most everything, nothing is private. Even if you make efforts to cover your tracks, a truly determined agency with enough resources likely will find out who you are if they want to.

    Nothing you say online is private, it can all be copied/screengrabbed/recorded/photographed and shared by the recipient.

    Even if you fully trust the recipient, often times it can still be intercepted unless it's end-to-end encrypted, but even then the end device can still be stolen too.

  • Far left is guillotines, this is just someone with issues (I don't mean her opinion but the fact that she has to try and "calm herself")

    No, thats a performative cunt. Its funny how you can recognise them so easily when they thing you dont like, but are so utterly confused when they say things you agree with. Almost like you have your own little agenda or something?

    I mean, on the subject of trans people. It never seems to enter anyones heads that they amount of hate transwomen get is because people see them as men. And its actually an extension of the extreme misandry the online world has embraced. Thats why we never talk about trans men, because they are still seen as women. But the far left, or woke, or whatever other name you wanna give them, wont ever admit that. Because they want to call "all men" scum who need to be taught not to rape, while at the same time shouting that transwomen are safe because they are women. They dont dare tackle the elephant in the room, which is that that they agree with what the far right is saying, under certain circumstances.

    Anyone, and I mean anyone, that speaks of any group as being a monolith, is a bigot. No ifs, no ands, no buts. All men, all women, all black people, all Dutch people, whatever is all the start of the same bigoted sentence. And "the left" does this every bit as much as "the right".

  • Sorry I could believe this if it weren't for your right-wing chud reveal at the end. Also chuds tend to have pedo tendencies so I think you're misrepresenting what you were banned for; as much as I hate to give the benefit of the doubt to reddit's moderation team.

    Yes, thank you for the example of what I was talking about. Very much appreciated.

  • For this scenario to happen a simple text filter that marks messages with the word "kill" would have been enough. that an LLM was involved is a distraction from the real issues.

    I notice this suggestion doesn't include any AI solutions. Could you please rephrase to emphasize how effective an ally AI can be at identifying negative sentiments among large userbases?