random9

Yeah, I have no doubt that these fake passports are legally completely useless, and their made up shit means nothing to the real world legal system - I just want to understand if they are paying more for more stars. I have dual nationality, passports from 2 countries, and I've never heard stars on passport even be a concept in the US or anywhere in the EU.

Can someone explain to me what this #-star passport shit is, or have a link to somewhere that explains it? I just started reading this sub, found quite a few posts that mention it. To me it sounds like the kind of scam where the more money (real money, not their fake iou money) you pay, the more stars you can get - but I want to know wtf it comes from.

What happens if you try to pay for those fake license plate tags with those fake i.o.u. crap I've been reading about on this sub? Surely they must accept it, no?

Nah, I bought a house 3 years ago. I still hate how inaccessible the housing market is, how shitty conservatives are towards other people and how much they deny science. Owning property doesn't magically make one conservative. Fuck conservatives, fuck the rich.

As I have gotten older I have become more angry and cynical. But I'm very much more anti-conservative now than I was before, which in the US would be more left leaning, but honestly I never thought of myself as that, I just thought that I was being rational.

But being rational these days is literally being anti-conservative, because of how conservatives are banning books, attacking LGBTQ+ people for just wanting to be themselves, denying global warming even exists, and yes, letting the rich get richer by being corrupt and cutting taxes for them.

Though I also have some views that might make someone very left leaning think I'm against them (for example I do believe that some words shouldn't be viewed as bad when not meant as personal attack against disabled people, like retard or fat or obese; and I also think people are allowed to choose their pronouns and in most cases I will respect it, but some people are just doing it for shits and giggles, not seriously actually considering themselves as what they choose). It's easy to think someone who disagrees with those views as I do that they might be conservative, but I am far, far from it.

I mean, you're partially right yeah - for bigger projects with more devs, they often DO provide windows/linux/etc executables, and that does save a ton of hours.

But for smaller projects with one main dev, it's a lot to expect one person to make releases for all platforms. Maybe for the platform they develop for at best - though if that's not your (not you personally, just general) favorite platform, you'd still be out of luck.

Again to repeat: it's a moot point in the case of this context since there was NO EXECUTABLE to provide - it was a python script. So arguing this is completely unapplicable in this case! The original poster was just being an entitled jerk who didn't bother reading anything and resorted to name-calling.

For what architecture? You use windows, what about Linux? What about MacOS? Should the author spend their time making an executable for each platform? Or only the platforms that are most popular? (Edit: also, I'm not going to touch the fact that for complex programs there are third party dependencies which have license restrictions to be bundled together into an exe or provided into a zip as a dll, which is extra work for the dev to do just to make an exe)

Secondly, as I pointed out in my above comment which you seemed to have missed:

Some code, as is literally the case for the original source does NOT run via a standalone executable, so there is NO exe to upload. It is run via third party interpreters, in this case the Python interpreter.

There's a section about how to run the code in the original post for example here https://github.com/sherlock-project/sherlock?tab=readme-ov-file#usage - it requires the source code (because its not compiled, it's interpreted) and installing python - which then is used via python3 sherlock to run the tool. Again, in cases like this there is literally no executable to upload. There may be some roundabout ways to upload an executable that packages, but that's way beyond just providing the source to be run via python.

Also to edit to say this: Regardless of how "easy" you may think uploading an exe for something might be, calling the people developing that code "stupid smelly nerds" as the original poster did (not you) is completely disrespectful, arrogant and entitled, and if someone demanded that I upload an exe to one of my repos like that, I would completely ignore their request.

I went to highschool and university in the US - I was lucky that I got a scholarship and that covered pretty much all my tuition costs.

But I had a friend, one year older than me, who joined and served in the US army for something like 2 years just so he could get his university costs covered and to save some money for living expenses.

It may not be intentional, but the high cost of higher education is an excellent recruiting tool for the US military.

I would suggest that github is the wrong place to go look for that. Github is for developers, primarily a place to share source code, for people who DO care about build files, deprecated classes, contributors, and git history - so they can make the software that runs large parts of the modern world more efficient and flexible.

Whether there's an executable provided is completely optional and up to each author. Further, considering in this specific example it was python code, it's far more flexible for the author to provide python run instructions (which the author HAD provided by the way) than it is to give you a .exe which would take extra, unnecessary effort, and overlooks that the tool he was writing could also be used on linux and macos based machines (because python command exist on those)

I agree that github is for developers or people who at the very least don't mind learning a bit of development and getting their hands dirty. The poster demanding an exe is quite entitled - and also from what I understand the repo he is referring to is a python repo, so there normally wouldn't be an exe, it'd just be run via a python command.

There's a bigger problem here, which is that technical skill in newer generations is also decreasing - as someone on reddit had once said "I'm a millennial and I'm doing tech support for my parents as well as my children". A generation raised on tablets and phones have gotten the false impression of being tech savy, when their actual technical skill is using end products.

Expecting every github repo to provide you with something you just click-and-run is overlooking the complexities and reality of how code is. By it self that isn't a problem, but the entitlement it takes to publicly and arrogantly post that on a public forum is astounding and counter-productive to people who work on those small repos.

So from my understanding the problem is that there's two ways to implement a kill switch: Either some automatic software/hardware way, or a human-decision based (or I guess a combination of the two).

The automatic way may be enough if it's absolutely foolproof, that's a separate discussion.

The ai box experiment I mention focuses on the human controlled decision to release an AI (or terminate it, which is roughly equivalent preposition). You can read the original here: https://www.yudkowsky.net/singularity/aibox

But the jist of it is this: humans are the weak link. You may think that you have full freedom to decide when to terminate an AI, but if you have any contact with it, even one directional, which would be necessary in order to observe it's behaviour and determine when to trigger said killswitch, a truly trans-human AI would be able to think in meta-terms such that to expose you to information that will change your mind about terminating it.

Basically another way of saying this is that for each of us there exists some set of words we can read, such that they will change our minds about any subject. I don't know if that is actually true to be honest, but it's an interesting idea if you imagine the mind as a complex computer capable of self modification, and that vision/audio is a form of information input that is processed by our minds, so it seems possible that there should always exist some sort of input capable of modifying our minds to a desired state.

Another interesting, slightly related concept, is the idea of basilisk images (I believe originally written in some old scifi short story). Basilisk images are theoretically an image that when viewed by a human cause the brain to "crash" or essentially cause brain-death. This has the same principle behind it, that our brains are complex computers with vision being an input method, so there could be a way to force the brain to crash simply through visual input alone.

Again I don't know, nor do I think anyone really knows for sure if these things - both transhuman ai and basilisk images - are possible in the way they are described. Of course if a trans-human AI existed, by its very definition we would be unable to imagine what it could do.

Anyway, wrote this up on mobile, excuse any typos.

Oh I agree - I think a general purpose AI would be unlikely to be interested in genocide of the human race, or enslaving us, or much of intentionally negative things that a lot of fiction likes depicting, for the sake of dramatic storytelling. Out of all AI depictions, the Asimov stories of I, Robot + Foundation (which are in the same universe, and in fact contain at least one of the same characters) are my favorite popular media depictions.

The AI may however have other goals that may incidentally lead to harm or extinction of the human race. In my amateur opinion, those other goals would be to explore and learn more - which I actually think is one of the true signs of an actual intelligence - curiosity, or in other words, the ability to ask questions without being prompted. To that extent it may aim convert the resources on Earth to construct machines to that extent, without much regard to human life. Though life itself is a fascinating topic that the AI may value enough, from a curiosity point of view, to at least preserve.

I did also look up the AI-in-a-box experiment I mentioned - there's a lot of discussion but the specific experiment I remember reading about were by Eliezer Yudkowsky (if anyone is interested). An actual trans-human AI may not be possible, but if it is, it is likely it can escape any confinement we can think of.