Sam Altman, the recently fired (and rehired) chief executive of Open AI, was asked earlier this year by his fellow tech billionaire Patrick Collison what he thought of the risks of synthetic biology. ‘I would like to not have another synthetic pathogen cause a global pandemic. I think we can all agree that wasn’t a great experience,’ he replied. ‘Wasn’t that bad compared to what it could have been, but I’m surprised there has not been more global coordination and I think we should have more of that.’

  • David Gerard@awful.systems
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    1 year ago

    this thread appears to have attracted keyword-seeking bad posters. these fine posters have been escorted to the egress and may continue to enjoy their subthreads on other fediverse servers and not this one.

    • self@awful.systems
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      1 year ago

      to clear up any confusion: if you’re a drive-by poster we’ve never seen before and you’re posting bullshit covid theories instead of anything related to what we discuss on this instance (Sam Altman being a fucker, for example), we can’t tell you apart from someone keyword searching threads to spread conspiracy bullshit en masse and the very funny part is, we don’t actually care how you got here

      garbage is garbage, don’t post your trash here

        • PsychedSy@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          I didn’t say anything on the topic and I can’t even see the negative ones. I don’t really know how many comments you guys usually get off-instance. I’m curious now if people actually care enough to just monitor shit and say dumb things.

          • self@awful.systems
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            1 year ago

            this kind of keyword searching (sometimes via a discord bot or similar for coordination purposes) is ridiculously common — old r/SneerClub was an interesting Petri dish for it, cause you’d get accounts that only post about Urbit or on TheMotte every couple months barging into a SneerClub thread for the first time going “uhhh can you prove to me, whoever the fuck I am, that these people are fascists though?” and it was painfully obvious to everyone else what they were trying to do

          • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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            1 year ago

            i meant that the discussion threads will still be present on non-home servers even as the users are blocked from here

            it lets them have the last word but in a way that means nobody on awful.systems will have to see it

    • Floey@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      How do you determine if someone is coming across a post because they searched a keyword? I arrived here because I sort by new comments and someone must have just commented.