Is this going to be available for free? And if so, to what extent? I’m not paying for AI, but would be cool to try it out.

I’ve also been burnt a few times by registering for some “free” AI service only to realise after putting in some actual effort into trying to create something that literally any actual value you might extract from it is gated behind a payment plan. This was the case when I tried generating voices, for example: spend an hour crafting something I like; generating any actual audio with it? Pay up. It’s like trying out a free MMO where you spend a long time creating your character just the way you want it only to be greeted by “trial over - subscribe now!”

True, I could have identified those as suggested solutions (albeit rather broad and unspecific, which is perfectly fine). I also sympathise on both accounts.

I have this personal intuition that a lot of social friction could be mitigated if we took some inspiration from the principle of locality physics when designing social networks and structuring society in general. The idea of locality in physics is that physical systems interact only with their adjacent neighbours. The analogous social principle I have in mind is that interactions between people that understand and respect each other should be facilitated and emphasised, and (direct) interactions between people far apart from each other on (some notion of) a “compatibility spectrum” should be limited and de-emphasised. The idea here is that this would enable political and cultural ideas to be propagated and shared with proportionate friction, resulting in a gradual dissipation of truly incompatible views and norms, which would hopefully reduce polarisation.

The way it works today is that people are constantly exposed directly to strangers’ unpalatable ideas and cultures, and there is zero reason for someone to seriously consider any of that since no trust or understanding exists between the (often largely unconsenting) audience and the (often loud) proponents. If some sentiment was instead communicated to a person after having passed through a series of increasingly trusted people (and after likely having undergone some revisions and filtering), that would make the person more likely to consider and extract value from it, and that would bring them a little bit closer to the opposite end of that chain.

Anyway, those are my musings on this matter.

We don’t have to prove that the brain isn’t puppeted from some external realm of “consciousness” in order to say we can be quite confident that it isn’t, because positing that there is such a thing as free will in the traditional notion of the term is magical thinking, which most of us might agree isn’t particularly respectable.

What we can do is take a compatibilist approach and say there is something that is “effectively indeterministic” about human decision making, because we can’t ever ourselves predict our own actions any faster than we observe them. I don’t have any moral contribution to make here; I just wanted to add this reflection.

I don’t see em suggesting any particular solutions, so I’m not sure what you are criticizing or why you think it would result in Elon remaining at large any more than from figurative fruit throwing.

I agree that social repercussions have a place, but I also agree that it is only “good enough” for many – but not all – situations. Seeking a more sophisticated approach based on studying and identifying potential root causes seems to me like it would be more sustainable, not to mention an opportunity for individual growth.

I don’t know if it’s actually a setting, I’ve only noticed the behaviour. Neat little feature!

What you describe is also a feature of AntennaPod.

Edit: AntennaPod is also open source.

If you press it the same way again (“are you sure the function doesn’t exist?”), there is a high chance it will “rectify” its rectification.

I use LLMs for having things explained to me, too… but if you want to know how much salt to pour in that soup, try asking it about something niche and complicated you already know the answer to.

They can be useful in figuring out the correct terminology so that you can find the answer on your own, or for pointing some very very obvious mistakes in your understandings (but it will still miss most of them).

Please don’t use those things as answer machines.

Could it be to identify you as OP?

edit: probably not; there is a different marker for that.

I’ve unironically done something like this

I see. Thanks for clarifying

You shouldn’t need to be a prompt engineer just to get answers to math questions that are not blatantly wrong. I believe the prompts are included in the paper so that you don’t have to guess if they were badly formatted.

Just want to add that I don’t think it’s a technological plateau. I think it’s capitalism producing shiny and “upgraded” versions of things that are easy to sell. Things that enable accessible and rapid consumption. High refresh rate, vertical high-resolution screens for endless scrolling in apps optimised for ads-scrolled-past-per-second. E-ink devices only good enough that you can clearly see the ads on them as you read your books. Things are just not made for humans. They’re made for corporations to extract value out of humans.

I’m just disappointed in the direction of UX they’re all taking. Ubuntu Touch was looking innovative and made me excited. Then that didn’t happen and now we just have a bunch of Android look-alikes but worse and buggier. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very glad to have GNU/Linux on a phone either way (especially NixOS Mobile), but I’m not excited to use one.

I don’t know if it’s just me getting older or if innovation in how we interface with technology has just sort of stagnated. In the past there was so much happening. New input methods (all kinds of pointer devices, joysticks, weird keyboards); graphical paradigms (floating windows vs tiling panes, tabs, stacking, grouping, virtual desktops); display technologies (vector graphics, convex screens, flat screens, projectors, VR headsets, e-ink); even machine architectures (eg Lisp machines) and how you interacted with your computer environment as a result.

As far as I can tell, VR systems are the latest innovation and they haven’t changed significantly in close to a decade. E-ink displays are almost nowhere to be found, or only attached to shitty devices (thanks, patent laws) - although I’m excited for the PineNote to eventually happen.

How do we still not have radial menus?! Or visual graph-like pipelining for composing input-outputs between bespoke programs?! We’ve all settled on a very homogenous way of interacting with computers, and I don’t believe for a second that it’s the best way.

It has so many interesting possible applications. Declarative and reproducible wine configurations for games and software; universal (cross-distro) packaging (without emulated runtime environments like flatpak); reproducible user environments managed easily with a GUI with trivial version control (both for config and software versions); pre-configuring a system before even setting it up (such as configuring a raspberry pi before you’ve even bought one so that once you have, you just install and configure everything in one go).

On top of the other explanations, it’s natural that many, if not most, who decide to check out alternatives don’t stick around for various reasons.

• They might not have found the right instance for them (or even realized they were supposed to).
• They might not care enough about the new state of reddit to leave, after all.
• The communities that kept them on reddit in the first place may not exist here so they have no incentive to stick around.
• The bugs, growing pains, quirks, and rough UX might have outweighed perceived benefits.
• They may have been put off by the model or culture for whatever personal/ideological reasons.
• They might still be using fediverse platforms but isolated by fediblocks or by their own choice.

They may or may not reconsider in the future, or their usage of the internet may have changed entirely (so they’re out of the game, so to speak).

We should just keep doing what we think is best for the kind of communities we want to see emerge and thrive here. Growth for its own sake is not helpful or valuable.

I maintain #science-space:matrix.org as sort of an entry point to explore scientific communities. Then there is #non-technology:matrix.org which is even more general.

While the basic idea is interesting, the statement is misconceived. It confuses what you believe to be possible with what is possible according to quantum physics.

For your statement to be true, the lottery would have to be set up in such a way that the choice of winning lottery number is decided by the outcome of a quantum measurement which includes the possibility of your number being chosen. The outcome would then exist in superposition, and as soon as you learn the result, you are entangled with it and enter into superposition as well.

But like I said, the core idea is still fun to think about, because this type of branching happens constantly and it becomes an interesting philosophical dilemma of how to think about what could possibly happen, not merely what does (as far as any ‘you’ can tell). Imagine if you could experience all outcomes of some particular chain of events and how that would affect the way you make decisions.

Something that would make it massively easier is portable/decentralised identities, or at least easy account migration. This should go for communities as well so that a community can exist independently of an instance, or be migrated to another instance with subscribers being redirected seamlessly.

That is why you would want to choose an instance that aligns with your values, so that if they defederate, it is to your benefit.