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AstralStorm

5,851 karma · joined July 15, 2015

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AstralStorm··on Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion
Neither does not have the same shared consistent group of participants.

A forum ultimately ends up a group of more or less known individuals with a focus.

Reddit and HN don't have that feel, chatrooms and such as Discord usually do, unless they get huge and overwhelm Dunbar's number.

The friend feeds like Facebook's are less anonymous, but they do not form topical discussions nor feel like hangouts with the person.

AstralStorm··on Jeopardy’s most controversial moment was years in the making
But a system with a perfect memory and sufficient search space would be great at it. This is precisely where the stochastic database, even a huge Markov model would work great.

Only the hard wordplays maybe would pose a problem, and statistically you can only go so hard on these before human players start lagging too.

Remembering a ton of facts is something the computer would be excellent at...

AstralStorm··on Computers are for girls (2022)
Interesting but wrong. Almost always kids perused the computers together and shared what they made. This worked exactly like arcades at times.

So not it either. Really my guess is that at some point games started being made for boys only. You saw a lot of war and fighting, racing style games, with much less else. Even platformers started to wear those trappings.

Further, early games were always competitive. That does not generally appeal to people with less testosterone.

There were exceptions, but the rule is as it is.

AstralStorm··on FBI arrests US Army veteran for 'conspiracy' over protest against ICE
What does a reasonable restriction make is up to the court to decide, not cops, and definitely not some federal agency.

There's a lot of precedent too, I'm sure.

So yeah, there's no real way to know ahead of time if any protest is or is not legal or legally impeded. That's not the case with continental law where it's defined ahead of time.

AstralStorm··on De-Googling TOTP Authenticator Codes
And yes, 2FA single use codes will protect against a simple keylogger.

But if its on the same device, it will not protect you against a password database harvester.

AstralStorm··on De-Googling TOTP Authenticator Codes
And this is why Aegis has a working encrypted offline backup.
AstralStorm··on De-Googling TOTP Authenticator Codes
It also provides enhanced security against session hijacking attacks.

Most sites require 2FA for changing the password, but do not require the password for changing itself.

AstralStorm··on Intermittent fasting correlated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease
Not quite to the level of explain, but what one only needs is an excellent liver. This is mostly a matter of yet unknown genetics. We know a few variants where different variants of classes of lipids are made reducing the risk for cardiovascular disease...

If you have a bad one like myself, you go decent diet and still have metabolic syndrome by 20. (No diabetes at least. Yet.)

AstralStorm··on Rick Beato is right to rant about music copyright strikes
You can. You will not be seen unless a label or some big name promotes you.

Radio? Forget about it. Big concerts next to big agents? Nope.

Thing is, breaking through or even is ever harder.

AstralStorm··on Rick Beato is right to rant about music copyright strikes
Until it accidentally hits filters, and then how can you prove the AI did it and did not incidentally plagiarize some original piece?

It's the opposite of a solution.

AstralStorm··on Rick Beato is right to rant about music copyright strikes
YouTube could be subjected to a class action in theory not in practice, because the terms of the site are so loose you can get ejected with no recourse and lose wages, while indemnifying them.

UMG however has not any relationship with the author so they actually can be sued. If they hate their subcontractor YouTube for it, that's their problem.

They're the legal entity on behalf of which blocking is done, after all.

AstralStorm··on Rick Beato is right to rant about music copyright strikes
The only way to do that would be to sue them with a big badass class lawsuit.

This one is doable.

And then a tort for wasting everyone's time and ruining the media.

Not seeing how that one would come to pass though.

AstralStorm··on I Don't Like "AI"
1) What. How do you extend that?

2) Kind of hard to argue that for electricity and phones. Internet, maybe because it was a bunch of academics. TV was boosted by big business.

3) It fails to solve any task, in particular LLMs. You're tricked into doing the work instead. Other kinds of machine learning are useful and do solve tasks. TV also didn't exist to solve a task, at least it was honest about it. Phones solve the task they were meant to, as did the internet until it got enshittened. (Still does, but worse.)

4) whut.

5) It actually steals information. All the other tech didn't.

AstralStorm··on I Don't Like "AI"
Unfounded? Especially the ones about Altmann are verifiable quotes...
AstralStorm··on Why did dlclose not unload the library? (2023)
You could do that, but then you're running valgrind.
AstralStorm··on The share of Americans having regular sex keeps dropping
That would be true if the change was not worldwide, but most countries did not introduce serious sex ed.

Poland in particular is the outlier here, both in fall of birth rates and lack of sex ed...

Yet it got here even angrier at about the same time.

AstralStorm··on The share of Americans having regular sex keeps dropping
The timeline does not match. Both were widely available in oughts.

So there was something smooth that hit a phase transition. Likely enployment or housing prices, forcing people to engage survival mode. People in this mode do not feel secure enough to have sex or especially start families.

AstralStorm··on The share of Americans having regular sex keeps dropping
The trade is living on average a fifth shorter.

We need an approved better alternative. Seriously chemistry exists, we actually have pharmaceuticals that literally are the alcohol with vastly reduced side effects. Still addictive, of course.

AstralStorm··on Trying to get error backtraces in Rust libraries right
More on how best practices in Rust are not documented anywhere but in a bunch of unfindable blog posts. :(

And even then, there's no guarantee what you find is not outdated.

AstralStorm··on In Search of AI Psychosis
Normally people attempt to escape these time sinks when not explicitly taking about philosophy or they tend to elicit silence.

These are excellent nerd snipes though and for attmepting to make one sound profound to uneducated.

AstralStorm··on In Search of AI Psychosis
Most people do not challenge theirs by reasoning, only by social approval - and that's easy to game.

That's why they turn 180 or radicalize badly when exposed to sufficiently strong social or usual media.

AstralStorm··on In Search of AI Psychosis
For a lot of people, the world models are really rough and incomplete, so they really really on common opinion on these matters.

This is the same if you tried asking a general populace ethical questions in a vacuum sneakily. You're going to be dismayed after collecting the set of approved behaviors per culture.

There's not really a way to evaluate one of these.

AstralStorm··on In Search of AI Psychosis
Sure the thoughts can influence your chemical state. Scott even provides an example. Suppose you become so engrossed in your weird idea you start to lose sleep over it... Or start to feel anxious about it.

At some point, your induced stress will cause relevant biological changes. Not necessarily directly.

PTSD indeed is likely an overload of a normal learning and stress mechanism.

AstralStorm··on In Search of AI Psychosis
See the key here is, the AI provides a very enticing social partner.

Think of it as a version of making your drugged friend believe various random stuff. It works better if you're not a stranger and have an engaging or alarming style.

LLMs are trained to produce pleasant responses that tailor to the user to maximize positive responses. (A more general version of engagement.) It stands to reason they would be effective at convincing someone.

AstralStorm··on Sometimes CPU cores are odd
Specifically, only something government sized is trustworthy enough to not plainly sell your data later... Or perhaps get it stolen.

Scratch that, this happens all the time. With a third party there's no way to revoke, government you can usually physically handle this.

AstralStorm··on I researched every attempt to stop fascism in history. The success rate is 0%
Good try, the state is rich and borders the ocean.

They can afford water facilities.

AstralStorm··on I researched every attempt to stop fascism in history. The success rate is 0%
The claim is false, as long as they are unable to change the form of the government they tend to flame out and lose support quickly, because there's not that much substance behind their populism. They tend to have no real plan that's why different from a typical warlord, just on a slightly bigger scale.

Unless they go to war...

The real issue is that nobody with any degree of power really cares.

AstralStorm··on I researched every attempt to stop fascism in history. The success rate is 0%
That only did not happen because the US national pride was wounded by the Japanese.
AstralStorm··on Why does AI feel so different?
So it works as an advanced search engine. Sometimes, for simpler things.

Do you want that in every device or a lot of them, in every home, every service, for super cheap?

What's the paradigm being shifted here?

AstralStorm··on Why does AI feel so different?
True, but original electricity stayed the same, even the turbine generators still in use are very similar. (Same with steam power, still in use today.) Batteries are improved but general operation is the same. There's many more devices using it, mostly for the better.

We don't even know if we want LLMs in more devices. Likewise we likely do not want Internet/email in every toaster.

LLMs staying the same would be the death of this technology. Even minor improvements don't matter enough.

Voice activated devices are not necessarily paradigm shifting either. We had these for over 25 years now.

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