Freebytes

I had a hard time getting Doom to run on my 486. I only had something like 4MB of RAM if I recall correctly so I had to restart my computer, edit the AUTOEXEC.BAT to remove options that I would use to load Windows, and then boot back into DOS to launch DOOM each time I wanted to play it to get that last bit of memory I needed. Then, when I wanted to run Windows, I had to edit the HIMEM.SYS stuff to get it running again. (I was a teenager with no Internet access. I have no idea how I figured out this stuff or where I got information from.)

We need to create something that look better! Let us update a small set of applications one at a time and leave the others that look like they are from Windows 98 still in place.

Years later, that look is old. We should update the look. But what about the other stuff we have not updated yet that is still old looking? We will get to it later.

Meanwhile, you have three or four different layouts and designs and patterns throughout the system. It is crazy. They finally updated "System" to look like the rest of Windows, but if you click "Advanced System Settings", it still brings up the old System Properties. And it is crazy that the old one is still easier to navigate and find what you are trying to find.

For one thing, they need to hire someone to be "Chief Executive of Naming Things That Make Sense" because they are terrible with naming stuff.

"I got an Xbox One!" "Oh, the first one?" "No, the XBox One not the original XBox 1."

Or, looking at the .NET evolution:

.NET Framework 4.8 .NET Core .NET Core 2 .NET Core 3 .NET 5

There is no .NET Core 4 because people would get confused with .NET Framework 4 which is still getting bug fixes and has support. And they wanted people to move from .NET Framework 4 so they called it .NET 5 instead of .NET Core 5.

Well, the name of the company is Microsoft, not Microhard.

I think Google is afraid of Microsoft.

The Apply button was pointless. OK is supposed to apply. Apply simply made the changes, but it did not dismiss the dialog. Apply seemed confusing to most users and there should have only been two buttons. If you click OK, there was no reason to keep the dialog visible since you should be able to click the same thing (easily) to get back to it.

If the Apply button was necessary because you could not easily get back to the dialog, then it was a problem with the interface before the dialog opened. That is, it should be easy to open dialogs, close them, and open them again.

The important thing is that they never said it was Johansson. They were not pretending to be her. They are not imitating her likeness whatsoever.

I have totally wanted to build out "pet VR". Put an animal on a type of treadmill in a virtual world and let them run around. The major issue with the idea is that dogs rely on smell quite a bit so it would likely not be a decent replacement experience for them versus going outdoors.

We should not make it more than $1000 per month. Very few would choose to be poor. It would put a lot of pressure on companies to pay decent wages, though.

It is important that this is based on all income levels equally. Yes, some will pay back that money in taxes, but the important part is keeping the amount equal. It would be even more effective if you gave them a monthly check (even if you would eventually take it all back via a consumption tax on people earning more). A ~25% national sales tax should be sufficient to cover a UBI program. (We should still have an income tax, though.) Furthermore, a consumption tax would decrease unnecessary spending since you can target only new products and not used products to encourage people to reduce, reuse, and recycle.

This is one of those fairly obvious situations where you can simply go outside and observe a collapse of insect populations. You may be too young to remember not being able to drive without windshield washer fluid due to the large number of insects that would be on your windshield in a single drive from place to place. Consider leaving your basement.

He is also saying that animals are fine. Animals are not fine. Many animals that consume water out of the river only live for five years or so. Diseases still get them.

I dread the inevitable "Internet dildo wars of 2037" where millions of networked dildos and refrigerators wreaked havoc on the entire Internet causing billions in damage. "Suspects remain at large."

As you illustrate, too many naysayers think that AGI must replicate "human thought". People, even those here, seem to equate AGI to being synonymous to human intelligence, but that type of thinking is flawed. AGI will not think like a human whatsoever. It must simply be indistinguishable from the capabilities of a human across almost all domains where a human is dominant. We may be close, or we may be far away. We simply do not know. If an LLM, regardless of the mechanism of action or how 'stupid' it may be, was able to accomplish all of the requirements of an AGI, then it is an AGI. Simple as that.

I imagine us actually reaching AGI, and people will start saying, "Yes, but it is not real AGI because..." This should be a measure of capabilities not process. But if expectations of its capabilities are clear, then we will get there eventually -- if we allow it to happen and do not continue moving the goalposts.

This is a very good point, and you could probably write quite a few articles about this particular subject. You may even have a service A that calls service B that calls service C that calls service A. Then you have a problem. Or, you have C get blocked by something happening in A that was unexpected. Ideally, you only have parents calling children without relying on the parents whatsoever, and if you fail in this, you have failed in your architecture.

People also attack people living in poverty for making poor decisions, but if you are poor, your entire brain is overwhelmed with thoughts of survival. Of course poor people are going to make poor decisions because they are not given the opportunity to think about anything else other than survival.

I think we could consider poor as having all of your needs but none of your wants. And if you have all of your needs and all of your wants, then you are absolutely not poor. I agree with you. You cannot 'be poor but not feel it'.

While it is true that children may not realize they are living in poverty, when they grow up, they look back and then realize the conditions. I can see the point of someone saying they never realized they were poor growing up, but if they look back, they must realize that they felt it but did not realize it at the time.

I absolutely agree with this. You do not need to homeless to be living in severe poverty, but poor people feel poor. To your point about 'choosing to experience homeless', going homeless by choice is called camping.

People claim, "I did not feel poor even if I could not afford the designer clothing..." Like, we are not talking about designer clothing. We are talking about basic clothing. Shoes that do not fit. We are talking about food. Never, never, never going to the doctor unless you are literally dying -- perhaps a broken bone being the only exception... maybe.

Interestingly, things are much better now than in the past for many. Even rural communities are often given the opportunity to have basic necessities. Some families act too proud to accept assistance, but they really should if they have children. They must humble themselves to accept the assistance that is provided because that is the whole point. They reap the benefits now to get themselves back on their feet so they can contribute to others that will also need it.

I see so many people act like they are going to starve if they do not eat two or three meals PER DAY. Yet, they have never actually known true hunger in their life.

Making someone watch 5 to 8 advertisements to see a 2 minute video is already drastic.

I love the concept, but the user interface could certainly use some work.

This sounds good, but I am a Firefox user. The page does not really highlight a sufficient number of features. I would like automatic reminders more than anything, though.

Students rarely even look at a globe, though. They see many more maps online.

The problem with clinical trials is that they are looking for specific patients, though. And they will exclude patients that introduce confounding variables. Some studies exclude patients that are closest to death because they will interfere with the trial as well.

This is getting ridiculous. I was not necessarily in agreement with the protest, but after seeing the reaction from Reddit, I am going to unsubscribe from all subreddits that are not part of the protest in support.

This is like a master class in how not to deal with this type of situation.

There was Voat previously. I think you can actually download the source code and spin up an alternative if you wanted. The issue is getting people to switch.

The only moat Reddit has is the critical mass of users. Numerous clones exist (such as Hacker News), and a new minimum viable product could be built in a couple of weeks. But once you have the users, it is pretty easy to keep them... unless you make them turn against you.

Creating an alternative to Reddit would be pretty easy, but the challenge is the critical mass of users necessary for anyone to ever replace it. (We are even using a clone right now.) Another challenge would be scalability, but this is not as difficult as it was in 2005(?) when Reddit came to life. They are playing a dangerous game disrespecting their users.

How is this actually accomplished, though?

Being able to bypass paywalls does not justify AMP. AMP is a threat to decentralization of the web.

It will be impossible to regulate and impossible to stop.

The code for AGI will not be some monolith of software architecture. The code will likely be simple. This means that someone in their basement could build it. The steps to get there are challenging, though. A single person could have developed the transformer architecture. A single person could have used 4-bit quantization and developed an AI that is just as good as ChatGPT and have it run on their local machine.

The difficulties are figuring out the best 'needle in the haystack' to solve the problem. This requires research, and this process happens much faster if you have more people working on it. For years, many people did not put any energy into AI systems because the hardware was not here yet. The hardware is here now. The cat is out of the bag.

If the Earth warms significantly, we could have a situation where it triggers an ice age. (There are mechanisms for this to happen.) If the surface temperature of the water surface rises to a very high level, we could also have hypercanes.