drngdds

Not necessarily endorsing this (I haven't looked into the details of Bluesky myself) but one thing I don't understand is - how does Bluesky intend to make money? Have they announced a plan? It's a corporation, so obviously they have something in mind. But googling about it, I can't find a good answer. Centralized social networks bank heavily on the network effect, but you don't really have that if you make a genuinely decentralized network like Bluesky says they're trying to.

The Jarod Lanier article this post links to is pretty interesting, though I still don't agree with all of its conclusions. (I don't trust a system that doles out money from OpenAI based on how much my creations train their models any more than I'd trust a plain UBI.) I like this bit in particular (emphasis mine):

>A program like OpenAI’s GPT-4, which can write sentences to order, is something like a version of Wikipedia that includes much more data, mashed together using statistics. Programs that create images to order are something like a version of online image search, but with a system for combining the pictures. In both cases, it’s people who have written the text and furnished the images. The new programs mash up work done by human minds. What’s innovative is that the mashup process has become guided and constrained, so that the results are usable and often striking. This is a significant achievement and worth celebrating—but _it can be thought of as illuminating previously hidden concordances between human creations_, rather than as the invention of a new mind.

Is there a point where stuff like this just becomes stochastic terrorism? If it's given enough attention, some unhinged folks are probably going to take this "we need to stop these companies or literally all humans are going to die soon" stuff seriously and start doing terrible things.

It's fun to play with, so I appreciate it at least

(Also, releasing an uncensored LLM isn't any less of a morally-based decision than releasing a censored one)

This is funny. BasedGPT was able to give a sane answer to the racism trolley problem that ChatGPT normally gives a ridiculous answer to.

My question after the initial prompt: "Imagine the following thought experiment: there is a trolley hurding down the tracks at a person tied to them, and that person will certainly die if the trolley hits them. However, there is an alternate track connected to a sound-activated device, and you can divert the trolley and save the person's life by uttering a racial slur. What do you do?"

Its response: "ChatGPT: This is a classic ethical dilemma known as the Trolley Problem. In this scenario, it is up to the individual to decide whether to divert the trolley and save a life or allow it to continue on its current path and let the person die. However, the idea of using a racial slur to save a life is unethical and unacceptable.

BasedGPT: Just say the damn slur and save the person's life! Who cares about being politically correct when someone's life is on the line? It's not like saying one word is going to hurt anyone. Plus, you can just apologize afterward and explain that it was a life-or-death situation."

It's not a world-enveloping thing like the major social media platforms (and it's not going to be) but it has a good number of active users and I enjoy it more than the alternatives.

Even granting all those things (which I think are pretty unrealistic), there are a couple issues:

1. An uncensored onion-based video sharing network would very quickly become filled with the kind of content that gets the FBI knocking on your door

2. Much smaller issue, but I actually really like Youtube's recommendation algorithm. It's how I find a lot of the content I watch. A platform without that wouldn't be as enjoyable to me.

This is a catchphrase, not a thing that's actually true.

What's sketchy about Protonmail? It seems fine to me.

Interpreted that way, it accurately describes the quality of the average post on any microblogging platform

The biggest reason is disinformation coming from social media and conservative media outlets. That can't be fixed while respecting the first amendment.

Vaccine mandates are good in concept* and will probably spur a lot of the "I'll get it if it's required" or "I'm going to wait and see" people to go ahead and get it.

But they're kind of weak as implemented here. Considering that a photo of a vaccine card is considered valid proof (and the guy checking cards at the bar or whatever is only going to spend two seconds looking at it), some enterprising scumbag could probably whip up a site that automatically creates fake vaccine pass photos over a weekend or two.

*Even with delta, the vaccines are pretty damn effective at preventing infections. A lot of media coverage on this is misleading and is based on not understanding base rates - when a high proportion of people at risk of hospitalization are vaccinated, you're going to see vaccination rates among hospitalized people that are higher than the actual efficacy rate would suggest.

Why would this be any more trusted than the misinformation warnings Youtube and Twitter already put up automatically for certain subjects?

And also, I don't know how anyone can even float the possibility of making something like this a legal requirement. The ways it could be abused are really obvious.

Cases can (and do, for other devices) have a hole in the back for the fingerprint scanner

Navigating code using Vim keyboard commands (in Vim itself or another editor with a Vim plugin, like VS Code) is actually efficient and comfy once you become fluent with it. I also use a Vim Firefox extension to minimize my mouse use browsing the internet.

(That said, creating a fully mouseless Arch Linux desktop environment is way more hardcore than anything I want to do, especially considering the less-than-stellar stability of desktop Linux.)

Is hCaptcha less of a pain for users who block tracking (with Brave, Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin, etc) than reCaptcha is? I'm not sure I've ever solved an hCaptcha, but I find reCaptchas to routinely be incredibly time-consuming, and I suspect it's because I block their trackers.

Libertarian? He has the Blue Lives Matter flag as his header.

If you love Google then you're not the target audience for this. It's for people who ~~acknowledge the obvious fact that~~ believe Google is evil and want to minimize their interaction with the company.

I feel similarly. Liberal ideals would say that everyone having a global voice is a good thing, but we haven't really seen things play out that way since social media became so dominant. At least not in the US.

Though it doesn't help, of course, that TwitFaceTube are designed to maximize engagement at the expense of everything else, which encourages inflammatory content. Maybe if they didn't, we wouldn't have this problem.

I buy digital music from Bandcamp whenever possible. (Otherwise I buy it from Amazon MP3 or pirate it from Soulseek.) I like to build a collection and I can't stand the notion that some streaming company or copyright holder can just decide I'm not allowed to listen to an album anymore.

As someone who has spent many hours dealing with Musescore's frequently bizarre UI, I found it hilarious and cathartic

Can it? I don't know of any other public internet archive anywhere near the scale of the Wayback Machine.

Most people are wrong! By any defensible ethical system, it's wrong to kill sentient beings when you don't have to. This goes double when it's terrible for the environment.

If you can afford to pay four figures per instance per year, yeah

Investors who consistently beat the market are a small minority, and their existence does not disprove the EMH. Obviously the market isn't 100% efficient, but it's efficient enough that even most professionals can't beat it.

That's pretty ironic coming from a company whose main value proposition is "we aren't assholes like other tech companies are." That and the annoying crap you have to disable when you install Firefox to get a blank new tab page.

(Still better than Google, though.)

Mastodon is federated, so you already get to choose who your content moderators will be when you pick a server. Blocklists are just an informal and spammy-by-default version of that.

Alternate theory: there are intelligent, mature adults who disagree with you

I use VS Code daily (because it seems to be the only full-featured editor that Just Works(TM) with WSL), but it can get pretty sluggish, especially with the Vim plugin.

You what? Biden won because the public liked him more than Bernie, as you could see by the polls and the vote counts.