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sledgehammers

116 karma · joined April 4, 2014

msc compsci.
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sledgehammers··on Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly building an AI clone to replace him in meetings
It does take tremendous talent and knowledge to build what he built, saying anything else is not just dishonest but weirdly cynical if not hateful. I think you grossly underestimate how difficult it is to build anything good. Not an easy thing to follow up all the expectations set after a massive global hit like that, a classic dilemma of a successful artist.
sledgehammers··on Some things just take time
Also you know, for programmers, say a 3 day work week is right there up for grabs. Even still employers would see big productivity increases.
sledgehammers··on OpenWorm – A computational model of C. elegans worm
Are you shitting on peoples work just for the sake of shitting on it?

edit. this comment seems unpopular, my intent was to defend the worm against trolls :)

sledgehammers··on Why Nvidia Keeps Winning
I started reading that book (seems great!) and stumbled upon this: "And it’s hardly clear that computer scientists will succeed in creating a convincingly-human artificial intelligence any time soon." Made me smile. Took but 8 years, the book was published in 2015. :)

(BTW. I'm super concerned about all the incredible amount of power nvidia has now and in the future. They get to decide the fate of the human race, I feel. And their incentive is just to make as much money as possible, while all negative externalities including the likes of extinction is left to the society to deal with. Sigh.)

sledgehammers··on [dead]
Massive wealth inequality bubble bursting from the bottom up?
sledgehammers··on YouTube is blocking videos for users who block ads
Almost two decades worth of content now locked behind worsening ad dystopia. I wish they didn't have this amount of immense power over the human race and the information it has access to.

Alphabet Inc needs to be broken with antitrust. Youtube has to be a separate company.

What a massive failure of democracy that this hasn't happened already. Fuck FAANG.

sledgehammers··on Show HN: Yet another macOS ChatGPT app
> it is not certain that allowing this would pass Apple reviews

Release the app outside the store? Fuck apple and their monopoly abuse control system.

sledgehammers··on YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad blockers
_Everything_ is getting more shit day after day.

Internet is burning. The sources of information are getting scarce, it's almost unbelivable.

sledgehammers··on Let's welcome Meta, not block them
How would you design a protocol immune from all the politics? Whatever the implementation, it's just a part of a larger complex system. This is a very hard issue, and trusting Meta or the likes is naive and dangerous with destructive consequences.

https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-netwo...

sledgehammers··on Open source AI is critical – Hugging Face CEO before US Congress
Whatever it is, I really, really, really, really hope it's doesn't fall into the hands of microsoft, google or the rest. (But of course it will and enshittification ensues.)
sledgehammers··on The 'fuck you' pattern (2021)
Except in a restaurant, the chef gets paid. In this platform, value is extracted from the chef, the waiter, the eater, the eaten, and their interaction, while tearing down societies. Not a fair comparison.
sledgehammers··on Discord monetization: microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes'
I wish we could as a species create a social media and communication platform not based on greed, addiction, micro-monetization, walled datagarden hoardism, and so on, but something above all that bullshit.
sledgehammers··on Google Threatens to Kill Open Source YouTube Front-End Invidious
AKA abuse their monopoly.

Kudos to this guy. Disobedience is a requirement for a change in a broken system.

sledgehammers··on AI Workbooks – A notebook interface for LLMs, image and audio models
> I think AI really needs a de-pythoning in general.

Yes, absolutely. The state of the Python ecosystem is what remains after a nuclear apocalypse.

We need more native stuff, ggml.cpp for one is a super important project.

sledgehammers··on Life before cellphones: The after-work activities of young people in 2002
You are welcome to do as you please. As a collective, we need to acknowledge the burnout epidemic. People need to have the honest freedom to be offline, without any social or business pressure. There's more to life than emails and a corporation that is free to fire you at any point.
sledgehammers··on Apple wants rights to the image of apples in Switzerland
We need to break down these tech monopolies.
sledgehammers··on The end of Reddit? Why the blackout is still going – and what happens next
Let's hope we don't repeat the same greedy walled datagarden monopoly and privatization/theft of information -problems with the next generation of social media. Does this shit culture ever change?
sledgehammers··on In praise of blowing up your life
Who gets to define normal though? We have one life in this crazy universe.
sledgehammers··on In praise of blowing up your life
Good point. What's a little quater/midlife crisis in addition to all the other major crises going on the world simultaneously? Haha. :)
sledgehammers··on In praise of blowing up your life
This is just my empirical evidence - let me know if you disagree and have contrary information - but psychological traumas like this are increasing everywhere I look. In my local community, local country, globally, it's the same story basically: burnout, a need for a life blowup. I think it's clearly a growing trend, the old world just isn't working.

Thoughts?

sledgehammers··on Ask HN: Anyone else disinterested in Reddit API drama?
I hear you, but I don't care about what drama you care about or don't.

This is part of a larger fight against monopolism and walled gardenism, theft and privatization of free information & data provided by users.

sledgehammers··on This is fine.
I totally get where you are coming from, and 100% agree, but you don't understand me at all. I'm not talking about data.

I'm talking about the world as a complex system of physics, chemistry, biology, society, politics, economics, digitalics (lol we need a new word for the digital world), its history, present, future. I think about how the technology is progressing on an exponential curve.

We NEED to be thinking about things at this level. Just look where the world is headed!

A quote from wiki: "accelerating change is the observed exponential nature of the rate of technological change in recent history, suggest faster and more profound change in the future and may or may not be accompanied by equally profound social and cultural change."

sledgehammers··on The internet is unusable now
How do we fix social media?

Let's start with the huge societal problems:

- optimizing for addiction

- fighting for attention

People need social validation for their personalities. Social media drives people into perfectionism - yet never being enough. You need to modify your entire self image to fit somekind of hazy image of perfect whatever. You are fighting for attention, you need to do ever more crazy and better shit to get more attention.

Other huge societal problems:

- sensorship, misinformation, death of journalism and therefore truth and therefore democracy

- centralized greedy growth-seeking monopolist culture kills innovation, creates dystopia

Is a well functioning distributed system a possibility? Your own device, or your goverments, or some global 3rd party, you choose, as a host? Let's not give the control of the internet to another monopoly with hardware like amazon, or monopoly with the traffic like cloudfare or whatever. Let's avoid these giant tech monopolies.

sledgehammers··on This is fine.
I think about the state of the world every day.

I feel that especially computer science has tought my brains ways of simplifying and therefore understanding complex systems. The world is obviously complex, but the more information you gather, the clearer the image becomes of total and massive changes that are incoming.

We need a new ism - not communism, not capitalism. Something new, better, something addressing the huge cultural, political, technological, biological problems we face.

Thoughts?

sledgehammers··on AI will save the world?
Yeah, this "just a machine" -argument doesn't make any sense.

First you need to define consciousness precisely. Then you have to proof that we as humans are somehow more than biological machines.

sledgehammers··on Three companies agree to pay $1B to settle 'forever chemical' claims
The leadership should go to jail. The fine should be 100x.
sledgehammers··on How Reddit became the enemy [video]
So refreshing to hear a voice of reason.

You are totally right.

This shit attitude needs to change.

sledgehammers··on Meta announces its Quest 3 VR headset
You can play whatever you want. This is not about you.

Overreaction? Do you see the state of the world? Meta has played a massive role in destabilizing it. You can keep playing resident evil, it's innocent. Underreaction is dramatically more dangerous than overreaction.

sledgehammers··on Yes, everything is horrible and fucked up, but
What's the latest GOOD news you've heard? I'd love to read some - honestly :)
sledgehammers··on Profit-Price Spiral: Excess Profits Fuelling Inflation, Not Wages
Supply and demand mechanism can take years, decades to materialize a such stabilization. Wealth hoarders have the power to suck huge amounts of wealth out and destabilize the entire economy, just like has happened now.

"Capital in the Twenty-First Century" talks about this, great book.

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