Yep, the problem would be worse because he would be a martyr and out of the news enough that his crimes would fade away into history. And a different fascist would lead that group. At least this way, there is some chance a few more people will finally understand he is a lying thieving scumbag pedophile rapist with no intention of ever helping anyone other than himself.

*a.

That’s the classic flaw with flood plane exemptions. The floods don’t tend to care. Next time, if they want to be exempt from flooding, they need to get out the old fashioned map and Sharpie.

EfFiCiEnCy

I think each title/post of the same content should be treated as its own top-level object in the comments section, so collapsing everything at the top level would show you all the posts and reposts from various communities.

On client side, you should be able to merge all the posts, to sort all top level comments together. But if you go to make a top level comment, you’ll need to be replying to a specific post from a specific community (selectable, but defaults to the title you were shown from outside the post).

From outside the post, I think it would be cool to be able to browse the various posts of the same content from different communities, seeing their titles, the name of the community/instance, the number of comments.

Just my initial thoughts. Mainly, I just think it’s cool that we’re talking about this issue at all because once we solve this kind of problem in all its forms and iterations, we could see some really cool decentralized communities start to coalesce. IMO, the next big step after this would be building systems a user could use to find instances and communities they’re not yet aware of.

Personally, I downvoted because lately I’ve been devoting almost all of my energy toward trying to develop software we can use to build a true democracy. That’s how I keep myself sane and believe I’m contributing to solutions. Others have their own ways.

And while I’m waiting for scripts to run, I do make the occasional political comment in places like this. But that’s a separate thing just to connect with people and unwind. I can’t speak for the others, but I was downvoting the assumption that just because someone shows outrage at an outrageous situation, that necessarily means they’re doing nothing to try to fix it. Those things are not mutually exclusive.

I spent about 20 minutes today trying to get Copilot on Word to tell me how to disable Copilot on Word. Worth every penny.

I also find USB to be limiting when it comes to range. I can go about 50 feet with a nice thick HDMI with copper wiring, but any further than 20 feet on USB necessitates fiber optics. Not an issue for everyone, but something I have been running into.

I’m glad you’ve broken that dating barrier as well! It certainly is difficult to invite people in when life is cluttered, and I can imagine the added complication of the clutter not being your own made things especially tricky. I’m personally on the opposite end of the cannabis spectrum at the moment - I used it for many years, mainly to break down my emotions and get at the root causes of my anxieties. I’m at the point now where I’ve done a lot of self improvement, but the cannabis has become more of a hindrance. I was dependent on it and definitely seeing some side effects from long term usage. I think it did serve a purpose, but it’s become time for me to stop using it as a crutch. Just a minor heads up to use with moderation if possible. I’m happy you’ve found someone though, and that your life is heading in a good direction. Wishing you all kinds of success in your relationship and life!

Well, the best thing that happened to me was meeting my girlfriend. Just happened a month ago, but we already feel like we’re going to spend the rest of our lives together and this is after me not dating at all for almost fifteen years.

So, the second best thing has to be several months ago when my family caught on to the fact that I was depressed and overwhelmed with clutter from stuff I was hoarding because I felt too guilty about throwing things away. They helped me sort through it all so it wasn’t so overwhelming. My living space is nice and tidy now and that’s what allowed me the confidence to go meet a partner who is perfect for me in almost every way.

Hell, I might be a CFO now and I’ve failed to notice! Hold on, let me check… No… No, I’ve just managed to burn a microwave dinner again.

Get out. No, don’t get your coat. Just go.

Freeze! This is a stick up.

But it is! I put my keys right here a few hundred years ago and now I can’t find them! I’ve looked in a 30.5 inch radius, so I’m pretty sure they’re gone for good.

Yeah, it’s specifically the not talking to a kid version that bothers me.

I pick up a subtext of self-importance and I think that’s what I find irksome. A mom is a parent. A momma is a special parent who will do anything for their baby, you’d better watch out. A kid is a child. A kiddo is a specific child who has a close bond with their momma or teacher that you wouldn’t understand. That’s the vibe I get.

Similarly, not a fan of when teachers and parents talk about their “kiddos.”

Feels like they’re needlessly using a more playful childish term to make themselves part of a separate “in group” who “gets it.”

I choose to take your questions as rhetorical, as I think our points do align. I quite agree.

My feelings are mixed. Everything you are saying is true. LLMs, right now at least, are a huge waste of resources. It’s triggering us to move closer to fossil fuels when we should be moving away. Every time I step outside to a nice balmy day, I think, am I going to miss this in a few years’ time? In a few decades, am I going to envy my current self who can do dishes without worrying too much about how much water goes down the drain? Are the generations to come going to look at my occasional can of tuna with contempt and jealousy? Or will they even have the luxury of retrospection?

I understand what we have to lose and how little we are doing about it. But I have also grown up being subjugated inside a capitalist hellscape. And I’ve spent the past few days having ChatGPT help me set up a CI/CD pipeline and start coding some games I’ve wanted to make for years. It’s allowed me to take a few hours of free time and make progress that I expected would have taken a week. It doesn’t have that effect on every task, but when learning new software, it really feels like having someone knowledgeable sitting next to me to answer my questions and point me in the right direction.

GPT 3 was kind of a neat party trick - sounds kind of like a person, but a pretty dumb person. GPT 4 sounded smarter, but still couldn’t code for shit. The o1 model still makes mistakes, but it retains the thread of our conversation weeks after the fact and has put together some code that I would have struggled to do myself. Even if it loses more money than it makes right now, I can see the value in progressing development until we achieve AGI.

People have expressed hopes that AGI will solve a lot of the world’s problems. That it will know just what to do about climate change. That it will crack codes in our DNA and give us endless healthy life. I am doubtful that these dreams will come to fruition. At least not in the way people think. It might have the intelligence to tell us things that we should have already known. Like that we can’t get much better yields in scrubbing carbon from the air than nature itself and we should have reforested far more land than we currently are. And that immortality will take huge amounts of resources and will come at the expense of the health of the masses. More gain for the rich. More suffering for the poor. Business as usual.

But I think there is a window of time where we can be hopeful about what AI has to offer. And we may even be able to leverage it to solve a big piece of the income inequality puzzle.

If we make a social media app that is not designed for profit but instead for the good of the people, there are a lot of problems such an app could solve.

We could design it to seek out real (non-bot) contributors. It will always be an arms race trying to sort real humans from bots but that is no reason to give up. It is a reason to get as far ahead in the race as we possibly can. We should build an app that both recognizes when someone is very likely to be real and when they have also contributed to a cause.

Imagine an application that tracks creative innovation, such as the creation of a funny video or a new meme format. When someone makes an idea and it is popular, the AI model would determine how much of a given experience is improved by their idea and give them profit residuals based on their contribution. And the more ideas that get built on top of the original idea, the more the newer contributors are rewarded for their contributions.

Think about if people could design a farm from the ground up using a socialized app for collaboration. Someone could design a camera system to keep track of livestock wellbeing and to head off diseases. They could make AI-empowered systems to track livestock happiness and find ways of increasing quality of life. And creating more humane automated methods of turning crops and livestock into food ready to transport. Some people would focus on creating ideal distribution methods. Others would create stores or restaurants. Others might work on the people themselves, encouraging them to give new more climate friendly meal options a try. Investors would be paid their dues, but there would be no CEO or board of executives. The means of production would belong to the people.

When people talk about the potential of AI, that’s what I envision. If I can make some passive income with my games and apps, that’s the next project I’ll be diverting my time towards. Because this is a narrow window we have to make this happen. The technology is here, but barriers from climate change and income inequality are only going up. We can lament the fact that AI is currently not profitable and hurting the planet, or we can put more of that energy to use by taking the tools humanity has made and using them to dismantle the systems which made this timeline so intolerable to begin with. The only way to take the current system apart is to make a new one that outcompetes our old ways of life in every measurable way.

Hey, that’s longer than I can run.

It’s got your number.