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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • You know what seems like a really good idea when we’re trying to reduce carbon emissions? A bunch of new satellite networks. We could get, like, one of the least trustworthy people on Earth to launch thousands of the things and then get everyone else to launch their own because he can’t be trusted. Literally just blot out the sun with them. No biggie.




  • I drive a cab. Yesterday I was trying to take a credit card payment and the square app kept screwing up, so I literally had to drive somewhere else for a signal and reset my phone. While waiting for it to reset, my fare and I commiserated on how much easier it would be if I could just take an imprint with a carbon sheet.

    It made me think about all the ways that it’s not necessarily a great idea to digitize everything and make it all dependent on technology functioning properly. There’s a lot of stuff that simply didn’t need power 30 years ago that absolutely requires it to function at all now.

    I keep notes in my phone for my taxi fares. I’ve convinced myself that it’s easier because I don’t need to keep track of a notepad, but I’m realizing that it’s not. It’s actually easier and preferable to have a single-purpose analogue device than it is to have to take the time to access another device that has all these other conflicting distractions and go get my notebook app. Then I have to wait for it to load and sync, then I have to wait for my keyboard to come up. Then, depending on how my phone is feeling, I have to wait for it to catch up with my typing.

    It’s good for the same reason it’s nice to have knobs with dedicated functions, or extra buttons. Dedicated inputs are simpler for repeated tasks than elaborate articulation of existing multi-purpose inputs.

    It’s needless complexity and bottle-necking at a single device, and the more complicated it gets the worse it seems it gets at actually being a phone. If the physical component that is your phone were part of a program, jamming all this functionality into one place and running a bunch of dedicated chromium instances for some reason, I’m not really sure you could reliably predict that it was created on the same planet that came up with single responsibility principle.

    You can’t enshittify ink and paper.

    Maybe we don’t want everything to be hackable, traceable, power-dependent, and susceptible to data loss.


  • Granted, I don’t assume that LLMs are currently equivalent to a lesser general AI, but like, won’t we always be able to say that they’re just generating the next token? Like, what level of complexity of ‘choice’ determines the difference between LLM and general AI? Or is that not the criteria?

    Are we talking some internal record of tracking specific reasoning? A long-term record that it can access between sessions? Some prescribed degree of autonomy within the systems it’s connected to? Introspection?

    Because to me “find the most reasonable next token for the current context” sounds a lot like how animals work. We make our way through a complex sea of sensory information and stored information to produce our next action, over and over again.

    I was watching Dr Kevin Mitchell discuss free will with Adam Conover recently, and a lot of their discussion touched on consciousness as basically the choice-making process itself. It’s worth watching, and I won’t try to summarize it, but it does make me wonder how big of a gap there is between ‘come up with the next token’ and ‘live’.

    It does make me suspect that some iteration of LLMs may form the foundation of a more complex proper AI that’s not just choosing the next token, but has some form of awareness of the process behind it.






  • Frankly, corporations seem to have no idea how to use LLMs. They want them to be a public facing company representative, which is exactly what LLMs can’t do well. Where they accel is as an assistant.

    Want to figure out what scale you’re playing a song in? It’s great at that. I’ve had it give me chords to go with scales too, or even asked for some scale options based on the feeling of the sound.

    It’s also great for looking for terms in other languages. I’ve got some ranged weapon abilities in my tabletop rpg. I knew i wanted one of them to be called pistolero, but I didn’t know the terms fusilero or escopetero, and might not have found them on my own, but chatgpt came up with them right away.

    I’ve also learned that it’s great at looking up game guides and providing hints that aren’t spoilers without giving the puzzle away. I had it generate results for the Lady’s Maze in Planescape: Torment and the Water Temple in Ocarina of Time. Amazing hints without giving it away.

    If you have your own brain and want to off-load some simple queries, it’s great. If you want to use it in place of a human brain to talk to customers, you’re barking up the wrong gpt.



  • This almost makes me want to give them my email address, or at least a throwaway, but I really don’t want to encourage that behavior.

    If a couple of decades and some change on the internet has taught me anything, it’s that toxic, abuseable change is insidious. Subscription models for games seemed pretty harmless when it was just a handful of MMOs. Consolidating more user-directed social interactions into an algorithmic feed seemed like a pretty good idea in 2009.

    But now, in 2024, when a company tries to get me to play along with something I try to think of what the wider implications would be of other companies adopting the same model. How many websites would start asking for email addresses? How long until they start doing shady things with them?

    I know that I can send something off to a junk address that will expire or that I’ll just never check, but for most users it’s just a massive spam vector for what is likely to be their only email address. It’s not really something I’d like to encourage.

    Goofy name aside, they sound like a pretty alright company other than that. Love the idea of a journalist-owned outlet, but I’d be even more into the idea of a journalist-owned outlet that’s more concerned with setting an example for the future health of the internet than with self-protectionism.





  • Basically something like Google docs with better privacy. Cloud-based document editing with at least markdown that automatically stays synced across devices. Sorting into folders is nice too, and an Android app is a must.

    I was using a word processor and idrive storage for a while, but I ended up losing work to crashes with a frequency that really was not working for me. Plus LibreOffice sucks. I don’t know why word processors need to be such bloated ugly garbage.

    Skiff really kind of hit the sweet spot. I’m looking at Notion but like, ugh.

    Edit: Okay. Notion seems okay so far. I’m a little shaded out by the whole let’s pull our project and merge it with this other one, buuut… It’s kind of better by the look of it. Hmph.

    Okay. Notion is complete and utter trash. It’s failing to save literally everything I do on my phone.



  • I’m not exposed to a huge amount of media coming out of Asia, outside of a handful of Korean shows that Netflix has picked up and anime. But like, if anime is any indicator, I’m not really surprised that the training data for Asian women is leaning more toward overt sexualization. Even setting aside the whole misogynistic ‘fan service’ thing, I don’t feel like I see as much representation of women who defy traditional gender roles as the last twenty or so years of Western media.

    It certainly could be that anime is actually a huge outlier here, but if the training data is primarily from the English speaking web, it might be overrepresented anyway. But like, when it comes to weird AI image behaviors, it pays to think about the probable training data.

    Like, stable diffusion seems to do a better job of rendering jewelry if you tell it to surround it with berries. Given the output, this seems to be due to Christmas themed jewelry ads. They also tend to add a lot of bokeh for the same reason.