_Algernon_

Plenty people of here work doing basically the same to maximize the amount of time people, including children and teens, spend staring at rectangular lights to show them ads.

Some amount of extremely competent engineers worked on the tech that made it possible to target beauty ads to insecure teen girls when they deleted a selfie.

Some amount of extremely competent engineers where complicit in building the tech that stoked the fire under the Rohingya genocide.

I could go on, but I think you get the point.

I'm not. As a reminder we are discussing within the context of this original claim:

>First, much like LLMs, lots of people don’t really have world models.

>Roughly 4% of the population are said to have aphantasia (lacking a "mind's eye"). Around 10% (numbers vary) don't have an internal monologue.

You don't need either of those to have a world model. A world model is a representation of reality that you can use and manipulate to simulate or predict the outcome of your actions. If you are able to discriminate that one of the actions of accepting a $ 1000000 unconditional gift is better than moving in front of a moving train you have a world model.

You can question the sophistication of world models in people — that's essentially what intelligence represents — but not their existence.

RSS provides GUID + update timestamp which combined allows the client to integrate changes or replace entries.

It's also absurdly wrong, and a quote that only a self-identified rationalist could smugly tout.

Of course everyone has world models. Otherwise people would wander into traffic like headless chickens, if they'd even be capable of that. What he likely means is that not everyone explicitly things of possibilities in terms of probabilities that are a function of Bayesian updating. That does not imply the absence of world models.

You could argue that some people have simpler world models, but claiming the absence of world models in others is extremely arrogant.

How much of that concrete was poured into ghost cities?

If you practiced some media literacy, you'd realize that (a) there is a point to that meme and (b) that there is a reason why you are on the receiving end of it.

Talk about missing the point…

>† replaced with a slightly less salacious word than the original in consideration for politeness.

1. You're on the internet. Nobody will get mad if you say "horny".

2. Bastardizing a quote is a worse outcome than you missing an opportunity to virtue signal your puritan values. Just say the original quote.

chrome.com redirects to https://www.google.com/chrome/ for whatever it's worth.

>[B]ureaucrats can be expected to embrace a technology that helps to create the illusion that decisions are not under their control. Because of its seeming intelligence and impartiality, a computer has an almost magical tendency to direct attention away from the people in charge of bureaucratic functions and toward itself, as if the computer were the true source of authority. A bureaucrat armed with a computer is the unacknowledged legislator of our age, and a terrible burden to bear. We cannot dismiss the possibility that, if Adolf Eichmann had been able to say that it was not he but a battery of computers that directed the Jews to the appropriate crematoria, he might never have been asked to answer for his actions. Neil Postman, Technopoly

Entities shouldn't be able to outsource liability for their decisions or actions — including the action of releasing stochastic parrots on society at large — on computers. We have precedent that occupations which make important decisions that put lives at risk (doctors, ATC, engineers for example) can be held accountable for the consequences of their actions if it is the result of negligence. Maybe it's time to see include computer engineers in that group.

They've been allowed to move fast and break things for way too long.

You'd need to make a case that proprietary OSes such as Windows or MacOS lessen the issue compared to FOSS OSes such as Linux. I doubt it considering that Windows is / was known to be the worst offender here.

In any case my bank has not banned the use of Linux to do homebanking. Why? Because there isn't a easy to plug-and-play API to do DRM and remove consumer rights. This is largely for historic reasons, but there is no reason a FOSS mobile OS couldn't work.

The absence of amplification is not not the same as eliminating it.

>In the United States, Section 230 is a section of the Communications Act of 1934 that was enacted as part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which is Title V of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and generally provides immunity for online computer services with respect to third-party content generated by their users. (Emphasis mine)

So either the content is user generated and their training of the model should be copyright infringement, or it's not and Section 230 does not apply and this is speech for which Open AI is responsible.

Describing methods in the abstract is different to engaging in argument with a specific individual over a period of time, encouraging them to do it.

No Wikipedia page does that.

All this is true about Linux on desktop, though my bank still allows me to log in to online banking.

At least for now.

I'm not aware of any major issues this has caused.

The trust isn't the issue. Google and Apple has made DRM easy for these companies to integrate, and therefore they do it. There isn't more to it than that.

The way we allow paternalistic tech companies to train the consumer to abdicate personal responsibility is going to bite us in the ass sooner or later. I'm betting on sooner.

Regulate the parents then. You don't strip search every customer in your store because one person shoplifted.

Mohammed caricatures or 100 year old vampires that look like 12 year olds?

Can't wait for the stochastic parrot to press the "launch nukes" button. We deserve it at this point.

Youtube offers rss feeds, for example: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCXuqSBl...

It's just a bit clunky to find. You need the channel id which you can find in the page source somewhere.

Note that this is a regular rss, not podcast rss.

RSS isn't dead. I use it daily. Most podcasts — all if you subscribe to the philosophy that mp3s without rss aren't podcasts — are built on it. Most websites still provide a feed, even if the owner isn't aware of it.

I have thought about doing this in the past but ran into issues (one of them being the friction in permanently deleting files once added). I'd be curious how you use it if you have time to share.

A monkey hammering gibberish on a keyboard can prove new math given sufficient time. That's a low bar to set. The question is if the signal-to-noise ratio is high enough for it to be worthwhile.

Better remove the locks on your house and bathroom and set up a public webcam while you're at it. After all, I'm not sure you're not a criminal, and to be sure of that I — and the rest of society — need to be able to observe you in your bathroom.

"innocent until proven guilty" exists for a reason.

This argument is basically the same as saying that stores should be allowed to sell alcohol to kids because it's the parents' responsibility to guard the store so their kids don't buy it.

Kids do not only have access to their own devices (for one, these days schools provide them with devices that parents have little say over often with only trivial filtering). And that is assuming the best case scenario where parents have the technical know-how to put in place non-trivial limits. Most don't.

The issue with social media isn't the free flow of information but the amplification of certain information — the information that tends to make you angry. The amplification is the cause of echo chambers, spreading of misinformation and disinformation, etc. It makes possible what in essence is a distributed denial of service attack on the human brain.

Sure, chain emails existed before, but they had a pretty low ceiling of how many it would reach. It didn't scale well.

In other words, you should regulate the amplification mechanism ("algorithm"), not what information is allowed to be said. I think forcing platforms to go back to subscribe+reverse chronological feeds would be a pretty good start.

With none of those features there is no excuse for the site working that terribly with JS disabled. Look at HN for comparison, which degrades gracefully with JS disabled.

>Essentially, wherever AC gets rolled out, heat-related death plunges. Taking Barreca’s estimate and applying it to Europe suggests that as many as 100,000 European lives — 0.013% of the population — could be saved every year if the 80% of European households who don’t have AC were to get it.

There is another side to this coin. How many extra people will die each year due to the additional radiative forcing caused by emissions due to the AC usage? Presenting one side without attempting to estimate the other side is not a fair comparison.