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totalconfusionon Keep Our Servers Running

Who's paying?

We could sit here all day arguing about subjectivity.

It's not been my experience that people can reliably tell the difference.

I, personally, would not equate pissing in somebody's soup with having a chat with an LLM but if we must, you need to appreciate that it's the piss itself, that makes the soup delicious, if the soup was not pissed in, it would be middling at best. Only in that context can you then ask yourself, "Am I bothered by this delicious soup?"

I think the analogy works in the context in which it was intended. I was illustrating the absurdity of contempt for something based on its provenance, after praising it. If you really don't like the paint analogy image this, you read a book, loved it, then later found out the author was black, or an LLM, then you hated the book.

I'm not sure I understand where you're coming from regarding evolution. Sexual reproduction is a comparatively recent evolution in the scheme of things. That which came before us defined us, are our ancestors and is our history. What comes tomorrow, engineered or otherwise I would consider our children and should be loved, cherished and allowed to thrive in the same way our ancestors ushered us all into this universe.

I wasn't being facetious when I asked if you could have a meaningful relationship with an algorithm, I asked about the teddy bear to draw a parallel to which a lot of people are familiar. If a child can have an enriched life and what I would call meaningful, intimate relationship with an stuffed toy, why shouldn't they also be able to have the same with an algorithm that talks back to them? I'm being both general and specific if I think about it.

If I could image your brain perfectly and put it into a perfect physics simulation running on silicon or whatever substrate, then have this same conversation with you, I would call that meaningful. Whether or not you would at that point label yourself as living, conscious, sentient, human, whatever. It would be a meaningful relationship to me.

I think people are scared of change, and that's alright.

totalconfusionon How much of HN is AI?

If people can't tell the difference but still get the shits because of some notion of being cheated or putting humanity on the pedestal, they're just being tribalistic. It's a common human rationalisation that helps entrench social hierarchies but in this case, and it's probably not the right word but Speciesism.

It's about as strong an argument as going to the paint shop, loving a colour, painting your house, then your neighbour informing you that a person of colour or an algorithm created it, then you hating it.

We were something different before we were primates, and we'll be something different after. Evolution has always been in a flux.

We're all just entities processing information and in my opinion, humanity should collectively get off the high horse.

Serious question, could you ever have a meaningful relationship with a teddy bear and/or an algorithm?

totalconfusionon How much of HN is AI?

Not everyone here is AI. I can't tell the difference so what does it matter? If I learn something or get inspired by a person or a bot, great.

AI tools are incredibly powerful, new and rapidly evolving, you shouldn't be surprised that everyone on HN is all over it.

totalconfusionon Ask HN: Smallest amount of working ML weights that can be tattooed on a body?

Encode it into a barcode

totalconfusionon Decades of Effort Restore Steelhead and Salmon Passage on Alameda Creek

IANAS - I am not a Salmon?

totalconfusionon Malaysia enforces ban on social media accounts for children younger than 16

We built this city

totalconfusionon Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?

Charles Stross - Accelerando

Never read anything quite like it since

totalconfusionon Vulture shortage threatens Zoroastrian burial rites

That's interesting, I wonder if this accelerates evolution from environmental pressure massively.

totalconfusionon Protein made from a microorganism that can be cultivated with CO2

Solein Green

totalconfusionon Protein made from a microorganism that can be cultivated with CO2

Solein Green

totalconfusionon Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging

Completely agree, in for a dime in for a dollar. The reality is legalizing drugs is a politically untenable platform to get elected on because economic realities like supply and demand play no role in the deeply entrenched moral prejudice that is so prevalent in the (often older) voting population.

I don't mean to be offensive or ageist and I'm sure lots of older people have been touched both directly and indirectly by drug abuse, my experience is those that have been affected in some way have changed their long held views on drugs being a criminal issue as opposed to a medical one.

totalconfusionon Show HN: Linkwarden – An open source collaborative bookmark manager

Amazing. Collaborative bookmark management needed to happen.

Imagine deciding you want to learn a new skill and not having to start from square one learning the lay of the land around your newly chosen subculture but rather it's already been curated for you and you can hit the ground running with great links to various assets and communities like software tools, forums, discords and video tutorials. I love the archiving functionality too.

Your website looks great and all the information I needed was right there. Concise, informative and neat.

I think the real value here is a tool that will allow people of all kinds to aggregate relevant content and help onboard people to the communities they know, live and love.

I feel like a freemium model would allow this tool to reach a massive scale as I see awesome utility in it but I don't expect normal people would self host or pay for it even if it cost 10 cents. It's just too much inertia.

I feel so dirty telling you how to charge for your own product.

Pagerank and SEO killed search. What you have here sounds a hell of a lot better.

Awesome work mate! I'm aways up for a chat.

totalconfusionon She Steals Surfboards by the Seashore. She’s a Sea Otter

Highly recommend this radio show if this is something you're interested in.

https://radiolab.org/podcast/new-nice

totalconfusionon Show HN: Timechief – My Smartclock Project

An alarm clock with NTP. Finally. It reminds me of a Pip-Boy. Consider integrating a light source in to it and maybe some USB outs for charging

totalconfusionon Reddit Ramps Up Its Threats to Protesting Mods, as Ad Buyers Leave

This is so real. Google's core functionality has become a victim of its own success and is now borderline unusable.

No exaggeration 80-90% of my searches have reddit affixed to the end.

SEO is the devil and page ranks utility died many years ago.

totalconfusionon 'Incredibly noticeable': alcohol ban cut family violence, crime in Alice Springs

How I read safety/dosing would be standardized weight/volume/concentration of the drug and not the idea of prohibiting sales over a certain amount per person per day. Which as you say would just turn in to a secondary market.

totalconfusionon 'Incredibly noticeable': alcohol ban cut family violence, crime in Alice Springs

Prohibition will lead to abuse of other drugs and empower local criminal elements.

Inhalants, petrol, glue, nitrous oxide. Whatever is available.

There are no opportunities in these places, people get fucked up to make life more bearable.

If you've never seen a remote town in outback Australia before, the film Cunnamulla (2000) is a pretty accurate representation. Might be a little dated but not much has changed.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KBMyzyZcCJo&pp=ygUKY3VubmFtdWx...

The health of these communities is at serious risk when you force them in to using unregulated black market narcotics and cleaning products to get high.