• 5 Posts
  • 36 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • The last time I went to a doctor, they read a list of questions from a form, entered my answers into their system, and then said they’d get back to me in a couple weeks to tell me if my insurance company would allow a follow-up. That appointment should have been a web page.

    Most doctor’s appointments I’ve had recently have followed the same pattern. A good doctor is invaluable. A burnt-out noob doctor following strict procedure is like a worse GPT that your have to meet in a building full of every conceivable virus, and that costs $500 instead of $0.05. A motivated layman with GPT4 and a prescription pad would have beaten 3 out of 4 doctors I’ve seen since covid.

    This is just my experience in the US mind you. Maybe I’ve had bad luck with humans, but I haven’t been impressed since all of the experienced ones retired.



  • GMO is kind of a red herring. It is often done to allow plants to survive Round Up, which had recently been shown to have toxic effects. There’s also compelling evidence that many people who think they can’t tolerate gluten actually can’t tolerate Round Up.

    The genetic modification isn’t intrinsically a problem, but the chemicals that plants need to be modified to tolerate are.



  • I’m for defederation at least until instance blocking is available. I’ve already blocked most of their communities from my feed, but comments have been really unpleasant since they federated.

    It’s not really about the ideology as much as not wanting to have to scroll past endless political bickering. Rage addiction is real and contagious.



  • I’m having a great time, but I also love FO4 and No Man’s Sky. The toe-dip I’ve done into colony building shows that they put real thought into Astroneer-like automated manufacturing stuff, which is my crack, and something I missed in NMS and FO4. It’s also clear from the first city that they know how depressing FO4 is, and wanted to add more variety.

    Story and characters are a cut above any other Bethesda game so far, but that’s not saying much. My wife is replaying BG3 next to me, and it makes Starfield’s writing look amateurish by comparison. It’s not the core of the game though, so eh.

    Downsides so far have been that the minor planets/moons don’t have much to do, and that inventory management is annoying with how much crafting components weigh.

    Ship combat is… Fine. It’s not as intricate as Elite: Dangerous or SW:Squadrons (for sim gamers, weapons are all on REALLY forgiving gimbals, which makes precision unnecessary), but not actively bad like NMS VR. I think it’s a good compromise, because not everyone wants to deal with a realistic sim in what is essentially a minigame.

    It’s also complex, which is good, but adds some awkwardness to the beginning.





  • There’s a difference between allowing speech about a thing and embracing the thing. This is a classic case of embrace, extend, extinguish.

    If you’re interested, I’d look into what happened with XMPP and Google talk. XMPP was a federated chat service. Google Talk became compatible with it, and instantly became the most popular client for it.

    It then broke compatibility slowly, pushing more people from other XMPP clients onto Google talk.

    They finally removed it completely, and because they were the most popular client, XMPP users moved to Google talk to maintain their connections to other users. The protocol basically ceased to exist.

    People are broadly assuming that’s Meta’s plan with threads and Mastodon, because it’s an extremely common way for corporations to get rid of open systems.








  • I see both sides.

    They’re probably going to completely (and intentionally) collapse the labor market. This has never happened before, so there is no historical prescedent to look at. The closest thing we have was the industrial revolution, but even that was less disruptive because it also created a lot of new factory jobs. This doesn’t.

    The public hope is that this catastrophic widening of the gap between the rich and poor will force labor to organize and take some of the gains through legislation as an altenative to starving in the streets. Given that the technology will also make coercing people to work mostly pointless, there may not be as much pressure against it as there historically has been. Altman seems to be publically thinking in this direction, given the early basic income research and the profit cap for OAI. I can’t pretend to know his private thoughts, but most people with any shred of empathy would be pushing for that in his shoes.

    Of course, if this fails, we could also be headed for a permanent, robotically-enforced nightmare dystopia, which is a genuine concern. There doesn’t seem to be much middle-ground, and the train has no brakes.

    The IP theft angle from the end of the article seems like a pointless distraction though. All human knowledge and innovation is based on what came before, whether AI is involved or not. By all accounts, the remixing process it applies is both mechanically and functionally similar to the remixing process that a new generation of artists applies to its forebears, and I’ve not seen any evidence that they are fundamentally different enough to qualify as theft, except in the normal Picasso sense.

    Interesting times.