It’s a really special book. I’m not sure I buy into the many worlds interpretation but I loved how the book delved into it in a very original eay and avoided common tropes.

I was using Jerboa because i was used to Sync for reddit. But, I got a bit tired of how rough around the edges it is, so I switched to just installing my Lemmy instance front page as Firefox “app” on my phone and realized it’s not that bad as a UI, so sticking with it for now.

I’ll probably try apps again in the future but I feel more open to “installing” good web apps now. Incidentally I tried the same trick with Reddit’s mobile interface after Sync stopped working and realized it’s also not so awful as I remembered. I did prefer Sync but I’ll see how it goes with this method. So it’s mobile web interfaces on Android for me for now.

Having said that, in both cases I think I’d prefer a more “simple HTML” type experience like old reddit over these dynamic SPA things they both have going.

Apparently if people are gullible enough you can even use video calls to commit crimes, no AI needed!

It was through a video call – where only the photograph of a man who was the same as Minister Jackson, with a cap and glasses – was seen where the imposter began to give orders to the two workers, who work at night. First, they removed 50 laptops from the different floors of the ministry. https://newsrnd.com/news/2023-07-22--negro-chico---the-prisoner-who-posed-as-a-chilean-minister-and-put-the-boric-government-on-the-ropes.r1-S2_TOcn.html

How do you block people using a VPN by region? Just block the whole VPN?

I would argue that what’s going on is that they are compressing information. And it just so happens that the most compact way to represent a generative system (like mathematical relations for instance) is to model their generative structure. For instance, it’s much more efficient to represent addition by figuring out how to add two numbers, than by memorizing all possible combinations of numbers and their sum. So implicit in compression is the need to discover generalizations. But, the network has limited capacity and limited “looping power”, and it doesn’t really know what a number is, so it has to figure all this out by example and as a result will often come to approximate versions of these generalizations. Thus, it will often appear to be intelligent until it encounters something that doesn’t quite fit whatever approximation it came up with and will suddenly get something wrong that seems outside the pattern that you thought it understood, because it’s hard to predict what it’s captured at a very deep level and what it only has surface concepts of.

In other words, I think it is “kind of” thinking, if thinking can be considered a kind of computation, but it doesn’t always capture concepts completely because it’s not quite good enough at generalizing what it’s learned, but it’s just good enough to appear really smart within a certain distribution of inputs.

Which, in a way, isn’t so different from us, but is maybe not the same as how we learn and naturally integrate information.

While I agree that porting one of these great reddit clients to a new platform like Lemmy is the way to go, I don’t see why it should be done by the individual developer instead of treated as a community effort. We’ll just end up in the same boat again where he’s piggy backing on another project (Lemmy, etc) to build a closed-source business that only he profits from. And while I have no problem with people selling apps they wrote, if none of these developers are going to open source their work so that the community can participate, I’d rather see a longer term effort go into improving FOSS solutions.

my favorite part of that video is when he says (paraphrasing):

this is like a video call, and that’s cool… but we can do so much more… like, we can … have meetings

such vision :)

Literally had a meeting with someone yesterday who, after starting late because of trouble logging in and things crashing, started off the meeting by apologizing for using Teams but said it was just easier because it’s the default. Made me chuckle.

Anyone who chooses Teams because they actually think it’s better… I just… are we even using the same program?

I would be happy to use another instance but my account is on this one. Is there a way to migrate an account, or perhaps “link” accounts on multiple instances somehow?

I spend my days in emacs and terminal emulators and I want this very badly in a laptop form factor so I can comfortably work outside.