cecilkorik @ cecilkorik @lemmy.ca

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Ultimately we want as smart LLMs as we can,

We do? I want LLMs to die in a fire (which they will likely cause by vastly and rapidly increasing global warming, so the problem at least solves itself)

We are not the same.

It's insane. The most painful thing I ever did was buying out of that water heater contract. Painful because I had zero interest in paying a red cent to those bastards, but I had no choice, their contracts are so iron-clad they've got them written by default into the literal home purchase agreement that the provincial government provides. I tried to reject that term in the home purchase agreement and refuse to take on the contract, but the seller threatened to walk away when I did that and I really wanted the house. So I sucked it up, bought the house, took the contract and bought it out, or rather tried to. They even made that a giant pain in the ass (fuck you, EnerCare!) Tried to tell me I didn't live at the address where the water heater was, because they had put a nonexistent house number on it and they kept relentlessly trying to make excuses to try to sell me on their stupid maintenance plan instead of correcting the information. Eventually I screeched and pestered and threatened them until they finally accepted my giant proscribed racketeering payment to take their bullshit off my bill, and thankfully I've never heard from them since, and I hope I never will.

I continued to use the thing for many more years until got old enough that it was making horrible banging noises and decided to replace it before it failed. happily got rid of the thing (which was actually a decent unit, I guess they don't want to have to actually repair/replace them when they've got you on forever-contract), and for only slightly more than the buyout payment, bought myself a fancy new water heater that I own for myself like a real adult,

I loved the first one, thought it was a vastly underappreciated gem. Glad to see the sequel getting some attention, although I haven't tried it yet. Apparently there are already mods for it, and workshop support is coming in a few weeks, which is a good sign to me. The community seem to be standing behind it. Fingers crossed it's as good as I hope.

We need to decide whether Canada Post is an essential service we require to be provided as equitably as possible to all Canadian population in the furthest reaches of our country in order to accomplish of the fundamental task of having a fair and functioning democratic society where at the very least people can remain informed in a timely and trustworthy way of important matters from municipal governments, government agencies and election officials and candidates, delivery of licenses, ID cards, bank cards and other important things fundamental to the operation of our country.

If we do consider that essential (I do), we need to discuss what the actual expectations for that service are, how it can continue to be done efficiently across the urban/rural divide and across the paper/digital divide. Whatever goals we ultimately decide are necessary, we need to make sure we are committed to fund it at a sustainable level to accomplish those goals, even if it means providing tax dollars. And if we are going to continue to operate it as a business, we need to understand that other businesses in the space are not going to play nice, they are going to be mean and they are going to try to put it out of business or weaken it until they can make an attempt to buy it by convincing the government to privatize it, because that's how business works. And the government needs to be able to recognize what they are doing and either use their prodigious financial reserves to weather the cynical attacks of private industry or simply put a stop to it with the powers that only a government can bring to bear. Government needs to stop acting like they're powerless and regulate the damn economy. If they can't regulate the industries they're directly participating in there is absolutely no hope for properly regulating the ones they aren't.

Canada Post should, in my opinion, be operated like CBC, at arms length, but with a funding commitment that allows a minimum service level to be guaranteed at no more than cost, with additional services provided as and when profitability allows. As for what that minimum service level should be, I think daily delivery to the door is probably fair to question the necessity of in the modern world, but I'd give people more options before unilaterally shoving all new neighborhoods into community mailboxes. I think community mailboxes should be reduced, and instead people given the choice of immediate secure digital delivery (when possible, like ePost but generalized for all mail that can possibly be scanned), daily delivery to a community mailbox, PO Box, or post office, or weekly delivery directly to the door. In fact, select all of the above if you want. Scanned for digital delivery first, sent to community box, and if you don't pick it up it gets delivered a week later. I think that's a reasonable minimum standard for almost anywhere in the country, except perhaps the most remote areas where at least weekly delivery to the local post office could be guaranteed. No it's not likely ever going to be as cheap or as smooth a system as we want it to be, but that's life, we've got a big country and a lot of responsibilities.

Don't mind me though, I'm just an idealistic old fart.

It's not even about lack of trust in the future, it's about what we picture that future to be. I think it's more about not wanting to continue this unsustainable pyramid scheme based on the myth of infinite growth. Things that grow infinitely kill their hosts, become plagues, destroy ecosystems, and then eventually die out because they have nothing left to live with.

To me, it's about deciding whether we are going to spread out into the solar system and maybe eventually the galaxy if we manage to survive that long, chasing that unsustainable goal of endless growth like a plague of locusts, consuming everything in our path and leaving behind only destruction and death and waste, until we can find nothing more to consume or until we starve ourselves to death before we can find enough. The other option depends on whether we can see the potential of thoughtful progress, embrace sustainability and think about controlling our growth and maintaining our population at a comfortable level, allowing us to find a more harmonious and intelligent way forward. The question is not whether we can continue to grow unsustainably -- we have the ability to continue growing for the foreseeable future and certainly can pursue that if that's what we decide we want, the question is whether we should, and the answer I think most people would come up with if they actually think about it is that we shouldn't.

I don't think most people necessarily think of it in those terms, I think a lot of people just look at things like the cost of living and at their own general happiness and comfort and value they get out of living, and that subtly but consistently influences whether people decide whether to have 0, 1, or 2 kids and stop there, or whether to have 3, 4, 5, or more, with people who are in poorer overall situations tending to have more, not less. This is why developed countries tend to have lower birth rates, typically below even replacement rate. One benefit of the globalization that has been done and the resulting massive wealth transfer to less developed countries is that it is lowering their birth rates and slowing global population growth. That is clearly visible through data. Demographics are a deceptively complicated thing, and are not always intuitive, but we do have a pretty good handle on it despite what it may seem like, and the world population is currently projected to stop growing around what is probably a reasonably sustainable level (about 10 to 11 billion).

The problem is that our attitudes towards sustainability and equality tend to get thrown out the window every time another major technological change or social upheaval happens, and then all bets are off again as we figure out how to fit that back into the new picture of existence and expectations and growth and progress. Some medical breakthrough causing significant human life extensions or essentially immortality could throw the entire population situation completely off base in mere decades and that will rapidly become a serious maybe catastrophic challenge. If you think the housing crisis is bad now, imagine how bad it would be if every homeowner lived for eternity and babies still keep getting born and growing up and then imagine you try to fix it by telling people they have to stop having babies or that they can't live as long as they want to.

A lot of the population growth we saw in the last century or two, from mere hundreds of millions into the many billions, came about almost entirely due to human life extensions and reduction of infant mortality. And of course that's a good thing, and we are right to strive for it, but it strains our economic foundation more than anyone realizes. Even small changes to these data points, resulting in people living a little longer on average, can have massive and continuous impacts on population growth until they reach a new equilibrium, which may be far higher than you expect and adds up to enormous amounts of additional resources needed.

Technology has given us all so much more resources than any generation in history, the problem is there are also a lot more people to share it with, so in some very real ways it is in fact less per person. Some of that is intentional, some of it isn't. The math of demographics and population growth are absolutely relentless and sometimes pretty unforgiving. We have to be really, really smart about it if we want to get ahead of it. And it's risky business dealing with very sensitive subjects.

Fair enough, last I heard it wasn't, and they certainly continue to talk like it isn't. It feels like maybe the shutdown post might've been a good place to try to spread some awareness of this fact as it might be something people losing access to the service might be interested in.

Why don't they just open it up to let people run their own Pocket services? The usual "proprietary code" excuses make no sense for an organization like Mozilla and it's being end of lifed anyway. Just dump it on a repo somewhere and let people hack on it if they want to. Why isn't this part of the sunsetting plan?

You missed the earlier version of the title, it was definitely inappropriate, and that's why it was edited. Title edits (regardless of who does them) should be recorded in the moderation log in my opinion, but unfortunately they aren't.

How to have irrefutable evidence of interference in an election: Step 1, be responsible for interference in an election. Step 2, provide the evidence, but blame others.

That's the point of the comment. It's pointing out why the analogy doesn't work. A stray feral cat, with few exceptions, MUST hunt to survive. A homeless person can use a food bank or scavenge or beg. They are not in the same situation and cannot be directly compared in potential fighting effectiveness.

6750XT is working great in PikaOS for me, have been playing Cyberpunk 2077 at very high settings (with RT off), 1440p, hitting around 100 fps. It has crashed once though, but that might just be a Cyberpunk thing rather than a Radeon thing.

Don't forget they'll also need a functioning and de-politicized justice system, which probably can't be trusted in the current political climate and seems like it's probably going to be at least decades away given all the damage that's been done to it lately.

I like Pika but it's mostly personal preference in my case, I've got a completely unsupportable and probably counterproductive addiction to apt. I agree with your assessment.

Most of those are all really simple, common things that are done when creating accounts on any service though. If Mastodon is literally the first service you've ever signed up for in your life maybe that's justified but most people have made an account somewhere before.

And that's the point OP is trying to make. It's a very familiar process, except for step 1, which you can literally just ignore and pick the big highlighted blue button and avoid that scary and confusing "Pick another server" button if you're not up to it.

At least duckduckgo and Kagi search allow you to turn off AI. It's a big part of why I'm using them almost exclusively now. I don't want every web search I do destroying the planet to show me some unnecessary, untrustworthy and often irrelevant and unwanted AI garbage.

The alt-right propaganda being firehosed onto social media is particularly targeted at and effective against young men. All our information spaces are under direct and sustained attack by enemies foreign and domestic, and most of them have the goal of influencing or simply destabilizing our democracy. I don't think this is really in question at this point, I think the only open debates are about exactly how much of these attacks can be attributed to what sources, but my belief is that any sort of adversary who's been accused by anyone is probably legitimately involved at some level.

We also don't seem to have any idea what we can do about it or we're going to do about it other than accept that it's happening and apparently continue to let it happen.

Not an option. They have to be connected to something, the grid has to be able to monitor and coordinate power plants of any kind remotely and for a solar power plant the inverters are where a lot of that logic happens. Obviously it's not going to have a public IP accessible to the whole internet, it may not even be connecting across the public internet at all but at the very least there are data collection and monitoring networks woven throughout the entire country and there are all sorts of ways anyone with nation-state level resources, nevermind China who manufactures and supplies so much of the world's technology, might gain access to them.

A few more honorable mentions that are not exact re-implementations with compatibility with the original datafiles, but more spiritual followups:

Total Annihilation - TA Spring > Spring Engine > Recoil Engine > Beyond All Reason https://github.com/beyond-all-reason (I think there are mods that make it "Basically TA")

Escape Velocity/EV Nova - Endless Sky https://endless-sky.github.io/

Goldeneye 64 (multiplayer only) - Goldeneye Source https://forums.geshl2.com/index.php?topic=7823.0

Warlords II - LordsAWar! https://libregamewiki.org/LordsAWar!

XCOM 1 (UFO Defense) and XCOM 2: Terror From The Deep - OpenXCOM https://openxcom.org/

Master of Orion 1 - 1oom https://github.com/1oom-fork/1oom

Ultima 6 - Nuvie https://github.com/nuvie/nuvie (apparently now part of ScummVM)

I believe it, but I'm still debating whether something like Kagi is worth paying for. On principle, I strongly feel like it is, but in practice I'm still evaluating. So far, I've played with it a few times and I haven't observed any notable improvements, but I'm trying to keep an open mind. First impression is that it's definitely a little quicker and cleaner to get at the information I'm looking for. And taking a step back, I have to say it's impressive that they can replicate a behemoth like Google's accuracy already. On the other hand, I've felt like Google has gotten so crappy at search recently that maybe I'm simply not going to be satisfied with anyone simply "meeting" them and maybe what I want simply isn't possible, in which case I'm just paying for disappointment.