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Typing monkey would be unable to produce 'Hamlet' within the lifetime of the universe, study finds
I have a way to make it work.
Have the monkey write down a single character. Just one. 29/30 of the time, it won't be the same character as the first one in Shakespeare's complete works; discard that sheet of paper, then try again. 1/30 of the time the monkey will type out the right character; when they do it, keep that sheet of paper and make copies out of it.
Now, instead of giving a completely blank sheet to the monkey, give them one of those copies. And let them type the second character. If different from the actual second character in Shakespeare's works, discard that sheet and give him a new copy (with the right 1st char still there - the monkey did type it out!). Do this until the monkey types the correct second character. Keep that sheet with 2 correct chars, make copies out of it, and repeat the process for the third character.
And then the fourth, the fifth, so goes on.
Since swapping sheets all the time takes more time than letting the monkey go wild, let's increase the time per typed character (right or wrong), from 1 second to... let's say, 60 times more. A whole minute. And since the monkey will type junk 29/30 of the time, it'll take around 30min to type the right character.
It would take even longer, right? Well... not really. Shakespeare's complete works have around 5 million characters, so the process should take 510⁶ 30min = 2.5 million hours, or 285 years.
But we could do it even better. This approach has a single monkey doing all the work; the paper has 200k of them. We could split Shakespeare's complete works into 200k strings of 25 chars each, and assign each string to a monkey. Each monkey would complete their assignment, on average, after 12h30min; some will take a bit longer, but now we aren't talking about the thermal death of the universe or even centuries, it'll take at most a few days.
Why am I sharing this? I'm not invalidating the paper, mind you, it's cool maths.
I've found this metaphor of monkeys typing Shakespeare quite a bit in my teen years, when I still arsed myself to discuss with creationists. You know, the sort of people who thinks that complex life can't appear due to random mutations, just like a monkey can't type the full works of Shakespeare.
Complex life is not the result of a single "big" mutation, like a monkey typing the full thing out of the blue; it involves selection and inheritance, as the sheets of paper being copied or discarded.
And just like assigning tasks to different monkeys, multiple mutations can pop up independently and get recombined. Not just among sexual beings; even bacteria can transmit genes horizontally.
Already back then (inb4 yes, I was a weird teen...) I developed the skeleton of this reasoning. Now I just plopped the numbers that the paper uses, and here we go.
And we need more of them!
I know, the maturity standard isn't too high, but I still think that Lemmy is going rather well given where the userbase is from.
By "witch hunting" I mean "to claim that someone, a group, or a piece of content belongs to a socially undesirable group, without rational grounds to do so."
Here's a made up example. Let's say that Bob uses a picture of Richard Stallman as his avatar. Alice sees it, and...
- [Alice] Bob! Why do you use that sick fuck as your avatar? You must be a paedophile!
- [Bob] Nah. I use this avatar because I agree with Stallman's views on software freedom, and nothing else. I don't agree with his opinions on sex and sexuality, specially not about children.
- [Alice] That's bullshit, I bet that you abuse little children! MOOOODS!
- [Bob] No, Alice, I don't. Stop lying.
- [Charlie] Alice, please, stop making shit up. Pleeeease.
- [Alice] CHARLIE YOU DISGUSTING PIECE OF SHIT WHY ARE YOU DEFENDING A PEDO???
Alice here is witch hunting. Alice has no grounds to claim that Bob is a paedophile, but she's still doing it.
The "witches" often do exist, mind you - they're racists, bigots, sexual offenders, paedophiles, incels, transphobes, fascists, so goes on. They are socially undesirable, and need to be kicked out. Even then, witch hunting should not be tolerated in online communities: what they do is intrinsically unjust, it makes their target feel like shit, it makes the whole community walk on eggs (because anything that they say or do might get distorted into "witch behaviour"), and it numbs people against the issue with the actual witches (just like the boy who cried wolves unwillingly protected the wolves, witch hunters unwillingly protect the actual "witches").
I saw this plenty, plenty times in Reddit. But here in Lemmy it's surprisingly more common, given the smaller userbase.
But I would argue that it is as true now as it was then: people don’t enjoy being on the receiving end of intolerance, hence tend to be intolerant right back, and yet that is as it should be.
Fighting back is good. Punching random people isn't. Witch hunters do the later, not the former.
I'm not expecting a big exodus, but rather a slow decline in both the number of users and their engagement. With a few peaks here and there that seem to revert the downwards trend, but each peak being smaller than the one before.
They won't be leaving for the same reason as most people here did, pissed at the IPO-related changes (such as killing 3rd party apps). It'll be more like "...meh, why would I check Reddit? There's better stuff elsewhere." We can already see the decline of the content quality in Reddit now; it'll get only worse over time.
I think that most will end in Discord. Some in Bluesky, and some will simply touch grass. Conservatives might end in Minitrue "truth social" or crap like that.
Facebook might perhaps absorb some of the former Reddit users. It feels disgusting for the privacy conscious, but for them it'll be a simple matter of not finding interesting stuff in Reddit.
The same applies to Reddit's liquid profit - for now, that value extraction still creates a small peak on raw profit, to the point that the bottom line became positive; later on the peak will barely reach the surface; later on, value extraction will be necessary to avoid making the bottom line too negative.
I think that most users there are still human beings, but botting has become a big enough problem that the platform can't be seen as a place for genuine content any more.
Yup, it is 100% relevant! Selling user data is extremely profitable, specially with a large userbase. However, it lowers the value of the platform - it makes users less eager to genuinely contribute with it (due to privacy concerns, seeing it as a "they're exploiting me!" matter, etc.). As such the data being generated there becomes less useful, less relevant, and less profitable over time, paradoxically enough.
I fucked it up and switched the terms, sorry. Look for "value extraction" instead; you'll find multiple references to the concept such as this or Mazzucato's "The Value of Everything".
To keep it short: you create value when you produce desirable goods/services for the customers; however, when you extract it, you're picking the value that was already created (by society, your customers, or even your own business) and turning it into profit. The later is faster but unsustainable, as that value doesn't pop up from nowhere, so when a business shifts from value creation to value extraction it'll get some quick cash and then go kaboom.
In Reddit's case, this value is mostly users willing to generate, curate, and share content with the platform, and other users knowing this:
- someone recommends you a product/brand. The person might be wrong, but you were reasonably sure that they aren't a corporation astroturfing their own product. Someone else might criticise it instead.
- you hop into your favourite subreddit and, while the content there isn't the best, it's still good enough - because the mods gave some fucks about growing their subreddits;
- you discuss some controversial topic. You might get dogpiled, but at least you know that the dogs piling you are human beings, that sometimes might listen to reason; a bot will never;
- et cetera.
All that value was being slowly extracted through the last years, but the changes in 2023/2024 did it the hardest.
As I often mention in other communities, this smells like value exploitation extraction from a distance. Value exploitation extraction typically generates a peak of profit in the short term, but it makes losses even harsher in the long run.
As such I don't think that Reddit is getting "bigger". That profit is like someone who lives in a wooden house, dismantling their own home to sell it as lumber; of course they'll get some quick cash, but it's still a bad idea.
In a letter to shareholders, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman attributed the recent increase in users to the platform’s AI-powered translation feature.
Let's pretend for a moment that we can totally trust Huffman's claim here. Even human translations often get some issues, as nuances and whatnots are not translated, and this generates petty fights, specially in a younger userbase like Reddit's; with AI tendency to hallucinate, that gets way worse. And even if that was not an issue, a lot of content is simply irrelevant for people outside a certain regional demographic.
EDIT REASON: I switched the terms, sorry. (C'mon, I'm L3.)
The forest of the Great Tree, in Tales of Phantasia. Near the starting city (I think that it's Toltus?). It looks beautiful.
The problem with no voting system whatsoever is that content then surfaces by recency and/or replies, so people generate a lot of noise to make stuff they agree more visible.
That said the current system is by no means perfect, and I agree with you that people should judge content by themselves.
The userbase is overall more mature and can actually discuss complex topics. Different instances have completely different feels, vibes, cultures and userbases, and that's amazing. Some admin teams are spez wannabees but the federated structure limits the damage that they can cause.
Relative lack of niche communities. Witch hunting is becoming a worse problem here than in Reddit.
In Windows XP/Vista times I used to be the "computer kid", helping others in the neighbourhood with their computers, in exchange of some pocket money. My brown M&M was a huge amount of desktop icons - nine times out of ten it meant that the issue with the computer (typically "why is it so slow???") could be easily solved by:
- uninstalling crapware
- updating and running the anti-virus
- updating the system itself
- running disk cleanup
- defragmenting the hard disk
And boom, as if by magic, the computer was over 9000 times faster!
The desktop icons themselves aren't a big deal, but they show that the person is rather sloppy on maintenance of their own machine. And they probably can't even move files here and there.
[Warning: I'm no lawyer, nor doctor] It depends on the country. At least in Brazil this wouldn't roll:
- Article 135 of the Penal Code - demands you to render aid to people under grave danger, as long as it won't incur in risk for you. That applies to everyone, not just doctors, but if you're a doctor it becomes really hard to explain why you didn't render aid.
- Article 33 of the Medical Ethics Code - forces the doctor to render aid to someone seeking urgent or emergent professional care, when there's no other doctor in a position to do so. Note that failure to follow ethics codes can make a professional unable to exert their profession legally.
At those times I love the two rounds system. It's a pain in the arse to go vote twice, and it is by no means perfect, but you can still vote based on your conscience without "wasting" your vote.
For example. This month we got mayor elections here. There were 10 candidates in the first round; I voted in a socialist as usual. They had zero chance to win, but showing them some support is a big deal in the long run - it shows that at least some people are interested in their platform.
Then in the second turn we had Total Piece of Shit vs. Somewhat Shitty. Then I simply voted in Somewhat Shitty to make things not so bad.
Sugar - it doesn't neutralise but mask the sourness, so the resulting taste is a bit more interesting. Bicarbonate will truly neutralise it but the result is a boring sauce.
I had a dream with a neighbourhood that doesn't exist.
In the dream I know how to reach it - you need to go on a certain direction without crossing the main street, except that it's literally impossible to do so IRL.
The neighbourhood is poor and dilapidated; we call it a "vila" here in my city. And yet it's safe enough to let me walk through that neighbourhood for a shortcut. There's no house yards there, or streets, just a bunch of houses built at random.,
The weirdest part? It was the third time that I dreamt with this neighbourhood.
At those times I'm fucking glad that /ð/ is typically short-lived. It tends to erase into nothingness, or to get fortified to /d/, or fronted to /v/.
I'm game. ba dum tss
Seriously. I don't post often but if there's interesting content about modding the games that I like (RimWorld, Factorio, ONI, Stardew Valley, stuff like this), I'd be happy commenting there.
Get your belly full, reverse genocide purple worms, wield a rubber duck, and leave Team Ant alone. And remember: you aren't there to fight, you just need to offer that bloody amulet on the right altar.
And what do you guys do about the faces in the slip gates that speak in latin?
Just don't #chat with them. The most that they'll say is "quid esse credis, Bellum?" anyway.
If we're considering even chimps "monkeys", there's already eight billion of them, I think that's enough.