Thanks for the info! All good points. I’ll keep snikket bookmarked for when I’m more competent in my server/self-hosting abilities and revisit how I chat.

Few things that make my blood boil like Trump saying “J-6 hostages.”

Understood. Thank you. It’d been some time since I’ve scrutinized Signal. It was a set-it and forget-it type situation.

Out of curiosity, what’s wrong with signal?

Funny. I was thinking the ai post leaned towards Don Hertzfeldt’s style, then saw the “original” and it look even more like Hertzfeldt (see hands), which means ai even manages to fuck up stick-figure fingers!

Edit: btw, good eye/attention to detail!

I appreciated her closing response and the distinction made between over-hyped LLMs and specific ML models.

AI is such an interesting word because it’s sort of like the word transportation and that you have bicycles, you have gas guzzling trucks, you have rocket ships, they’re all forms of transportation, but they all serve different purposes and they have different cost benefit trade-offs.

And to me the quest to artificial general intelligence has the worst trade-offs because you are trying to build fundamentally an everything machine, but ultimately it can’t actually do all of the things. So not only do you confuse the public about what you can actually do with these technologies, which leads to harm because then people start asking it for things like medical information and instead getting medical misinformation back.

But also it requires all of these things that I described, the colossal resource consumption, the colossal labor exploitation. But there are many, many different types of AI technologies that I think are hugely beneficial. And this is task specific models that are meant to target solving a specific well scoped challenge, something like integrating renewable energy into the grid, weather prediction, drug discovery, health care, where you identify cancer earlier on in an MRI scan.

These are all very task specific. It’s very clear what the use case is. It’s — you can curate very, very small data sets, train them on very, very small computers. And I think if we want broad based benefit from AI, we need broad based distribution of these types of AI technologies across all different industries.

The library

Unfortunately they seem to make products better until they reach saturation, then they split into tiers, raise prices (and/or lower offerings - looking at you Max) and start introducing ads into paid tiers.

I’m curious what the speed limit of the road was. It blows my mind how fast we let cars drive in residential areas. The fact that these kids can’t walk 2 blocks safety between the grocery store and home-- or put another way, that if they don’t use the crosswalk between home and the grocery store, there’s a serious risk of death-- is such a failure of city planning and societal values.

Neither article mentions how far it would be had they used the crosswalk, but I’d guess, with a 4 lane road, for two kids it was really out of the way.

How heartbreaking. 7 years old. As a parent you can’t say, “yeah, you can walk two blocks home,”? Land of the free, but no autonomy for people without a car.

I was actually unaware of those features and thinking of an over engineered solution. Good lookin out!

Agreed. Would be great if we could save old backups on a server and search it from a client, instead of the current option of keeping everything in one local backup. The latter is a real problem after a while if you have contacts that like sending videos.

Is a server a requirement? I haven’t tried myself but localsend (p2p) comes to mind.

Signal backups are an issue. They keep growing. I need to look into a solution sooner or later that isn’t just buying a phone with more space. I’d like to find ways to reduce the size and keep managing the backups myself, but that’s gonna take time. If they offer a secure, private, and affordable service, I’d prolly just redirect my donations to that.

Also, many proprietary softwares rely on open source libraries. So unless they catch, patch, and do not contribute those fixes, proprietary will be at least as vulnerable as the oss they depend on.

Good point. We’ve gone full circle, or line, on that one.

Sounds like they need another ai system for the de-dorian work /s

Naomi Klein refers to the right co-opting left phases (triggered, othered, fake news, etc) as “pipiking.” I think doing the reverse is hilarious, but also imagine a future where it results in an Idiocracy-like dialect 💀

I’d bet the sprawl and heat make biking impractical.

Pop’s the distro that made me go full linux. It let me tinker and have the linux experience without a lot of setup or preexisting knowledge.

Shot. Sorry I couldn’t help then. Good luck with your troubleshooting. I know it can be a very frustrating issue.