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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)VO
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185
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2 yr. ago

  • Just kind of dawned on me while looking at the number, Reddit's licensing deal with Google is valued at $60 million per year. That's really not very much money at all, considering the amount of data Reddit has and continues to accumulate. And chump change for Google, no doubt. Reveals how little leverage Reddit actually has at this point. This was their flagship deal, and the best they could get was $60mil per year.

    Also puts the API fiasco in a new light. "Look, we need to charge for API calls, because we need to restrict public access to data as a precondition of selling all your shit in a few months to Google, for the financial equivalent of a cup of coffee."

  • it’s an AMERICAN MILITARY DEFENSE CONTRACTOR worth billions

    Probably one reason why the FAA isn't immediately shutting Boeing's shit down, you know when doors fall off their planes mid-flight, and investigations uncover more problems.

  • Think it's more of an allusion to lurking habits, active times, metadata, stuff not related to public posts. I'd imagine the average user has plenty of stuff they've browsed through that they wouldn't want their family / co-workers, etc. to know.

  • Would also need to get a burner phone number w/ answering machine to take calls from 240 million grandmas, cheapskate businesses and cash-strapped public schools for any & all tech support questions until the end of time, because if there was an issue with system stability in any way whatsoever, or if the router went down or the printer stopped working, they'd assume it was the fault of 'the guy who changed everything'.

    Linux is great & everything, but this sounds like a recipe for utter disaster, not a way to make an easy buck.

  • Wouldn't checkering itself, even in the abstract, need to reference two discernible colours or shades, and so, wavelengths of light, and so, some extension along a z axis, and position in time? Is it possible even for an abstract checkered pattern to be defined in any less than 3 dimensions + time?

  • Interesting. I'm curious to know more about what you think of training datasets. Seems like they could be described as a stored representation of reality that maybe checks the boxes you laid out. It's a very different structure of representation than what we have as animals, but I'm not sure it can be brushed off as trivial. The way an AI interacts with a training dataset is mechanistic, but as you describe, human worldviews can be described in mechanistic terms as well (I do X because I believe Y).

    You haven't said it, so I might be wrong, but are you pointing to freewill and imagination as somehow tied to intelligence in some necessary way?

  • Thanks! I'm not clear on what you mean by a worldview simulation as a scratch pad for reasoning. What would be an example of that process at work?

    For sure, defining intelligence is non trivial. What clear the bar of intelligence, and what doesn't, is not obvious to me. So that's why I'm engaging here, it sounds like you've put a lot of thought into an answer. But I'm not sure I understand your terms.

  • By a doctor, I very much want to be seen strictly as the biological organism that they have spent their life studying. The fact that there are very few doctors, and every person born on this earth will be a patient, means that a standard for unvarnished and concise language is morally praiseworthy in terms of its service of the greater good.

    I guess my feeling is, there's no good reason to get offended by the standard of language that the medical system operates in. There is an ocean of ill people who need help, and we're not all special, in that sense.

    A doctor who is led into a cognitive trap by seeing "diabetic" on a chart, is a bad doctor. I'm not sure small refinements of language are the remedy for that doctor's deficits.

  • I took a philosophy of art course once, and the prof put an image of this painting up, and polled people in the class without foreknowledge of the context of the piece to write on a piece of paper & submit what they thought the emotion being conveyed in the painting was, and he'd read a few of them. One person wrote 'crushing defeat', and the class chuckled. I think about that often.

  • TBF he got kicked out of congress for his shenanigans, is literally a national laughing stock for his idiocy, and also needed the money badly so likely would have said anything. A lot of moving pieces with this guy.

    No need to pour one out, at least, not over this.

  • Mmm. I grew up in a different time too. Makes me ponder how the software circumstances of that time built in us a very different idea of what an iteration actually is, when it comes to writing. The fact that we couldn't go back and atomically dissect the history of a piece. That a draft, and an edit, were something heavier. Maybe we'd have to think a bit more slowly and carefully before irreversibly casting a previous version into the ether.

    Don't get me wrong, I'm not making a "gen z bad" post. Just reflecting on how things are different these days, and maybe it leads to a different kind of work.

  • I don't begrudge anyone for believing that Covid-19 came from a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. History shows that governments will make every effort to avoid standing up and telling their citizens a difficult truth. The lab leak theory is a fruit of rampant dishonesty in government. It's directly the fault of the government that conspiracy theories like this exist, and it's hypocritical for governments to bemoan those theories and the people who believe them.

  • I think one of the things at play with Rand is that there are a handful of tiresome dirtbags who wave her work around like a bible. Doing so is pretty silly, and I understand why that provokes strong adversarial reactions. But to associate a reader of a text with a zealot of that text, is incorrect, I agree.

    She's not philosophically rigorous, it's pretty plain to see. But neither is Nietzsche, and he can be a fun read if you're in the mood for that kind of thing. I'm not putting them on the same plane as thinkers. I'm just saying it's not a sin to read an unserious text with an open mind.

    I think the most controversial aspect of her work is the notion of embracing selfishness. A taboo thing to speak aloud, in her times, and now. But, who can honestly claim they are purified of selfishness? So I can't help but wonder if the theatrical outpouring of hatred for Rand is a way for people to disavow their own selfishness and comfort themselves with well worn axioms about the primacy of community. And avoid the difficult conversation of our relationship to selfishness and what it actually means.

    Feed me downvotes.

    Anyway, thanks for bringing it up OP. Cheers.

  • Interesting.

    I hope for a new paradigm in web searching. I wouldn't even mind if a search took 5-10 minutes, if it meant a handful of quality results. I easily waste that much time or more sifting through garbage ai and ad-driven results as it stands.

  • All I want is a search engine that 1. doesn't make moral judgements on the results relevant to a search, 2. filters out ai and ad farm results by default, and 3. can be toggled to effectively search web 1.0-style forums.