gmuslera

Why to put front and center that chat app? I mean, is not something that makes it unique, if the app itself can run in android and iOS then it is just a chat app, with far less users than i.e. whatsapp.

At first I thought that it was an AI app, and reading more could find why that would be innovative, but no, just a chat app targeting the same phone users and the ones willing to install the app in other phone brands.

All visible reactions should be positive. They also removed dislike buttons from YouTube a while ago.

Didn't followed the reasoning. What is "one colony"? some genetically homogeneous expedition? Unless you get a more or less continuous flow of colonizers from the home world, to be viable it needs hundreds of diverse individuals to kickstart. And setting, viability, being self-sufficient, becoming widespread enough within the planet to survive climate/tectonic/etc events should be in the picture unless it is an elaborate and very expensive way to get rid of some troublesome individuals. Establishing one colony nearby in Mars is still far from being feasible with today's knowledge and technology, and probably not so close technology too.

Even generational ships are a challenge, but more important, if we are able to make long term self-sustaining generational ships maybe we won't need to land, or change the equation between traveling and settling.

In any case, we didn't reach any outer solar system planet yet, not even with probes. We might not be fully aware of many of the practical problems of reaching and settling on another solar system planet. We might be like ancient mesopothamians asking ourselves why we shouldn't be able to build a tower to the moon.

That 3°C is about the yearly average of global temperatures, from deserts to poles, night and day, all year round, and maintained for several years. That is not weather, but it’s more like system energy.

Now, some regions get more average heating than others, so in that is not even, and then there is the weather, what you feel day to day. And right now we are already getting extreme heatwaves and other extreme weather events like flooding rains and hurricanes in zones where they were not usual. Those will increase in frequency and intensity, and I would not be surprised if there are peaks of temperature beyond 55°C, even before 2050, in industrialized countries

We should be able to draw the rest of the owl to get there. So far what we got is more inequality, less rights for people but more for corporations (and immunity to consequences/abuses).

Getting even more power will make the ones that control resources to reach something similar enough to AGI to share their profits? realistic/practical/widespread UBI in all the world?

The dynamics that have been shown so far points in the opposite direction. AIs have "rights" that humans does not and humans are slowly losing the ones they used to have.

In some way they are telling that they respect your privacy. Or they have your data (and then do something with it, now or later), or no one will.

They could provide some Google-style takeout to get your data before deletion, but that may not have any meaning or practical use without their devices and software.

The predecessor of the N9, the Nokia N900, with Maemo, is not even mentioned in the article, and it caused a buzz at least in the circles I were back then. And it had one of the best physical keyboards for a smartphone back then.

The N9 was pretty good, usability, design, hardware, but the apps started to weight, and it become a race between Android and iOS.

There was just one smartphone with Maemo (N900) and just one with Meego (N9). More models, letting other vendors to use them, android app compatibility compatibility and not having Elop could had saved Nokia. Now what we have is Sailfish as a descendent of them.

If systems are not ready, then there is plenty of room of systems doing it the wrong way.

Suppose being charged by time used to run your tasks. Then your task takes -1 second, you will be charged zero, 1 second, or 18 quintillon seconds?

"Right" without use case can be wrong. And by use case I include scale. For a small team, few machines, some in-place infrastructure may worth it. Smaller than that may be overkill, bigger than that may not be enough, or end being cumbersome, insecure or not work for everyone.

One problem with trying to make satellites invisible is that you are making them invisible. Probably the dynamics up there are not the same as down here, or try to apply logic that doesn't work in that environment, but with secret, or failing, broken into pieces, with fried electronics or whatever satellites you may be losing an important hint that something is there.

The "Who watches the watchers?" question is not rhetoric once you take into account present and near past abuses of those that perform surveillance and the ones that have power over them.

And it is far bigger and pervasive than spotting a Flock camera in your neighbourhood.

Time matters in some of the categories there. What if a meme (I don't know, money, the tragedy of the commons, some future cult of the dead or whatever) works as a great filter and wipes mankind and any civilization that develops it at some stage? it is an antimeme even if, for some thousand years, it became locally popular? Something that erases itself or whatever spreads it over a not short period of time qualifies as antimeme or not?

Never cross a river 4-feet deep on average. A heatstroke may not let you see how cooler the rest of the year may be.

Dead people doesn't count. At least until is their turn, I suppose.

Is not about doing something never been done before. Feels more like doing something that can be sold, because else there could be legal problems, competition, captive markets and so on. That is about the current state of the world, not yourself.

You can't know everything that has been done in the past, or is being done and finished before you ended. But as far as you are not just cloning something that you already seen working, you can explore what you are capable of doing, for the sake of it, for the experience of doing it and make it work, for the things that you think are useful or nice or whatever in what you did.

And if all that effort don't end in something that can be sold, you still grow through the process. You are not ensured commercial success even if you try something truly new. But maybe that is not always a bad thing.

We have to distinguish "our" dreams from, let's say, cultural ones. A lot of what we want, what we perceive as living a full life, having fun and so on comes from culture (and increasingly in the last decades/centuries, with mass media).

Besides that, we can't achieve everything, we could not be everywhere when something interesting happens there, at the very least because a lot of those things happened in the past, or do everything because physical condition, economics, or extra conditions (i.e. being an astronaut).

So you draw lines. This is what I can do, I can go, I can be. You may push boundaries, but in the end it will always be more things outside than inside. And try to be the best on what matters on those boundaries.

At some point they should stop using the European part of the name.

The Postel's Law (or Robustness Principle) is related to this, be conservative with what you do (i.e. try to closely adhere to standards for your outputs) and flexible in what you accept (at least up to some point).

Homeopathic AI

It is not just twice as fast, the pressure to keep rising the rate is still building up. CO2 emissions keeps piling up for centuries, more sea ice is permanently melting, permafrost is thawing at an increasing rate. Positive feedback loops are making that that heating twice as fast happen at shorter periods.

And over that, there are jumps to new higher baselines like with happened in the previous El Niño, and will happen in the incoming monster one.

Even not participating in elections have consecuences, at least for proper democratic countries.

But in countries where participation is mandatory, at least you can say that most of the (national) negatively affected people got what they voted for.

For improper "democratic" countries where elections are rigged or participation is biased towards some population sectors in a way or another, they are not really elections by the population.

It is not a war on the web, but on how it was traditionally used (and abused). And that "traditional" way was shaped by google too.

As you want a cookie, i put you in a table, napking, serve you a bag of cookies and hope that you eat/find the cookie you want, while hearing my music, watching my ads, pushing you more foods that I sell and other services. And sometimes, that is the experience you are searching for. But also, many just want a cookie.

That is what a conversational and maybe agentic interface can give you. Have someone a blueberry cookie? Then it gives it to you, and also give pointers to restaurants that give a more complete experience sometimes (while others may try to scam you). It is a shortcut, but also doesn't hide you the traditional way to access that.

They are not saints, but neither are all the ones in the other side. But the new way to access the relevant information you want, in a way that you can use it, have its own value.

"Narrowly", missing a ball of 12k km of diameter by 90k km.

The problem on the side of closed source software is that if there had been leaks of source code, the vulnerabilities and exploits may remain unknown for long time.

It is not the same world.

Food distribution networks exists, so local lost crops may or not affect food availability (economy will be different) in most regions.

Also it will be different in absolute values, the difference with the average may be the same (or higher), but the average sea temperature now is higher, and cross thresholds that push us further into positive feedback loops towards global warming. And things don't go back to previous levels.

Thinking in Systems: A Primer, by Donella Meadows. More things I lived and worked on would had made more sense if I had read it a decade earlier.

There had been a lot books that were influential, but appeared not too long before I read them. But some had been around for long and were been widely known, so the opportunities for reading them earlier were bigger. The Selfish Gene is in that category.

It is not trivial, nor as simple as just deleting the app, without understanding what ties us there that can't be changed with just that particular act. We are social animals, our culture has been driven to making social contact through this platforms, at the very least to people that you don't meet in person (i.e. because they are in a different country, busy when you not) or communities.

There are some basic things that you may need in a way or another that in modern world are best solved with some social network mechanism. So it is not a sharp and total cut, but identify those essentials and or limit your usage to them, or provide a alternative channel for all in your communities for that particular communication. And if your network doesn't go to alternatives you will need to reach compromises.

Most of us are not alone, and need to belong to some communities. That is a factor that have to be considered before burning your (needed) bridges.

The elephant in the room is the man in the room. AIs are still tools controlled by people, specially people in power. Even with their own agency, they have their base prompts and biased information feed controlled by people in power. AIs are dangerous because dangerous people now have a bigger hammer to hit us with it.

There are a lot of assumptions in those laws, and they were exploited by Asimov himself in his short stories and books. Redefining what is human, adding a zeroth law, weakening laws, lack of understanding of human nature (i.e. lending an arm to a dangerously angry woman), even with those theoretically perfect laws it was still able to be exploited and cause harm.

Even the Men on Fire episode of Black Mirror was able to trick humans, with laws or not.