HN user
These people are an opportunity for the rest of us to be better people, to show compassion and mercy. They are not worthless to the rest of society. Giving them LLM companions says that they are — that their only self-worth is their feelings.
The thing is, individual moderation isn't sufficient to combat collective capture. This is Ivan Illich's idea of "radical monopoly", where a technology (like cars or the internet) becomes so entrenched that individuals can't realistically opt out any longer. This happens when we abdicate our collective responsibility to the internal logic and incentives of the tech.
Yes, but design nudges use in one direction or another. Or, as McLuhan said, "the medium is the message."
I don't know the answer. But a robotic voice is probably not a bad idea — just having a reminder that the thing you're talking to is not actually anything like you. If you want to go full send, you could have the LLM generate a clickable interface on demand so you could interact with it as a machine. Voice/computer interfaces are obviously useful, especially for disabled folks. But the ones that existed in the past didn't pretend to laugh at your non jokes or imitate vocal fry.
Right, I think the challenge is that LLMs are essentially language-based, which is itself a very convenient interface. Covering the maximally humanistic default interface with something more mechanical is like tying your own shoelaces together, but it would protect us from the psychological hijacking we're so prone to when interacting with these machines.
This is actually not a bad option
This is the opposite direction AI should be going. Human relationships are the most valuable thing we have, and so, naturally, technology seeks to intermediate and now replace them.
I'm not Catholic, but this podcast presents a very interesting argument against talking to AI as if they were human: https://newpolity.com/podcasts-hub/debate-chatbots
Time to coin a new term, I think: "openwashing".
Europe is adopting open source and open protocols, not to promote individual sovereignty, but explicitly to protect European sovereignty from foreign influence. This is not what these technologies were built for; "promoting democracy" does not protect the rights of individuals.
The technology listed is mostly federated, not radically open (like, for example, nostr). In particular, ATProto has provided the EU with the perfect opportunity to signal openness while simultaneously standing up a new walled garden in which dystopian "moderation policies" will be the norm.
I have been telling people lately that I feel like I'm losing my mind. And I'm not even someone who has leaned into AI coding that much either; I've just tried to learn the tools since Claude got "good". But my inherent laziness, which was always flattered as something that makes me a good programmer, has made me unable to use the tools with the required discipline. The result is that I have not thought deeply about the software I write for around 3 months. Every additional week that goes by without me doing a refactor or serious feature addition saps my confidence. I know I can still code. But I feel worried that I can't. Today I am refactoring a 4k LOC AI-written rust codebase. I don't know rust, but I will finally learn it today. And I can already tell the end result will be 50% the size and immeasurably more coherent.
Do github, gitea, and gitlab not?
Sounds like a misconfigured repository. Try for example https://gitworkshop.dev/danconwaydev.com/relay.ngit.dev/ngit...
It's all open source, hosted on nostr itself. See the creator's profile for all related repos:
I don't know how new Tangled is, but there is a fairly mature github alternative being built on Nostr:
The basic idea is that you can put your repository on multiple GRASP-compatible nostr relays (GRASP is a sub-protocol that glues nostr and git together), so even if one server goes down you can transparently sync using the others. This means in effect 100% uptime if you choose reliable servers, as well as cryptographically-signed repositories, activity, issues, etc.
Yeah, any time you need either an index or a caching layer you have to re-centralize one way or another. But decoupling those "services" from the data storage itself helps, and credible exit makes the gatekeepers far less powerful. An example: a few weeks ago nostr.band, one of nostr's main indexers/search services went away. Search is still somewhat impacted (evidence that we were centralized around it), but indexing (i.e. finding users' relay lists) is still covered by several other services.
That's what decentralization looks like. You might also try:
nostr.com nostr.how nostr.net nostrich.love nostrhub.io usenostr.org And of course https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
Getting clients to do the right thing is like herding cats, but there has been some progress. Early 2023 Mike Dilger came up with the "gossip model" (renamed "outbox model" for obvious reasons). Here's my write-up: https://habla.news/hodlbod/8YjqXm4SKY-TauwjOfLXS
The basic idea is that for microblogging use cases users advertise which relays their content is stored on, which clients follow (this implies that there are less-decentralized indexes that hold these pointers, but it does help distribute content to aligned relays instead of blast content everywhere).
Also, relays aside, one key difference vs ActivityPub is that no third party owns your identity, which means you can move from one relay to another freely, which is not true on Mastodon.
probably not
1000x redundancy makes it vanishingly unlikely. Although I know we're due for a pole shift so all bets are off I suppose.
nostr never goes down
Is it open source? This is a cool idea, but I'm pretty sure it's probably just a thin wrapper around claude. I also couldn't install it on my headless dev box because it relies on a localhost callback. Well, I'm looking forward to the first open source version in about 10 minutes.
Why is no one talking about using zero knowledge proofs for solving this? Instead of every platform verifying all its users itself (and storing PII on its own servers), a small number of providers could expose an API which provides proof of verification. I'm not sure if some kind of machine vision algorithm could be used in combination with zero-knowledge technology to prevent even that party from storing original documents, but I don't see why not. The companies implementing these measures really seem to be just phoning it in from a privacy perspective.
If you're looking for an alternative, I'm building flotilla.social, a self-hostable chat app built on nostr, which uses cryptographic identities to prevent identity capture.
FOSS, optionally self-hosted alternative built on nostr: https://flotilla.social/
In contrast with Roomy, Discord does provide for non-public community spaces.
With our unique financial rewards model, scale matters. The more justice you unlock, the more monetary compensation you receive.
In fact, we pledge to distribute to tippers $200 million out of every $1 billion we collect.
What? Donating 20% of profits is great, but this sounds very weird. Is the only thing that drives this revenue donations? In which case, why do we need a rent seeking intermediary? Nostr has bitcoin tips built in, and you don't have to pay anyone to send money to whomever you want.
Couldn't agree more with this. Another way to describe this kind of honesty is as "integrity", or in other words the coherence of your inner and outer lives. Hypocrites are always in a contest against themselves, which is a kind of self-sabotage. Insisting on personal integrity forces you to align your stated values with revealed preference, sharpening both.
It was (and still is) deployed in a number of places, so it's a valid criticism in that context. That said, it's mostly dunk.
Going back to the site, I see what you mean. Very fair criticism. The site appeals to a bunch of implicit ideals without defining its terms.
My point is that question is sort of a category error. It's like asking what type of business the internet is for, or what the use case of smart phones is.
Here are a few things built on nostr, with specific use cases:
primal.net is a twitter-like client with bitcoin micropayments and long-form articles (also see coracle.social, nosotros.app, jumble.social, Amethyst, Damus, yakihonne.com and many others); zap.stream is a twitch-like client for live streaming; flotilla.social and chachi.chat are group chat clients; dtan.xyz is a client for torrenting on nostr; satlantis.io is sort of a travel ratings thing; zap.cooking is a recipe website; yakbak.app is for voice messages; nutstash.app is a cashu wallet built on nostr; cashumints.space lists cashu mints that advertise themselves on nostr.
What's neat is that all these clients can do things the way they want to, but remain interoperable, which means that new developers can create an app and immediately have access to all existing nostr users and their social graph.
Nostr is essentially a compromise between p2p and traditional web architectures. It cuts with the grain of the internet by using web servers, while reducing the dependence users have on servers by using keys for identity and digital signatures for authenticating data.
The effect is that users have "credible exit" (among other things), which has been discussed for years. This doesn't really create any new "use cases", which is why the use case is often described as "whatever, it's the new internet".
What it does do is introduce a very different set of trade-offs which favor user control over platform control (with the attendant UX trade-offs (or at least a different set of UX idioms)).
The reason the focus is on social is because that represents the majority of applications that do exist, the original motivation for building the protocol, and a value proposition (censorship resistance) that lots of people can relate to.