softg

Why just teens though? Getting manipulated by algorithms crafted to maximize screentime and ad revenue is bad for anyone.

These platforms rely on ads to survive. Which means it should be easy to regulate them. You can prevent them from selling ads at which point they will be forced to comply. If they don't, someone else will get the ad revenue. Europe is already hostile towards american tech giants anyways.

The possibilities are endless. Pass a law that forces all social media with more than x users to not implement constant scrolling, make their ranking algorithm open source, allow people to use their own algorithms, employ robust moderation etc.

Instead we have a blanket ban that requires id checks but leaves the manipulation machine intact so it can prey on adults. Mental health is not the real issue here. They want to be able to track people and destroy anonimity online. Children are a convenient excuse.

If the main purpose of this was to satisfy people's morbid curiosity that makes a lot of sense. Maybe they made up some juicy deaths in slow news weeks even.

I don't see how selecting the Lion, the Robot or the Scarecrow at random is going to help with any of the issues you mentioned. Now some rando (or group of randos) that you didn't even know existed gets power based on pure luck. You will still need media to learn about them and they could still be made up.

At least elections have a veneer of consent since people are asked which of the available options they prefer. Can you imagine anyone going to war because people chosen by a lottery wheel asked for it?

This is a problem of scale. The Greeks back then lived in small city-states where random selection meant that every able bodied male had a good shot at holding an important office at least once in their lifetime. You didn't need to hatch devious schemes to come to power. You couldn't abuse your fellow men because they would be in charge tomorrow. That's the true power of random selection and it's completely inapplicable to today's society at large.

at that point you could just buy cheap drones yourself and ram those into your neighbor's (oops)

I think the point they're making is "Walter White is a well-behaved chemistry teacher who resorts to manufacturing and selling drugs after he gets cancer" would still be true even if he stopped dealing drugs after he was offered money.

The Czech Republic changed its official name but many places still use the old name. Same with Eswatini, Côte d'Ivoire, Cabo Verde, etc. I suspect name changes aren't that reliable for dating globes since some of them probably have modern borders and former official names.

What's even worse would be enforcing the wrong solution that will cause more damage. The French have a saying, fuite en avant (lit. escape forwards) when someone insists on doing something knowing full well that it will not work but they do it anyways because it's better than inaction.

Considering the rise of the far right in the last EU elections, anyone who's seriously considering weakening public encryption must be out of their minds.

Excession is literally the next book on my reading list so I won't click on that yet :)

With this metaphor you seem to be saying we should, if possible, learn how to control AI? Preferably before anyone endangers their lives due to it?

Yes, but that's a big if. Also that's something you could never ever be sure of. You could spend decades thinking alignment is a solved problem only to be outsmarted by something smarter than you in the end. If we end up conjuring a greater intelligence there will be the constant risk of a catastrophic event just like the risk of a nuclear armageddon that exists today.

Bears can't use their strength to make even stronger bears so we're safe for now.

The Unabomber was clearly an intelligent person. You could even argue that he was someone worth listening to. But he was also a violent individual who harmed people. Intelligence does not prevent people from harming others.

Your analogy falls apart because what prevents a human from becoming an emperor of the world doesn't apply here. Humans need to sleep and eat. They cannot listen to billions of people at once. They cannot remember everything. They cannot execute code. They cannot upload themselves to the cloud.

I don't think agi is near, I am not qualified to speculate on that. I am just amazed that decades of dystopian science fiction did not innoculate people against the idea of thinking machines.

I know nothing about physics. If I came across some magic algorithm that occasionally poops out a plane that works 90 percent of the time, would you book a flight in it?

Sure, we can improve our understanding of how NNs work but that isn't enough. How are humans supposed to fully understand and control something that is smarter than themselves by definition? I think it's inevitable that at some point that smart thing will behave in ways humans don't expect.

Why wouldn't it be? A lot of super intelligent people are/were also "destructive and evil". The greatest horrors in human history wouldn't be possible otherwise. You can't orchestrate the mass murder of millions without intelligent people and they definitely saw things as a zero sum game.

A list that includes Bulgaria, funnily enough

Since the last ice age we've been dropping like flies. In fact, we're the only humans left.

I was under the impression that was our doing. All of these human varieties were outcompeted by homo sapiens who replaced them. Modern humans don't need to worry about another hominid taking their place because we're the last one standing.

The middle class thinks about its survival and keeping their assets intact. Building wealth is not possible for most people. But if you have money laying around, buying assets is the way to go, yes. Which is why the price of housing, cars, etc. skyrocketed. That in turn made buying assets even more attractive. Real estate prices grew in absolute terms (as in dollars) for the last few years.

The cheap loans I talked about aren't constant, for example you can't get them right now. They were available when the government artificially depressed the interest rate. A lot of people bought houses and cars that way and they are paying peanuts atm. The banks were/are still turning a profit because the interest rate was low, so the price of money was low for them as well. The government printed money to bankroll this growth until finally the lira crashed down. Basically everyone who earned in the local currency paid the price.

You get used to it. You get used to seeing a different price tag every time you get groceries. You get used to real estate prices doubling almost every year. You use dollars or other metrics for comparing prices year on year. You might even see some benefits. High inflation is great if you're in debt. Ideally you get a huge raise once a year too. The few months following your raise are the easiest. The minimum wage was raised 60 pc this month which is why the monthly inflation picked up speed.

Right now the interest rate is about 40 percent in Turkey which reins in the inflation a bit. Originally the crisis started b/c the president refused to raise interest rates like the rest of the world. Now that he appears to have returned to his senses things calmed down a bit. There's also municipal elections in a month and the gov't has been generous with public sector wages and the minimum wage to shore up support. Some sort of devaluation against the dollar following the elections is inevitable. The talk here is that the gov't will impose severe austerity measures after the elections since there won't be another one for the next three years. It's possible that the things get really grim after that.

Biodiversity doesn't "benefit" anyone so much as it comprises, entirely, the world from which we're inextricable.

Is it though? There's been several extinction events that wiped out the biodiversity of the planet and they were all natural too. We might be inextricable from the world but we can and do manipulate it to our benefit.

I don't understand what is the problem with anthropocentrism. Given the chance, I'd prefer more biodiversity for sure, but if it's objectively bad for human beings I think human interests should come first. It's just that the current cycle of overproduction and global warming isn't benefiting humans either. That's not the fault of human-centered thinking, it's the fault of profit-centered short-term thinking.

I enjoyed this game, it made me feel better about myself until I tried France and was unable to think of a single départment between the Pyrénées and Marseille. Are you planning to add other countries? A pan european version with german states, french and spanish regions etc. could be interesting.

I only switch to chrome when I need to fake response payload, I couldn't figure that out in ff. Otherwise pretty much the same functionality. They also look the same.

why do archaeologists use CT scanners to painstakingly read fragile rolled-up scrolls from thousands of years ago?

I was under the impression that we haven't read a lot of old scrolls, tablets, etc. because it costs money and most of them are uninteresting. A lot of clay tablets just document financial transactions iirc.

I imagine the first human to be "revived" from a frozen brain would be quite a feat. 100000th? Not so much. Would the future archelogist still care about that?

I think I'd like to have my brain frozen -ideally after a long and fulfilling life- just for the heck of it but the chances of a future civilization with the means and the will to resusciate a large quantity of random damaged brains from the past is low.

That's incredibly unlikely to happen [today] given how large cutting-edge AI tends to be [today] and how scarce GPUs are [today].

I mean is it that unreasonable to think that humans are radically different from any other species we know? Because we obviously are. I don't see any dogs writing on this forum to dispute the uniqueness of humans any time soon. There are clearly many things that we humans can do and no other animal can. A study about chimps using sticks to hunt termites isn't going to be enough to bridge that gap.

"Deserved" is a human concept. Pretty much all 'smart' animals (orcas, dolphins, bonobos, etc.) engage in extremely cruel behaviors towards other species or even to their kind. They are no better than us. We're the only ones who are having moral qualms over it (and we should).

Given how much money governments spend on nonsense, why can't we take some money, and build simple, but quality and stable shelter for people?

A better question is, given how much money governments spend on nonsense, why can't we take some money, and build actual housing for people? Surely a society that can produce semiconductors and fighter jets etc. is capable of assembling few thousand bricks/wood/whatever and build homes.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. If we had thousands of homeless shelters we might end up seeing people moving to shelters from actual houses that they can ill afford. Some could argue that evictions should be easier because worst case there would be shelters to go to. You will degrade housing for poor people instead of helping the destitute.

Normally this place gives me anxiety (so many things to learn) but people's dismissiveness of LLMs here gives me hope for a change.

I feel like if LLMs make writing software significantly easier (and that's a big if) , they are going to make it easier for everyone and everything. That will bring its own problems. Stuff that is barely achievable today may be the norm. The website of the mom and pop shop next door may need the graphics of an AAA title to stay in business. Securing things will be difficult because malicious actors will have their own LLMs. People will have new gadgets that do things that we didn't know we needed. Maybe I will be programming drones that can fetch beer from the fridge. I can really use one right now. There's so many things that can still be improved, imo it is hard to think that a potential jump in productivity will make software development less important. It might result in same people undertaking bigger tasks.

Except here in the metric land when we want to buy a pound of something (or thereabouts) we ask for half a kilo. And the second can easily be 3/4 liters.

Meh. I'm Turkish, I was raised as a muslim. My entire family are muslims. I am not going to let random people on an English language forum accuse me of being insensitive towards muslims. That's the hill I can die on I guess.

In Turkish, jihad (cihat) is only used for holy war. Nobody but the most demented religious zealot would suggest a ministry of agricultural jihad. Now, discussions on the subtleties of the meaning of the word jihad in Arabic are interesting, but they do not mean much because Iran isn't an Arab country. I do not speak Persian and I can't tell if jihad is used for 'struggle/effort' in that way in that language. We use other Arabic words like 'mücadele' for 'struggle' for example, but not jihad.

What matters is what the word jihad means in Persian, not Arabic. Both of your links point out that jihad was added during/after the Islamic Revolution, when the country was swept by a wave of religious fervor. Unless a Persian speaker contradicts me, I think my point stands.

As a broader term maybe, but you can't deny the religious connotation of the word, especially under a theocratic regime. Also I am not entirely sure if the broader sense of the word would be obvious to Iranians, who do not speak Arabic (except in the southwest). I wonder if anyone who speaks persian can confirm that that they use jihad for struggle/effort outside of religion.

TIL Iran has a 'Minister of Agricultural Jihad'. I assume they declare holy war on crickets or something.

The variety of electronics, toys, clothes or food available to an average person has definitely increased and I agree that one can spend less and maybe even work less (depending on what line of work they are in) by avoiding them. That's true.

The problem is they are not the big expenses that improve someone's quality of life. Decent housing, health insurance/healthcare, education and transportation are the big spending items for most people, not toys or even phones. Most of the things you mentioned are affordable to almost everyone in the developed world, maybe in an inferior form (like a huawei instead of an apple, h&m instead of gap) but still available.

For an average joe who has two kids and has to be at work because most people can't and don't work remotely even today, "hacking" inexpensive living isn't so much about giving up on their huawei phone or h&m clothes. It's more about giving up on having a decent place to live, giving up on their children's education, not being able to commute to work, etc. And that's not quite doable at all.

This was typical, to be expected a century ago, but with the nature of marketing and social pressure

It might be typical and expected but that doesn't mean it was desirable even then. People lived that way because they had to. It was always considered a difficult way of life. It's more likely that people gave it up as soon as they could when they had the chance.

I think there are two different concepts here. You can be materially minimalist, i.e. you can refuse to buy superfluous consumer products that are pushed by marketing etc. You will still need housing, healthcare and transportation (assuming that you have to drive to work). Those things have very real objective benefits and their widespread adoption can't be explained with marketing or social pressure. And you won't be able to get those for 100 dollars a month (correct me if I'm wrong). If you are foregoing those as well you're not just materially minimalist, you're basically going off-grid and abandoning civilization altogether.