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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Were probably? That’s a giant understatement and you know it.

    Ai will save billions of lives and improve the living standard for everyone on the planet, it’ll be just like mobile phones where the biggest benefits come to the poorest communities - tech haters often ignore this reality, millions of children in Africa, Asia, etc were only able to get access to education through mobile infrastructure.

    The internet has given everyone access to huge amounts of education resources and it’s only increased as they technology matures - current LLMs are amazing for language learners and for people who need things like English articles explained in their own language, I just asked chatgpt to explain the code I’m working on in Tagalog and it did it without hesitation (I can’t speak for the accuracy personally but looks legit) it even translated variable names but not function calls.

    And this before we’ve scratched the surface of it’s utility, I’ll tell you one thing if you ever say to your grandkids ‘o I was against ai when it came out’ they’ll look at up like you’d look at someone who said they didn’t think math would catch on or that iron would never be as popular as bronze.



  • Yeah I think that people should be a lot more willing to pay someone to contribute to open source than they are to pay for usage of closed code. It really should be seen as the best form of charity, like when I donate to an open source project that makes a good education tool what I’m really doing is donating that tool to every school in the developing world and every student that wouldn’t have been able to afford a paid version.

    I think that we need to get into a world where showing off which projects you support is a way of flexing, like all these super rich attention seekers need to start funding development teams for apps ‘oh yeah I was so annoyed the librivox app didn’t have ai search tools that I paid two PhD students to implement it, apparently it’s been a real boon for foreign language learners and literary academics but I just use it to find me historic novels similar in theme to events in my own life, you know it suggested shadow over innsmouth, I don’t know what it’s trying to say!’

    People need to see that it’s much better to buy something for everyone in the world than just for you, especially because it makes it possible for other people like you to repay the favour and pay for further improvements which benefit you


  • Yeah the amount of good ai can do for the world is staggering, even just giving a speed boost and quality improvement to open source Devs will unlock a lot of new potential.

    The problem is people in a certain age bracket often fear change because they feel they’ve put effort into learning how things work and if things change then all that effort will be worthless.

    It doesn’t really matter though, gangs of idiots literally smashed the prototype looms when they were demonstrated because despite the cost of cloth being one of the major factors in poverty at the time a handful of people took it on themselves to fight to maintain the status quo – of course we know how it turned out, the same that it always does…

    Areas that resisted technological and social growth stagnated and got displaced by those which welcomed it



  • You’re making up a lot of stuff, Xerox had a gui UI for a whole decade before apple and they certainly weren’t the only ones.

    The MP3 player they made was literally just a feature limited version of already popular devices. I got my arcos a year before the first apple device was released and it had every single feature that apple would slowly add in every new expensive version over the next decade

    Apple does hype and marketing, that’s their innovation - taking a feature restricted version of a technology and getting celebrities and media idiots to pretend it’s the best thing in the world and actively ignore or discount the many better options.






  • The capitalist mindset really is a weird one, rent seeking is out of control. We’re talking about a tool that allows independent creators and hobby users to improve the quality of their projects but all you can think about is the possibility of getting a couple of dollars in royalties.

    Regular users being able to use advanced noise reduction allows regular people to better compete with corporations, it’s the sort of technology which can help displace the monopolies which rule the world. But you’re against it because they didn’t give you 6 cents for listening to your cover version of country roads


  • Fun note too that theologians have decided it wasn’t betraying Jesus that got him damned to hell for eternity that would have been fine and they could have all enjoyed heaven together but he got depressed and killed himself which damned him to hell

    Jesus just watching with a shrug as his friend who helped him carry out his whole destiny of saving us from original sin burns on agony

    Also one of Jesus closest friends who’d been there with loads of the proving Jesus is Christ moments still didn’t really believe in him enough to actually think he was the literal son of God who reigns over heaven or surely he’d understand the his earthly death isn’t really a big deal to him - like when I log off a video game and I’m back in my bedroom.


  • Do you get the super creepy ‘easten European girls are popular because of their traditional values…’ and the I’ve that’s ‘Chinese women want to come and study in but need loving middle aged men to have sex with them while they’re here…’ I’m paraphraseing of course but that’s basically what they say.

    Makes me laugh when everything is sanitized because advertiser’s don’t want to appear next to anything untoward then the adverts are for human traffickers.

    Though honestly the ‘student was expelled for inventing a more efficient heater’ advert is possibly worse, of course he was expelled he broke the laws of physics, he should have been arrested! Why is such an obvious scam allowed but a friendly Australian can’t call his cobba a cunt?



  • Oh I had totally missed the 3d printing in space that’s really cool, just watching their video about it and wow is it painful with the marvel tie ins and stuff but looks very cool

    Seems like the ability to control temperature dissipation without convection could be really useful especially with metals like platinum, might be even sooner that it’s commercialised at scale if they can gather raw platinum and make high quality parts especially something like premium bike or boat parts, the corrosion resistance would make it perfect for tidal generation components too.

    That could be a possible first strong business, if the space platinum to earth pipeline is already in progress then it should be relatively cheap to divert some for manufacturing then parachuting them in splash down zones would make sense for tidal generator parts.

    Of course with progress on fusion it’s possible there won’t be a huge market for reliable cheap energy but we’ll see. I suspect the first thing made will be jewelry that’s sold in small amounts for absurd prices.






  • Yeah its weird tech is moving so absurdly fast at that moment that people seem to have gotten used to huge breakthroughs and want one ever week, like with ai how astonishing developments aren’t even implemented yet but people are saying it’s not impressive or development has stalled.

    There’s a lot of really good stuff that’s coming to market slowly, the main problem is lithium is so cheap and easy at the moment that it’s not really worth it for anyone to take a risk on something new. It is happening but it’ll take a while for the special use cases to filter though and it to reach a more general market.

    Another good example is wave power, there are now working commercial devices and very successful test projects but because it’s complex and still has high planning and development costs associated with it everyone is sticking to wind and solar. There will be a point soon where tidal generation sneaks into common use just like desalination did

    Hardly anyone is even aware how many of the areas we got told would have water wars now have desalination partnerships and plenty of water to go round. They can even extract lithium in the same process and we’re starting to see that getting built too.

    I think the real thing is going to be when the various strands of ai combine with the incredibly good robotics we have developed over the last few decades, people are going to be shocked how much it’ll speed up every physical industry. Being able to show the robot ‘this surface here needs to be sanded smooth ready for spraying’ and it can understand the request, evolve a movement solution and continually check it’s work as it goes.

    The problem is everyone knows that’s coming and it’s a game changer so no one is really interested in the amazing advances we keep making or the more basic tools. Companies aren’t going to invest five years researching and developing the sort of product we can make now when they know other companies as already investing big in general purposes tools that’ll ruin all those markets.