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anachronist

@anachronist@midwest.social

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anachronist ,

Yeah the fediverse has lower engagement all around because the community is a lot smaller. This is especially true in "long tail" communities. However, the upside is that there are no bots, dark patterns, or manipulated feeds.

That being said, while I appreciate the chronological feed I do wish there was some way to "weigh" less active communities so that I can see their activity in my feed without them being drowned out by the busier communities. I've noticed that I've gone to communities that I'm definitely subscribed to, and seen that there were several posts that I missed because the posts were drowned out by content in busy communities like, for instance, technology@beehaw.org

anachronist , (edited )

And before SpaceX the cost to do anything in space was extremely prohibitive.

As opposed to now..

With SpaceX they created re-usable rocket components

Nobody had done that before? Wasn't the promise that they would do few quick checks, refuel, and send it back up same day?

Before SpaceX the U.S. was reliant on Russia’s soyuz to get us to and from the space station.

Nasa had do use Soyuz because crew dragon was late. SpaceX won the contract then underdelivered a late product. Basically exactly what ULA or Boeing would have done.

Wanna talk about Artemis?

anachronist ,

Look up "interurban railways". Most towns east of the Mississippi used to have frequent rail service with whistle stops at every farm and crossroads. In addition to passengers these railroads also transported the harvest, Sears purchases, kit houses, even hearses!

anachronist ,

Spite and pettiness seem like a poor way to run a business but what do I know? I'm just a guy who's gotten zero starships successfully to orbit.

anachronist , (edited )

Yeah that was the joke. 🙃

Edit: Also none have made it to orbit or even near orbit. They initially claimed that the third one made it to the non-circularized suborbit they had planned, but later analysis was that it did not actually reach the planned velocity:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQ03eVRgiZ4

anachronist ,

Which part of the video is wrong? The fact is that it failed to reach planned velocity. This is public record. If it did not reach planned velocity then it did not reach the non-circualized suborbit that they intended. They were not "just a circulization away from orbit."

The CSS channel was created when Musk and Shotwell were making bonkers claims about their Mars plans, as well as other crazy bullshit like the suborbital rocket airline stuff. The point of CSS is that none of their claims pencil out if you do even basic math, and they proved that by doing the math. They've also gone after other space grifters like orbital assembly.

anachronist ,

The planned goal of the mission was to achieve orbital velocity but not orbital trajectory. This was because they had not yet demonstrated the ability of their vac engines to relight in space. If they go into a stable orbit but can't relight they can not deorbit and they become space junk.

They initially claimed that this was a success (they achieved target velocity) but subsequent analysis was they were quite a bit off. Also because their engine relight test was failed/cancelled they will also not be allowed to attempt a stable orbit in IFT4. They have to demonstrate relight/deorbit capability before they will be allowed to attempt stable orbit.

anachronist ,

Google was already going downhill but when they fired Matt Cutts and replaced him with an advertising person was the point where it was obvious they weren't interested in search anymore.

anachronist ,

The appeal to google and friends is that it's even less obvious when you're being advertised to when a LLM tells you something than on their existing SERPs.

anachronist ,

A simple path forward, is to go from classifying single elements of training data, to classifying multiple elements and their relationship in the training data.

Training data already has multiple labels.

Slightly less simple, is to gather orders of magnitude more data, by just hooking the input to an IRL robot.

An entire point of the paper and video is that massive increases in training set size are showing diminishing returns.

Another step, is for the NN to control the robot and decide which parts of the data require refinement, and focus on that.

🤡

anachronist ,

Alternate theory we'll look back the same way we looked back on the claims that IBM watson was intelligent, or the claims in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, 2010s, that <insert technology x> was going to make computers truly intelligent.

anachronist ,

Tictok is horrible but this entire ban is being driven by the swamp being upset that young people have come to the wrong conclusion about Israel. I think that the idea is that as long as people are using facebook or google-owned properties, people can be shown only information that will lead them to the correct, approved opinions.

Google fires 28 workers for protesting $1.2 billion Israel contract (www.nbcnews.com)

"Google issued a stern warning to its employees, with the company’s vice president of global security, Chris Rackow, saying, “If you’re one of the few who are tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again,” according to an internal memo obtained by CNBC."

anachronist ,

2000s were peak libertarian for SP. They were against the war on terror so they didn't code "Bush-right" but they were extremely libertarian. I remember the media trying to push this "millennials are conservative actually" line by inventing the phrase "South-park republican"

Still I remember them landing some good observations. For instance, in one episode the boys learn how veal is made and become animal rights activists. You can tell TP/MS are not animal rights activists, but after the boys steal the cows the media, police, government, etc all instantly start calling the boys "terrorists." It really caught the whole post-9/11 zeitgeist of "anybody you don't like is a terrorist."

anachronist ,

This is the definition of late-stage capitalism. Capitalism starts out by finding useful things that improve lives for at least some people (potentially by ruining it for others). For instance, it invents assembly lines to make manufactured goods cheaper but in so doing makes the worker's job dull, repetitive, stressful, and robs him of his agency. This is early stage capitalism. Things are getting worse for some people but broadly better for many.

But then later on capitalism runs out of things to improve. You can only invent the assembly line once. You only get that boost when you implement it. So you have to come up with something else. Maybe you computerize things. But eventually you can't wring any more profits out of production and profits must go up, so you have to take them out of the customers. You roll up all the competing firms into a monopoly and then start jacking up the price, slashing the quality, etc. This is late-stage. It becomes more and more parasitic and the snake eats its own tail.

anachronist ,

"You know what would be totally sick? What if we made our building's roof into a matrix of inverted metal parabolas?"

anachronist ,

We're not ready because we're using concepts like "raising" to describe the creation of a probabilistic word sequence generator.

Don't anthropomorphize the algorithm.

anachronist ,

The purpose of Mozilla is to kill Firefox. That's what Google is paying for.

anachronist ,

Wikipedia gets something like $150 million in donations annually. Firefox absolutely could have done similar numbers back when they had a massive userbase, and it would have given the users a feeling of ownership. Instead they decided to be funded almost entirely by the technology monopolist.

anachronist ,

I think for like ten minutes they were vetting people joining or something, and the answers were high quality. But the whole thing turned into yahoo answers within a month of it getting popular.

anachronist ,

Customers: The glass on our iPhone screens keep cracking.

Apple: Glass on both sides of your phone!

anachronist ,

VR has been around in modern form for more than a decade and the only truly novel and useful application is some types of gameplay.

Apple claims that the future is AR but the only novel and useful application is feeding you more ads. This is a massive benefit for them, but not a reason for anyone to buy this thing and subject themselves to it.

anachronist ,

The crowd cheered at the first two items, but had no real idea why the third item was such a big deal.

I'm not sure, I took that to mean a competitor to Palm, which was pretty popular among a niche segment of the population. Although data plans via 3G kinda sucked back then and most Palm users I knew were constantly trying to connect to wifi.

The Cult of AI: How one writer's trip to an annual tech conference left him with a sinking feeling about the future (www.rollingstone.com)

From the (middle of the) story: The reason CES was so packed with random “AI”-branded products was that sticking those two letters to a new company is seen as something of a talisman, a ritual to bring back the (VC) rainy season.

anachronist ,

The fundamental problem with tech in the 2020s is that it's pretty much done eating the world. The last big earth-moving platform shift was smartphones over a decade ago. Ever since they've just been trying to make wearables happen, then make VR/AR happen, then make web3 happen, then make AI happen.

They keep on trying to make these new platforms happen but they don't really have any compelling features. Before smartphones when I'd travel to a new city I'd buy a paper map.. and get lost. I don't get lost anymore. That's genuinely a different experience. Nothing since has created any sort of earth shattering change on that level.

anachronist ,

just yesterday I saw a documentary about a sect using their own cryptocoin to pay its members for peddling ayahuasca and other psychedelics

Finally! A use case!

anachronist ,

Ok then be specific.

Like, before smartphones I was lost in hamburg, looking at a paper map trying to figure out where the heck I was, trying to find the street names hidden in the brickwork of the buildings. I had to have a friendly person help me out. I've never been lost like that since smartphones. Give me a specific case where chatgpt would do something like that.

anachronist ,

On the other hand, we’d been trying to do anything useful with natural language since the 50’s and had thoroughly failed.

That's really not true. For instance, machine translation and spam detection (document classification) were getting really good by the late 2000s. Image recognition was great beginning the late 2010s.

What we've seen in the last few years (besides continual incremental improvements in already-existing solutions) is improvement in the application of generative tools. So far the uses cases of generative models appear to be violating copyright, cheating on homework, and producing even more search engine spam. It can also be somewhat useful as a search engine so long as you want your answer to be authoritatively worded but don't care if it's true or not.

anachronist ,

ye olde chan

anachronist ,

I work in tech and asian guys tend to outnumber white guys in it, especially if you combine east asian and south asian.

anachronist ,

How is he wrong?

anachronist ,

Part of that is just smoothness and symmetry which we consider to be attractive attributes but is also a consequence of the averaging that the algorithm is doing (which is why AI images all look various sorts of "melty").

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