SeeingRed [he/him]

Profit over functionality aside, one thing that can make Google slightly more tolerable is to switch it into “web search” mode. This strips away all the AI crap, sponsored links, etc. apparently there are ways you can set it to be the default. I find I use Google less and less anyway, but it’s a good option when the first page is useless garbage.

The number of times the Google AI summary has either outright lied or given me some horrible hallucinated approximation of an answer is disgusting. Asking it anything remotely complicated, technical, or uncommonly searched gives the most egregious results. It’s to the point that I question anything it says, which means it’s truely useless. At best, I read a few lines, see if the information seems relevant, then I click on its source links, often to find that the information stated just isn’t at those links.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been playing Microtopia which is a game about ants that are microprocessors/mechanical. It is a factory simulator, but the base components are the ants and production buildings.

The ants have a lifespan, so you are managing them as a resources that is also required to make more of themselves. And there are not any belts or inserters as in most games, but instead the ants act as the logistics system, the resource gathering system, and the productive system.

It’s a slightly fresh take on the genre, and it was fun to learn the novel systems. However, it really could use some QOL and some options for lower graphics settings.

These sorts of games are fun for me because they allow me to solve small problems that slowly lead to complex systems. I really enjoy the feeling of accomplishment from building something complex like this.

I would like to have a kid, but can’t afford to. My wife also is trying to get her career off the ground and so we are not really in the best position. I’m well off enough for our current life, but if we move to a bigger space and have to start paying for all that is required, the math doesn’t math anymore.

Maybe in a few years we’ll reconsider before we are too old

It really is like this. I have a friend who’s family grew up in the Soviet Union, and left during the collapse (he was born after). He is vehemently against Communism, but he’s also strongly against capitalism. It’s a bit frustrating to talk with him because he’ll agree with me right up until I start to talk strategy or historical context around the Soviet Union.

I always find it silly how humanoid robots almost never turn in a way that looks easy. They do a small shuffle and it takes multiple steps to turn 90 degrees.

I guessing that it’s not a trivial problem to solve. Or maybe there are hardware limitations that don’t allow human like movements. Like, maybe the hip and leg sockets are not able to make certain motions. Otherwise, it’s something that could easily be solved through reinforcement learning. Maybe it’s just never been a priority either.

I know that from an economic perspective, having a robot that can do a human task slowly but for less than it takes to hire a human for a proportional amount of time makes sense. And if we want to reduce mundane human working hours under socialism, it makes sense to build these sorts of robots. Especially as their abilities increase (more dexterity, better sensors, better software, etc.). Right now they feel super gimicky, but I can see the potential.

That bit at the end where the one bot charged the other bot was kind of cute.

What is this even supposed to mean!? I guess the reader needs to only see Russia as some mythologized evil to make that sentence make sense with the rest of the article.

I definitely get that. I was somehow able to get through it because it was what I was focused on at the time, and it still took me a while.

It really is worth reading. To make it easier, I suggest a reading group, or a reading companion podcast, or the audio version.

This has truely been a wonderful thing to see. I do wonder about what actions will be taken by the west in response to this.

At least 小红书 seems to be in the position that they want to allow the western users to keep using their platform non-region locked.

I’m the same way, and have a friend with a good memory. Every time we meet up he talks about all the DnD games we played and different things we had done in the past and I only really remember, like, half of it.

I’ve kept journals in the past, but I rarely stick to it. It’s interesting to return to those after a while.

That’s true, on a non human timescale the progress is nearly impossible to predict, especially with novel technology. For example, when space travel was an early concept, we thought travelling the stars was a forgone conclusion. We now know that any exploration in that front will be locked behind either breakthrough science or will be limited to slow generation ships, or robotic exploration.

That a technology capable of producing human level intelligence, or beyond does feel like a certainty since there is no reason to believe that the process of intelligent thought is limited to a biological substrate. We haven’t discovered any fundamental physical laws that stop us from doing this yet. Key issues to solve beyond the hardware problem come into effect with alignment, understanding the key fundamentals of consciousness and intelligence, understanding different types of minds beyond those of humans, and better understandings of emergent phenomena. But these areas will be explored in sufficient detail to yield an answer within time.

I will have to read these other books, I’m definitely interested in picking up some more good books.

We definitely have a series of breakthroughs needed before I can see any possibility of human consciousness uploads, to say nothing of the resources required to simulate that intelligence. Any simulation of intelligence requires resources, it may be plausible that we can bring the resources required below the resources for keeping a human alive. That being said, I’m not sure it’s the only logical progression of technology.

I’m partial to the concept of artificial realities presented in the “Culture” book series.

In that series, the biological population in the “Culture society” is well educated, truly free and provided anything they could want by purpose built extremely compassionate AI. Then simulated world’s are primarily an afterlife or an alternative to the physical world.

They also had artificial intelligence and uploaded biological intelligence interact with the physical world through robotic presences.

There were some interesting concepts that came out of that, like highly religious societies producing horrific “Hell” afterlife when they realized that metaphysical afterlifes were not experimentally verifiable.

I had issues with some of the takes of the author, but it was an interesting read.

I assume this is an attempt to re-shore manufacturing, especially if as many of us expect, many countries choose to take the tarrif hit so that they can keep trading in their own currency between eachother.

It’s a strategic bet, bring home some manufacturing while hurting those who defy the empire. It’ll certainly reduce the availability of certain goods in the US as countries choose other markets. This likely would help to encourage some level of reshoring, or at least increase pressure from the ruling class to force more coups of other countries to force them back onto the dollar system.

Whether this will backfire or not will is something that is very hard to predict.

This is definitely good news. It’s too bad they didn’t go as far as Cuba on their most recent rewrite of family law, but I’m glad things are moving in the right direction.

I hope Didi gains custody of her son soon enough, that will also be a win when it happens.

I’m definitely curious about the self cleaning property, and how easily it is to produce (is the process sustainable, toxic, expensive reagents, etc.) That was the biggest issue with a lot of the previous radiative cooling surfaces. If I have time I’ll try to read into it more.

There was a neat video on how to make your own from readily available material, but not from cellulose, but it had issues with being clean and application onto surfaces. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KDRnEm-B3AI&t=1s

Im curious how each agent differs, or is trained. Seems they had doctor and nurse agents, as well as patient agents. This would be a good way to start partial implementation. It would allow some tasks to be taken over by the in a hybrid format which could allow an even richer training environment.

I could never see the west doing this in a way that would actually improve the quality of service.

One of the issues with LLM AIs that we’ve seen time and again is that it can be extremely confident and perfectly incorrect. I have no doubt they are doing their best to train the AI with the best data, but I hope they are also working to solve some of the underlying issues with LLMs.

I believe it could just be “awe” or “awestruck” with it’s roots in both awesome and awful. Though the context of the modern usage of “awe” is maybe not quite right.

The specific context here would be closer to breaking free of the simulacrum of the hyperreal (media, digital life, and our daily work) and seeing reality as it is. I’m not sure that there is a single word for this combined concept and feeling, though it would be a good one to know.

The hyperreal concept is interesting, though I admittedly don’t know much about it.

So often our whole world is just the things on the screen in front of us. Everything around us is filtered out and ignored.

However, every once in a while, that small piece of light ceases to be a world and becomes just a screen. The physical glass and electronics lose their status as a world and become just the physical objects. You now notice how they feel, how the borders of the device look, how it sounds to tap on it. The rest of the room comes into focus and your mind realizes that there is a world outside the room. The room, the screen, the whole world, shaped by other humans fills you with hope and sadness. You realize you live on just one spec of dust in a vast cosmos. But that spec is important and precious, because it is where you, and everyone else is. All these things are real, all have a story to tell. The people all have wants, fears, desires, but your interactions with them are superficial, mediated by tiny interactions, or just through the physical stuff they made which you interact with. You want to scream and cry from the sublime understanding of it all.

As quickly as it arrived, it is gone, the screen beckens you back and the world fades away into the background and you become immersed in the digital realm once again. Your eyes and brain filtering out everything but the screen, your fingers nothing more than a means of changing the screen, your body and mind, no longer important, is forgotten.

This is quite the change. I’m excited to see how it plays out. The one thing that bothers me is that the recommendations of the employee councils are not binding, but it’s far better than not having it at all. Hopefully in practice any company that goes against employee desires will be penalized in some tangible way.

The way I see it is that at least 4% of the workforce will have a say in how the companies are run, and those 4% will be elected by the other 95%. Good law, will probably be popular.

There will definitely be a need to have significant amounts of resource (food and other agricultural products) stock piling as the climate becomes more unpredictable and variable. Otherwise famines will be far more common.

Ultimately it’ll mean analyzing the conditions as they currently exist and will exist in the coming decades and having realistic plans based on local and global conditions.

Citys, regions, countries, will need to look at what is currently lacking in their response and put in the resources to address the deficiencies. This could include things like cold/hot shelters, flood mitigation infrastructure, massive food storage infrastructure, backup sources for water and energy supply.

For a resource perspective, we would need improvement to efficiency (including removal of capitalist incentives for making products that are not needed and over marketing them for the sake of profit, obviously), and retrofitting cities for lower overall energy and resource use. Having the ability to run a city on less means the storage and buffers needed in the event of an emergency are much smaller.

It was always projection. It’s honestly comical how often that is the case.