Revolutions by Mike Duncan. It’s a history podcast with each season about a revolution, American, French, South American etc. with a huge backlog

Already listened through once but now I put it on to go to sleep, cause it’s fine if I miss something now.

Yeah but this is a “needle in a haystack” problem that chatgpt and AI in general are actually very useful for, ie. Solutions that are hard to find but easy to verify. Issues like this are hard to find as it requires combing through your code , config files and documentation to find the problem, but once you find the solution it either works or it doesn’t.

I mean openais not getting off Scott free, they’ve been getting sued a lot recently for this exact copy right argument. New York times is suing them for potential billions.

They throw the book at us

Do they though, since the Metallica lawsuits in the aughts there hasnt been much prosecution at the consumer level for piracy, and what little there is is mostly cease and desists.

It will eventually have to happen, cars, including evs, are not sustainable, at least at the current levels of usage. If you look at any climate report looking into it the choice is between Americans driving a lot less or severe climate change. I hope murica will make the right choice but the more we tie cars to ideas of freedom and peace of mind the harder that choice will be. It will be tough to fight considering the tens of thousands of hours of car ads most Americans are exposed to pushing that narrative, so it will require just as much reinforcement on the negatives of cars, traffic fatalities, CO2 emissions, airborne micro plastics from tires, maintenance and repair costs, obesity, sprawled cities, etc.

It may not happen in our lifetime, or at least when your healthy enough to bike/hike , but eventually we’ll have to transition away from personal cars. Id prefer to build towards that future now for the reasons listed above but if you want to delay that’s fine, you’ll just have to explain to your grandkids why you did.

Yeah maybe there are are 2000 mountains, but how many have mountain bike trails? If there are trails then there is probably some organization maintaining them like the state or national park service who can also run the shuttles. Shuttles are also pretty cheap and can stop at multiple trail heads based off requests. You can also rotate where the shuttles go each day / week so if there’s a more obscure trail/mountain then you can just wait until it comes up in the schedule. The towns would also probably want to run the shuttles as well since it will bring business to the area.

Ok, let’s assume we want less people on the mountain, what gives you the right to go to the mountain then? Because you can afford a car? That doesn’t seem fair. Also most people have a car so it’s not restricting that many people. If we say only 30 people should go to the mountain a day that’s way easier to enforce if we say only 2 shuttles of 15 are allowed. It’s also fairer as who gets to go is just determined by whoever signs up first, as opposed to whether someone owns something.

I think many people would like to socialize. There’s a loneliness epidemic and many people are looking for friends but don’t know where to meet them. If I was looking for friends with common interests like mountain biking the shuttle up would be a great place to meet them. Just because I want to get away from civilization doesn’t mean I want to get away from socializing, I hike regularly with groups of people and they mostly enhance the experience. If you aren’t into that that’s fine too, just put on your headphones ignore everyone and set off on the trail solo, nothing stopping you from doing that.

For the last point like I said usage can be controlled, even better then cars, but assuming the same usage a shuttle is less pollution then multiple cars. If like you said there are 5-6 cars at a particular trail head then one shuttle carrying all those people will cause less air and noise pollution and make it safer for animals.

No I haven’t lived in rural America but most Americans haven’t either. Most live in the suburbs, cities or towns. It’s like saying people need to eat less sugar and we should stop using it for every food and people saying “what about the diabetics who need sugar” yeah they do but that’s not the majority of people. We can make exceptions for them while also overhauling our food industry to remove this thing that’s causing health problems for most people.

As for the mountain bike scenario ideally you would take a train to a town near the trail and then the town can have a shuttle up to the mountain. If we did fully invest in public transit this wouldn’t add too much to your trip and has some other benefits.

• This would be good for the park and wildlife in general as less traffic would make it easier for animals to migrate. Less roadkill

• This would lower the amount of development needed in the park as parking lots wouldn’t be necessary.

• It would make mountain biking more accessible for people who don’t have a car or can’t drive.

• It would make it more social, you could meet people on the shuttle on the way up, if there are regulars then a community could form.

• It would reduce the amount of air and noise pollution.

It is a different level of scale, mastodon has about 1 million users spread over a bunch of instances. Threads has over 200 million users on one instance. also due to the network nature of social media the amount of connections and messages sent through those connections can scale exponentially with the amount of users.

That would work if we invested as much into public transit as into cars. This goes back to designing cities for public transit instead of cars. If we did that with the money we currently are putting into cars we could have high frequency metro lines where inner city interstate / highway routes and high speed rail for inter city interstate/highway routes along with frequent bus service in the cities/towns on the lines. We think public transit is inherently slow and unreliable but that’s because we never invest enough money to make it fast and reliable.

llms suck because they steal content and are unreliable since they don’t link back to sources

Open ai makes a deal to pay media org for there content and makes it so they can link back to original article

“Ars technica sold out”

I feel more comfortable walking around them, they never blow stop lights /signs, always go the speed limit, never honk (except when parking I guess) and are very patient. If they see a pedestrian they just stop instead of creeping forward making you question whether to walk in front of them and then getting mad when you won’t cross in front of their still moving car like people.

By a truly unbelievable coincidence, I was recently out for a walk when I saw a small package fall off a truck ahead of me. … Inside, we found the latest versions of the Cellebrite software, a hardware dongle designed to prevent piracy (tells you something about their customers I guess!), and a bizarrely large number of cable adapters.

I guess it makes sense signal works with the mafia

Depends who owns it / who payed to have it constructed. If the tenets own it and payed to have it constructed, or payed someone who payed someone… Then it’s a condo or a co-op depending on whether you own a unit in the building or own x% of the building which entitles you to a unit.

If another organization, almost always some form of government, payed to have it constructed and owns it then it is public housing.

If it’s anything like cities skylines original, houses just pop up according to demand with seemingly no construction cost calculated, probably because it would add a ton more complexity with mortgages and speculative markets etc. for little gain to players who mostly just want to play with trains and metros.

Trump said in a Truth Social post Tuesday. “Biden’s hatred of Bitcoin only helps China, Russia, and the Radical Communist Left. We want all the remaining Bitcoin to be MADE IN THE USA!!! It will help us be ENERGY DOMINANT!!!”

Didn’t COMMUNIST China ban it mostly because it was putting strain on their grid? Not sure how wasting states worth of electricity to fuel a glorified ponzi scheme is going to help with energy dominance but who am I to question the self-proclaimed genius.

You can get the film replaced, for free the first time, then like $20 after. Mine basically came all the way off on the fold for my z flip, but then I went to a galaxy store and they replaced it and it’s fine now.

Id recommend disc golfing. You can start if with just a mid range disc and that’ll cost ~$15 then your good to go. Most major cities will have at least one course that’s free at a park so you don’t need to spend more after that. It has a pretty low skill floor so you can pick it up pretty easily but a very high ceiling so there is a lot to learn and grow which can help with depression. Also gets you walking outside in nature which can help with depression too. It can be as social as you want it to be, you can invite friends, or just go solo, and even if your solo you can strike up conversation with the people in front of you and sometimes they’ll even let you throw with them.

If the choice is between the u.s. government and the Chinese government choosing what’s appropriate for me to watch then I’d choose the u.s government as it is still has some democratic levers which the American people can use to stop it from propagandizing too much. There is no such influence they can wield in the Chinese government. I’m not ok with it though and it’s more a matter of the lesser of two evils. Ideally there would be no centralized control over these services and the algorithms would be open source and the servers federated, to allow people to transparently evaluate the biases each service has and make their own decision free from the centralizing network effect present in current social media. If I am unable to inspect it then I want the person who is able to do so to have interests that are better aligned with mine, either an elected representative or at least a worker with similar national interests to me.

As for the book question it’s not a matter of a single book. Unless they’re advocating for atrocities I’m for any creator being allowed on the platform, the problem is how the platform is showing that content, it’s a matter of the book store instead of a single book. If the library has a copy of the three body problem, or even Maos little red book alongside a bunch of other books countering it then that’s fine. But if there’s no library and only one book store in town then the owner of that book store has a lot of political power and should be under a lot of scrutiny. If the owner of that store isn’t a part of the community and doesn’t have interests that align with it, or even run counter to it, then the people of that community are right to become skeptical and demand a more open system. This is why libraries are so important, they provide an information repository owned by the public instead of private interests.

It’s not about the data, it’s about the algorithm. Unlike other social media which has followers, subscribers etc. that dictate what you see tik tok is a pure black box recommendation algorithm. Tons of people’s world views are shaped by tik tok and a slight tweak to this algorithm can have huge political consequences. I’m far from a china hawk but even I can recognize the dangers of allowing that sort of machine to be in the hands of a foreign rival. Ideally we’d take it out of the hands of the corporate interests running the ones here in the u.s. as well and force them to be open sour e, but that doesn’t seem possible right now and at least those companies are more beholden to the American people then byte dance, there are American employees in those companies that can raise a red flag if management is telling them to push the algorithm in a direction.

The youth also probably won’t care in a years time. Even if tik tok actually shuts down in the u.s. instead of selling, which I still doubt they will as that would effectively be burning 10s of billions of dollars to prove a point, the youth can just move onto another app like Instagram reels or YouTube shorts which offer the same experience but aren’t as good because of the mass network effect tik tok has. If everyone is forced out of tik tok and onto one of the other apps they’ll gain that same network effect and have the same experience after a bit of transition/ AI training time. The kids aren’t attached to byte dance or tik tok, they’re attached to the content and content creators who make it, and those can move to another app very easily.

It looks like they didn’t even get the money, these were “student loans” so the money just went to pay for the tuition.

Your missing another big part and that’s unions are hamstrung down there. A lot of places in the Midwest offer similar advantages, ports aren’t as good but you can still ship a lot on the great lakes, but they won’t go there because they’re afraid of unions.

Always good to start an argument with name calling. Did you actually want a discussion or did you want to post your opinion and pretend it’s the only true one in a topic as subjective as the definition of art?

Just because someone isn’t able to discern whether someone has put more effort into something doesn’t mean that person lacks skill. A lot of people would not be able to tell some modern art from a child’s art, that doesn’t invalidate the artists skill. There are some people though who can tell the modern art painting and recognize the different decisions the artist made, just as someone can tell whether someone put effort and meaning into a piece of art generated by AI. There’s always the obvious deformities an errors that it may spit out, but there’s also other tendencies the AI has that most are not aware of but someone who has studied it can recognize and can recognize the way the author may or may not have handled it.

Back to the camera argument all those options and choices you listed of saturation, focus, shutter speed … can also be put into an AI prompt to get that desired effect. Do those choices have any less of a meaning because someone entered a word instead of turning a dial on a camera? Does a prompt maker convey less of a feeling of isolation to the subject by entering “shallow depth of field” as a photographer who had configured there camera to do so? Could someone looking at the piece not recognize that choice and realize the meaning that was conveyed?

As for your final argument about it being used to farm clicks and ad dollars, that’s just art in capitalism. Most art these days is made for the same purposes of advertising and marketing, because artists need to eat and corporations looking to sell products are one of the few places willing to give them money for their work. If anything AI art allows more messages that are less friendly to consumerism to flourish since it’s less constrained by the cash needed to pay a highly technically trained artist.

It’s obviously horrible in the near term for the artist but long term if they realize there position they may come ahead. AI needs human originated art to keep going or it may devolve into a self referential mess. If the artists realize there common interests and are able to control the use of there art they may be able to regain an economic position and sell it to the AI training companies. The companies would probably want more differentiated art to freshen the collapsing median AI tends towards so they get to make the avant-garde art while the ad drivel and click farming is left to the AI. This would require a lot of government regulation but it’s the only positive outcome I can see from this so anything on that path, like the watermarking, would be good.