gurkendoktor

6 ms·

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by gurkendoktor 4y ago
Humans are great at making up purpose where there is absolutely none, and indeed this is a helpful mechanism for dealing with post-scarcity. The philosophical problem that I see with the "AI overlord age" (although not directly re
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by gurkendoktor 4y ago
Your comment summarizes what I worry might be a more widespread opinion than I expected. If you think that human extinction is a fair price to pay for creating a supercomputer, then our value systems are so incompatible that I really don&#x
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by gurkendoktor 4y ago
One avenue of hope for successful AI alignment that I've read somewhere is that we don't need most laypeople to understand the risks of it going wrong, because for once the most powerful people on this planet have incentives that
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by gurkendoktor 4y ago
To be fair, ants have not created humanity. I don't think it's inconceivable for a friendly AI to exist that "enjoys" protecting us in the way a friendly god might. And given that we have AI (well, language models...) th
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by gurkendoktor 4y ago
For one thing, we could try to come up with safety measures that prevent the most basic paperclip maximizer disaster from happening. At this point I almost wish it was still the military that makes these advances in AI, not private companie
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by gurkendoktor 4y ago
Not you specifically, but I honestly don't understand how positive many in this community (or really anyone at all) can be about these news. Tim Urban's article explicitly touches on the risk of human extinction, not to mention al
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by gurkendoktor 4y ago
Ooohh, I didn't know this name for it, thanks. I somehow came across it as The Sultan's Riddle on the internet: https://explainextended.com/2016/12/31/happy-new-year-8/ I prefer this less steri
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by gurkendoktor 4y ago
Self-correcting because frustrated users will simply start their own Google? Even if that happens, their second generation of employees will start a revolt if their company doesn't follow the latest DIE best practices. I honestly think
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by gurkendoktor 4y ago
Here's what I would consider a boring example of such anti-vaxx heresy: https://www.eugyppius.com/p/maximum-vaccination According to this Guardian article, the "Center for Countering Digital Hate" (also
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by gurkendoktor 4y ago
I agree about the engineering failure, but I'm not sure if mass hysteria is the right term. It was messier than that, we also saw a few leaders chilling out too much too early. My favorite: https://twitter.com/billdebla
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by gurkendoktor 4y ago
I disagree. The appeal to solidarity w.r.t. masks would never have worked because a tiny minority of scalpers can ruin it all. But the white lie didn't work either, so it seems like the worse option regardless. Appeals to solidarity w.
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by gurkendoktor 4y ago
Agree with everything you said, but want to add one more point: I have made my peace with all of these bureaucratic failures. Maybe a certain amount of contradiction and chaos is part of living in a democracy. The scary part is that at the
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by gurkendoktor 4y ago
Notably, the Mac Mini does not have a stupid external power adapter, but just uses a standard cable that costs like $1. I did carry mine around for a while, and it was glorious! I'm not sure why Apple's competitors insist on inclu
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by gurkendoktor 4y ago
I went from a 16" MacBook Pro with an i9 and 32 GB of RAM to the MacBook Air with 16 GB of RAM, and my build times at work were almost exactly the same. But the single-core speed makes everything _feel_ so much faster than the stupid s
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by gurkendoktor 4y ago
Exactly: Most studies that I've been referred to are shiny McKinsey pages that boil down to big companies having more diverse boards on average. Besides what you said, that's not a surprising correlation because it's easy for
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by gurkendoktor 4y ago
If you look at some PRs on elementary's GitHub, you will see that neither Cassidy James nor Danielle were cranking out mountains of code at any point in time. Both were involved in reviews and UX decisions, Cassidy seemed a bit more in
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by gurkendoktor 4y ago
elementary's daily/preview builds are only accessible to GitHub sponsors over a certain amount. I wonder how that worked out, because I like this pseudo-subscription model a lot better, and wish AppCenter could even figure out tha
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by gurkendoktor 4y ago
> people who clearly have no idea what the actual majority of people pushing for inclusive language are typically suggesting and shy. It does not seem to matter what any majority wants. I have never seen a request to rename something bec
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by gurkendoktor 4y ago
> You have inflected nouns and adjectives -- you'd have to come up with new endings for those Two proposals that I've seen replace all endings with either -x or -ens. German source - https://de.wikipedia.org/wik
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by gurkendoktor 4y ago
German unfortunately has no equivalent of singular they. The concept is a non-starter because "they" and "she" are both "sie". The new PC spelling is to always write he*she or he:she instead of he/she to m
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by gurkendoktor 4y ago
There is (was?) always a lot of C++ in Core Animation stacktraces, and Core Animation was really foundational to the iPhone UI.
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by gurkendoktor 4y ago
> Things like Fitt's Law and so on. It was not just opinion. Here's another one: "users were roughly 37% faster at finding items when visual indicators varied both in color and icon compared to text alone" Source: ht
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by gurkendoktor 4y ago
A curious inverse of this headline from last year: > Code in huge ransomware attack written to avoid computers that use Russian, says new report Edit, a better reference than the NBC article: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2
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by gurkendoktor 4y ago
I have moved from a 13" M1 Air to the 16" M1 Pro only because I wanted a bigger screen for traveling. I feel some buyer's remorse because it was more than twice as expensive, and I don't really care about the extra speed
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by gurkendoktor 5y ago
A neutral web browser is not one that only lets me access politically neutral websites (all five of them), but one that doesn't care what I look at. In fact, the few times that I've used Yandex were because it is not politically
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by gurkendoktor 5y ago
Regarding your last paragraph, I generally agree, but there is at least one exception: If you need lots of RAM and nothing else, then many consumer laptops won't do the job.
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by gurkendoktor 5y ago
> history has shown that slavery is unsustainable and that humans resist and succeed against it time and time again The problem is that technology as a force amplifier is getting better and better. At some point it gives the 1% enough po
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by gurkendoktor 5y ago
I admire your optimism, but almost every Steam Deck review complained about the UI. All the work under the hood looks really good, with Proton and pressure-vessel and so on, but they just don't seem to have the almighty yet tasteful UI
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by gurkendoktor 5y ago
I think that technical hurdles absolutely matter, even more so at the current scale of elementary. And offering apps that are neither sandboxed nor auditable sounds like a PR disaster waiting to happen once someone steals Bitcoin wallets. T
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by gurkendoktor 5y ago
I don't think that's the basic premise. elementary is not just a GTK theme, they have their own set of apps (for better or for worse) which follow their HIG, they are rewriting productivity apps to use the EDS backend throughout t

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