No, the podcast can absolutely missrepresent the thing that it’s sumarizing. The podcast also adds commentary, and I think it’s especially this commentary that I find unreliable.

I think that it is impressive, but not necessarily that useful? In particular, you can’t really trust what they’re saying to be accurate so it doesn’t actually give you that much usable information.

Very cool, but I’m not sure what I would actually use it for.

Yeah thought that might be the case! It’s just a thing that a lot of people have misconceptions about so it’s something that I have a bit of a knee jerk reaction to.

There are a couple of reasons that might not work:

• Maybe we’ll asymptotically approach a point that is lower than human-level cognitive capabilities
• Gradual improvements are susceptible to getting stuck in a local maxima. This is a problem in evolution as well. A lot of animals could in theory evolve, say, human level intelligence in principle, but to reach that point they’d have to go through a bunch of intermediate steps that lead to worse fitness. Gradual scientific improvements are a bit like evolution in this way.
• We also lose knowledge over time. Something as dramatic as a nuclear war would significantly set back the progress in developing AGI, but something less dramatic might also lead to us forgetting things that we’ve already learned.

To be clear, most of the arguments I’m making aren’t really about AGI specifically but about humanities capability to develop arbitrary in principle feasible technologies in general.

Another possibility is that humans just aren’t smart enough to figure out AGI. While I’m sure that we will continue incrementally improving technology in some form, it’s not at all self-evident that these improvements will eventually add up to AGI.

A breakthrough in quantum computing wouldn’t necessarily help. QC isn’t faster than classical computing in the general case, it just happens to be for a few specific algorithms (e.g. factoring numbers). It’s not impossible that a QC breakthrough might speed up training AI models (although to my knowledge we don’t have any reason to believe that it would) and maybe that’s what you’re referring to, but there’s a widespread misconception that Quantum computers are essentially non-deterministic turing machines that “evaluate all possible states at the same time” which isn’t the case.

You could still automatically delete all new posts and comments or something like that I suppose

Yeah it seems like most Brazilian twitter users have gone to bluesky. I’m glad that so few went to threads actually.

I think there’s a cultural difference too. Bluesky is much closer to (a subsection of) twitter culture pre-musk than anything else. Weather you think that’s good or bad is a matter of taste but it is probably the easiest thing to get people who like pre-musk twitter to switch to.

Maybe paywalled subreddits are more intended to become competitors to maybe patreon and only fans rather than present day subreddits? Like a lot of patreons have discord access as a perk, the paywalled subreddit could potentially fill that role instead. Don’t think it seems like a good idea and don’t think it’ll become more than a gimic

Nice, I’ll check it out. I’ve been meaning to customize the desktop a bit more but it works well enough for the moment.

There are probably better alternatives, but I have a raspbery pi plugged into my tv and use KDE connect to remote control the mouse and keyboard from my phone. If I wanna watch youtube I’ll navigate to youtube.com and click on a video.

I think that it’s quite bad if Microsoft puts peoples family photos on their servers without the user realizing it. That’s not a niche privacy nerd sentiment, I think that a lot of people would find that creepy. Having the option easily available can be really good for a lot of non-techy people but it should be very clear what stays on your computer and what doesn’t, and how to keep something private if you want to, which I’m not sure that it is if Microsoft quietly backs up Documents, Pictures etc.

I think he was still on the board after he closed his account, him leaving the board might be much more recent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download

Don’t know anything about this particular case so while “social engineering to create a backdoor” is certainly a possibility, so is the more straightforward explanation that it is drama about real or perceived problems in the nix community. I think that it’s dangerous to dismiss this altogether because of the recent xz debacle.

You should, there’s a lot of cool stuff going on in the Morrowind community and now is a really good time to get (back) into the game. Province: Cyrodiil, which has adding cyrodiil as based on Morrowind-era lore to the game as a goal, is set to release have its first major release later this year. I’ve also been getting into tes3mp lately which is a fork of OpenMW for multiplayer.

As a big fan of the neverwinter nights community,

You might appreciate this April fools joke from the OpenMW team then :D

This might not be what you mean when you say “addictive”, but since I’ve been addicted to it for the last half year or so, I’m gonna suggest it anyway: Morrowind.

While the original came out in 2002 for Windows and later Xbox, there’s been a fan remake of the engine which runs on linux (and windows and macos) called OpenMW.

It’s an open world role playing game about exploring the island of Vvardenfell, which is a strange and alien place that’s easy to lose yourself in. Most of the wildlife is made up of insect- or dinosaur like creatures. There are forests made up of giant mushrooms, and ancient wizard lords who use magic to grow mushrooms into buildings that you have to be able to fly to navigate. It’s a world with a rich history, featuring several different religions, cultures and overlapping and competing political structures.

Despite its age, it is to this day a game with a very active modding community which can extend and improve the games mechanics and visuals. It also features what is probably the longest running active modding project, Tamriel rebuilt which seeks to add the rest of the province of Morrowind to the game. It’s about half way done and has basically another game worth of content in it at this point.

I do love me a good video game video essay, but I think that a more traditional journalistic format has a lot of strengths when it comes to covering small games. It’s probably true that youtube has replaced a lot of traditional journalism but I think that this is overall bad for the video game echo system.

One thing that I think is missing from the equation is good video games journalism that covers indie games. Video game journalism has never been doing amazing but it’s practically dead now.

Tying discovery to the same platform that you consume things on is really bad, because it always gives that distributor way to much power. Similar story with spotify, but journalism about underground music is at least in a slightly better place.