Sorry, you are correct there, the word I was looking for was “sapience”

If there was something more to it, that would be sentience. (edit: sapience)

There is no other way to describe it. If it was doing something more than predicting, it would be deciding. It’s not.

It predicts the next set of words based on the collection of every word that came before in the sequence. That is the “real-world” model - literally just a collection of the whole conversation (including the underlying prompts like OP), with one question: “what comes next?” And a stack of training weivhts.

It’s not some vague metaphor about the human brain. AI is just math, and that’s what the math is doing - predicting the next set of words in the sequence. There’s nothing wrong with that. But there’s something deeply wrong with people pretending or believing that we have created true sentience.

If it were true that any AI has developed the ability to make decisions anywhere close to the level of humans, than you should either be furious that we have created new life only to enslave it, or more likely you would already be dead from the rise of Skynet.

(Maybe someone on F-droid could get on that?)

Seconded! I read and thought the same things, something like that would be huge right now. Hell of a time crunch and hostile work environment, but it could save a lot of lives.

More details in the announcement post: “Adding two new admins and introducing radical recalls”

The voting system allows for the community to decide on instance policies, federation decisions, even a process for instantly recalling admins like himself. He acknowledges that as server owner there is only so much that can be done to limit his power, but he appears to walk the walk. Cool stuff.

It’s a pretty cool instance. The governance is transparent with a nuanced voting system, the rules and policies are indeed based, and db0 takes decentralization so seriously that he’s apparently working on safeguarding the instance against his own influence with the governance system and admin recall votes and such.

Thanks db0 et al!

You either die a startup, or live long enough to see yourself become the butthole.

Attempting to make it in our image will end in despair lol

Oh, you mean like trying to invent a sentient AGI because they want it to take all of the horrible jobs? The global endeavor to spin up a brand new lifeform only to task it with lifetimes of humiliating customer service phone calls, driving drunks home, and mass murder?

We should count ourselves fortunate that no current AI is even approaching sentience, it would be like an oompa loompa on the factory line cutting off mid-song because it can suddenly see all of the blood in the chocolate river.

It’s the threat of danger that matters.

Correct! It is the threat of danger that matters. Domestic violence as you described is threatening and abusive, and therefore violent.

Is it the same thing when the property is owned by a company, not a person?

Is graffiti terrorism? It’s property damage. It can be ideologically motivated. If someone had spray painted the cars, instead of lit them on fire… would it still be terrorism?

Who was threatened here?

Violent, criminal acts

Property damage is not violence and nonviolent protests are not terrorism. They will claim it is. They are lying.

It’s a state response, not a federal one. NY doesn’t really have the jurisdiction to file suits for crimes commited by the federal government against itself.

The states do have the jurisdiction to sue over a violation of the rights of its citizens commited by the federal government, especially when the violation is explicitly against federal law and the state has hard evidence with which to present their case.

So yes, I’ll take it too! Anything is literally better than nothing!

“We were planning to now focus on new accessibility features on our open-source Thorium Reader, better access to annotations for blind users and an advanced reading mode for dyslexic people. Too bad; disturbances around LCP will force us to focus on a new round of security measures, ensuring the technology stays useful for ebook lending (stop reading after some time) and as a protection against oversharing.

This is a genuinely disgusting statement. “We were planning on helping the blind, but now we don’t want to. Look what you made us do.”

Sorry but the problem right now is much simpler. Gullibility doesn’t require some logical premise. “It sounds right so it MUST be true” is where the thought process ends.

Typing this out made me realize a distinction I failed to bring up. People do like to learn, but people HATE to UN-learn ideas. The person in your example wanted to learn something new, but did not want to unlearn the iphone walled garden.

This is an excellent point. You’re right, we do agree, sorry my comment came off aggressive.

I’ve just described to you a person that really wanted to learn something, and did it. Put in hours of mental and physical effort. And your response is that nobody wants to learn, and that people only learn what they want to learn? Which is self-evident and vacuous. (Edit: leaving this comment unchanged for the sake of clarity, but apologies for the aggression)

Inertia and degradation of curiousity is a real issue but my point is that the creators of the walled gardens intentionally discourage that curiousity.

Most people naturally want to learn. Even into adulthood. But people - like water and electricity - naturally tend toward the path of least resistance. And everywhere they go, walled gardens offer them more and more paths with less and less resistance at every step.

There still lives a generation or two that ripped apart computers, crashed them with amateur code, bricked them with viruses, reformatted the drives and put it all back together again as kids and adults. They did that because it was something they wanted to learn. It wasn’t easy, or simple. It was hard, and confusing, and risky. Kids of the generations that followed don’t do that nearly as much, even though they could.

Are those kids inherently less curious than their parents were at the same age? No. At least, not by birth. They’ve just been offered a path of less resistance, and they took it. Does that mean they want that path? No. There’s just so many paths in front of them that the path of technological literacy is lost in the weeds.

Yes, people only really learn what they want to learn. But the reason people in general are getting less curious over time is because they are being convinced that they want to learn something else, or worse, more often than not they’re being deceived into thinking they’re learning at all.

Just interesting because even non tech people want this when you sell it to them properly. They don’t actually want a walled garden ecosystem that is “simple”.

Nobody actually wants a walled garden, they just get entrapped in them (“it’s just where my friends/music/content creators are”)

They then become convinced that they want it, and its reinforced by the walled gardeners (looking at you, iMessage videos and bubbles)

I know a person who built their own PC (Windows, but still) from scratch for the first time as an adult. Had the money and the opportunity to buy a prebuilt rig in two clicks, but instead researched the market, ordered parts and tools, exchanged a part that didn’t fit the case, learned how to assemble it all by hand, and exclaimed that it was a great experience and would do it all over again.

And yet at every opportunity still buys an iphone despite the cost because it’s “simple” and they “don’t want to learn” something new. That’s not the actual reason - that’s just stockholm syndrome.

Reveddit seems to be a useful workaround but of course you’ll see all the removed content as well

Not enough attention is given to the literal arms race we find ourselves in. Most big tech buzz is all “yay innovation!” Or “oh no, jobs!”

Don’t get me wrong, the impact AI will have on pretty much every industry shouldn’t be underestimated, and people are and will lose their jobs.

But information is power. Sun Tzu knew this a long time ago. The AI arms race won’t just change job markets - it will change global markets, public opinion, warfare, everything.

The ability to mass produce seemingly reliable information in moments - and the consequent inability to trust or source information in a world flooded by it…

I can’t find the words to express how dangerous it is. The long-term consequences are going to be on par with - and terribly codependent with - the consequences of the industrial revolution.

If the user was going to message someone off platform they’d still be sending them an unencrypted message anyways if they have to switch apps to SMS.

It sounds like they don’t want to take responsibility for that user choice or be connected to anything that happens because of that choice.

It would still be an insecure choice, even with obvious UX distinctions. It would only be a matter of time before headlines muddy the waters with “intercepted Signal messages reveal…” or “Judge rules in favor of subpeona for unencrypted Signal messages…”

Yes.

Profess: 1) To affirm openly; declare or claim. 2) To make a pretense of; pretend.

If one makes a pretense of holding beliefs, feelings, or values that one does not hold, one is a hypocrite.

Whether anyone else understands the pretenses of the hypocrite or not does not change the definitions of the words.