Lvxferre

Okay, here’s a silly explanation.

Imagine two people want to communicate. They shall be named Alice and Bob. It’s night, and they’re too far away to hear each other; but each has an electric torch, and they can see the light coming off the other person’s torch.

Those torches are fancy. They have two settings: “strong” (big arse blinding light) and “weak” (wee light, but still visible). Let’s call a strong flash “1” and a weak flash “0” for short.

They also have a code, that they use to interpret the flashes of light that they send each other. Here it is; check the “binary” column. For example, if Alice sent Bob a weak flash, then a strong flash, then weak, strong, weak, weak, strong, strong, then Bob is supposed to interpret this as an “S”.

This is already enough to communicate. Like this:

• Alice: 0000 0010 0100 1000 0110 1001 0010 0000 0100 0010 0110 1111 0110 0010 0000 0011
• Bob: 0000 0010 0101 0011 0111 0101 0111 0000 0011 1111 0000 0011

Remember, each “0” is a weak flash and each “1” is a strong flash. When we decode it with the table from the link, here’s what you get:

• Alice: Hi Bob
• Bob: Sup?

Now. Messing around with the settings of a torchlight is slow, painful, and annoying. So is to watch closely for light flashes, write them down, and decode them with a table. So… let’s use machines to do so?

• Encoder: a fancy machine with a built-in torch. You type “S” down that machine, and it outputs weak, strong, weak, strong, weak, weak, strong, strong flashes in this order.
• Decoder: another fancy machine. It has an optical sensor; if it gets the exact sequence of flashes from above, it’ll output “S”.

Okay, now let’s replace the torch. We want something that emits light that you can see from as far as reasonably possible; like, from Mars if you want. We could instead use light that has been amplified by radiation, it’s really strong and directed. The common name for that is “laser”.

If by “a little toxicity” you mean a little bit of aggressiveness, sarcasm, etc., I agree with you. It depends a lot on the community though - in some, allowing it will be counter-productive.

If however you mean harassment and hate speech, as the author of the text, I strongly disagree. If the mod doesn’t curb down those things, they might not be “lording” over the discourse, but other users are - because

• users shut each other up through harassment
• hate speech silences whole groups, as they leave the community

Another detail is that you don’t need to control the discourse to curb down harassment, since it’s only behavioural and not discursive in nature.

So IMO when it comes to those two things the problem is not overzealous mods, but dumb ones not doing due diligence, who are a bit too eager to falsely accuse their own users to be voicing hate speech or harassing each other when it is not the case.

[Sorry for the wall of text.]

You’re reading too much into my “look it up”. It was basically “I’m not wasting my time with your rhetorical question”.

I’m aware of what you’re explaining (semantic drift + polysemy), however neither is relevant here.

Wtf is “hate speech”?

Look it up.

To call hate speech and harassment “toxicity” downplays both issues.

Optimists cause more harm than good.

Kids are as smart as we used to be. And we didn’t save the then-future, now-present. Same deal with boomers.

Names will change, corporations will change, investors will stay the same. For us things won’t get meaningfully better or worse than they are.

Maps like this remind me that I suck at geography. Whoever annotated those things knows considerably more about USA than I do.

Pets? One of my cats found a nice solution for that: recruit some dumb human as her heating pillow. (The “dumb human” is me, by the way.) And when I’m not on the bed she sleeps inside a blanket folded in the shape of a pocket.

…although winter here rarely goes below 0°C, subtropical region and all that shit. If I was a bit souther I’d probably have some heaters in the bedrooms, and that’s it - there’s no reason to heat the whole house.

Thanks for the additional info. The article is a mess.

Bluesky is too busy RP-ing as federated to be actually federated.

[Bluesky] is in breach of EU regulations for not disclosing key details about the group […] “All platforms in the EU . . . have to have a dedicated page on their website where it says how many users they have in the EU and where they are legally established,”

The commission cannot regulate Bluesky directly as it does not yet reach the threshold of more than 45mn monthly users in the EU to be designated a very large online platform.

So, basically: it isn’t there yet because it isn’t necessary yet.

…as suspicious as I am of Bluesky, the title of the article is kind of misleading.

Thank you!

Perhaps.

Worst hypothesis the company gets completely bankrupt, but someone takes up the torch.

If you’re referring to symbolic AI, I don’t think that the AI scene will turn 180° and ditch NN-based approaches. Instead what I predict is that we’ll see hybrids - where a symbolic model works as the “core” of the AI, handling the logic, and a neural network handles the input/output.

I believe that the current LLM paradigm is a technological dead end. We might see a few additional applications popping up, in the near future; but they’ll be only a tiny fraction of what was promised.

My bet is that they’ll get superseded by models with hard-coded logic. Just enough to be able to correctly output “if X and Y are true/false, then Z is false”, without fine-tuning or other band-aid solutions.

However once they lose the googlebux, a meaningful part of the revenue stream will be donations. And features implemented because of donators asking for them are, typically, things that we users desire.

May I be frank? I suspect that, in the long run, Mozilla not getting this money will actually benefit Firefox. Sure, so exec will get pissed as they won’t get 5.6 million dollars a year, and Firefox won’t get some weird nobody-asked-for feature that’ll be ditched some time later; but I think that they’ll focus better on the browser this way. Specially because whoever is paying the dinner is the one picking the dish, and with a higher proportion of their effective income coming from donations, what users want will stop being so neglected.

Just my two cents.

I’ll copypaste an interesting comment here:

[Stephen Smith] This article is a great example of a trend I don’t think companies realize they’ve started yet: They have killed the golden goose of user-generated content for short-term profit. // Who would willingly contribute to a modern-day YouTube, Reddit, StackOverflow, or Twitter knowing that they are just feeding the robots that will one day replace them?

You don’t even need robots replacing humans, or people believing so. All you need is people feeling that you’re profiting at their expense.

Also obligatory “If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product”.

They evolved. Just like they would inside your body.

…in Brazil those are sold in skewers, people call them kafta. And yes, if you don’t take care while shaping them, they’ll look, well… not really appetising.