Before this is all over, MS will be charging users to extract their snapshots from a proprietary cloud-only one drive account. The recovery process will take about 3 hours, and involve scrolling through ai-authored help articles that don’t lay out clearly and methodically how to access the old snapshots. The comments on the help articles will begin with “Hello sir, can you confirm that you have followed the steps at this link?”. The link, before delivering you to an irrelevant solution, will shunt you to a landing page that forces you to log into your microsoft account before you can see the answer.

“We don’t understand. Why aren’t people simply searching for Taylor Swift”

Oh look, the sequel to birth certificate.

For real!

Just kind of dawned on me while looking at the number, Reddit’s licensing deal with Google is valued at $60 million per year. That’s really not very much money at all, considering the amount of data Reddit has and continues to accumulate. And chump change for Google, no doubt. Reveals how little leverage Reddit actually has at this point. This was their flagship deal, and the best they could get was $60mil per year.

Also puts the API fiasco in a new light. “Look, we need to charge for API calls, because we need to restrict public access to data as a precondition of selling all your shit in a few months to Google, for the financial equivalent of a cup of coffee.”

Think it’s more of an allusion to lurking habits, active times, metadata, stuff not related to public posts. I’d imagine the average user has plenty of stuff they’ve browsed through that they wouldn’t want their family / co-workers, etc. to know.

Would also need to get a burner phone number w/ answering machine to take calls from 240 million grandmas, cheapskate businesses and cash-strapped public schools for any & all tech support questions until the end of time, because if there was an issue with system stability in any way whatsoever, or if the router went down or the printer stopped working, they’d assume it was the fault of ‘the guy who changed everything’.

Linux is great & everything, but this sounds like a recipe for utter disaster, not a way to make an easy buck.

Interesting. I’m curious to know more about what you think of training datasets. Seems like they could be described as a stored representation of reality that maybe checks the boxes you laid out. It’s a very different structure of representation than what we have as animals, but I’m not sure it can be brushed off as trivial. The way an AI interacts with a training dataset is mechanistic, but as you describe, human worldviews can be described in mechanistic terms as well (I do X because I believe Y).

You haven’t said it, so I might be wrong, but are you pointing to freewill and imagination as somehow tied to intelligence in some necessary way?

Thanks! I’m not clear on what you mean by a worldview simulation as a scratch pad for reasoning. What would be an example of that process at work?

For sure, defining intelligence is non trivial. What clear the bar of intelligence, and what doesn’t, is not obvious to me. So that’s why I’m engaging here, it sounds like you’ve put a lot of thought into an answer. But I’m not sure I understand your terms.

Not being combative or even disagreeing with you - purely out of curiosity, what do you think are the necessary and sufficient conditions of intelligence?

I’m glad to hear this and hopefully it fulfills my fantasy of having sex with Clippy.

Interesting.

I hope for a new paradigm in web searching. I wouldn’t even mind if a search took 5-10 minutes, if it meant a handful of quality results. I easily waste that much time or more sifting through garbage ai and ad-driven results as it stands.

All I want is a search engine that 1. doesn’t make moral judgements on the results relevant to a search, 2. filters out ai and ad farm results by default, and 3. can be toggled to effectively search web 1.0-style forums.

White House used Panic!

It hurt itself in its confusion!

Microsoft OS workload on an AI-optimized chip:

(5%) consumer benefit - users can get access to Clippy+ with a Microsoft premium account subscription, that if users aren’t subscribed, they’re reminded every time they go into the settings application

(15%) anti-piracy & copyright protection

(70%) harvesting and categorizing all user activities, for indiscriminate internal use, sale to other companies, and delivery to governments

(10%) Uninstallable OEM bloatware that does the same, but with easily exploited security flaws that are never effectively patched

Not sure if you already know, but - sophisticated large language models can be run locally on basic consumer-grade hardware right now. LM Studio, which I’ve been playing with a bit, is a host for insanely powerful, free, and unrestricted LLMs.

Excellent point.

I see what you mean, but I disagree that this is a misfire or miscalculation on the church’s part. This latest development reads as another jab at gay people, from a familiar angle. It’s a reaffirmation by the church that same sex couples who love each other aren’t seen as equals in a congregation.

Nobody should be raping children. Roman Catholic priests have done this, are doing this, and the Roman Catholic church has a long and ongoing history of covering it up. If the head of the Roman Catholic church fails to stop it, they’re blameworthy.

Something a pope could easily promise, but never will:

“We acknowledge our church has a history of sexual assault against children. Our church has sought to obscure this history of abuse. This was wrong, is wrong, and needs to be corrected. Sexual assault and abuses of power in the church are unacceptable and will no longer be tolerated. The church commits to fully funding local law enforcement investigations into all allegations of sexual assault by church staff, and disclosing any information the church may have that is relevant to those investigations. All victims must be heard. With victim consent, their stories will be recorded in a centralized, public, transparent record not administrated or controlled by the church in any way.”

Any church that isn’t afraid of raking in money in envelopes, but is afraid of making a commitment like the above, is a problem, yep, I agree. There’s no excuse. Saying the pope doesn’t have the power to do this is mealymouthed and also, incorrect.

I don’t know if you’re a Catholic or not, I just want to say more generally - I don’t see how any Catholic, including the pope, has the right to opine on the finer points of official scriptures while priests are raping children and the church covers it up.