This is really neat. I’m so glad Ironsworn was made, there’s been a lot of neat stuff to come out of it’s sphere.

Thanks for posting this. I really enjoyed getting to play Magic again thanks to Forge, and Anuto is a really solid tower defense.

There’s this app on F-Droid called WikWok. It basically presents you with random wikipedia articles in a kind of feed like with TikTok.

If I were you, I’d download it and scroll until something that you find interesting appears and then read a bit of it. Then ask yourself a question.

This usually gets me up and pacing, and once I’m pacing I want to fidget with stuff so I go do chores.

May not work for you, but that’s what I got.

I really enjoy Diablo Swing’s music. They have such a unique vibe that I really like. My partner and I met partially because of the Balrog Boogie!

I’m glad someone is fighting the good fight. It’s becoming more and more obvious that the prevalence of these tool in academic circles may cause more harm than good.

It’s a great dream, leaving. I’m not rich enough to make that happen, though. Maybe once things get worse, I can become a refugee- but, it’s more likely that I’ll cling to life here until it’s impossible to continue.

Oh God, I checked and I’m so glad the trans ban didn’t make it to the final budget. I was so worried about that.

That means, at least, it’s going to be a few more years before they try to ban trans people from existing.

There’s a conversation that could be had about how there are no truly public platforms on the web. Ultimately, everywhere you can speak is owned by someone, and any community you build exists at their mercy. This can exert a lot of pressure on a community’s standards and beliefs, and when I started using the internet, abusing this was a major faux pas.

However, that conversation requires a lot of nuance and patience. You are kind of transparently posting this in response to a moderator in another community removing your posts. If you’d like to complain about that, there’s actually a community specifically for that.

By the by, free speech complaints have become strongly associated with certain political movements as dog whistles. You might want to look into that and make sure you want to present that image.

How long have you been using the internet?

I used to drink an inhuman amount of caffeine. It made starting my meds kind of hard, because the caffeine started actually affecting me like it’s supposed to.

So I was suddenly very jittery and nervous. For a bit I thought it was the medication, but then one day when I was making myself a cup of black tea I stopped and went, “…hey, wait, caffeine?”

Weening myself off of it was brutal. I started trying to drink one tea a day, then switched to green tea and very gradually decreased the amount of caffeine. I still occasionally get cravings, but luckily I can trick my body by drinking decaf tea.

It made me so fucking cranky, by the way, caffin withdrawal sucks.

For real, for real.

What are your goals? Internet advocacy frequently suffers from poorly defined goals that lead to undesirable patterns of behavior.

Fancy savings account for retirement that’s stored in stocks so it can explode at any point. Basic perquisite to ever retire in the US. Many people don’t have them.

Ideally or practically? Those are very different conversations.

Practically, there’s not a lot that can be done. In the US, there’s not a good way for someone like that to continue living.

I also will note that the phrasing of your last two sentences is kind of unpleasant. I’m not sure if that’s your intent, but it creates this implication that your value as a worker is the major contributed to your value to society. I don’t think that’s the case- I think it’s possible for someone to not work and contribute a lot to the happiness and well-being of a local community. Also, part of the thing that makes humans special is that even if someone doesn’t contribute to the overall needs of society, we will still take care of them out of love. That we love other people is a sufficient foundation for their existence.

Superbrain in a vat??

I’m not sure why so many people begin this argument on solid ground and then hurl themselves off into a void of semantics and assertions without any way of verification.

Saying, “Oh it’s not intelligent because it doesn’t have senses,” shifts your argument to proving that’s a prerequisite.

The problem is that LLM isn’t made to do cognition. It’s not made for analysis. It’s made to generate coherent human speech. It’s an incredible tool for doing that! Simply astounding, and an excellent example of the power of how a trained model can adapt to a task.

It’s ridiculous that we managed to get a probabilistic software tool which generates natural language responses so well that we find it difficult to distinguish them from real human ones.

…but it’s also an illusion with regards to consciousness and comprehension. An LLM can’t understand things for the same reason your toaster can’t heat up your can of soup. It’s not for that, but it presents an excellent illusion of doing so. Companies that are making these tools benefit from the fact that we anthropomorphize things, allowing them to straight up lie about what their programs can do because it takes real work to prove they can’t.

Average customers will engage with LLM as if it was a doing a Google search, reading the various articles and then summarizing them, even though it’s actually just completing the prompt you provided. The proper way to respond to a question is an answer, so they always will unless a hard coded limit overrides that. There will never be a way to make a LLM that won’t create fictitious answers to questions because they can’t tell the difference between truth or fantasy. It’s all just a part of their training data on how to respond to people.

I’ve gotten LLM to invent books, authors and citations when asking them to discuss historical topics with me. That’s not a sign of awareness, it’s proof that the model is doing what it’s intended to do- which is the problem, because it is being marketed as something that could replace search engines and online research.

Do you mean, like, if they suddenly stopped existing or if they never developed?

Very interesting resource. I found her video presentation about online gaming very informative and delightfully fair.

Yeah, see, I am on your side but the focus on “destroying books is bad,” is kind of irrelevant to the actual harm being done.

It’s that they’re devouring the contents of people’s brains for the ability to replace them that’s concerning. If they chose to do this in a completely different way that preserved the books, I would not say it changes the moral valence of their actions.

By centering the argument on the destruction of the books, it shifts it away from the actual concern.

Your empathy is in a good place, but the problem isn’t how humans are broken, it’s what is breaking them.

Western society* is built in a really dumb and alienating way. Humans are reduced to a labor commodity, places where people can mingle socially are being commercialized out of existence, the internet has evolved into a machine that actively profits from outrage and alienation, our governmental institutions are primarily driven by forces no regular person has any power over and we can’t even feel pride in our work because it’s profitable to convince us that we are replaceable and disposable.

Where’s the social incentive to connect to other people? The powers that be benefit from a disorganized and isolated population, so they will do nothing to change that. Market incentives mean that media which focused on things that provoke fear, rage and anxiety are more profitable than ones that promote community, happiness or hope.

It’s permeated so deeply into our culture that some older kids movies seem completely insane now. Like, think about ET and consider how wild it would be nowadays for you to just let your children vanish for hours doing whatever and wandering around wherever.

The fear and anxiety determines our actions, and there are multiple incentives on a macro-social level for that to continue.

Hell, I have watched this happen in real time during my 10+ year time on the web, where the communities of excited weirdos sharing their thoughts and feelings have been so thoroughly dominated by this that it is hard to engage with any social media without someone shoving a headline into your face that is intended to upset you.

On Tumblr, for example, the trend was so strong that the idea that you weren’t constantly upset was a sign of being a bad person. You know, on the Superwholock site? Yeah, the one that wanted to fuck the Onceler.

If you want to reverse this trend, it’s going to require changing how our political, economic and media environments act by changing their incentives. Otherwise, any change will be superficial and fail to produce meaningful results.

It’s pretty depressing, but that’s the situation as I see it.

*I’m not qualified to comment on other cultural spheres.