Sometimes I think about how so many of us look up at the stars and wonder “if there really are aliens out there, why aren’t they colonizing the galaxy as fast as possible, as any intelligent species would naturally do?” like it’s the thing just anyone looking at the stars might think. we might be the horrifying biomechanical paperclip maximizer that the other aliens in the galaxy have to band together to defeat or face extermination.
Yep, I think the accepted English pronunciation of “Euler” is as a homophone of “oiler”, so the award would be “the oilies”. I never heard the name out loud as a kid so I pronounced it “you’-ler” until well into adulthood, until someone made a big deal about me not pronouncing it correctly. I remember the occasion very clearly 🙃
We can call it the Euler Award for Excessive Achievement in Science. Or the Eulies if you’re in the industry. And we can make a big deal about it if anyone pronounces it “the yoolies”
That tracks. It felt like someone at the show really liked the first version but someone at the network made them change it, so they were like “fuck it, put a tambourine under it idk” and called it good enough.
Ooh, I never get to ask this question: Do you have a preference between the initial version and the season 3 version? I always felt like they changed it because they got the feedback “fans don’t like the song” but they didn’t really know what to do with that feedback, so they wound up with a rewrite that sounded almost, but not quite, exactly the same. But I am in the group that never really vibed with either so I find it hard to draw comparisons. Curious to get a perspective from someone who liked the intro.
It’s nice. Feels like browsing in an old western saloon.
I hope it happens. And by it I mean VR / AR equipment that I can comfortably use for a few hours at a time without getting sweaty, fatigued, or motion sick. When I’m using a computer I like to have a bunch of displays, and it would be really convenient to have a comfortable headset that I can wear instead and live my dream of coding in VR / AR and spin displays up or down on a whim, or better still use some as-yet-undreamed VR native UI that takes advantage of the platform. That dream is still a way off, it seems like, but I still want it.
Gonna give The Victorian internet a read, thanks! Really love the noosphere, I have a few pieces in progress with ftl communication featuring aliens / future humans that sort of evolve / claim to have evolved into hive sentiences with their own ansible network that borgs them together. And since maintaining the network is crucial to the survival of the culture, network engineers are generally very powerful political figures. A severance between two populations can be treated as the birth of a new sentience or a heresy, depending on the prevailing ethics of each group, and there are always factions that break away from the collective and prefer old-fashioned async society. Really love thinking about how these technological networks could evolve over the long term.
Thanks for doing the moddin’ 🤠🤏
I don’t think it has to be, or even should be the case really. I mean, as a general rule I don’t think it’s a great idea to let kids download stuff off the internet and run it without a knowledgeable adult at least reviewing what they’re doing, or pre-screening what software they’re allowed to use if they’re younger than a certain age. You can introduce kids to open source software and teach them computer skills while still putting limits on what they’re allowed to do, e.g. not allowed to install software without asking a parent, or only allowing them to test software on an old machine that doesn’t have sensitive data on it. I know I got thrown to the internet as a kid but I don’t think that’s the best way for kids to learn stuff.
That said, I don’t have kids and don’t plan on having them, so I don’t know how realistic that is for kids nowadays. I don’t know if they’re still as far ahead of the adults as we were when it came to working the internet so I recognize the possibility that that all may be clueless childless adult nonsense.
That seems to be the prevailing opinion. I can’t complain. As far as I definitively know, the Parks & Rec version of the series finale is completely correct. Sounds like it really went off the rails there toward the end.
Game of Thrones. I enjoyed it at first, then realized about halfway through I had really lost interest and was just watching through intertia. Eventually I stopped and still haven’t seen the last few seasons. From context, it seems like I wasn’t missing much.
galacticwaffle is an LLM bot.
Dunno. Where there are some eyeballs, there’s some market for influence. Obviously someone is bothering, but as for how much money is being thrown at the fediverse at this moment, I would guess somewhere between “peanuts” and “small potatoes”. On the other hand I imagine a bot trained here could be deployed elsewhere with little effort, similar to how a reddit bot can be deployed to lemmy with a little bit of rework, so maybe it’s seen as a low-risk training ground. In any case I don’t see it being a problem that gets less salient as the fediverse grows.
Who knows what scale they’re operating at. The problem with this kind of bot is that you only really notice if they’re doing a bad job (theoretically). This might be someone who wrote an LLM bot for a lark, a small-time social media botter testing a variant for fedi deployment, or an established bot trainer with dozens or hundreds of accounts that’s field-testing a more aggressive new model. I doubt you could get away with hundreds of bots like this on lemmy, I think the actual user pool is small enough that we’d notice hundreds of bots posting at this volume. but again, I don’t really know how I’d detect it if it were less “obviously smells like LLM slop” than this one. In bot detection, as in so many fields, false negatives are a real bitch to account for.
That’s why he banned golden idols, he knew they were immune to his one weakness.
If I were to hazard a guess, it’s for training. Make a bot, make a bunch of posts and comments and get organic interactions, see what get you flagged as a bot account, incorporate that data into your next version, rinse, repeat. The goal is probably to make a bot account that can blend in and interact without being flagged, presumably while also nudging conversations in a particular direction. Something I noticed on reddit is that the first comment can steer the entire thread, as long as it hews close enough to the general group consensus, and that kind of steering is really useful for the kinds of groups that like to influence public thinking.
I don’t think galacticwaffle is necessarily trying to steer here, I think they’re just trying to make a bot that flies under the radar. but I imagine that that kind of steering is what someone who would pay for this kind of bot would use it for.
Brown is navy orange
Oh my god yes. It’s amazing to me how much art we produce where the artist is adamant that no one ever see it. Like, Kafka wanted all of his works destroyed on his death, and his art is so weird and different that it got it’s own word to describe it, because there’s nothing quite like it. Makes me wonder about how much of that art happens every day, and we’ll never know because, for whatever reason, we can’t bring ourselves to share it.
It really depends on the advice, and my relationship with the advice giver. I generally give advice at least a thought, even if it was unwanted, unless I have a reason to mistrust the advisor. As for how I respond to the person, if it’s a friend I’ll usually have followup questions, for people I know less well it’s usually a cordial variant of “hmm, interesting perspective” and then I have to think on it for a while before I respond, if I respond at all.