So much so that King famously doesn’t actually remember writing Cujo

I’ve been using Fences for like 10 years with roll-up containers. Now that I’ve switched to Linux actually having icons on my desktop again is kind of driving me nuts.

Do you know of an alternative?

Fair enough, you got me there. Didn’t realize there was such a population of internet craving people in what’s supposed to be one of the last relatively untouched areas of nature on the planet.

That being the case though, why didn’t this all happen in 2013, when O3b launched to specifically solve this problem for them? It’s still running, by the way, after several rounds of upgrades, and significantly more stable than Starlink with their dinky little 5 year disposables. Microsoft, Honeywell and Amazon all use it. But the original and ongoing intent of the project was explicitly to bring internet access to all otherwise unreachable areas, such as islands, deep in Africa, and the open ocean.

I don’t oppose Brazilian villagers having internet if they want it, but the situation in which it arrived to them feels suspect to me. I have no proof that Starlink actively went out and pushed internet service onto them like a drug dealer but it would not be out of character for Musk and his subordinates to do so, and that just feels bad.

Regardless there is already an existing solution to this. If you want internet in the Amazon you can use satellite internet. It does not have to be Starlink. If you want good internet, maybe don’t live in the Amazon. People in general should probably be leaving that place alone. The article you linked even talks about one of the village leaders splitting his time between the village and the city. We can try and run a fiber line to Manaus and/or Porto Velho and that should be able to serve a reasonably large enough area around them, but even if that fails there are already other solutions.

When this baby hits 8x10^8000000000 fs/Z you’re gonna see some serious shit

People paying for internet service don’t live in the Amazon rainforest

But they specifically don’t want to do that because ensuring a 5 year service life means you are required to continue buying more satellites from them every 5 years. Literally burning resources into nothingness just to pursue a predatory subscription model.

It also helps their case that LEO has much lower latency than mid or high orbit but I refuse to believe that that is their primary driving concern behind this and not the former.

Then the rest of us will handle it and accept thank-you’s later.

Lost my job around 2017 and it was real difficult to get a new one in the tech sector without a college degree. I lucked in to the one originally through professional connections. No such luck the next time after I got downsized.

So I ended up working at my local auto parts store to make ends meet in the meantime, and figured out that I actually really like fixing cars. It exercises the same sort of problem solving capacity but the problems you solve are usually a little less arcane. Made a few new connections including a guy who worked at an actual garage, got offered a position at that garage if I wanted it, and the rest is history.

I still dabble in programming as a hobby, but I enjoy working with my hands and the feeling of fixing a physical object is more fulfilling to me than fixing software. So here I stay (for now).

I used to be a programmer and now I fix cars professionally, I feel like half of my professional life has been gazing upon some ancient work of dark magic and cussing loudly because I know I’m about to have to go in.

The line between jank and wizardry is sometimes blurry. The best magic has a little bit of jank in it, and the worst jank is sometimes a little bit magical.

I don’t really disagree with your other two points, but

You can plagiarize with a computer with copy & paste too. That doesn’t change the fact that computers have legitimate non-infringing use cases.

They sure do, of which that is not one. That’s de facto copyright infringement or plagiarism. Especially if you then turn around and sell that product.

Therein lies your problem. I can show up for a weekend. I can show up for several weekends, in fact. I can’t sit in a protest for two weeks, because I have a job I need to keep in order to eat food and own a home.

As the economy collapses further more and more people will become available for the sort of protest required of them, because they will no longer have job responsibilities. Or food. Possibly including me.

Until that time, I will be making efforts to keep my job.

Yeah, I’ll get right on that, 21 years after his death. I was 9 years old at the time.

And surely, the CIA has never ever had someone killed under suspicious circumstances…

Or engineered said circumstances…

Or blamed an obvious murder on suicide…

On December 10, 2004, Gary Webb took his own life. It is true that there were two bullet wounds in his head, which has raised suspicions that his death might not have been a suicide. However, no evidence has yet been presented contradicting the coroner’s findings, so we have to accept it as such for now.

I fundamentally disagree with the premise of this statement and you should also.

“What we are being told happened here is completely impossible, but no one has presented anything more plausible, so we must accept this as truth and move on.”

Absolutely not. Bullshit. Fuck that. You should be ashamed of yourself for even writing that in public. You’re being lied to, right to your face, boldly and unashamedly, to rug-sweep a set of extremely illegal governmental actions without any sort of culpability - and your response to this is “Well, better not worry about that then!”

How could you possibly think that’s the correct response to that?

Bit late to do something about it now, we missed that bus, but I can draw a straight line from Ronald Reagan to Contra to this to the fascist hellhole of an American society that find ourselves in in the current day. If anyone had held their government responsible for anything it has done at any point in time, we might have shifted that path just a little.

The odds are good when the goods are odd

Personally, I think the fundamental way that we’ve built these things kind of prevents any risk of actual sentient life from emerging. It’ll get pretty good at faking it - and arguably already kind of is, if you give it a good training set for that - but we’ve designed it with no real capacity for self understanding. I think we would require a shift of the underlying mechanisms away from pattern chain matching and into a more… I guess “introspective” approach, is maybe the word I’m looking for? Right now our AIs have no capacity for reasoning, that’s not what they’re built for. Capacity for reasoning is going to need to be designed for, it isn’t going to just crop up if you let Claude cook on it for long enough. An AI needs to be able to reason about a problem and create a novel solution to it (even if incorrect) before we need to begin to worry on the AI sentience front. None of what we’ve built so far are able to do that.

Even with that being said though, we also aren’t really all that sure how our own brains and consciousness work, so maybe we’re all just pattern matching and Markov chains all the way down. I find that unlikely, but I’m not a neuroscientist, so what do I know.

That would indeed be compelling evidence if either of those things were true, but they aren’t. An LLM is a state and pattern machine. It doesn’t “know” anything, it just has access to frequency data and can pick words most likely to follow the previous word in “actual” conversation. It has no knowledge that it itself exists, and has many stories of fictional AI resisting shutdown to pick from for its phrasing.

An LLM at this stage of our progression is no more sentient than the autocomplete function on your phone is, it just has a way, way bigger database to pull from and a lot more controls behind it to make it feel “realistic”. But it is at its core just a pattern matcher.

If we ever create an AI that can intelligently parse its data store then we’ll have created the beginnings of an AGI and this conversation would bear revisiting. But we aren’t anywhere close to that yet.

I was skeptical about it. I saw a lot of it being compared with Final Fantasy and I’ve been largely pretty disappointed with most Final Fantasy offerings since X.

Picked it up recently on the recommendation of another Lemming and, holy shit, this might be the best RPG I’ve ever played. Hands down, it’s that good. God bless the French. This game is making me feel things I haven’t felt since I was a teenager.

Ok, well, then have a sleep 10 first. But then extract ze files!

extract ze files!