• 3 Posts
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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • The Earth has carrying capacity limits. I think we’re probably over that, temporarily, mostly because of fossil fuels. We turn fossil fuels into energy and food, degrading that environment and decreasing the Earth’s carrying capacity at the same time. It’s like we’re playing a game of Jinga to push population higher at the expense of our foundation.

    What happens when rich nations become poorer? The world’s current predominant economic system cannot function without growth. What will the elites do to maintain the status quo? Perhaps push for banning abortion, contraceptives, and taking away women’s rights and autonomy?


  • Wealth isn’t zero sum, it’s created all the time (and at a rate literally not achievable simply by underpaying employees, to pre-refute the expected response).

    Explain. In a very basic sense wealth is created by acquiring resources (some of which are finite), then adding value through labor. So, the way I see it, the workers are creating the wealth, then the business/owners/investors/shareholders take a significant portion of the employees’ surplus value of labor. I.e. there is a pie of value/wealth that an employee creates, and the more of that pie the business/owners/investors/shareholders get, the less the workers/wealth-creators get.




  • Where I live, I would still need to pay for a VPN to use torrents. I’ve been banned from an ISP before for torrenting (thankfully, I had multiple ISPs available for me).

    At the moment, I just “pay” legally because I get a few “free” streaming plans from my mobile provider and ISP. Occasionally, I just use a free streaming site if I really want to watch something that’s not available to me. Every once in a while, I try anonymous p2p such as Tribler or torrenting over I2P, but it’s still extremely slow, unfortunately. I’ve never used Usenet, but I think it’s about the same price as a VPN or seedbox would be?


  • I’ve tried a couple rolling distros (including Arch), and they always “broke” after ~6 months to a year. Both times because an update would mess up something with my proprietary GPU drivers, IIRC. Both times, I would just install a different distro, because it would’ve probably took me longer to figure out what the issue was and fix it. I’m currently just using Debian stable, lol.


  • It’s also trained on data people reasonably expected would be private (private github repos, Adobe creative cloud, etc). Even if it was just public data, it can still be dangerous. I.e. It could be possible to give an LLM a prompt like, “give me a list of climate activists, their addresses, and their employers” if it was trained on this data or was good at “browsing” on its own. That’s currently not possible due to the guardrails on most models, and I’m guessing they try to avoid training on personal data that’s public, but a government agency could make an LLM without these guardrails. That data could be public, but would take a person quite a bit of work to track down compared to the ease and efficiency of just asking an LLM.







  • One hypothesis is that having more tokens to process lets it “think” longer. Chain of Thought prompting where you ask the LLM to explain its reasoning before giving an answer works similarly. Also, LLMs seem to be better at evaluating solutions than coming up with them, so there is a Tree of Thought technique, where the LLM is asked to generate multiple examples of a reasoning step then pick the “best” reasoning for each reasoning step.