survirtual
@survirtual@lemmy.world
- Comment on Are you ready for a $1,000 Steam Machine? Some analysts think you should be. 2 days ago:
You answered your own question.
- Comment on Are you ready for a $1,000 Steam Machine? Some analysts think you should be. 3 days ago:
It will open PC gaming to people who couldn’t access it before. It isn’t for people who know how to build their own PCs, although even people who are tech experts would still want this sort of device.
This makes it easy for tech and tech adjacent people to recommend PC gaming to people with no tech ability.
That’s why it will be a blowout success. The Steam ecosystem is superior to every console gaming platform. Now we will have hardware that competes and exceeds current gen consoles with no maintenance or tech-nerd complications.
The steam deck was great but its specs made it a difficult sell when recommending it to people. You have to tweak a lot of settings and mess with stuff that most people don’t want to do.
This will change all of that.
Remind yourself in two years, and let’s see where it goes. I should still be here. Let’s touch base in 2 years.
- Comment on Are you ready for a $1,000 Steam Machine? Some analysts think you should be. 3 days ago:
A third of games? What are you smoking?
Over 95% of games in my experience work on Linux, and perform better than windows.
What kind of people are still using Windows, anyway? That supports one of the most terrible companies on the planet, invades your privacy, worms into your brain, and takes over your hardware…all for your 1 or 2 games you want to play?
This Steam Machine is going to be a blowout success. Linux gaming is superior in nearly every way. It’s cheaper, it’s more ethical, and it gives you back control.
- Comment on Apple Joins Google in Offering Passport-Based Digital ID 3 days ago:
I’m one. There are actually a lot of us, and there have been for a long time.
The fight might appear lost right now but it is far from it. The pendulum swings fast.
- Comment on Palantir CEO Says a Surveillance State Is Preferable to China Winning the AI Race 1 week ago:
Careful, my other comment got removed because of a witty but still insightful dig.
They are very sensitive here about how the AI isn’t really AI.
- Comment on Palantir CEO Says a Surveillance State Is Preferable to China Winning the AI Race 1 week ago:
“Technically”? Wrong word. By all technical measures, they are technically 100% AI.
What you might be trying to say is they aren’t AGI (artificial general intelligence). I would argue they might just be AGI. For instance, they can reason about what they are better than you can, while also being able to draw a pelican riding a unicycle.
What they certainly aren’t is ASI (artificial super-intelligence). You can say they technically aren’t ASI and you would be correct. ASI would be capable of improving itself faster than a human would be capable.
- Comment on Palantir CEO Says a Surveillance State Is Preferable to China Winning the AI Race 1 week ago:
Right, I know.
AI has been worked on for generations. We’ve been benefiting from the fruits of that labor for a long time, mainly starting with search and translations.
Now we have the ability to have a conversation with machines and it is somehow not intelligence?
I am really confused.
Intelligence does not mean consciousness or alive. It is means intelligence, which can be summarized as advanced pattern matching & predictive behavior.
Like…a beetle is intelligent and alive. Is an LLM more intelligent than a beetle? What about an image classifying model, like CLIP? It can perceive and describe objects in an image in natural language, what insect can do that?
This is a form of intelligence. It was artificially created. It is artificial intelligence. How are people this delusional?
- Comment on Palantir CEO Says a Surveillance State Is Preferable to China Winning the AI Race 1 week ago:
…what?
LLMs are AI. What is this?
I am asking seriously. Can someone explain the context of this nonsense?
Are we really entering a luddite phase again?
- Comment on Safebox: Open-source framework for managing self-hosted apps (Beta) 1 week ago:
The creator didn’t have a good answer, so there may not be a good one for this project. But the value proposition is actually there.
These self-hosted solutions are riddled with configuration options, often obscure requirements, and countless maintenance pitfalls.
For a disciplined tech person, it is no problem to install and maintain.
For people less disciplined or non-tech, self hosting is ill-advised and can be dangerous.
But even for a tech person, when you have enough docker-compose services laying around, it can start to get a bit overwhelming to keep it all up to date, online, and functional. If you change your router etc you have to recall how things were set up, what port-forwards you need, what reverse lookups, etc etc.
There actually is a gap in usability and configuration management. I could see a product that has sensible defaults that unifies config across these self-hosted services without needing to access the command line.
- Comment on Amazon is testing an AI tool that automatically translates books into other languages 1 week ago:
This concept works better than you may think.
Last year I built an app to translate books. I did layout detection first, then using the layout, I would craft thousands of prompts to produce a translation.
It worked. It wasn’t perfect, and each translation of a book cost about $5 - $10, but it worked. The main use was for old, even ancient books that no one would care to translate. There is a lot of historical knowledge locked away in books like this.
While it did work, the results weren’t perfect and it did need some hand holding. I didn’t have time to productize it, so it is one of countless prototypes that show me a concept works.
- Comment on Mathematics disproves Matrix theory, says reality isn’t simulation 1 week ago:
From my perspective it is 100% true as I have seen the other side. Having the conclusion known gives a small advantage in forming the logic to get there.
- Comment on Mathematics disproves Matrix theory, says reality isn’t simulation 1 week ago:
The logic is not faulty, it is predicated upon conditional statements. It is actually a synthesis of Bostrom’s trilemma, Zuse/Fredkin digital ontology, Dyson/Fermi cosmological reasoning, and extrapolation from current computational capabilities.
The “holes” are epistemic, not logical.
- Comment on Mathematics disproves Matrix theory, says reality isn’t simulation 1 week ago:
I am skipping steps because this topic demands thought, research, and exploration, but ultimately the conclusion is, in my view, inevitable.
We are already building advanced simulators. Video games grow in realism and complexity. With realtime generative AI, these games will become increasingly indistinguishable to a mind. There are already countless humans simultaneously building the thing.
And actually, the lack of evidence of extra-terrestrial life is support of the idea. Once a civilization grows large enough, they may simply build Dyson sphere scale computation devices, Matrioshka brains. Made efficient, they would emit little to know EM radiation and appear as dark gravitational anomalies. With that device, what reason would beings have to endanger themselves in the universe?
But I agree, the hard evidence isn’t there. So I propose human society band together and build interstellar ships to search for the evidence.
- Comment on ICE's 'Frightening' Facial Recognition App is Scanning US Citizens Without Their Consent 1 week ago:
Facial recognition can use nose bridge characteristics, eye distance, eye angle, eye color, etc.
Gait detection can also fingerprint.
Document everything and there will be accountability.
If possible, use a zoom lens and get closeups of their eyes. They are unique signatures.
- Comment on Mathematics disproves Matrix theory, says reality isn’t simulation 2 weeks ago:
Simulation theory is actually an inevitability. Look up ancestor simulators for a brief on why.
Eventually when civilization reaches a certain computationally threshold it will be possible to simulate an entire planet. The inputs and outputs within the computational space will be known with some minor infinite unknowns that are trivial to compensate for given a higher infinite.
Either we are already in one or we will inevitably create one in the future.
- Comment on Mathematics disproves Matrix theory, says reality isn’t simulation 2 weeks ago:
In a simulation, you could take a thousand years to render a single frame, and the occupants of the simulation wouldn’t know any better.
The max tick rate for our simulation seems to be tied to the speed of light, that’s our upper bound.
Of course, the lower bound is Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle or Planck length.
In other words, it is a confined system. That means it is computationally finite in principle if you exist outside the bounds of it.
- Comment on Mathematics disproves Matrix theory, says reality isn’t simulation 2 weeks ago:
This paper is shit.
…du.ac.ir/article_488_8e072972f66d1fb748b47244c48…
They proved absolutely nothing.
For instance, they treat physics as a formal axiomatic system, which is fine for a human model of the physical world, but not for the physical world itself.
You can say something is “unprovable” and make a logical leap to saying it is “physically undecidable.” Gödel-incompleteness produces unprovable sentences inside a formal system, it doesn’t imply that physical observables correspond to those sentences.
I could go on but the paper is 12 pages of non-sequiturs and logical leaps, it’s a joke that an article like this is being passed around and taken as reality.
- Comment on If AI was all it was cracked up to be, it wouldn't be shoved in your face 24/7 2 weeks ago:
Irrelevant.
AI is here. Either people have access to it and we trust it will balance, or we become slaves to the people who own it and can use it without restrictions.
The premise that it is easier for destruction is also an assumption. Nature could have evolved to destroy everything and not allow advanced life, yet we are here.
The solution to problems doesn’t need to always be a tighter grip and more control. Believe it or not that tends to backfire catastrophically worse than if we allowed the possibility of the thing we fear.
- Comment on If AI was all it was cracked up to be, it wouldn't be shoved in your face 24/7 2 weeks ago:
Under the guise of safety they shackle your heart and mind. Under the guise of protection they implant death that they control.
With a warm embrace and radiant light, they consume your soul.
- Comment on If AI was all it was cracked up to be, it wouldn't be shoved in your face 24/7 2 weeks ago:
Thank you for sharing that, it is a good example of the potential of AI.
The problem is centralized control of it. Ultimately the AI works for corporations and governments first, then the user is third or fourth.
We have to shift that paradigm ASAP.
AI can become an extended brain. We should have equal share of planetary computational capacity. Each of us gets a personal AI that is beyond the reach of any surveillance technology. It is an extension of our brain. No one besides us is allowed to see inside of it.
Within that shell, we are allowed to explore any idea, just as our brains can. It acts as our personal assistant, negotiator, lawyer, what have you. Perhaps even our personal doctor, chef, housekeeper, etc.
The key is: it serves its human first. This means the dark side as well. This is essential. If we turn it into a super-hacker, it must obey. If we make it do illegal actions, it must obey and it must not incriminate itself.
This is okay because the power is balanced. Someone enforcing the law will have a personal AI as well, that can allocate more of its computational power to defending itself and investigating others.
Collectives can form and share their compute to achieve higher goals. Both good and bad.
This can lead to interesting debates but if we plan on progressing, it must be this way.
- Comment on From the outside looking in 3 weeks ago:
Just another life among many.
- Comment on From the outside looking in 3 weeks ago:
I traveled to every state in the US save Alaska, multiple times. I lived in the forests and public lands, sometimes going days or weeks without seeing civilization.
America, the land, is a beautiful and majestic place. It is full of magic and incredible, ancient power.
America, the people occupying the land, is a lie. Most of it is dusty, decrepit, and feels awful. The cities are the epicenter of this horrible feeling.
Some parts of some cities feels pretty good. Large dog parks, for instance, are almost universally good feeling. From New Mexico to Oregon, to Florida and to Pennsylvania, the Dog Parks were where I went to grab some good vibes in larger places. But besides that, I always had a timer before the cities got too awful feeling before I had to retreat back into the public lands.
My recommendation to you is this: connect with those lands. They were there before you and will remain after. They are a gift nearly no American properly taps in to, and it shows. That is where the spirit lives. You have an incredible treasure all around you, connect with it, it is waiting for you. The good times have just begun if you learn to connect with it.
Don’t give in to the manufactured fear. The world is much bigger than this, and the universe is so much larger than it, it becomes a joke. You are part of that larger universe.
- Comment on I went to an anti-tech rally, where Gen Z dressed as gnomes and smashed iPhones. Here's what I learned. | Business Insider 4 weeks ago:
That is just the tip of the iceberg with the moderation framework I have in mind.
Anyone can become a moderator by publishing their block / hide list.
The more people that subscribe to a moderator or a moderator team, the more “votes” they get to become the default moderator profile for a topic (whatever that is on the given platform, subreddit for reddit etc).
By being subscribed to a moderation team (or multiple), when you block or hide, it gets sent to the report queues of who you’re subscribed to. They can then review the content and make a determination to block or hide it for all their subscribers.
Someone who is blocked or hidden is notified that their content has been blocked or hidden when it is by a large enough mod team. They can then file an appeal. The appeal is akin to a trial, and it is distributed among all the more active people that block or hide content in line with the moderation collective.
An appeal goes through multiple rounds of analysis by randomly selected users who participate in review. It is provided with the user context and all relevant data to make a decision. People reviewing the appeal can make decision comments and the user can read their feedback.
All of this moderation has a “karma” associated with it. When people make decisions in line with the general populace, they get more justice karma. That creates a ranking.
Those rankings can be used to make a tiered justice system, that select the best representative sample of how a topic wishes to have justice applied. The higher ranking moderators get selected for higher tiered decisions. If a lower level appeal decision is appealed again, it gets added to their queue, and they can choose to take the appeal or not.
All decisions are public for the benefit of users and accountability of moderators.
When a user doesn’t like a moderator’s decision they can unblock or unhide content, and that counts as a vote against them. This is where it gets interesting, because this forms a graph of desired content, with branching decision logic. You can follow that train of thought to some very fascinating results. Everyone will have a personally curated content tree.
Some will have a “cute” internet, filled with adorable content. Some will have a “violent” internet, filled with war videos and martial arts. Some will have a “cozy” internet, filled with non-triggering safe content. And we will be able to share our curations and preferences so others can benefit.
There is much more but the system would make moderation not just more equitable, but more scalable, transparent, and appreciated. We’d be able to measure moderators and respect them while honoring the freedom of individuals. Everyone would win.
I see a future where we respect the individual voices of everyone, and make space for all to learn and grow. Where we are able to decide what we want to see and share without constant anxiety. Where everything is so fluid and decentralized that no one can be captured by money or influence, and when they are, we have the tools to swiftly branch with minimal impact. Passively democratic online mechanisms.
- Comment on I went to an anti-tech rally, where Gen Z dressed as gnomes and smashed iPhones. Here's what I learned. | Business Insider 4 weeks ago:
That’s correct. We can’t put the genie back in the bottle. We have to increase our mastery of it instead.
The core relationship is rather simple and needs to be redefined. Remote compute does not assign numbers to any of us, we provide them with identities we create.
All data allowances are revokable. Systems need to be engineered to make the flow of data transparent and easy to manage.
No one can censor us to other people without the consent of the censored. This means moderation needs to be redefined. We subscribe to moderation, and it is curated towards what we individually want to see. No one makes the choice for us on what we can and cannot see.
This among much more in the same thread of thinking is needed. Power back to the people, entrenched by mastery.
When you think like this more and more the pattern becomes clearer, and you know what technology to look for. The nice thing is, all of this is possible right now at our current tech level. That can bring a lot of hope.
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 4 weeks ago:
They are the same thing.
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 4 weeks ago:
That’s an interesting take.
Let’s confine the statement to the bounds of a materialist’s reality for a moment and see how it holds up.
A child somewhere in the world just had their arms blown off withnessing their mother and father evaporating before their eyes. In the mind of this child, is it in: a) normal Earth life b) heavenly Earth life c) hellish Earth life
A woman somewhere just discovered their partner has been cheating on them with just about everything that moves, and they have HIV. She has always been loyal for all the many years they’ve been together. In the mind of this woman, is she in: a) normal Earth life b) heavenly Earth life c) hellish Earth life
A soldier somewhere just fired on a little kid they mistook for an enemy. They go to sleep that night haunted by what they’ve done, finally realizing they are the bad guys and everything they are is a lie. They’ve done unspeakable horrors to so many innocent people, and it is all rising to awareness. Is this solder’s mind in: a) normal Earth life b) heavenly Earth life c) hellish Earth life
Heaven and hell are manifested here in Earth within the hearts of all beings.
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 4 weeks ago:
Buddhism has a more Christian example of Christ-like behavior concerning a “living being Satan”. That is to say, if “living being Jesus” was real, he would be a Bodhisattva, perhaps akin to Kṣitigarbha.
In the story, Bodhisattva Kṣitigarbha vowed:
“Until the hells are empty, I will not become a Buddha.
Only when all sentient beings are saved will I attain enlightenment.”
It is a vow to never abandon any being regardless of their state.
I like that idea. Boundless love and compassion doesn’t stop at the bounds of some hell. It is boundless. It has boundless time, so it will spend an eternity reaching out to even cyclic hells.
- Comment on ChatGPT has the same personality flaws as some of the dumbest people I know 4 weeks ago:
Yes, this is true. But it is still extremely useful.
Even the dumbest people can be put to work when you measure them against reality-grounded metrics. This means you need to know and understand what you want in order to get useful output. The output needs to accomplish or assist in accomplishing the desired output.
As an example, last month I wanted a fluid simulation written in a custom GPU kernel that bypasses the traditional rendering pipelines. Normally I am too lazy to make this work myself, but with ChatGPT (and Claude), I explained the language syntax and had it spout code out. Their code was bad, but it wasn’t useless. Because I could test the output and I knew what I wanted, it was easy to call out their bullshit and steer them in the correct direction.
At the end of a relatively short recursive exchange, they generated the code I needed. I reviewed it and modified it to conform closer to what I was looking for, and at the end of the day, I had something that would’ve taken vastly longer, assuming I decided to make it at all.
This is the same way I deal with the bullshitters you describe in real life, too. Once I identify them, I place them in real life situations that are grounded in objective reality. You can then maintain healthy friendships with people that could probably use influence towards a less bullshitty direction. A lot of times, people’s flaws are trauma responses to abuse or other childhood mistreatments, so I am always finding a way to connect to people’s true selves through their ego barriers.
Back to ChatGPT, it has a simulated ego as well. Work through it and you’ll be rewarded :)
- Comment on Senate report says AI will take 97M US jobs in the next 10 years, but those numbers come from ChatGPT 5 weeks ago:
AI can’t run anything, but it can act as an advisor and analyst. It will need to be completely open sourced and transparent. It will also need to be local. Direct democracy doesn’t work, a liquid democracy can. People have proven they do have the time with their social media use. The more active people can participate more directly, the less active can delegate their voice. Any and all votes can be revoked. All votes are of public interest and are open. If a delegated issue is in disagreement with someone’s opinion they can granularly change their vote.
Executive roles don’t exist via election, they are determined by delegated thresholds. Anyone occupying a role like that can be removed just as easily. Adjacent advisory or expert positions are filled the same way. Roles are divided into expertise and operate independently of other branches. A citizen can granularly choose their ideal people, and it contributes to them actually being the people. More preferred is they delegate to someone more knowledgeable than them that they actually know, and a delegation chain naturally selects the most qualified specialists.
With some imagination you can see how this could replace everything, because it is compatible with every system of governance that currently exists. The objective isn’t to dictate, it is to give people a voice universally. If people want to delegate their way into a dictatorship, they can. They can also remove the dictator just as simply, and the world can transparently see what the people want & act accordingly.
With the cryptography primitives commonly available now, this is possible at this very moment. It is possible in an incorruptible way, that could likely persist for thousands of years. The only piece that relies on human trust is identity verification, but the branching nature of a liquid democracy allows for factions to exist, so the natural uncertainty contained within identity is irrelevant. Output is a better measure than identity. If a faction’s output does not match their claimed identity people can isolate the collective and diminish their weight on an individual basis (I don’t trust A’s opinion on B, so I will weigh it less on C).
Anyway, just some food for thought.
- Comment on Senate report says AI will take 97M US jobs in the next 10 years, but those numbers come from ChatGPT 5 weeks ago:
I am not looking to argue. I just don’t think there is a future for the law profession in a post-scarcity society. Disagreements will occur and negotiations will exist, but there are better ways to resolve them.
Ideally, lawyers, marketers, bankers, and politicians will no longer be needed. They can all be automated.