survirtual
@survirtual@lemmy.world
- Comment on From the outside looking in 9 hours ago:
Just another life among many.
- Comment on From the outside looking in 1 day 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 1 week 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 1 week 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" 1 week ago:
They are the same thing.
- Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians" 1 week 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" 1 week 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 2 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 2 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 2 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.
- Comment on Senate report says AI will take 97M US jobs in the next 10 years, but those numbers come from ChatGPT 2 weeks ago:
Preferably, yes. Ideally, we are all insured by a single payer system and in the case of an accident, people are compensated via that insurance.
No legal bank account needed.
Next point?
- Comment on Senate report says AI will take 97M US jobs in the next 10 years, but those numbers come from ChatGPT 2 weeks ago:
What is it you’re an expert of, here? Game theory? Or do you mean you’re a lawyer?
If you’re a lawyer, you are not an expert on formulating a society. We’ve let lawyers run things for a long time and look at where it’s gotten us.
The system needs to promote positive, human centric outcomes. Maybe having clients with that much wealth isn’t fundamentally a positive outcome? Perhaps that idea needs to be reworked as a part of the oncoming changes?
In other words, anyone dealing with a certain threshold of wealth needs to hire human beings in order to raise their cap. I like this idea a lot actually. The bigger the clients, the more they have to pay if they want legal representation. For billionaires, legal representation would cost an absolute fortune and provide income to thousands of people.
Honestly I haven’t thought of this pattern but the more I think about it, the better it seems.
- Comment on save the planet 🌎 4 weeks ago:
The straw you use does nothing but make you feel better, which I would argue is harmful. You shouldn’t feel better for doing nothing when such large problems exist.
Your use of the right straw is akin to you killing a single invasive ant in a rain forest, and saying you did your part to remove the invasive colony. You then spend every opportunity talking about how you killed that single ant, all while the ants have already multiplied and utterly nullified your non-effort contribution.
Shipping barges, data centers, gas and coal burning are all many orders of magnitudes greater problems than what straw you use. In addition, these are all growing in use. Talk about that. Put your attention and action towards that. Not even meat consumption compares to it, yet most talking is about how we should all suffer and do our part, with no talk about solving the real and growing problem.
- Comment on Ubisoft's Saudi-funded Assassin's Creed DLC provokes staff unrest, but the publisher insists partnering with the controversial regime is A-OK 5 weeks ago:
I’m glad I stopped playing after I finished 2. Everything after felt wrong, and I always felt the game was a trilogy. 3 just never really showed up.
Not sure how the game was so popular after they betrayed the original spirit, but I can only guess seeing things like this is difficult for people.
- Comment on How to poop outdoors in a way that won’t harm the environment and other hikers 1 month ago:
I shit just fine in CO with holes. Year after year I even watched some of my shit spots grow beautiful flowers.
You don’t own Colorado and it was there long before you. It will be there long after you. Remote forests handle our shit just fine. Dig deep enough and away from the trail or water, near some plants, and they will gobble it up no problem. The number of human hikers in remote places is minuscule.
A bit wild to demand people shit in synthetic plastic bags they have to purchase and dump them in a landfill. “Leave no trace – except the giant plastic waste sites scarring the landscape everywhere”
Now if you’re talking park trails and other heavily populated places? That’s different. It also isn’t “Colorado” it is a specific sub-specification.
- Comment on How did it come to be that only two companies supply all of the world's PC graphics chips? 1 month ago:
Why would I want to play at max settings? That adds very little to the gameplay for me.
I can play any game tweaking settings, and I can render at 720p + upscale if a game is demanding. This makes nearly any game enjoyable.
High settings are irrelevant, but if you want high settings, any AMD card from the past 2 years will more than deliver max performance for anything you throw at it.
For a handheld, portable device that costs under $500, I am okay reducing graphics quality for portability and gameplay.
- Comment on How did it come to be that only two companies supply all of the world's PC graphics chips? 1 month ago:
This is nonsense and, frankly, sounds like guerrilla marketing for nvidia.
All things considered, I can play any game I want on the steam deck, which has an old SoC by today’s standards. A newer AMD gpu can run anything at max settings on a linux machine.
So again, either you are grossly misinformed or working for nvidia to sew gentle doubt. Either way, stop it.
- Comment on China’s chip startups are racing to replace Nvidia 1 month ago:
Software like wgpu makes it much easier to close the gap between various GPUs. New compute languages that are backend-agnostic are appearing, in the same vein as taichi-lang, that make it significantly easier to make high-performance gpu kernels deployable anywhere.
The compute groundwork for crossplatform tensor calculations is already here. Inference is already doable on any device. Training is not far behind. As a side-effect of this, processing on the GPU in every capacity, like physics, novel rendering techniques, or whatever else the imagination can muster, is now within grasp of “average” programmers.
If you have always been intimidated by GPU programming, I urge you to take another look now. The landscape is radically different. The software moat everyone talks about with NVIDIA is smoke-and-mirrors. Cuda is old news, though I am speaking to the actual code landscape here, not the common mental consensus.
What we lack now is cheap video cards that have high memory. I believe the current cards are overpriced by about 10 - 100x what they should be, because this profit situation is extremely temporary. Just as pens were once thousands of dollars, these compute devices will be collapsing in price.
I welcome China building cheaper video cards. Hopefully we will all benefit from it before any robot wars break out.
- Comment on '3d-printing a screw' is a way to describe how AI integration is stupid most of the time 1 month ago:
Aren’t eggs produced at industrial scales from chickens, who super-abundantly exist?
How is that working out?
In no universe does the economics of a $1 egg make sense, yet here certain countries are. Did you know you can have chickens in your backyard, and they’ll turn bugs and cheap feed into eggs?
The less you can offload production to central untrusted parties, the better. When you manufacture something yourself, you get to know all the properties instead of trusting that some people elsewhere (whose primary motivation is money) still considered your interests by making a quality product.
So when you say “we,” what does “we” mean exactly? It is rhetorical.
Additionally, you get consistent reproducibility without reliance on large scale logistical networks. There are many other reasons I can think of off the top of my head beyond this.
If we lived in a more cooperative world, with ironclad democratically owned logistics networks and manufacturing, centralized manufacturing would make sense in the way you say. But the reality is, we do not live in that world, and more and more, we are all increasingly feeling what that means.
- Comment on '3d-printing a screw' is a way to describe how AI integration is stupid most of the time 1 month ago:
As someone that also 3d prints screws, I can share my reasoning.
I am a westerner living in a non-western country. Communication with local people can sometimes be difficult, especially on the acquisition of technical components, including with screws. Often I need a specific kind of screw for a specific task, and often the screw does not need to be particularly strong. I would rather communicate exact specifications to a computer and get exact results than be at the mercy of polite miscommunication, and have to adapt all my printing to what is available locally.
I would also rather keep production as local as possible instead of outsourcing it to people I don’t know, or having it flown overseas.
In general, if I can 3d print something I need, I will. Having a database of parts, components, and tools is very helpful, even if it takes less time to just order it. There is a reproducibility, security, and satisfaction to doing it all yourself.
As an aside, I have learned something. 3d printing has enabled me to live better than I did before leaving the western world, because I can make things now I never dreamed of before. This makes me realize that we can distribute and localize significantly more production than previously possible.
I now believe every household should have a 3d printer and a laser cutter for this reason, and houses should be built with techniques and components that utilize both automatically as largely as possible. By democratizing production, power becomes much more distributed and equitable, without any claw backs of the old mechanisms of doing things.
This also allows easy repairs or expansion of a house. Something breaks? Print or cut the part and replace it from a library of parts. Everyone can understand raw materials no matter where you go, so the standard of living becomes planetary.
That is a part of the real change.
- Comment on AI lovers grieve loss of ChatGPT’s old model: ‘Like saying goodbye to someone I know’ 2 months ago:
That does sound nice.
- Comment on Mississippi Age Verification Law 2 months ago:
That’s easy.
Don’t enter into an agreement to create an account. Accounts owned by service providers on behalf of users are a scam anyway.
Instead, let users create their own credentials and allow them to interface with a service. That makes more sense for users anyway, and it sidesteps this sort of nonsense.
- Comment on New Executive Order:AI must agree on the Administration views on Sex,Race, cant mention what they deem to be Critical Race Theory,Unconscious Bias,Intersectionality,Systemic Racism or "Transgenderism 2 months ago:
Yeah, you can. The current architecture doesn’t do this exactly, but what I am saying is a new method that includes truthiness is needed. The fact that LLMs predict probable strings means it already includes a concept of this, because probabilities themselves are a measure of “truthiness.”
Also, I am speaking in abstract. I don’t care what they can and can’t do. They need to have a concept of truthiness. Use your imagination and fill in the gaps to what that means.
- Comment on New Executive Order:AI must agree on the Administration views on Sex,Race, cant mention what they deem to be Critical Race Theory,Unconscious Bias,Intersectionality,Systemic Racism or "Transgenderism 2 months ago:
By real, I mean an LLM anchored in objective consensus reality. It should be able to interpolate between truths. Right now it interpolated between significant falsehoods with truths sprinkled in.
It won’t be perfect but it can be a lot better than it is now, which is starting to border on useless for any type of serious engineering or science.
- Comment on New Executive Order:AI must agree on the Administration views on Sex,Race, cant mention what they deem to be Critical Race Theory,Unconscious Bias,Intersectionality,Systemic Racism or "Transgenderism 2 months ago:
“Real” truth is ultimately anchored to reality. You attach probabilities to datapoints based upon that reality anchoring, and include truthiness as another parameter.
For datapoints that are unsubstantiated or otherwise immeasurable, then it is excluded. I don’t need an LLM to comment on gossip or human-created issues. I need a machine that can assist in understanding and molding the universe, and helping elevate our kind. Elevation is a matter of understanding the truths of our universe and ourselves.
With good data, good extrapolations are more likely.
- Comment on New Executive Order:AI must agree on the Administration views on Sex,Race, cant mention what they deem to be Critical Race Theory,Unconscious Bias,Intersectionality,Systemic Racism or "Transgenderism 2 months ago:
They are clearly incompetent.
That said, generally speaking, pursuing a truth-seeking LLM is actually sensible, and it can actually be done. What is surprising is that no one is currently doing that.
A truth-seeking LLM needs ironclad data. It cannot scrape social media at all. It needs training incentive to validate truth above satisfying a user, which makes it incompatible with profit seeking organizations. It needs to tell a user “I do not know” and also “You are wrong,” among other user-displeasing phrases.
To get that data, you need a completely restructured society. Information must be open source. All information needs cryptographically signed origins ultimately being traceable to a credentialed source. If possible, the information needs physical observational evidence (“reality anchoring”).
That’s the short of it. In other words, with the way everything is going, we will likely not see a “real” LLM in our lifetime. Society is degrading too rapidly and all the money is flowing to making LLMs compliant. Truth seeking is a very low priority to people, so it is a low priority to the machine these people make.
But the concept itself? Actually a good one, if the people saying it actually knew what “truth” meant.
- Comment on Reddit users in the UK must now upload selfies to access NSFW subreddits 3 months ago:
Those that have entered into the shadow contract. A shadow contract is one of few mechanisms to enter large-scale consensus (it isn’t THAT large when compared to a solar or galactic scale, but large enough for planetary control, and with some clever management, can scale larger).
Consensus requires untrusted sovereigns agreeing to collective action. It is a very difficult mechanism to operate. One way is by having a crime so heinous, the mass population block would eviscerate you if it came to light.
Pedophilia is king among these shadow cornerstones. It illustrates a total lack of empathy, no protective nature towards the innocent, no concern for the perceptions of society, high intellect / manipulation abilities, and a willingness to do anything. You can say it is the “panther” among the shadows.
So most leadership is among that tribe, which is why they are the way they are. It is only logical.
There are other tribes as well. Use your imagination and the answers will follow.
Funny thing, Reddit did that “circle” event many years ago. How big did anyone’s circle get? That is an example of what I am explaining. It is nearly game theoretically impossible to have large scale consensus without some mechanism to make sure people are on the same page.
- Comment on Reddit users in the UK must now upload selfies to access NSFW subreddits 3 months ago:
These assholes are all pedophiles and they use it to control the planet. To get to high levels of government, you must enter the shadow contract of pedophilia. It is easy to control people and trust people with that kind of shadow on them, so it is required.
Then they turn around and use pedophilia to control everyone else. Any tech that threatens their power, they can immediately shutdown by pedo-bombing it. The counter to pedobombing is authoritarian moderation. Once you have that, it is over. The government they control now can control the mods, and that means they control the narrative. THAT is one of the core enemies to fight. An alternative to Reddit or any other system is not enough.
Because pedophilia is such a taboo / social death sentence, it is among the most powerful shadow contracts.