FaceDeer

Day 1, I replicate a replicator kit and put it together. I also contact a realtor and let them know I’m interested in buying some land. Off grid, far from cities, doesn’t matter.

Day 2, I replicate two replicator kits and put them together.

Day 3, I replicate four replicator kits. I’ve now got eight of them. I’m not sure I’ll need sixteen, at least not right away, and my basement is starting to get a bit crowded. So I’ll leave it at that for the moment, but the moment I think I need more replicator capacity I can have it.

If you watch the video you’ll see that there’s an ongoing process that gradually eliminates parties until there’s only two remaining. Canada has been progressing along this path. There’s only one national conservative party of any note now, and on the left only the Liberals have any chance at forming a government. The NDP can only act as a spoiler for the left. Give it some time and the NDP will wither away, leaving only the Liberals and Conservatives.

I consider Trudeau’s betrayal of his electoral reform promise to be one of the worst political stabs in the back that has happened to the Canadian electorate in recent history.

And yet, in the upcoming election I’m going to vote Liberal. Hell, I’m probably going to do volunteer work for their campaign. Because in my particular riding the projections are currently a tossup between Liberal and Conservative, with the NDP having only a 1% chance of winning and no other party having any meaningful chance of winning. So in my riding Liberal and Conservative are the only choices that matter. The two party system has already arrived in the spot where I live.

I hate this. But I recognize the reality of the system I live in. This is basic game theory, voting third party would only harm my own interests.

First past the post voting systems are exactly what limits it to two parties.

Well, that’s fine if you prefer it that way. I prefer relative anonymity and subject-focused discussion myself. It’s a preference, not an objective “I’m right and you’re wrong” sort of thing.

Glad to hear that he’s apparently doing okay.

But I must say, I think it’s probably for the best that he dialed down his Fediverse engagement. Both for his own sake (nobody should spend that much time on social media) and for the Fediverse as a whole - he seemed to be everywhere that I went and it made the place feel small and monocultural.

I’ve always liked the way on Reddit I barely ever recognized anyone’s name. I prefer engaging with the conversation, not with the people.

This just in: people who are used to earning millions of dollars and being the center of public adoration warn against anything that might change that.

Unfortunately, it’s still a democracy. The electorate wanted what’s now going on. That could rapidly change at this point, but for now not yet.

Alternately, they might ask ChatGPT. Still better than asking randos on an Internet forum.

Which is an application that generative AI is important for, ironically.

This is silly.

Whether it’s “silly” or not is irrelevant, the problem described in the article is real. I have seen innumerable PDFs over the years that were atrocious when it came to the use of those accessibility features, the format’s design factors in to how people use it and people use it terribly. If plain old OCR were enough then this wouldn’t be such a problem.

Ah, they were paid with exposure.

How dare those AIs draw inspiration from the things they’ve seen without compensating the IP holders.

I’m not making any statements about what other people may think about it. The question was why this guy is doing this thing, and I expect it’s because he finds it fun.

I’ve seen plenty of weird bots on Reddit over the years that had no point to their existence other than, presumably, having been fun to code. This is probably one such.

Right, and this is presumably something he finds fun. You were asking why, I was explaining why.

No, it’s not the same. I was using basketball as an analogy. Someone who doesn’t enjoy basketball wouldn’t “get it”, just as you’re not “getting” the fun that can come from building and playing around with AI bots. Different people find different things to be fun.

I actually wandered away from the SubredditSimulator successor subreddits because even with GPT2 they were “too good”, they lost their charm. Back when SubredditSimulator was still active it was using simple Markov chain based text generators and they produced the most wonderfully bonkers nonsense, that was hilarious. Modern AIs just sound like regular people, and I get that everywhere already.

What I am failing to understand is: why?

People do things for fun sometimes. You could ask this about almost anything that people do that isn’t directly and immediately related to survival. Why do people play basketball? It’s just pointlessly bouncing a ball around in a room, following arbitrary rules that only serve to make the apparent goal of getting it through the hoop harder.

Something similar happened to Babylon 5, it was designed as a 5-season series and then they were told season 4 would be the end. So they hurriedly wrapped everything up for the season 4 finale.

And then they were told they were getting a fifth season after all once that was all locked in, so they had to create a whole season of filler for season 5.

As I recall, the main point of contention was that this was one of the first big “there’s a big mystery and the whole series is one big story to unravel it and we totally have it all planned out, honest” series. And then it turned out that no, they didn’t totally have it planned out, and they were just making crap up as they went and most of the profound “clues” people were trying to cobble together were basically meaningless.

Maybe the show runners managed to cobble something together out of them that was satisfying regardless, but still, it felt like quite the betrayal. History repeated itself with Battlestar Galactica, where the show kept insisting “they have a plan!” When no, they really did not.

I’m not hoping, I know that every possible 1024-character ASCII text file is going to be generated over the course of all this. I’m just hoping that one of them will tell me to do something that will get me out of the loop. If I reach the end of the possible 1024-character text files without escaping, that means that either the solution takes more than 1024 characters to encode or there is no solution at all.

It’s important to increment the count and record it for next time before I read it, just in case one of those 1024-character strings contains an argument that convinces me to do something other than that.