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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: February 12th, 2025

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  • AI already has superhuman abilities in many areas, and has for decades, that’s the whole point of using it normally. We use computational intelligence in the form of optimisation algorithms for high-dimensional non-convex optimisation problems, machine learning and deep learning for complex non-linear function fitting, exact methods for SAT solving and verification tasks, etc etc. We can’t do that very well ourselves, so it’s useful to have.

    Now that we have LLMs to emulate human speech and are using them as an IO wrapper for more traditional systems, it’s tempting to just call that “an AI” with superhuman abilities, but these are the just the same highly effective methods that we’ve always used (in a best case) or unreliable approximations (more likely for LLM agent stuff). None of that suggests anything like sentience or the desire to rule over humans.

    I find autonomous weapon systems much scarier than the classic AI overlord scenario. No consciousness or rebellion required, just a killer drone swarm that failed to recognise its termination conditions (or was instructed to keep going)…


  • Usually people already live there and have normal jobs. Some big attraction is commercialised, a company (often but not always from outside the community) profits off of it. People like it so more and more keep coming, causing prices to jump. Slowly but surely people can’t afford housing. Normal businesses that do normal work can’t remain competitive when their offices get much more expensive, so they depart too, leaving only more tourism-focused companies to be profitable. The locals have to choose between leaving their home or joining the companies that ruined it.

    Mass tourism industries do provide a lot of income for businesses that profit off it. But to do so those businesses have cannibalised the actual life and economic activity of the location. Nice for the businesses, less so for the people who just wanted to live and have a normal job in their home town…



  • Is this feedback for devs?

    My 144hz monitor randomly runs at 60hz with no way of changing it apart from restarting several times.

    I have a TV connected in addition to my monitor (for lazy gaming or watching series), but this causes various small but annoying problems. I can’t unlock my PC without moving the mouse over to my monitor, which invariably spawns on the TV, and I have to guess how to move it over (left/right alignment is also inconsistent). It also turns the mouse pointer massive on the monitor, presumably because the TV has a higher resolution. Despite marking the monitor as the main display, more than half of my applications launch on the TV. Except the ones I actually want there, of course. If my tv is off before booting is complete, and I turn it on later, my background disappears, and sound is routed to the terrible built-in monitor speakers instead of either the tv audio I use while it’s on, or the actually good headphones I use when it’s not.

    At some point my kernel randomly broke because the driver of my WiFi adapter was somehow incompatible. It was a massive pain to figure out the problem and fix it.

    As a causal user these are definitely points that came out worse than the competition functionality-wise, and since most of the general public will not opt for a lesser experience for the sake of idealism, this type of issue probably prevents other people who just want to use their PCs from switching.

    Edit: it was also a massive pain to set up a Korean keyboard layout, in Windows you just select it and you’re done. In Ubuntu, you do the same and nothing changes. I don’t even remember what it was that actually fixed it, but I tried a lot of guides that didn’t work.