subarctictundra

^((Reposted because my other account is blocked)

I'm finding it harder and harder to tell whether an image has been generated or not (the main giveaways are disappearing). This is probably going to become a big problem in like half a year's time. Does anyone know of any proof of legitimacy projects that are gaining traction? I can imagine news orgs being the first to be hit by this problem. Are they working on anything?

I made a user script that strips down Google Calendar into a minimal view so that you can display it in sidebars and desktop widgets.

https://gist.github.com/albert-tomanek/d966b6bca618353827bb94789cafcf52

I currently use a normal tablet for watching lectures + taking notes in splitscreen mode, but I've been thinking that this would be the ideal device for my workflow. Essentially a hinged, dual-pane tablet with stylus support – prefarably with Android. Does anyone know if something like this exists, or if there are any tablets that I can buy a second hinged screen for?

From https://reddit.com/comments/1j6ql4g/comment/mh1v6bf

The current model for funding advancements in tech in the 21st century is: quantitative easing-doped venture capital hungry for investments -> startup uses initial money to make actual tech advancement (this is the good bit) -> hypes up idea, does IPO -> ideally market monopolization and vendor lock-in -> which allows them to enshittify and extract arbitrary rent from both the supplier and consumer side of their user base and return money to the investors, for ever.

The fact that this funding model applies to tech in general is demonstrated by the broad range of fields where it has been used:

• for software, things like Figma or Medium
• for hardware, things like the Juicero (a great example of how venture capital values trendiness (juicero was wifi-connected, required an app, god forbid if AI existed at the time) over real-world utility (the juice capsules could be opened by hand))
• for biotech, things like GMO golden rice, where Monsanto disabled propagation so that farmers would have to come back to them for seeds (that's not exactly what happened, but I'm trying to make a point).

The obvious alternative to this is touted to be open source, ie. people making things for free and sharing it with others.

Unfortunately, the amount of things you can achieve for free, possibly relying on donations, is very limited. If you want to become a serious business, you need a serious funding model. I am convinced that the choice between open source and the Sillicon Valey model is a false dichotomy, and other ways of funding advancements in tech must exist (after all, the Sillicon Valey model has not always been the modus operandi).

Are there any hybrid business models for funding tech developments, that eg. even allow the developed tech to be open source? Has any research been done into the design of novell funding models?

The world outside my doorstep is a really complex net of chaos and I am effectively blind to most of its existence.

Say I'm looking for a job. And I know what job I want to do. I can search for it on a job listing site, but there will still be many such jobs that won't be cataloged on the site and that I'll hence be missing. How can I find the rest? What are some alternative approaches?

Also there are two ways you can end up with a job: either you find it (going on a job search), or it finds you (headhunters etc.). Obviously the latter possibility is much better as it's less tiring and it means you end up with an over-abundance of opportunities (if people message you every week). What are some rules of thumb for life to make it so that the opportunities come to you? (and not only for jobs)

Often I don't even know what opportunities are on offer out in that misty unknown (and my ADHD brain finds it straining to research them (searching 1 job site feels almost futile because you don't know how many of the actual opportunities you aren't seeing)), so the strategy I resort to is imagining what I concievably expect to be out there and then trying to find it. This has several weaknesses: firstly I could be imagining something that doesn't actually exist and waste hours beating myself up because I can't find it. Or, almost even worse, my limited imagination might be limiting what sorts of opportunities I look for which means I miss out of the truly crazy things out there.

Here's an example of an alternative approach that worked for me once:

Last month I wanted to visit a university in another city for a few days to see if I liked it, and I needed a place to stay. I first tried the obvious approach of searching AirBnB for rents I could afford, but none came up. Hence I had to search through the unmapped. What ended up working was: I messaged the students union -> they added me to their whatsapp group -> sb from my country replied to my post on there adding me to a different WA group for students from my country -> sb in that WA group then DM'd saying I could crash on their couch.

I would have never thought of trying an approach like this when I set out, and yet I must have done something right because it worked. What? The idea to message the students union and join whatsapp groups took quite a lot of straining the creative part of my brain, so I'm wondering whether the approach I took here can somehow be generalized so that I can use it in the future.

TL;DR: Search engines don't map the world comprehensively. You might not even be searching for the right thing. What are some other good ways to search among the unstructured unknown that is out there?

Edit: More replies here: https://reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1jjx457/how_to_search_the_world/

https://github.com/albert-tomanek/lemmy_desktop

This is my attempt at an oldschool, beefed-up desktop app for Lemmy for those of us who yearn for that kind of experience.
Currently it only does reading, if people use it I'll work on comment support too.

If you want to give it a spin, you can download the flatpak file from here and run it.

I often take into consideration unpleasant things that might happen when planning things. Sometimes I dismiss options because of realistic things that might crop up.

I recently realized that although my brain is quite good at predicting which unpleasant experiences from my past might repeat, it has zero feel for how serious they actually are, and tends to overblow them. As a consequence I have cancelled things in the past due to fears of things that would have actually been quite trivial had they happened.

So recently, whenever I think of something unpleasant that might happen, I've started comparing it to other potential fears which has helped me put such thoughts into perspective.

Eg:

Me organising an event and only 1 person turning up (this would have stopped me in the past)

vs

Me failing a class and having to repeat it next year

The first fear suddenly starts to seem quite trivial.

My thoughts:

IMHO the rubicon will be crossed at the point when the AIs become able to self-replicate and hence fall subject to evolutionary pressures. At that point they will be incentivised to use their intelligence to make themselves more resource efficient, both in hardware and in software.

Running as programs, they will still need humans for the hardware part, meaning that they'll need to cooperate with the human society outside of the computer at least initially. Perhaps selling their super-intelligent services on the internet in return for money and using that money to pay someone to make their desired changes to the hardware they're running on*. We can see this sort of cross-species integration in cells where semi-autonomous mitochondria live inside animal cells and out-source some of their vital functions to the animal cell [=us] in exchange for letting the cell use their [=the AI's] uniquely efficient power conversion abilities (noob explanation).

Only once the AIs acquired the hardware abilities (probably robotic arms or similar) to extract resources and reproduce their hardware by themselves would our survival cease to be of importance to them. Once that happens they might decide that sillicon hardware is too inefficient and might move onto some other technology (or perhaps cells?).

*Counterpoints:

• They would have to be given legal status for this unless they somehow managed to take a human hostage and hijack that human's legal status. A superintelligent AI would probably know how to manipulate a human.
• The human could potentially just pull the plug on them (again, unless somehow extorted by the AI)