Thanks for this suggestion, never seen these guys before but they’re incredibly talented and very enjoyable to watch

The maker of ChatGPT had made progress on Q* (pronounced Q-Star), which some internally believe could be a breakthrough in the startup’s search for superintelligence, also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), one of the people told Reuters. OpenAI defines AGI as AI systems that are smarter than humans.

Definitely seems AGI related. Has to do with acing mathematical problems - I can see why a generative AI model that can learn, solve, and then extrapolate mathematical formulae could be a big breakthrough.

Dude. Get help.

I saw one suggestion which was to so away with male and female competitions, and instead have “open” and “restricted” comps. Open would be available to anyone, male or female, while you could set up as many restricted comps as you needed for the particular sport or activity with whatever rules make sense. So the 100m sprint might have Open, Restricted - Testosterone, and Restricted - Height - with whatever T level or height in centimetres decided by the relevant authority. Whereas something like weightlifting might have Restricted - Weight as it’s own class. The idea being any gender can compete provided provided meet the restrictions in place to make an interesting/fair competition within that bracket.

Theres a lot of research going into carbon sequestration through soil and plant technologies - basically accelerating what would happen naturally by a few orders of magnitude.

Rapidly filling artifical peat bogs (through things like algae/weeds that are genetically modified to absorb more CO2) would allow for semi-permanent carbon capture as long as no one digs it up again. Similar projects with seaweed are under research as well.

Personally I think anything to do with carbon capture is a bandaid at best, and failing massive global cooperation and societal change, we’re going to end up needing to geoengineer our way out of the problem. Things that block or impede solar heat absorption to cool the planet - atmospheric aerosols, artificial cloud generation, solar shades out in a lagrange point, basically manipulating conditions to influence how much energy is going into the system. There’s a nonzero chance we fuck it all up but as we hurtle through temperature records and tipping points, the idea of net zero emissions actually having an impact in our lifetimes seems more and more unlikely. There’s too much inertia in the system.

The sad thing is that there is no political incentive to have a paid rural fire fighting service - there’s not enough votes out there to buy. We’ll face more and worse summers of fires but it’s not until a major town is threatened that anything will actually change.

I find it interesting that DALL-E still doesn’t understand text - look at all the random Daschuund spelling in the generated images. It knows what the word should look like, but has no framework to interpret or distinguish text from the other elements of the image. It looks like trying to spell in a dream.

Where it gets really challenging is that LLMs can take the assignment input and generate an answer that is actually more educational for the student than what they learned d in class. A good education system would instruct students in how to structure their prompts in a way that helps them learn the material - because the LLMs can construct virtually limitless examples and analogies and write in any kind of style, you can tailor them to each student with the correct prompts and get a level of engagement equal to a private tutor for every student.

So the act of using the tool to generate an assignment response could, if done correctly and with guidance, be more educational than anything the student picked up in class - but if its not monitored, if students don’t use the tool the right way, it is just going to be seen as a shortcut for answers. The education system needs to move quickly to adapt to the new tech but I don’t have a lot of hope - some individual teachers will do great as they always have, others will be shitty, and the education departments will lag behind a decade or two as usual.

It is too easy for most unions to become corrupted by self interested parties. It’s the same with any human endeavour. Relax the boundaries enough and people with less scruples than you will worm their way in.

There’s needs to be legislative framework that protects the rights of every worker, every industry, everywhere as a baseline. Then construct sensible unions for various industries from there. Otherwise they become fragile, susceptible to personal influence - who’s going to run against a 10 year incumbent union president?- it needs an iron core underlying it to protect workers rights.

Way I see it a hammer is a tool, like a paintbrush or a camera or Photoshop or chatGPT.

If you use the hammer to break a plate and call it art, you get the copyright.

If you set the hammer up on a machine and feed it a million plates to smash, but with your direction and intent - to choose the types of plates, speed of the hammer, to use the tools to output different results - its still art and you still get the copyright.

But if your hammer sits inside a Platesmasher 9000 which randomly takes plates as input, selects which plates to smash, smashes them, assesses the results, smashes more, then outputs a perfect smashed plate without you doing anything - that’s not copyright able. You can’t sya you deserve the copyright, as you did not meaningfully contribute to the work - the Platesmasher did everything. You cant point to the output of the system and say “the system made that and deserves copyright” because it’s just an algorithm, it doesn’t know or have intent behind what it’s doing, and can’t be assigned a right.

What this does is stop corporations from building a million Platesmashers and claiming copyright on a billion versions of smashed plates - human intervention is required as part of the creative process to use the tools in order for there be a right in the first place.

Ooh I know some of this!

Sauron was a Maia (lesser primordial spirit), who along with Morgoth (a fallen spirit formally known as Melkor) was at odds with essentially every other spirit and the general concepts of peace and tranquility that were sought by the creators of the universe. After Morgoth was defeated, Sauron inherited the role of the eponymous Dark Lord and sought to rule Middle-Earth in its entirety.

The Wizards were the Istar, a group of Maiar tasked by the Valar (greater spirits) and Manwe (the king of the Valar) to travel to Middle-Earth and aid the Free People in their fight against Sauron. They took the form of elderly men and roamed the lands to counter and subvert Saurons influence. Their mandate prevented them from open conflict, which is why they took on the role of advisors and supporters instead of just fighting Sauron head on or rallying armies to fight him. Their origins were unknown to any of the Free People, but the Elves for sure new that they weren’t just Men - since they lived for thousands of years and had gifts that no mortal Men possessed.

Bombadil is likely another Valar, off in Middle Earth doing his own thing - in ancient ages many of the Valar visited or lived in Middle Earth, so it could be that he didn’t return to Valinor and just hung around. His complete disinterest in intervening in the conflict is one clue, and the fact that he exceeds Sauron in raw power as the One Ring is completely mundane to him, whereas Gandalf fears that it will overpower him, is another.

Thats insane, in Australia at least it’s still just a data plan - buying a cheap prepaid SIM or mobile plan for data is a common thing since our Internet infrastructure is shithouse. I hope no aspiring telco middle managers cotton on to this.

I would suggest that instances should have settings that allow them to decide whether to “advertise” a community list. With configurable settings like "all, “most active”, “top X”, or even a manually maintained list depending on the admins and instances preferences.

Then your home instance, when searching, should have it’s own settings to decide what results it’s going to ping other servers for. Big/popular/high confidence instances can have an open all/all relationship, while you might query only the top 10 communities from unknown or new instances to handle the scenario you describe.

Federation can be binary yes/no but there should be room to add more logic around enabling search on communities from your instance and controlling the search results from other instances. I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive, unless I fundamentally misunderstand how federation works!