Ive seen this said a lot here lately, but like, cloud computing still requires computer hardware, so shouldnt an increase in hardware prices make that more expensive as well?

Lowering the amount of people wouldn’t help such a thing, because demand for stuff and therefore number of potential jobs in an economy is at least partially a function of the number of people. If you reduce the population, you also reduce the number of needed employees, leaving you right back where you started.

Now I’m trying to think of what I’m forgetting about trekkie gear from those books. All that comes immediately to mind is the Bob that names himself after Riker, but that’s less gear and more a virtual persona or something.

Maybe Im not saying this right: Im wasnt arguing for the virtues of echo chambers with that, Im saying, with how fedi is designed, there is no means to prevent someone that wants to make an echo chamber from doing so, so suggesting that one should not allow an echo chamber to exist is a fool’s errand. In a more general sense, it seems to me that, either you let people decide what kind of content to see, in which case many if not most will naturally create echo chambers simply because they dont want to see views too different from their own, or you have some means to force people to see stuff they dont want to, which requires some difficult-to-escape authority have power over their media feed and as such is incompatible with decentralized federation (and of course risks that authority pushing everyone into their echo chamber). Both of those things lead to serious issues in my view, so its a bit of a “pick your poison” situation when it comes to social media design. Beyond that though, it does have to be acknowledged that there is simply more content, more messages and people wanting to spread their word, out there than any given person has the time or attention or mental capacity to process. That means that some system must exist that determines what fraction of it all you actually see (even if its just as simple as “the things most recently posted on a given platform when you looked at it”). I can see no way to do this that doesnt introduce biases.

I mean, allowing echo chambers doesnt really seem avoidable on fedi tho? Like, only one side has to defederate to break two way communication, so if someone wants to avoid you, you cant really stop them, and the whole concept of moderation in a decentralized system relies on each instance being able to selectively view or block content from other instances based on the values of that instance. You cant really say “what works is challenging people” if the people you want to challenge have an “ignore” button for when you get too loud for their taste.

Not to mention, even if it proves satisfactory to the existing userbase, any new users will start with no history to draw inferences from, wouldn’t that tend to imply that any existing users unaffected are essentially “grandfathered in”, but with the same privacy concerns for everyone else in the long run?

It does say “as a baseline” so presumably its just there for comparison’s sake

I wouldn’t say print books have no place today, it can’t be assumed that one will have access to electronics in all circumstances after all and many people do prefer physical media, but it’s definitely an indictment of the sort of cheaply made basically disposable books made in larger quantities than needed to fill their current niche, and of the way unwanted (by their owners) but usable goods are dealt with in general.

Sure, but it is rather a waste of paper, ink, manufacturing and transportation capacity etc. It’s not the only instance of this of course, waste of unsold inventory exists in just about any industry that sells physical products, but it’s still frustrating to see it.

I mean, if were talking about efficiency tools for artists to use rather than straight up automatically generating the assets (not sure what those tools would be at the moment, but I’ve not been following what the AI industry actually releases for awhile because it’s always seemed a bit useless), then the result should be an increase in the output of those artists rather than replacing them with statistical amalgam.

The nature of deep dish pizza aside, doesn’t cheeseless pizza predate the kind with cheese anyway?

Isnt this kind of thing literally how tankies got that name in the first place?

I actually liked the theme song tbh. Its cheesy but has a charm to it and I think it fits the “early exploration” kind of vibe they seemed to be going for with the setting and timeframe choice.

You misunderstand, I am not saying “make sure he spends it responsibly”. Nobody has has “made” him do this at all, and I didn’t advocate for a policy of doing so. What I’m saying is that I don’t think this particular use is worthy of condemnation the way his other actions are, because in the long run I think that this specific thing will end up benefiting people other than him no matter if he intends for that to happen or not (even if the American healthcare system prevents access, which I’m not confident it will do completely, not every country has that system, and it’s statistically improbable that the US will have it forever, and research results are both durable and cross borders). That sentiment isn’t saying that it excuses his wealth, just that I think people are seeing only the negatives in this merely because of the association with Altman’s name and ignoring the potential benefits out of cynicism. The concept is just as valid with him funding it as it would be had he been condemning it instead.

The response to something beneficial being only available to the rich shouldn’t be to avoid developing that thing, it should be to make it available to everyone. The failures of the US healthcare and economic systems don’t suddenly make developing new medical techniques a bad thing. Human augmentation is another issue from curing genetic disease, though I’d personally argue that wouldn’t be a bad cause either, with the same caveat about it availability. It at least has more potential to improve somebody’s life somewhere down the line than just buying a yacht with his ill gotten gains or some other useless rich person toy would.

I’m not sure I get the universal negativity to this. Like sure, Altman sucks as a person, and an individual having enough money to significantly bankroll research like this is a sign of an economic failure, but surely curing or preventing genetic disease is just about the most uncontroversial use human genetic modification could have?

Microbes are still made of chemicals, it’s just different chemicals

and not to mention, the tools required to create it (maybe not the best examples, but still) are already in the possession of virtually everybody.

It’s an old meme I think, I’ve seen variants before but with different “relatively poor country that most people on the English speaking Internet know next to nothing about” instead of Moldova. I think that the guy in the meme is Majira Strawberry, who is from the American west coast to my knowledge and therefore would have a bit of a long trip to cause trouble in Eastern Europe. I mean people travel but you’d figure if furries were causing trouble in Moldova it’d be the ones that live in the general area.

It somehow feels physically exhausting to intentionally slow down below my normal walking speed, because then I notice what my feet are doing instead of it being automatic.