“algorithm” just means “set of instructions”, it is a bit unfortunate that it’s become the default term for talking about this kind of thing.

I think that youtube wants to maximize watch time, if you just watch subscriptions you might get “done” at some point but with the home feed you can just keep watching forever

People have scrutinized what chatgpt for example is allowed and not allowed to say by its programmers. I think the difference here is that there is lower hanging fruit to grab because the Chinese state has a different relationship to censorship than a lot of other states.

I also associate Sinophobia with being prejudiced against Chinese people or Chinese culture, however being critical or skeptical of the Chinese state is actually perfectly reasonable. I’m also very critical of the US state and this isn’t because I’m “americaphobic” or some nonsense.

Please explain how this is Sinophobic.

It can be hard to bootstrap yourself up from zero followers. I’d recommend posting something just so that people have an idea of the kind of thing they can expect if they follow you from checking out your profile. But you probably won’t get much engagement from your own posts at first, so it will probably be more fun to just reply to other accounts.

Bluesky has a feature where you can set up customized feeds to filter for any kind of content you want. The person who saw your post might have seen it in the “newskies” feed which just contains every first post that any account makes for example. So one way to get engagement can be to write posts that show up in a certain feed that people follow, like there exist some feeds that are based around certain topics that usually trigger based on your post containing certain keywords. Most people just use the following feed though, I think.

Bluesky is funny because they genuinely have some great user based moderation tools but on the official moderation side they’re really bad in all honesty. The sum of these two parts are a better experience than most websited on the internet at the end of the day

Twitter has historically been used as a platform by a lot of different fandoms and the network effect is strong enough that they haven’t managed to leave en masse until now

No, the podcast can absolutely missrepresent the thing that it’s sumarizing. The podcast also adds commentary, and I think it’s especially this commentary that I find unreliable.

I think that it is impressive, but not necessarily that useful? In particular, you can’t really trust what they’re saying to be accurate so it doesn’t actually give you that much usable information.

Very cool, but I’m not sure what I would actually use it for.

Yeah thought that might be the case! It’s just a thing that a lot of people have misconceptions about so it’s something that I have a bit of a knee jerk reaction to.

There are a couple of reasons that might not work:

• Maybe we’ll asymptotically approach a point that is lower than human-level cognitive capabilities
• Gradual improvements are susceptible to getting stuck in a local maxima. This is a problem in evolution as well. A lot of animals could in theory evolve, say, human level intelligence in principle, but to reach that point they’d have to go through a bunch of intermediate steps that lead to worse fitness. Gradual scientific improvements are a bit like evolution in this way.
• We also lose knowledge over time. Something as dramatic as a nuclear war would significantly set back the progress in developing AGI, but something less dramatic might also lead to us forgetting things that we’ve already learned.

To be clear, most of the arguments I’m making aren’t really about AGI specifically but about humanities capability to develop arbitrary in principle feasible technologies in general.

Another possibility is that humans just aren’t smart enough to figure out AGI. While I’m sure that we will continue incrementally improving technology in some form, it’s not at all self-evident that these improvements will eventually add up to AGI.

A breakthrough in quantum computing wouldn’t necessarily help. QC isn’t faster than classical computing in the general case, it just happens to be for a few specific algorithms (e.g. factoring numbers). It’s not impossible that a QC breakthrough might speed up training AI models (although to my knowledge we don’t have any reason to believe that it would) and maybe that’s what you’re referring to, but there’s a widespread misconception that Quantum computers are essentially non-deterministic turing machines that “evaluate all possible states at the same time” which isn’t the case.

You could still automatically delete all new posts and comments or something like that I suppose

Yeah it seems like most Brazilian twitter users have gone to bluesky. I’m glad that so few went to threads actually.

I think there’s a cultural difference too. Bluesky is much closer to (a subsection of) twitter culture pre-musk than anything else. Weather you think that’s good or bad is a matter of taste but it is probably the easiest thing to get people who like pre-musk twitter to switch to.

Maybe paywalled subreddits are more intended to become competitors to maybe patreon and only fans rather than present day subreddits? Like a lot of patreons have discord access as a perk, the paywalled subreddit could potentially fill that role instead. Don’t think it seems like a good idea and don’t think it’ll become more than a gimic

I do love me a good video game video essay, but I think that a more traditional journalistic format has a lot of strengths when it comes to covering small games. It’s probably true that youtube has replaced a lot of traditional journalism but I think that this is overall bad for the video game echo system.

One thing that I think is missing from the equation is good video games journalism that covers indie games. Video game journalism has never been doing amazing but it’s practically dead now.

Tying discovery to the same platform that you consume things on is really bad, because it always gives that distributor way to much power. Similar story with spotify, but journalism about underground music is at least in a slightly better place.

even a small amount of change into an LLM it turns out to radically alter the output it returns for huge amounts of seemingly unrelated topics.

Do you mean that small changes radically change the phrasing of answers, but that it has largely the same “knowledge” of the world? Or do you mean that small changes also radically alter what a llm thinks is true or not? If you think the former is true, then these models should still be the same in regards to what they think is true or not, and if you don’t then you think that llms perception of the world is basically arbitrary and in that case we shouldn’t trust them to tell us what’s true at all.