We lost our first good boy to this. One moment he was happy sprawled out on the floor, next howling in agony and dragging himself by his forelegs. Nothing the vet could do, described it as basically a major stroke for a cat. Just one of those freak things.

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.

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.

I strongly, strongly suggest you revisit some of the preconceptions that led you here. I was going to instinctually retort, but instead took 5 minutes to read the relevant Wikipedia article on the topic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Africa#West_Africa. It is clear that the topic is more nuanced than I originally thought, so thank you for bringing that to my attention, but it’s a crude and broad brush to imply that most slaves already existed in slavery prior to the Atlantic trade. There is also a significant difference between slaves in Africa who were exchanged between local groups in a wholly African context, versus slaves chained up and flung across the Atlantic with a 12% mortality rate and forced under a European slavery conception.

I suspect your response has rubbed others the wrong way, as it did myself, so consider this an attempt to find a common ground for dialogue - whatever the history of Africs prior to the Atlantic Slave Trade, I think we can agree that what happened was utterly grotesque and an atrocity upon the history of our common humanity.

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.

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.

Showing him a modern blender hitting 30,000 rpm

I agree, you want bums in seats as quickly and effortless as possible. Your average user coming from reddit just wants an “all” feed they can use to curate their own front page, they don’t really know, care, or want to learn about the plumbing underneath. The ones that do care will figure it out as theres plenty of resources available.

Knowing very little about the technical side - and speaking only from my experience trying to get my own account set up - I almost think the fediverse need a dedicated, standalone sign up instance (or series of instances) that has no posting enabled, but is automatically federated to the X most popular instances - so that apps and web interfaces can create simple default sign ups for new users without them needing to understand what instances even are.

Something like “lemmy.gateway” that can act as a home for the user account that then looks at the instances where the content actually happens, that can have high availability and redundancy in the event of server load on the popular instances, and that “just works” for your average reddit migrant so they don’t have to go diving into instance details to dip their toe in the water. That way your “content instances” can go up or down without impacting new user signups, your apps can work to load popular posts even if what would normally be your home instance is down, and you can decouple things a bit - maybe your “gateway” lemmy instance can drop some code to run leaner since it doesn’t have to worry about posting content.

To fund it you’d need some selfless souls, or perhaps agreement between major instances to shell out some revenue to host the sign up instance network, with the idea that getting users in to the fediverse generically is just as important as getting them on specific instances.

I have no idea if this is even possible but from a new user flow, if the intent is to maximise active users, you just want to get people “in” so they can eyeball, vote and post - then let learn how lemmy is different. Not the other way around.

This is a good summary; as a reddit exile myself who exclusively used Sync, I think it’s worth emphasising that Dawson has done an amazing job of making the transition from reddit to lemmy pretty seamless from an app design point of view. I can set my views and filters up identically as they were in the Reddit version of the app, and the lemmy experience becomes essentially identical to reddit.

There’s definitely a conflict between “paid closed source app” and “FOSS fediverse”, and there’s arguments to be made about whether user revenue should be directed to server expenses to maintain communities or front end app development to attract more users, which I think will be interesting to see play out. But at the end of the day Sync makes lemmy “useable” in a way that replicates the reddit experience, which is what a lot of migrants were after - other apps (while arguably more feature rich in terms of the fediverse) just didn’t quite hit the dopamine-feed the way Sync does.