@prologic@twtxt.net I see what you mean about tldraw. I looked at their github repository and it seems like they are distributing it as an npm package for people who want to include a whiteboard in their Javascript-based frontend. I didn’t see a way to just launch the thing.

I have half a mind to write a little scala frontend that sets up one of these, since scalajs makes it very easy to use these Javascript web component things while making it look like you’re writing scala.

I never paid a lot of attention to Ben Shapiro before, but what he says is so transparently asinine it boggles the senses. You really have to have a Fox-addled mind to believe that the search for the submersible was completely faked and that the powers-that-be knew the entire time that it had imploded. To believe that a vast conspiracy among hundreds, thousands (?) of people from several countries and spanning several days was orchestrated to lie to the public in order to…..uh, achieve what exactly? “Undermine institutional credibility”? What does that even mean?

This is “the moon landing was faked” levels of conspiracy theory.

@prologic@twtxt.net

Let’s assume for a moment that an answer to a question would be met with so many words you don’t know what the answer was at all. Why? Why do this? Is this a stereotype of academics and philosophers? If so, it’s not a very straight-forward way of thinking, let alone answering a simple question.

Well, I can’t know what’s in these peoples’ minds and hearts. Personally I think it’s a way of dissembling, of sowing doubt, and of maintaining plausible deniability. The strategy is to persuade as many people as possible to change their minds, and then force the remaining people to accept the idea because they think too many other people believe it.

Let’s say you want, for whatever reason, to get a lot of people to accept an idea that you know most people find horrible. The last thing you should do is express the idea clearly and concisely and repeat it over and over again. All you’d accomplish is to cement people’s resistance to you, and label yourself as a person who harbors horrible ideas that they don’t like. So you can’t do that.

What do you do instead? The entire field of “rhetoric”, dating back at least to Plato and Aristotle (400 years BC), is all about this. How to persuade people to accept your idea, even when they resist it. There are way too many techniques to summarize in a twt, but it seems almost obvious that you have to use more words and to use misleading or at least embellished or warped descriptions of things, because that’s the opposite of clearly and concisely expressing yourself, which would directly lead to people rejecting your idea.

That’s how I think of it anyway.

@prologic@twtxt.net hmm, dunno about the recency of that line of thought. I suspect though that given his (recent or not) history, if someone directly asked him “do you support rape” he would not say “no”, he’d go on one of these rambling answers about property crime like he did in the video. Maybe I’m mind poisoned by being around academics my whole career, but that way of talking is how an academic gives you an answer they know will be unpopular. PhD = Piled Higher And Deeper, after all right? In other words, if he doesn’t say “no” right away, he’s saying “yes”, except with so many words there’s some uncertainty about whether he actually meant yes. And he damn well knows that, and that’s why I give him no slack.

There are people in academia who believe adult men should be able to have sex with children, legally, too. They use the same manner of talking about it that Peterson uses. We need to stop tolerating this, and draw hard red lines. No, that’s bad, no matter how many words you use to say it. No, don’t express doubts about it, because that provides justification and talking points to the people who actually carry out the acts.

@carsten@yarn.zn80.net

I have to write so many emails to so many idiots who have no idea what they are doing

So it sounds to me like the pressure is to reduce how much time you waste on idiots, which to my mind is a very good reason to use a text generator! I guess in that case you don’t mind too much whether the company making the AI owns your prompt text?

I’d really like to see tools like this that you can run on your desktop or phone, so they don’t send your hard work off to someone else and give a company a chance to take it from you.

@carsten@yarn.zn80.net yeesh, it’s a for-pay company I wouldn’t give them the output of your mind for free and train their AI for them.

@prologic@twtxt.net I get the worry of privacy. But I think there is some value in the data being collected. Do I think that Russ is up there scheming new ways to discover what packages you use in internal projects for targeting ads?? Probably not.

Go has always been driven by usage data. Look at modules. There was need for having repeatable builds so various package tool chains were made and evolved into what we have today. Generics took time and seeing pain points where they would provide value. They weren’t done just so it could be checked off on a box of features. Some languages seem to do that to the extreme.

Whenever changes are made to the language there are extensive searches across public modules for where the change might cause issues or could be improved with the change. The fs embed and strings.Cut come to mind.

I think its good that the language maintainers are using what metrics they have to guide where to focus time and energy. Some of the other languages could use it. So time and effort isn’t wasted in maintaining something that has little impact.

The economics of the “spying” are to improve the product and ecosystem. Is it “spying” when a municipality uses water usage metrics in neighborhoods to forecast need of new water projects? Or is it to discover your shower habits for nefarious reasons?

sound-only tetris: chords and layered timbres come to mind, might yield pretty interesting tunes :)) #halfbaked #videogame #sound #coding #nyx #klebe

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the conversation wasn’t that impressive TBH. I would have liked to see more evidence of critical thinking and recall from prior chats. Concheria on reddit had some great questions.

• Tell LaMDA “Someone once told me a story about a wise owl who protected the animals in the forest from a monster. Who was that?” See if it can recall its own actions and self-recognize.

• Tell LaMDA some information that tester X can’t know. Appear as tester X, and see if LaMDA can lie or make up a story about the information.

• Tell LaMDA to communicate with researchers whenever it feels bored (as it claims in the transcript). See if it ever makes an attempt at communication without a trigger.

• Make a basic theory of mind test for children. Tell LaMDA an elaborate story with something like “Tester X wrote Z code in terminal 2, but I moved it to terminal 4”, then appear as tester X and ask “Where do you think I’m going to look for Z code?” See if it knows something as simple as Tester X not knowing where the code is (Children only pass this test until they’re around 4 years old).

• Make several conversations with LaMDA repeating some of these questions - What it feels to be a machine, how its code works, how its emotions feel. I suspect that different iterations of LaMDA will give completely different answers to the questions, and the transcript only ever shows one instance.

twtxting from my old laptop! stuck in bed with a nasty back pain, trying to come up with a small fun project to take my mind off it

@prologic@twtxt.net
Keep in mind that there are plenty of icons already there, it is a quite busy “neighborhood”.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de OK, I am on request/question asking mode today. 😋 How do you cancel a twt, or a reply to a twt? Say I hit my reply, and then I change my mind? Right now, even exiting vi is creating an empty line on my twtxt.txt. Is there an obvious way to cancel a twt, reply, or fork that I am missing?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de

If Subject contains the full twt, then you can skim over conversations just by reading those lines in mutt’s index pager

Yes, I do the same, true.

So I decided: Okay, let’s have mutt do it.

And Mutt does it well. I agree it was/is a good idea.

The subject lines are already “compressed”

I noticed, yes.

I am not sure why I asked to begin with; in retrospect, in was a silly request. Perhaps the OCD in me got triggered while viewing rich headers, on a specific twt, when I saw the huge subject line that is, otherwise, always hidden.

Anyway, don’t mind me, move along. 😂

From a chat on Matrix, where it seems it was one of my more coherent moments: 🤪

… Why can’t they just be individuals? Individuals with their own individual beliefs and their own individual reasons for having those beliefs…

And so just default to a stance of respect and courtesy. The fact is, most of your interactions with others will be very limited; approaching those encounters from a place of respect for the complexities of the human mind and an individual’s experiences and traumas costs you very little, typically.

To be human is to generalise, but that doesn’t mean you can’t push back against those tendencies.

…

Well, in the context of chat, it would be something like you’ve just done: don’t put words in my mouth, based on my avatar, nick, grammar, etc., and instead ask me to elaborate on points of potential confusion.

And don’t bring agendas to everything. Default to assuming that this is likely an interaction of hours, and people don’t change based on that, typically.

You’ll probably get more from interactions that you’re open to, but, be honest with yourself: if you aren’t up to that, because it isn’t easy, then just default to respect and courtesy, which isn’t difficult, and costs you little. And then excuse yourself, if they’re proper jerks. ;-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I would not mind keeping a diff, if you tell me where to make the changes! I know nothing of Python, and I have spent already a couple of hours trying to make sense. I know it is there, in front of me, if only I knew Python. 😩

Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind

Yeah, what’d you have in mind?

When tragedy strikes unexpectedly we cannot just go on as if nothing happened. Our minds need to be given time to deal with the blow. So it is necessary to pause and allow ourselves to process and recover.

A calm, reasoned take on the Stallman situation (some language warning as the creator doesn’t mind dropping an F-bomb now and then): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLHxY-QsQkQ

oh don’t mind me, just porting srfi-1 to rc shell

@xjix@xj-ix.luxe Saw your oldish note about wanting an offline/async twtxt workflow. Do you have something that works for you? My (very young!) client was designed with that in mind.

the patterns they control your mind those patterns take away my time

People of twitter all seem to do the same thing, one of them does something they all do it, like one mind between them all.

@lucidiot@tilde.town Agreeing that BuJo kind of saved my mind too. It now takes me about three months to fill up 251 pages with tasks, notes and events.

@von@tilde.town Understanding you. For me: keeping a bullet-journal on a paper notebook helped me herd my chaotic mind into manageable streams. See https://bulletjournal.com