Revv

Personally, I take comfort that the executive will be weakened as it looks more and more likely that we’re about to have a wannabe dictator coming to office.

I’m going to say first off that this is kind of depressing. That said, after my initial knee-jerk reaction of “fuck you, Duolingo,” it occurs to me that is might be a better outcome than them pulling out of Russia altogether.

Providing Russian citizens easy access to language learning provides them access to non-Russian media and non-Russian discourse on queer issues.

In my own experience, learning a language as an adult has taken place in ~3 stages: 1. learn from instructional material exclusively, 2. consume foreign language material with native-language support/tools, 3. learn more of the language via context. If having an app available to folks in an oppressive country helps them get through stage 1 and into 2/3, it gives them a chance to escape the hateful discourse of the regime… In theory.

On the other hand, maybe it’s just capitalists being capitalists.

I’m a big fan of cheap (as in ~$10/yr vps) and reverse proxy over wireguard. My home ip isn’t exposed and I’m able to quickly spin new containers up by updating my reverse proxy config and adding a wireguard peer.

I keep two VPSs- one as reverse proxy for all my miscellaneous services and another solely for email. The latter port forwards raw traffic over wireguard to my email server container. That way, even if the VPS gets compromised, my personal data remains secure.

I end up paying ~ $30/yr (+ whatever I’m paying in electricity) for domain + VPS. It’s a bit more involved than tailscale, etc, but I’m willing to put in a little extra work to make sure I’m not at the mercy of some company getting up to some rent-seeking bullshit.

I agree with respect to the low likelihood of changing one’s old posts being effective in preventing their being used as training data. I’d assume, however, that those who are motivated to “vandalize” (itself a loaded term to refer to altering one’s own words) their old posts have more than one motive; in addition to inconveniencing humans, doing so devalues reddit as a place to find information and, in theory, punishes reddit for their actions, maybe even deters others from behaving similarly.

This a situation where I think that maybe a shared distaste/disdain for “slacktivism” leads to folks discouraging potentially effective collective action in one of the limited contexts where online protest has a chance of having any effect.

It’s a hoodie.

If only there had been another widespread, wasteful prior use of expensive and power hungry compute equipment that suddenly became less valuable/effective and could quickly be repurposed to run LLMs…

Have you searched for a “surrey”? Maybe you’ll have better luck with that?

Is there a good reason I don’t know about to prefer this over Aegis?

Don’t forget the smoot!

The really nice thing about old cameras is that the glass is cheap. With an F-mount Nikon, you’ve got decades worth of lens production flooding the used market and really affordable upgrades for the body if/when your decide to move up.

Let folks with more money than brains (or someone else footing the bill) chase after the latest and greatest while you scoop up the leftovers. :)

Doesn’t this only put a (statistical) limit on how cheaply a civilization can launch planet-ending attacks? It may well be feasible for a civilization to aim and accelerate a mass to nearly the speed of light in order to protect itself from a future threat. It doesn’t necessarily follow it would be feasible or desirable to spend the presumably nontrivial resources needed to do so on every planet where simple life is detected.

Add to this the fact that, at least I understand it, evidence of our current level of technological sophistication (e.g. errant radio waves) attenuates to the point of being undetectable with sufficient distance and the dark forest becomes a bit more viable again.

Personally, I don’t like it as an answer to the Drake equation, but I think that it fails for social rather than technological/logical reasons. The hypothesis assumes a sort of hyper-logical game theory optimized civilization that is a. nothing whatsoever one our own and b. unlikely to emerge as any civilization that achieves sufficient technological sophistication to obliterate another will have gotten there via cooperation.

Hey! Sorry you’re feeling shitty. I just finished Cassette Beasts while I was down with COVID. It’s a fun, different take on the Pokemon formula with a cool aesthetic. Perhaps not the absolute coziest, but still cozy in my book.

Since before it was the CIA. Open Source in this context isn’t about software licensing, it’s about gleaning everything you can about an adversary from publicly available information without infiltrating anything.

A non-intelligence example of this would speculating on what products a company is working on based on their job postings.

To bring it full circle, one can glean from this posting that the CIA is looking to hire someone to troll the internet for folks to target for further intelligence gathering. Business as usual.

I think the idea you’re driving at is that the worst leaders in human history will drive us to extinction. That’s not the scary thought to me. The scary thought to me is that decent or even good leaders might do the same when put in the wrong position. There are plenty of cases where individual rational decisions combine to disastrous consequences for all involved. I wonder if it’s possible for humanity to continually avoid such survival-threatening prisoners’ dilemmas…

In addition to all the other reasons offered re: functional analogy, many of the aviation terms themselves come from naval / boating / sea-faring. Pilot is a good example, previously having been used in the sense of “riverboat pilot,” etc.

To me, this reads like “Giant-ATV-Based Taxi Service Couldn’t Exist If Operators were Required to Pay Homeowners for Driving over their Houses.”

If a business can’t exist without externalizing its costs, that business should either a. not exist, or b. be forced to internalize those costs through licensing or fees. See also, major polluters.

Aviation/Flying. r/flying had been a pretty much daily stop for me prior to leaving reddit as it was one of they only good places to talks with other pilots. I’d love to have a place to chat with other pilots and/or homebuilt aircraft folks rather than a dozen or so barely maintained forum sites.

Inexplicable.

I chose a name that means the same thing as my birth name, but in a different language (old English -> Norwegian). I asked my mom what my name would have been if I had been born a girl and took that first name as my middle name.