• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I don’t hate this article, but I’d rather have read a blog post grounded in the author’s personal experience engaging with a personalized AI assistant. She clearly has her own opinions about how they should work, but instead of being about that there’s this attempt to make it sound like there’s a lot of objective certainty to it that falls flat because of failing to draw a strong connection.

    Like this part:

    Research in cognitive and developmental psychology shows that stepping outside one’s comfort zone is essential for growth, resilience, and adaptation. Yet, infinite-memory LLM systems, much like personalization algorithms, are engineered explicitly for comfort. They wrap users in a cocoon of sameness by continuously repeating familiar conversational patterns, reinforcing existing user preferences and biases, and avoiding content or ideas that might challenge or discomfort the user.

    While this engineered comfort may boost short-term satisfaction, its long-term effects are troubling. It replaces the discomfort necessary for cognitive growth with repetitive familiarity, effectively transforming your cognitive gym into a lazy river. Rather than stretching cognitive and emotional capacities, infinite-memory systems risk stagnating them, creating a psychological landscape devoid of intellectual curiosity and resilience.

    So, how do we break free from this? If the risks of infinite memory are clear, the path forward must be just as intentional.

    Some hard evidence that stepping out of your comfort zone is good, but not really any that preventing stepping out of their comfort zone is in practice the effect that “infinite memory” features of personal AI assistants has on people, just rhetorical speculation.

    Which is a shame because how that affects people is pretty interesting to me. The idea of using a LLM with these features always freaked me out a bit and I quit using ChatGPT before they were implemented, but I want to know how it’s going for the people that didn’t, and who use it for stuff like the given example of picking a restaurant to eat at.




  • A bundler, a transpiler, a runtime (designed to be a drop-in replacement for Node.js), test runner, and a package manager - all in one.

    Bun’s single-file executables turned out to be perfect for distributing CLI tools. You can compile any JavaScript project into a self-contained binary—runs anywhere, even if the user doesn’t have Bun or Node installed. Works with native addons. Fast startup. Easy to distribute.




  • I use FreeTube, but this doesn’t seem like a “youtube piracy” solution because it is streaming the content directly from youtube, which can ultimately prevent access; I already am blocked from watching certain videos that require you to be logged in to watch.

    The problem is basically, if there is a specific youtube video you want to watch, but youtube insists that you must provide ID to see it, right now I don’t think there’s actually a lot of recourse for that because there are too many such videos for anyone else to actually host them or offer torrents or anything.






  • I don’t watch his other content but in that one video he was absolutely doing exactly what a typical user would do in his situation. He was trying to follow a tutorial, he ran into the sort of warning message Windows users are conditioned to breeze past, and followed the onscreen instructions without trying to understand the confusing stuff. They changed how it worked after that incident, as they should if mass adoption is at all desirable.


  • What about a way to donate (held in reserve for that purpose?) money after the fact for specific commits, and then have a way to indicate which things you’d be most likely to donate to going forward if they are completed? This would mean less reliable payments since there wouldn’t be a guarantee any given contribution would result in a payout, but there wouldn’t be any disincentive to work on things and there would be a general idea of what donators want. Plus doing it that way would eliminate the need for a manual escrow process.







  • I have read some articles about this, and I can see how it makes sense in some contexts. Like iirc when this happened to Red Lobster, they were able to make money through a combination of ripping off a certain group of investors, and the significant value of the company’s real estate holdings. That makes sense.

    In the case of online magazine equivalents though I really don’t get it. What is there to sell off? Shouldn’t any potential long term profits be priced in at the point they get bought out? If the company has tangible assets like offices, couldn’t they just sell those without firing anyone and have people work from home? The intangible assets are all directly tied to the publication’s reputation and audience, which seems like it would die off fast without anything worthwhile on the site.