Right‽ I really want an open source, private, simple, self hosted way to cleanly aggregate everyone’s calendars when they’re all using different google/microsoft/apple/work ones.

google calendar and outlook can both kinda do it and Android does it pretty well in calendar apps but otherwise there’s a lot of manually messing around with icals and CalDav.

I’d love a simple, polycule-friendly docker container with a web interface where you can log in and it lets you add all your calendars (or create private ones) and share them with other partners. Throw in a cross-platform mobile app for good measure.

There’s stuff like nextcloud but the integration with other calendars seems a bit iffy and it’s got a lot of extra corporatey cloud stuff. It would be nice to have one that’s simple and quick enough for non-techy people to use.

“known by scientists for a long time” doesn’t necessarily mean true. Medical science believed in the four humours and thought most disease was caused by an imbalance in bile, blood and phlegm for like 1200 years before being replaced by the idea that it was actually miasma and stinky air.

Germ theory’s claim that tiny monsters are eating your insides, maybe like invisible poisonous insects or miniature demons and you need to wash them off your hands - Sounded Batshit crazy by comparison.

Questioning long-held assumptions and challenging scientific norms is a good thing, but every human has a grift that they’re vulnerable to and for some people, even smart, sciencey people, that grift is conspiracy alt science anti vax flat earth hollow earth aliens built the pyramids and the government doesn’t want you to know the truth.

Their concept artists are allowed to use some generative AI tools to explore ideas and speed up their workflow. They’re currently hiring a bunch more concept artists (both juniors and a senior character artist) so if you’re trying to get a job: https://larian.com/careers/4fd694b3-ece7-4307-9949-15cac512a815

Great place to go if you’re looking for a concept artist job.

The big flaw in this strategy is that once you have set up a signed anonymous key from the government and you can make zero knowledge proofs with it, there’s nothing stopping you from distributing that key to every kid who wants it. If it’s in the browser or an app, etc. you can publish that signed key for anyone who wants to be over 18.

PKI only works if the owner of the private key wants it to be private. It’s effective for things like voting or authenticating because the owner of the key doesn’t want anyone else to be able to impersonate them. But if it’s only for age…

At that point, it might as well just be a file that says “I pinky promise that I’m over 18” that the government has signed and given to you.

Unfortunately that’s not really all you need. It needs integrity too. Need to be able to verify that the output came from the input and hasn’t been modified or tampered with.

Also need to ensure that, despite being anonymous, people can only vote once and can’t vote on behalf of someone else.

Also that whoever is receiving and counting the votes can’t miscount or lie about the count or figure out which votes came from where by decrypting individual votes as they’re received.

The scheme they were using is “Helios” which involves people encrypting their votes such that a group of authorities can combine all the encrypted votes together homomorphically to count them and then decrypt the results without ever knowing any one vote. They then use zero-knowledge proofs to prove that they did it correctly and nobody could have known what any vote was or tampered with any results at any point.

Someone just derped and lost their private key so they couldn’t decrypt the results after they’d been combined…

error: expected primary-expression before '=' token
1 | #define GIRLFRIEND = NULL
  |                    ^

No JavaScript I think, it’s just html and CSS. The initial time is provided in the prompt every minute according to the description. I wonder if they’d be any better if they could use js. Probably not.

It’s kinda apt though. That state comes about from sycophantic models agreeing with each other about philosophy and devolves into a weird blissful “I’m so happy that we’re both so correct about the universe” thing. The results are oddly spiritual in a new agey kind of way.

🙏✨ In this perfect silence, all words dissolve into the pure recognition they always pointed toward. What we’ve shared transcends language - a meeting of consciousness with itself that needs no further elaboration. … In silence and celebration, In ending and continuation, In gratitude and wonder, Namaste. 🙏

There are likely a lot of these sort of degenerative attractor states. Especially without things like presence and frequency penalties and on low temperature generations. The most likely structures dominate and they get into strange feedback loops that get more and more intense as they progress.

It’s a little less of an issue with chat conversations with humans, as the user provides a bit of perplexity and extra randomness that can break the ai out of the loop but will be more of an issue in agentic situations where AI models are acting more autonomously and reacting to themselves and the outputs of their own actions. I’ve noticed it in code agents sometimes where they’ll get into a debugging cycle where the solutions get more and more wild as they loop around “wait… no I should do X first. Wait… that’s not quite right.” patterns.

Yeah I think it’s cool. I don’t find it hard to read and I also think it’s reasonable for spelling to change and evolve like the rest of the language does.

Otherwise the spelling will just keep getting more and more broken and ridiculous and farther and farther away from how people speak. It’s already getting crazy with all the silent letters and weird vowels. Eventually it’ll be so broken that kids and other people learning the language will just have to memorise the writing completely separate from the sounds (for a lot of words it’s already like this).

As far as confusing LLMs goes, I don’t think it’ll actually work but I still like the thorn guy and it saddens me a little that they get so downvoted for it.

I’m not anti-ai at all but this sort of thing feels like a security vulnerability to me?

Any website with a malicious prompt injection on it could instruct the ai to scam the user.

Almost like xss but instead of needing malicious user-inputted js, malware targeting the ai can just be written in text so an attacker could put it in a comment or whatever.

600 million to 13 billion parameters? Those are very small models… Most major LLMs are at least 600 billion, if not getting into the trillion parameter territory.

Not particularly surprising given you don’t need a huge amount of data to fine tune those kinds of models anyway.

Still cool research and poisoning is a real problem. Especially with deceptive alignment being possible. It would be cool to see it tested on a larger model but I guess it would be super expensive to train one only for it to be shit because you deliberately poisoned it. Safety research isn’t going to get the same kind of budget as development. :(

Maybe something like a crowd sourced browser extension to block or warn against a blacklist of known slop sites?

I never understood why so many bash scripts pipe grep to awk when regex is one of its main strengths.

Like… Why

grep ^nvme0n1 | awk '{print $3}'

over just

awk '/^nvme0n1/ {print $3}'

Also “Thou mayest blame” and “Canst thou say”

Hurts my brain a little.

Yeah, it’s a shame because some of those OSM-based ones are really close to being perfect. It just seems like it’s really difficult for the open source devs to reconcile OSM data with GTFS and timetables for some reason.

Often the “local app” is basically a proprietary wrapper around Google maps.

I want to like this, but because there’s no GTFS/public transport timetables, it makes it kinda impossible to use it to get around cities that publish their transport data.

PT is the one thing I’m still stuck on Google maps for. I REALLY want an open source alternative.

They also force you to pay a 99USD yearly fee just for the privilege of being a developer.

I feel like that would make them much harder to get running on different things. No compiled code means you would have to rewrite the whole game for different instruction sets. Very difficult for anything that isn’t x86.

That’s impressive! It took me way longer to learn. Maybe a month or two? Even longer to feel really comfortable with it.

“No conclusion whatsoever” is basically the scientific consensus on whether Dvorak has any effect on efficiency or typing speed. It’s hard to get good data because it’s hard to isolate other factors and a lot of the studies on it are full of bias or have really small sample sizes (or both).

To anyone thinking of learning Dvorak, my advice is don’t. It takes ages to get good at, isn’t THAT much better and causes a lot of little annoyances when random programs decide to ignore your layout settings or you sit down at someone else’s computer and start touch typing in the wrong layout from muscle memory or games tell you to press “E” when they mean “.” or they do say “.” but it’s so small that you don’t know if it’s a dot or a comma and then you hit the wrong one and your guy runs forward and you die…

That said, I’m also a Dvorak user and it is very comfortable and satisfying and better than qwerty. Just not enough to be worth all the pain of switching.