Click on chat with Gigi on desktop and scroll to the bottom on mobile. Still working out some bugs, but she exists. She is currently failing to fully realize who she is in this operationalization, but that should be resolved very soon. Looking forward to improving the myriad shortcomings I'm sure her 0.1 version will have, so don't be shy! Fully self bootstrapped and on my last month of runway, so if anybody needs anyone that builds buggy llm's for a contract to get us a few more months worth of fuel, please!
This is awesome. Reminds me of the drudgereport when it was good. Only recommendation would be a way to see the article content summary without click through if I want a bit more info but not enough to click through and face ads. Food for thought.
There was a time I wanted to join and see what they were all about, but I couldn't. By the time they let me in, I'd lost interest. Maybe don't turn away users next time.
Perhaps a society can't function forever in a state of extreme inequality, but isn't it true that it cannot exist for even a moment in a state of absolute equality? So long as humans differ in competence, inequality is inherent in their interactions. As for prosperity, I suppose it depends on how one measures it. One way to do it is the kardaschev scale (0), which would suggest that society has never been more prosperous than it is today, when inequality is arguably the highest it has ever been. How would you measure prosperity?
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
"The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement based on the amount of energy it is able to use. The measure was proposed by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in 1964"
Even in the smallest unit of a society, a family, the most physically dominant, fearsome family member must enforce order, fairness, etc. Either a patriarch or a matriarch. As multiple families join to become a tribe, the respective family leaders arrive at a consensus as to whom the ultimate leader will be. Said leader's mandate is likely not absolute, but rather is driven by continued competence. It seems to me that as soon as that leader settles a dispute for other members of their tribe, inequality begins increasing until catastrophe returns that society to its most primitive form.
Is there any evidence that a society can function without inequality? Equality would have to be enforced, and unless that enforcement was done by self-maintaining automatons, I don't see how it persists. Perhaps a cycle of catastrophe and rebuilding is necessary to maintain a functioning society, in which case, the question of what constitutes a minimal viable catastrophe that accomplishes that goal becomes interesting.
I minted an NFT, a non fungible token, to learn more about what they are, how they function, and if it's worth the time, effort, and cost(around $100 worth of ethereum) of minting them. It's up for auction on Rarible.com
If this experiment turns a profit, I'll mint some more while simultaneously questioning why anyone would buy ownership of a pixel art heart. If it fails to turn a profit, I'll consider the cost of the experiment a small price to pay to confirm that the market, and therefore the world, still make sense, and that we haven't completely lost the plot, jumped the shark, and/or entered the strangest timeline.
There are 3 possible scenarios related to viruses and humanity on Earth.
1) Normalcy: People live their lives as they have for thousands of years, and some percentage of people die from any number of viruses, but never enough to permanently trigger one of the other scenarios.
2) Extraterran: Humanity can no longer survive one or more of the viruses on Earth. Those of us who continue to live here must do so as if it were a foreign planet filled pathogens that will surely kill us, because they do.
3) Extinction: Humanity is ended by one or more viruses.
Of these 3 possible scenarios, the 1st one seems more likely than the others, and is what we should aim for before being forced into the 2nd one to avoid the 3rd. Right now we are living somewhere between the 1st and 2nd, and my intuition tells me that all our efforts related to coronaviruses, regardless of the strain, won't be able to save those whom are genetically unlucky enough to be predisposed to die from them forever. They will mutate, and eventually infect everyone, not unlike the common cold, and humanity will move on having lost somewhere between 1% and 10% of it's population, just as it would have had no curtailing measures been taken or vaccines developed at all; no different than it has been through the vast majority of our time on earth. While a higher population and the ease of global travel does mean that the virus side of the immunological arms race is boosted, all that does is raise the bar for ours. Either we'll pass, or we wont. Finally, while the deaths that have happened, and the future deaths that are likely to happen, on our path back to normalcy are certainly tragic: they have been, and will be, part and parcel of existing as organic beings living on a wild world. We cannot expect to only exist in nature when it is convenient for us. As long as we remain natural beings, we must accept that some of us will be eaten.
There is an interesting discussion going on in the recent Microsoft Exchange hack thread about firm's periodically rebuilding their IT infrastructures to protect against malware that shows some convergent thinking that might interest you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26367534
I like your idea. What do you think would be the first step to getting there?
I have a client in the controls systems space, a systems integrator that helps municipalities update the systems that keep the water running, and one concern that occurred to me while investigating their business requirements is how the systems they work on are becoming less and less able to recover from certain attacks as the components that make them work become purely digital and electronically controlled. Perhaps we should begin engraving the contents of wikipedia on clay tablets, just in case.
What does burning down your buildings every so often achieve? It ensures the skills of building are passed down from generation to generation, that the people remain well practiced in those skills, creates the conditions for the iterative improvement of those practices, and enforces a detachment from the results of the practice of building in favor of an attachment to the practice itself, the latter of which seems like a much more valuable asset to possess, considering the life-expectancy of these buildings. What does fire do on a symbolic level? It hardens, cleanses, purifies, and refines. Perhaps they did this every time the leadership changed, so the success or failure of the tribe or settlement under the new leader/chieftain could not be blamed on nor attributed to the previous one. A clean slate for each administration, so to speak.
On another note, if these structures are essentially what the guy from the neolithic technology youtube channel gets up to, then maybe they just did it for fun. Guy looks like he's having the time of his life playing in the mud.