Okay…

Pop quiz. Who was just elected as president of Ireland?

Bad bot.

(Seriously, someone ban this spammer unless they offer proof of life?)

I was fortunate enough to travel outside the country recently.

Someone local asked us WTF is going on in America, and got… silence from our group, which was divided between Fox News boomers and millennials like me.

I think that’s quite emblematic. We can’t even talk about this shit in person without blowing up.

What you see online/in news now is a caricature of the worst of America. Normal people here aren’t chronically online, or worse, professional influencers, and algorithmic scams/busted parties largely made them delusional voters.

That being said, I’m a U.S. southerner and I have seen some shit you wouldn’t believe. Like shit too dramatic for television. Some is finally out in the open.

Well Musk’s quote there isn’t wrong.

Musk isn’t an engineer, but neither are those consultants. They should all be deferring to deeper within the company for technical decisions instead of conflating some sci fi literacy with practical decision making, and leave musk to making much coarser ones at most.

And that’s why Sora sucks, because it’s censored, closed weights, totally opaque, largely toolless, and peddled like spam.

I mean, I’m as big a ML fans as you’ll find on Lemmy, but this is a slop machine to build some Altman hype.

A controllable, integrated version as a tool, with augmentations like VACE or SDXLs controlnet would be neat. Thats also great because it’s not so easy for 1 click zero effort automated spam, which is by far Sora’s largest market as is.

…And guess what. We have that, it’s neat already, it’s open weights, it’s improving, and it’s not so controversial/abused because there’s an actual tiny barrier of entry to using it, like Davinci Resolve vs instagram filters.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure working Nvidia on wayland is a very recent thing.

Honestly I just boot from my (AMD) IGP for linux, which is better for compute anyway.

I guess it depends on what that ‘something’ is.

My box used to be like this (mostly Nvidia issues), but its been relatively well behaved. And now my Windows install has become a pain with UWP apps, printers, and LAN drives, specifically, that I’ve just given up trying to resolve TBH. Not to speak of some programming stuff.

Both OSes are tools that make specific things easier.

So many folks seem to be the opposite of me…

Linux just works now. Shit with my printer, device drivers, LAN things, stuff like like is like wrestling an animal on Windows for some reason, and… just works with KDE. It’s like they’ve swapped places.

Random Windows apps works better in wine than they do in actual windows, sometimes. With no fuss: I double click and they launch, that’s it.

Don’t even get me started on security.

But Linux is (mostly) not performant for gaming, at least not on Nvidia. It’s… fine, but I’m not going to take a 10%+ hit, sometimes much more severe, and poorer support for HDR, frame limiters, mod tools and such when I can just boot neutered Windows instead.

So I’m not getting away from Windows in the near future, but to frank, I don’t understand why more folks (who get past the admittedly tall hurdle of learning about partitioning and installing an OS) don’t dual boot, or seek to use certain poorly supported Linux native apps when double clicking exes mostly just works.

But my point is you don’t have to pick and choose. And there’s no commitment. You can have your cake and eat it, and send the cake back if you don’t like it.

No, I just skimmed the transcript because it’s an hour long, heh.

I did get that bit about SETI and the original paper, which is interesting, and also agree that astronomers looking for them over the paper is hilarious and stupid.

Man, I miss my jailbroken iPhone 5.

It was like having your cake and eating it, and somehow its stock (much less tweaked) UI is less clunky than whatever TF Apple has done to my discount 16. Maybe it’s because I was using Android in between, but still…

With the caveat that I only read the transcripts, I don’t find that compelling at all.

The initial sentiment is correct; folks like Sam Altman responding to existential problems like “oh we can just build a Dyson Sphere in 30 years” should be in freaking jail instead of power.

But the only other justification I see is “well, this is stupidly impractical in the context of current humans.” Things like:

• “What, we make all those nanobots and get all that energy with fusion and use it to disassemble Jupiter?”

• “Why don’t we just use that energy to leave the solar system?”

• “Say it’s a Dyson Swarm; what do we do living on all those solar satellites?”

She’s fallen into the same trap of “existing sci fi” she accuses other of falling into.

We’re not talking about a bunch of people in space looking to expand a habit. At this point, we’re talking about some AI that’s already converted an entire moons worth of mass into computronium, can upload folks to VR and simulate realities, that can reconfigure atomic nuclei into ultradense strings of matter or construct and control tiny black holes to generate energy and elements.

It’s left the solar system loooong ago.

Its capabilities, needs, and goals are completely umhuman, and at that point pondering how to efficiently capture the output of all this stellar mass sustainably is absolutely practical to plan. A Dyson Sphere (or more practically a swarm) isn’t the only way, but it’s not the worst idea for a “young” intelligence. And in OA, at a certain point, the Sephrotics seem to construct “sci fi” dyson spheres as habitats for aesthetic reasons, whereas their actual industrial/computational bases are more utilitarian arrangements of masses.

Yeah, I buy the filter (or at least a big filter) being early. That does seem like a freak accident, even with all that time for it.

But on the spread of civilization, this is why I love Orion’s arm: it posits that if a civilization like ours makes it another few thousand years, it’ll expanded in a bubble at a significant fraction of the speed of light and be extremely difficult to extinguish at that point, meaning civilization should have spread across galaxies by now:

https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/49333a6b7d29f

That makes a lot of sense to me.

And the fiction, even as wild as it is, gives the still somewhat unsolved Fermi Paradox a lot of thought:

https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/464d087672fe7

I particularly like the ‘Ginnungagap Theory’ that, perhaps, there’s some unknown barrier to expansion.

https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/464e942db2789

“Even with all the equipment available in the Civilized Galaxy and beyond the amount of the Universe which can be examined in detail is tiny. Imagine our own Galaxy as a deep sea fish, with very sharp but tiny eyes, peering at the other galaxies with trepidation.”

The whale, especially its ‘lip,’ is so perfect.

I have, but I’m also concerned that humanity got “lucky” so far and that this won’t happen again. There are theories positing that there are several blocking “gates” to civilization, and humanity passed an exceptional number of them already.

It’s reasonable to assert that’s a misleading, human centric perspective; but I’d also point out that the Fermi Paradox supports it. Either:

• The conditions that gave birth to our civilization are not exceptional, and spread intelligent life is hiding from us (unlikely at this point, I think)

• They are exceptional, and we just happened to have passed many unlikely hurdles so far (hence it is critical we don’t trip up at the end here).

• They are not that exceptional (eg more intelligent vertebrates will rise, and would rise on other planets), but there is some gate we are not aware of yet (which I have heard called the Great Filter).

Another suspicious coincidence I’d point out is that we are, seemingly, the only advanced civilization from Earth so far. If we died out soon, other vertebrates that rise would find evidence of us by this point, wouldn’t they? Hence odds are we wouldnt be the first and we would have found precursors if ‘vertebrates rising and then killing themselves off’ was a likely scenario.

TL;DR: I suspect vertebrates -> our tech level is a difficult jump.

It is amazing how much I dread new Windows features.

I mean, I was pretty optimistic for a long time. I loved the DRM/presentation changes and hardware scheduling. I like a new task manager or finishing half-finished settings menus or little security optimizations. This was even going into Windows 11.

Now…

I know they’re not going to finish anything, like UWP or the settings menu they overhauled in Windows 8.

I know, in all likelihood, I’m not getting improvements to performance, presentation, latency, audio, resource utilization. No new filesystem or neat features…

We’re getting bloatware. Or ads. Or tracking. Or broken Copilot in yet another orifice I don’t want it in, and that’s speaking as a fervent local ML runner.

And every time it updates, I know I have to check the programs, task manager, services, and purpose made debloating programs to see what crap I have to castrate next. It’s unreal. No wonder folks are dumping it for Android/iOS.

Humanity survived though. Even with ‘humans’ dying out, I’d like some form of life to expand and go on.

My biggest fear is Earth ‘fizzling’ and never expanding before the Sun eats it, and the odds of that happening are pretty high.

Billionaire seem to have a… unscientific view of a sci fi future. Especially Musk, since he thinks he’s so transcendental, but apparently Bezos can’t help himself now either.

It doesn’t look like Star Trek.

It doesn’t look like a Cyberpunk movie.

I’d recommend diving into this for a more scientifically ‘thought out’ and optimistic extrapolation: https://www.orionsarm.com/

Interestingly, this is a neat idea waaay down the line, in the way a Dyson Swarm is interesting. But not anytime in the near future, not until humanity is very, very different (assuming we survive that long).