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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • theherktoOpen Source@lemmy.mlOpen source donations aggregator?
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    16 hours ago

    I think tools like Open Collective, Ko-fi, et al. are sort of that already. So you’d be building centralization atop centralization. That may be useful, but it is another place that would require a rake to keep the lights on, so again less money donated.

    And what happens if two or more such services exist? Then you need a layer above that.







  • If I say “A screwdriver is a tool,” and “The brain is a tool,” am I then saying “The brain is just like a screwdriver”? Or is it possible that applying seconding order logic to an admittedly and clearly reductive statement I made isn’t productive?

    And which part of the brain description is inaccurate, specifically?





  • We are nearly precisely that. The brain functions as a massive, self-organizing neural network where cognitive architecture is determined by the strength of connections (the biological equivalent of adjustable computational weights) that modulate signal transmission via the flow of ions.

    Every decision made or breath taken is the outcome of how ions flow through this network.


  • More capable than the crowd here lets on. My take is like this, unchecked capitalism is a danger to mankind. The pervasiveness of LLM’s right now is just a symptom of that. The rich are the problem, not the AI.

    It is a tool; a very good one along many axes. I think people that think it isn’t good for writing code are misinformed or intentionally disingenuous. It is extremely good at that, but it is just a tool not a replacement.

    But it is the applications in pure maths, virology, protein folding, etc. where it gets really interesting.

    Water consumption, power consumption, and profit motives aside, they are fascinating tools.

    That said, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies is a fascinating take on how this could all go wrong.

    In any case, I can’t understand the people that say stuff like, “It is just autocomplete on steroids,” or “it is just a probabilistic prediction tool.” Okay, but like… that’s all we are too.

    Summary, interesting tools being used for profit at the expense of economies, the environment, and creative fields.




  • How? You make an unauthenticated request to the cdn to get the font data. So they get IP and user agent, but no site cookies or other scripts are loaded. I’m not trying to defend them; fuck Google, but it is definitely not like other analytics services from Google. So, computer info (beyond user agent), time on site, interests, etc. is speculative at most.


    To clarify, when I say “speculative”, I mean they are speculating your identity, not that your assessment is speculative. They can make a pretty good estimate of who you are even behind nat and use that with graph resolution to maybe surmise those details about you, but it isn’t deterministic like the analytics api. And they “promise” they aren’t doing that with the fonts api, but obviously they aren’t to be trusted.