I am going to be in Minneapolis soon and I have 1 free day which I want to spend going to local bookstores. Does anyone have a favorite local store in the city? I particularly like going to bookstores with good SFF sections, and also lots of book club/staff picks; and also to used bookstores with good SFF fictions. It's my first time in Minneapolis so every local bookstore there will be new to me!

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

Posting not a link as it's just a newsflash type thing. Translations with deepl. Edited some of the text myself to get rid of some redundant stuff.

Link

In March, sales of Jolly Cola increased at least 13-fold in Rema 1000 compared to the same period last year. Grocery chains Coop and Fleggaard have also seen significant increases. The Jolly Cola brewery also said earlier in March that they have never experienced anything like this.

Further context:

Link

Danes are bypassing American products, and chains are feeling it.

The boycott movement can be felt at the Danish fast food chain: ""We are clearly experiencing a growing interest. The fact that we are a Danish burger chain is an interesting alternative to the American chains for many Danes."

At a vintner, the anti-American movement is not a big issue, but the wine merchant has still received a “no thanks” from some customers when he has suggested an American wine: "Now that Trump has come to power, the demand is not as great as it used to be. Some people are simply opting out."

Even though consumers in Denmark want to send a signal and turn their backs on Trump and the US with their wallets, it could ultimately be a disservice to ourselves: "It should not become a joint boycott against the US, because we risk losing significantly more as a country than we gain from it. If the US suddenly says that it's time to stop buying Novo Nordisk medicines in the US, it will hit the Danish economy tenfold compared to the effect a consumer boycott has on the US economy,” he says. “There is no reason for us to provoke this trade war to become even fiercer than it already is."

Oh, and then there's also this:

Danish grocery chain to distinguish European from US goods.

More chains are joining in now: Coop to introduce labeling of American goods

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like advetising.digital, cory booker and april fools day. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was miffed.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

I would love to self-host a Tildes instance with my domain to create a community in my native language speakers. I saw, from old posts, that it is not an easy process at all. But I really love the concept and the style of Tildes. It is better than Reddit and other Fediverse platforms.
Is there anyone who managed to host Tildes instance?

I would be so glad to have some guidance.

I understand that Tildes implements rate limiting for replies to comments in order to discourage excessive back-and-forth debates or arguments. My current rate limit is one reply every 2 hours. So, if I reply to a comment on one post and then try to reply to a comment on another post, it tells me I have to wait 120 minutes (minus however many minutes since my last comment) until I can comment again.

Is this the normal rate limit? If so, don't people find this... limiting?

Update (2025-04-09 at 08:22 UTC): I was just able to comment twice within ten minutes, so it seems the rate limit has disappeared as mysteriously as it appeared.

The popular online discourse on Large Language Models’ (LLMs’) capabilities is often polarized in a way I find annoying and tiresome.

On one end of the spectrum, there is nearly complete dismissal of LLMs: an LLM is just a slightly fancier version of the autocomplete on your phone’s keyboard, there’s nothing to see here, move on (dot org).

This dismissive perspective overlooks some genuinely interesting novel capabilities of LLMs. For example, I can come up with a new joke and ask ChatGPT to explain why it’s funny or come up with a new reasoning problem and ask ChatGPT to solve it. My phone’s keyboard can’t do that.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are eschatological predictions: human-level or superhuman artificial general intelligence (AGI) will likely be developed within 10 years or even within 5 years, and skepticism toward such predictions is “AI denialism”, analogous to climate change denial. Just listen to the experts!

There are inconvenient facts for this narrative, such as that the majority of AI experts give much more conservative timelines for AGI when asked in surveys and disagree with the idea that scaling up LLMs could lead to AGI.

The ARC Prize is an attempt by prominent AI researcher François Chollet (with help from Mike Knoop, who apparently does AI stuff at Zapier) to introduce some scientific rigour into the conversation. There is a monetary prize for open source AI systems that can perform well on a benchmark called ARC-AGI-2, which recently superseded the ARC-AGI benchmark. (“ARC” stands for “Abstract and Reasoning Corpus”.)

ARC-AGI-2 is not a test of whether an AI is an AGI or not. It’s intended to test whether AI systems are making incremental progress toward AGI. The tasks the AI is asked to complete are colour-coded visual puzzles like you might find in a tricky puzzle game. (Example.) The intention is to design tasks that are easy for humans to solve and hard for AI to solve.

The current frontier AI models score less than 5% on ARC-AGI-2. Humans score 60% on average and 100% of tasks have been solved by at least two humans in two attempts or less.

For me, this helps the conversation about AI capabilities because it gives a rigorous test and quantitative measure to my casual, subjective observations that LLMs routinely fail at tasks that are easy for humans.

François Chollet was impressed when OpenAI’s o3 model scored 75.7% on ARC-AGI (the older version of the benchmark). He emphasizes the concept of “fluid intelligence”, which he seems to define as the ability to adapt to new situations and solve novel problems. Chollet thinks that o3 is the first AI system to demonstrate fluid intelligence, although it’s still a low level of fluid intelligence. (o3 also required thousands of dollars’ worth of computation to achieve this result.)

This is the sort of distinction that can’t be teased out by the polarized popular discourse. It’s the sort of nuanced analysis I’ve been seeking out, but which has been drowned out by extreme positions on LLMs that ignore inconvenient facts.

I would like to see more benchmarks that try to do what AGI-AGI-2 does: find problems that humans can easily solve and frontier AI models can’t solve. These sort of benchmarks can help us measure AGI progress much more usefully than the typical benchmarks, which play to LLMs’ strengths (e.g. massive-scale memorization) and don’t challenge them on their weaknesses (e.g. reasoning).

I long to see AGI within my lifetime. But the super short timeframes given by some people in the AI industry feel to me like they border on mania or psychosis. The discussion is unrigorous, with people pulling numbers out of thin air based on gut feeling.

It’s clear that there are many things humans are good at doing that AI can’t do at all (where the humans vs. AI success rate is ~100% vs. ~0%). It serves no constructive purpose to ignore this truth and it may serve AI research to develop rigorous benchmarks around it.

Such benchmarks will at least improve the quality of discussion around AI capabilities, insofar as people pay attention to them.

Update (2024-04-11 at 19:16 UTC): François Chollet has a new 20-minute talk on YouTube that I recommend. I've watched a few videos of Chollet talking about ARC-AGI or ARC-AGI-2, and this one is beautifully succinct: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWHezX43I-4

As per title this is inspired by my recent problems with a Latitude 7320 notebook.

I can't use my desktop right now and so wanted some cheaper nb for normal usage and eventually settled on this model due to being able to get it at an acceptable ratio of price to age and seeing it as compatible on Ubuntu, not noticing the disclaimer until later.

The problems started right after installing Fedora KDE - the nb was running at absolutely abysmal performance and this problem affects several models.

Running passmark I've got above 2000 on cpu, on Windows I had 11000. The cpu was throttling to 1500Mhz and lower for no reason. Switching a BIOS setting of power management to "ultra performance" got me to twice the score.

Eventually using throttled from github for various Lenovo and Dell models and thermald I was able to get to twice that again, still a fifth less than on Windows. Also the repo has potential of security concerns due to how it works, also potential to just stop working due to them later.

Mainly I'm posting this to just say that there is zero legitimate technical reason why this should happen, it works on Windows and on Dell tampered Ubuntu images. The hw is fine but for some reason someone somewhere decided to artificially limit the hw for whatever reason.

Right now I am still indecided if I should write off the several hours I've spent on this and return the machine to play the dice with some other model.

Edit 5.4.: it turns out I was not using the throttled package correctly and now have roughly equivalent performace in Linux as in Windows up from the 4/5 or so after all the other workarounds. All of the points still apply though. I also heartily recommend s-tui as a nice utility for cpu monitoring and stress test.

I have been listening to the PreHistory Podcast, written and produced by an actual academic archaeologist. I enjoy the rigor and specificity but i’m having trouble finding similar content I like, especially without the promotions and ads and fan service. I know that in the age of social media personalities such dry content is hard to come by.

I particularly enjoy ancient history, but feel free to offer other podcasts that feature people who have mastered their discipline and have found clear, effective, and even entertaining ways of sharing it. Thanks!

I recently had a (mostly) civilized discussion with an older gentleman who mentioned reading a book about how newer generations have not learned how to suffer, and that is the root cause of many evils in the world today. He then expressed a sort of excitement at the thought of self-induced suffering through our supreme leader's terrible economic and geopolitical decisions. It would "make us stronger on the other side."

To which my question was, and is still: "You're a top 2% earner in the most powerful country in the world. You have everything you could ever want or dream of. Why do YOU want to suffer?"

My second question/point was: "What you're describing as people being too comfortable, I'd counter that it's just the advancement of technology and industry -- most of us don't HAVE to suffer by breaking our backs working the fields from sun up to sun down because we have equipment to do that for us. Instead, we can work our desk jobs and play games on our phones."

And my final question/point was: "Why would anyone ever wish suffering upon anyone else? That doesn't seem very biblical."

I'm really struggling to understand the line of thinking that I am hearing from the very top levels of the government all the way down to the working class. The thinking that "we deserve to suffer." In a sense, I feel that it's a sort of disguised retribution or malice, i.e. "I don't want to suffer, but there are a bunch of people I disagree with that do need to suffer."

Please help me understand so I can be better prepared to debate the next person who tries to make this point to me. I'm looking at you, Dad.