I need you to do me a favor: please keep an open mind and reserve judgement until after you've thoroughly digested the ideas I'm presenting here. These are not my ideas, and I have no connection to this project. I hope to do them justice in representing them accurately and as clearly as I understand it all.

Please don't be dismissive. Please don't jump to conclusions. I would not be posting about this if I did not believe it has tremendous potential to reshape the digital economy, and therefore everything that governs how civilization progresses in the next century. Dramatic, much? Yes, but I hope I have your attention.

I'm not posting this as a plain link, because the website looks incredibly sus. Just trust me for a few minutes. Links are at the end.

(No generative AI was used to write this post.)

What is PrizeForge?

PrizeForge is a financial service that can be best thought of as "Representative Crowdfunding" (my term, not theirs). Like direct crowdfunding (e.g. Kickstarter), it lets people pool their money to support expensive projects that would otherwise be impossible to fund. Similar to Patreon, it can also be an effective tip jar for much smaller things that would otherwise go unrewarded.

The innovation is two-fold: first, contributors never move alone. As a contributor, you set a ceiling on your weekly payment. This is the "enrollment" amount. However, the actual amount of money disbursed each weekly cycle is the amount that is successfully "matched" with other contributors. In the simplest example, if I wanted to enroll for Tildes at $20/week, and one other user enrolled at $5/week, the disbursement would be the sum of the matched funds: $5 + $5. In this way, nobody ever pays an unfair proportion of the total, and small donations become an integral part of funding allocation. Additionally, like how philanthrophists often match charitable donations to meet a fundraising objective, matching provides a powerful incentive for individuals to contribute by making individual contributions feel more significant, since any money you part with can be doubled by another contributor. The more you put in, the more others will too. (PrizeForge calls this algorithm "Elastic Fund Matching". The full algorithm gets considerably more complex, but they have a neat visualization on their site and videos.)

Second, unlike existing crowdfunding and patronage systems, creators and companies do not receive fund disbursements directly. Rather, representatives ("Delegates") send the money to the people and organizations that should receive funds to deliver value to the stream's contributors.

"Won't delegates just siphon funds to themselves?" you ask. Well, yes, that will 100% happen at some point. Corruption is a human problem that can't be solved with technology alone. PrizeForge aims to provide mechanisms to allow the community to be very dynamic, so contributors can easily switch to a new representative—for any reason. Additionally, tools for transparency in how the money moves would go a long way in keeping delegates accountable.

In the context of open-source software, delegates should be experienced power users who are well equipped to evaluate features and bugfixes, and then can award the prizes to developers according to their best judgement.

The use of a representative has many advantages over direct crowdfunding. Someone highly invested in a software product has valuable experience and would be more effective at setting priorities for features and bugfixes. An experienced and trusted delegate would save developers time having to parse the requests (...demands?) of individual users who may not be able to articulate what they really want. Also, if a developer or company stops doing what people want (providing value to the people who care), then funds can flow to competing alternatives in a very granular and dynamic way, as the delegates shift funding and/or new delegates arise.

If we could pick a delegate here for Tildes, would anybody really object to @cfabbro?

These trusted delegates already exist, everywhere! We just haven't been able to cooperate in the right ways to delegate our individual power, so they can truly move the needle on funding the projects we care about. PrizeForge is, I believe, the first truly sustainable funding model for community-owned and directed open-source.

Addendum

Watch this video first! Before you get scared away by the terrible scammy-looking website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO46oEdlkY8

The FAQ: https://prizeforge.com/faq

The company's github page: https://github.com/positron-solutions

Looks like just two people, with Psionikus doing all the promotion and running accounts. The company is incorporated in South Korea. They've got a bunch of emacs tooling, and I believe the PrizeForge concept originated out of a desire to improve the funding/development process of emacs, then the lem editor. They also apparently have a bit of beef with the FSF due to emacs politcs. Check out the last FAQ for a fun easter egg.

The sub-reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/PrizeForge/

The Hacker News comment that took me down the rabbithole: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45036360

Bonus thoughts:

• What's really crazy is that this is not a crypto or blockchain project. You can do a simplified version of the elastic fund matching with just money, pen & paper.
• This financing scheme is basically an idealized utopian voluntary tax system. I can imagine a granular delegate system being extremely effective at making politics incredibly boring. Imagine electing a local representative only to have potholes fixed in your area, using only the funds earmarked for fixing potholes. It would be so much simpler to keep them accountable. Either the roads are crap or they aren't! Where's the money, bub?! Why've you got a fancy new lawnmower?! I want my $2 back!
• If this reaches critical mass, it ends surveillance capitalism and digital feudalism. I don't want to live in Black Mirror, and this seems like the way out of that future.
• I would really love it if we can establish a funding stream for Tildes. I know I can donate to Tildes directly, but it would be a great test run to help PrizeForge get operational and build credibility. I only need one other crazy person. Isn't the internet great? (My credit card has not been stolen btw)
• The password login is still in development, so you have to login via Google SSO. I absolutely hate using Google SSO but I get it from a developer perspective. Proper auth is hard and companies like Tailscale took the same path and still don't support password login. (My google hasn't been hacked either fwiw)

This is always weighing on my mind and is coming after this comment I wrote.

The tech sector, especially the hyper-online portion of it, is full of devs who were doing some random shit before and shifted to AI the past few years. Don't get me wrong, I'm one of those: In much the same way, very shortly after the release of ChatGPT, I completely changed my own business as well (and now lead an AI R&D lab). Sure I had plenty of ML/AI experience before, but the sector was completely different and that experience has practically no impact aside from some fundamentals today.

The thing is, LLMs are all in all very new, few people have an active interest into "how it all works", and most of the sector's interest is in the prompting and chaining layers. Imagine network engineering and website design being bagged into the same category of "Internet Worker". Not really useful.

Some reflexions on the state of the business world right now...

In most SMEs, complete ignorance of what is possible beyond a budding interest in AI. Of course, they use ChatGPT and they see their social media posts are easier to write, so they fire some marketing consultants. Some find some of the more involved tools that automate this-and-that, and it usually stops there.

In many large companies: Complete and utter panic. Leaders shoving AI left and right as if it's a binary yes-ai/no-ai to toggle in their product or internal tools, and hitting the yes-ai switch will ensure they survive. Most of these companies are fuuuuuucked. They survive on entropy, and the world has gotten a LOT faster. Survival is going to get much harder for them unless they have a crazy moat. (Bullish on hardware and deeply-embedded knowledge; Bearish on SaaS and blind-spend; Would short Palantir today if I could)

In labs just like mine: I see plenty of knowledgeable people with no idea of how far-reaching the impact of the work is. Super technical AI people get biased by their own knowledge of the flaws and limitations so as to be blind to what is possible.

And in tech entrepreneurship, I see a gap forming between techies who have no respect for "vibe coders" on the grounds that they're not real programmers, and who don't end up using AI and fall massively behind since execution (not code quality) is everything. And at the same time I see vibe coders with zero technical prowess get oversold on the packaging, and who end up building dead shells and are unable to move past the MVP stage of whatever they're building.

And the more capable the tool you're using is, the more the experience can be SO WILDLY DIFFERENT depending on usage and configuration. I've seen Claude Code causing productivity LOSSES as well as creating productivity gains of up to 1000x -- and no, this isn't hearsay, these numbers are coming from my own experience on both ends of the spectrum, with different projects and configurations.
With such massively different experiences possible, and incredibly broad labels, of course the discussion on "AI" is all over the place. Idiocy gets funded on FOMO, products built and shut down within weeks, regulators freaking out and rushing meaningless laws that have no positive impact, it's just an unending mess.

Because it's such a mess I see naysayers who can only see those negatives and who are convinced AI is a bubble just like that "internet fad of the 90s". Or worse, that it has zero positive impact on humanity. I know there's some of those on Tildes - if that's you, hello, you're provably already wrong and I'd be happy to have that discussion.

Oh and meanwhile, Siri still has the braindead cognition of a POTUS sedated with horse tranquilizer. This, not ChatGPT, is the most-immediately-accessible AI in a quarter of the western world's pocket. Apple will probably give up, buy Perplexity, and continue its slow decline. Wonder who'll replace them.

First, I am emphatically not talking about LLMs.

Just a shower thought kinda question. For most people, the primary issue is anthropomorphizing too much. But I think programmers see it differently.

Let's say someone comes up with something that seems to walk and talk like a self-aware, sentient, AGI duck. It has a "memories" db, it learns and adapts, it seems to understand cause and effect, actions and consequences, truth v falsehood, it passes Turing tests like they're tic-tac-toe, it recognizes itself in the mirror, yada.

But as a developer, you can "look behind the curtain" and see exactly how it works. (For argument's sake, let's say it's a FOSS duck, so you can actually look at the source code.)

Does it ever "feel" like a real, sentient being? Does it ever pass your litmus test?

For me, I think the answer is, "yes, eventually" ... but only looong after other people are having relationships with them, getting married, voting for them, etc.

My understanding of how large language models work is rooted in my knowledge of statistics. However a significant number of people have never been to college and statistics is a required course only for some degree programs.

How should chatgpt etc be explained to the public at large to avoid the worst problems that are emerging from widespread use?

I feel like writing another rant, why not.

I guess it visibly started about the time Windows 10 released and probably earlier with smartphones but it is really going into overdrive lately. Especially with all the AI(it is like exponential being used to mean a lot, really. Words have meanings, being minimally precise is not waste of time) being shoved into everything.

Statistical based autocomplete being added everywhere whether it makes sense or not or whether the user wants it or not. They will get it anyway. It makes sense somewhere, in some situations when the user deliberately invokes that.

Settings that really should be standard user accessible are just not and in very lucky cases there are not too painful workarounds. Just several examples. Search bar in address bar(I could write a rant on this alone, is having to decide before using one or the other really that inconvenient?). Forced internet search in Windows start menu search. Automagically starting downloads without any user involvement. Also defaults such as hiding extensions automatically on Windows explorer.

Constant ui reshuffles, generally for the worse(at least from the point of valuing utility and good sized monitor). Less information, straight up insulting language. Uh, oops something broke. This is prevalent even in Linux on some distros. What the hell, why? What broke? Would it be that much effort to link high level overview and logs locations? Or at least start treating the user like an adult again?

Search engines straight up ignoring the actual query entered. I can get any amount of low quality and irrelevant results(not even one or the other, they have to have it both ways) I want but a relevant result on the first page is a miracle regardless if it is actually useful or not. My guess is they simply throw the text into the nearest mainstream bucket with zero regard for nuance and specificity.

Algorithmic content recommendations. That is to say black box content reshuffling made by entity concerned with ads and engagement. Hiding crowd sourced signs of content helpfulness(dislikes).

Forced internet connection, forced online accounts, forced permanent or regular internet connectivity. Forced updates, forced telemetry.

Inability or strong discouragement to take control of the user owned devices. Smartphones, consoles, smart things generally.

Zero chance of being able to read and understand all of the TOS that are thrown everywhere but a strong pressure to accept them anyway. Sometimes after the end user paid already.

It is not hard to see the benefits for one side but I don't understand end users who embrace this. Do they really think it benefits them? It does not take all that much effort to be a generation or two behind the latest user hostile trends even if opting out completely is next to impossible.

Back in high school when I was writing essays, my teacher always demanded to use justified text, because simple left aligned or right aligned text looked ugly. Even back then as a totally rebellious teenager, I agreed with her. Print has used it for hundreds of years, why shouldn't we?

The web has always resisted this development because it was difficult. Yes, the css property text-align: justify exists, but browser were always missing the crucial functionality of hyphenating words. That led to very ugly justified texts and so called "rivers" of whitespace because the spaces got so large. Begrudingly, I got used to it.

I was surprised to learn that all major browsers support the new hyphens css property since late 2023. This one adds exactly that crucial functionality. I was stunned and immediately tried it out and oh look, the web is so much more beautiful now.

You can try out yourself here on Tildes! Just right click a comment, click "Inspect" and then when the dev console pops up, add

text-align: justify;
hyphens: auto:

to p, which stands for the paragraph html tag and in which all text posts are rendered on Tildes.

It looks so much better! But I do wonder why it hasn't spread around more in the web. Am I the only one? Am I nitpicky? I feel like the improvement is stark and very good for functionally no extra work. I even installed a browser extension which augments a website's css so I could automatically do it on most websites.

I'm not sure where to bring this up and I wanted an outside perspective. This may seem like I'm doing the same thing here but I honestly just want to know if anyone has any insight. The trend in talking about is the act of creating a reddit post in the form of a question. I've seen so many posts on Reddit popup that are just questions or screenshots/pictures with a question as the title.

For instance in gaming subreddits I'll see a post with the title of something like "What do you think is the best game in X series?" And they will have a screenshot of what would be the perceived most popular game in a franchise like final fantasy or halo or something. This is only one example, I see so many questions constantly in my home feed.

Is this some kind of concerted effort to train an LLM or is it simply some unspoken advantage that karma farmers use to drive engagement? Or am I simply just diving into conspiracy theories created by my own ignorance?

I think most people would agree that the internet and technology in general have absolutely gone to shit over the past decade or so. There is no corner of the internet nor of the software world that hasn't been affected by enshittification. Everything exists to serve you ads. Everyone wants to extract as much money from you as possible. Every website is in a race for the bottom as they try to find the lowest effort content that makes them the most money. Every piece of software is pushed out half-baked and/or stripped down to the bare minimum with the rest paywalled or with the devs pinky promising to fix it 5 updates down the road.

Every social medium is just bots. The front page of Reddit is easily 35% easily detectable bots at least and who knows what the rest is comprised of. And it's probably the one that's doing the best at the moment, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, all of them are just bots and propaganda and engagement farming the whole way down. And the worst thing is, they're complicit. Hell, they're actively encouraging it and trying to find ways to make it worse. And I have no doubt Reddit will bend the knee soon enough too (they just banned /r/whitepeopletwitter because Musk made a tweet critical of the sub).

There's probably some element of rose-tinted glasses here, but the old internet was just so much better looking back. Like, early 2000's to maybe 2012, 2013 or so, that was the peak. No colossal data harvesting schemes feeding into algorithms designed to keep you engaged on their site 24/7 for the purpose of shilling you advertisements and selling your data, no mass propaganda, no Dead Internet Theory (which can hardly be considered a theory anymore). Yeah there was shit content, there was tons of it, but I can deal with shit content and petty forum drama and whatnot; what I can't deal with is all the multi-billion dollar corporations trying to shape the entire landscape of the Web into the perfectly minmaxxed cash-generating machine that does as little as possible for as much data and advertising as possible.

Modern software isn't much better. Windows and MacOS are filled with anti-user features, telemetry you just can't turn off, Windows will often just install shit on your computer without telling you. They turn your computer into a walled garden, where you can do what you want as long as you play by their rules, but without giving you any real control over what your computer does. Yeah you can delete system files and brick your laptop if you feel like it, but anyone who's ever tried to permanently disable Windows updates will know that in the end you're not the one calling the shots: Microsoft are. And... Like, that's insane, right? It's running on my fucking computer, it's my CPU doing the work, I want to know what the hell it's doing and not just the parts it lets me see, and if I want it to do something different then I should be able to make it so.

I hate it all. I'm tired. I want out.

These are my problems. Here's what I've done about it so far.

• Obsessive privacy on the web. No Google services. Firefox with as much telemetry turned off as possible. Protonmail and ProtonVPN for everything (and I'm considering getting out of those too with the pro-Trump stances they've been taking recently). As minimal an online footprint as I can get, I make as few accounts as possible and I don't use shared or even slightly related usernames (my username here is an exception as it's my Reddit username, and no, it's not my real name), I delete accounts whenever I can and I GDPR request the services afterward. Virtual cards for online payments as much as possible. Will probably make a Javascript whitelist at some point too. Is all of this overkill? Yes. Why do I bother? Because fuck them.

• As little social media presence as possible. Real life necessitates some amount of social media interaction of course, I have Facebook and Instagram but use them exclusively for messaging. I often see people excluding Reddit from social media but I don't fully agree, even if it's not exactly in the category it still targets a lot of the same psychological weak points in us, encouraging doom scrolling and shaping our opinions through echo chambers and propaganda (it's always important to remember that echo chambers and propaganda you agree with are still echo chambers and propaganda). I still use Reddit admittedly, but I've tried to minimise my usage as much as possible and I'm shopping for alternatives.

• Free and Open Source software as much as possible. I'm all in on GNU these days. Yes, it's a massive pain in the ass. My job unfortunately requires some Windows-only software so I'm running a dual partition but I'm trying to get as much of my computer usage onto Linux as possible (I use Arch btw). Like I said above, it's my computer, if I can't control what it's computing then it stops being my computer, it's at best shared between me and all the developers of the proprietary software I have installed on it.

That's my rant. It's been a long time coming.

There are still things I'm looking to change, especially with how I use the internet. Getting rid of Reddit is the next big step for me, I think. I just can't be bothered with it anymore, but there is still something about it that I love, every time I look through a small niche topic community, or an interesting new hobby sub I've never seen before with years of cool posts for me to go through. And yeah, I do still enjoy browsing through /r/all even when it's 80% shit and objectively bad for my mental health. But at this point the overwhelming mass of utter shit is just not worth digging through anymore. I'm tired.

Tildes is really cool. It reminds me of the old internet, the ideal usage of the Web. I open the site, I see a link to an interesting article, I read it, I give it a like, I read and/or contribute to the discussion in a comments section. I want more of this.

If anyone has any links to cool sites that I should check out I'd greatly appreciate it.

I'm considering installing some abandonware games, and, as anyone who trawls the internet for old executables knows: they are often rife with viruses/malware.

It's easy to avoid the ones that are clearly malicious using tools like VirusTotal, but it gets trickier when the "is it clean?" is more of a "maybe" than a "no" because you're not sure if something is a false positive.

I'd rather not take chances and will generally avoid anything I find even slightly suspicious, but it did get me thinking: if I ran the games through Linux instead of Windows (e.g. via WINE or Proton), am I equally vulnerable?

Does something like that sandbox the virus? Is the virus rendered ineffective by being in a system it's unable to exploit as intended?

Or is this wishful thinking and it's still risky no matter what?

I'm not asking this as a "help me play abandonware games" plea (though, if there are best practices out there feel free to enlighten me). Instead, it's a curiosity -- a "help me better understand Linux vs. Windows" from someone who's not super techy.

Ironically, AI has boomeranged from surpassing human intelligence to having us spot it like a dove in a pond. So now, leave in all the little flubs to make it a bit more clear that a person at least typed this in a keyboard, you know?

Can be viewed here

Is this just the usual pointless Apple fanfare?

I'm not very techy so I'm just wondering why this is a big deal. It seems to me it's just a different theme of sorts? But in this video MKBHD is making it out to be a really big deal. Is it like technologically super impressive? What's the big deal?

I was about to recommend wordpress.com (free tier) to someone and realized I have no idea if I should. I am not a tech person but I should have an idea of what to suggest when someone even less technical ask me for advice. Did it all die down? Is Wordpress safe to use now?

Noted smoked meats enthusiast Mark Zuckerberg has recently been running around collecting ML experts for a project involving an organization called Meta Superintelligence Labs, which is set to feature compute clusters with names like "Prometheus" and "Hyperion", and which will attempt to "deliver" superintelligence.

Isn't this sort of behavior on the list of things people are absolutely not to be allowed to do? Or has something changed and we now feel it's safe for Mark Zuckerberg to be allowed control of a piece of equipment that can outsmart all his enemies and also Mark Zuckerberg? Are we all safely convinced he will fail?

If it cannot be permitted, who is responsible for not permitting it?

Presumably, my understanding of Cloudflare is too simple, too rudimentary, or even entirely lacking in some aspects.

As far as I understand it, the main feature is just faster and more reliable access to sites, right?

If I host a website on a server in New York, and someone tries to look at it in Tokyo ... that's a long distance and a lot of potential hops to retrieve the file(s) directly from the NY machine. Cloudflare provides closer-location mirrors of websites so there is less lag time, plus having multiple copies makes my website more readily/reliably available.

That's good, I get that, especially for big, professional business-critical-type sites/services.

But it's not actually essential, is it? Anyone, anywhere on Earth could still visit my NY website w/o the existence of Cloudflare.

Is there more to Cloudflare than this? I realize they are getting into a variety of 2ndary "value-added"-type features, like their own "are you a robot" tests and probably a bunch of other stuff I don't know about ... but fundamentally, are they actually necessary for the Internet?

Why is Cloudflare such a big deal?

I'm starting to use AI increasingly, and am getting some value out of it. I'm curious if paying for paid tiers of the big players (in particular, ChatGPT and Claude) provides significantly better responses.

I'm aware that the paid tiers offer more features and benefits than just higher response quality. For me, those are just nice-to-haves, and not my primary concern.

My main uses of AI are software development and foreign language learning. So far, I've used the free versions of ChatGPT and Claude, as well as "proxies," including Github Copilot and Duck.ai. For both my use cases, I've found the responses usually good and helpful. I just maintain a healthy skepticism about the correctness of the answers, and challenge, test, and double check where needed (especially testing suggested code when developing software).

Have you found response quality to be noticeably and significantly better with paid tiers? I was just randomly thinking, and it occurred to me that the cost of an AI subscription is in the same ballpark as a subscription to a language learning service like Duolingo. So, if I can get value from AI that approaches what I'd get from a dedicated language learning service (even if it doesn't quite match or exceed it), then also getting the value of general AI in the same subscription should make things quite valuable and worth it. Not to mention possibly getting better software development assistance in the same package.

I have changed my email more than once, just as part of customizing my online identity and all that.

and that obviously required me to login into any accounts I had and updating the email associated with them.

the most common workflow I have found is
login -> navigate to settings page -> edit the email field to the new email -> go to the inbox for the new email -> click confirm on confirmation email

then you can go to that website and do the forgot password, provide your email and change the password and get complete control.

I have always found that workflow weird cause it's the most prevalent one I have come across and seems so susceptible to tampering.

if someone leaves their laptop unattended for 3-4 minutes in public while visiting a bathroom (which happened often in the library of my university), there was nothing preventing me from going to their Facebook or whatever account they had open on their computer, changing the email to my own email and then clicking confirm on my inbox once I am back at my desk.

and most people don't have 2FA so that would effectively give me control of their account.
Hell, my university once had a potential data breach and they were 99.999% sure the data was not actually accessed by a malicious actor but still sent a mass email saying that they were advising everyone to change their passwords. a classmate of mine in the software systems program's attitude was basically "oh well, who cares?" and I just facepalmed internally.

there are maybe 3 websites I have come across that instead first send a confirmation email to your current inbox and after you confirm on that, then you get a confirmation email on the new email inbox. which isn't perfect but I feel like it's a bit more sensical and the best you can do without involving 2FA.

even then, that's also susceptible to the situation I described above if the user is always logged into their email.

I find it odd that websites don't prompt for a password as part of the email update process (or better yet 2FA with an app as even prompting for a password isn't a guarantee if the user has the password manager as an extension in their browser and they recently unlocked it before leaving their session unattended) to ensure that email changes are always done by the account owner.

I am a big fan of Cloudflare Tunnels, it's let me muck about with quite a few low risk apps and it's been fun.

one thing that's always bothered me though is the SSL setup.

According to their website, only enterprise users are allowed to manage their own TLS private keys.

I can kinda understand the logic behind free accounts not having that perk.

But if you are someone who really doesn't like cloudflare reading your traffic or you are a business, it seems odd to me that it's not being demanded of cloudflare that they make it more available for paid users to not expose their TLS private keys to cloudflare.

Why are so many folks OK with cloudflare essentially being able to read all their traffic?

or am I overestimating how many people are using the Pro and Business account? is the majority of their users just Free or Enterprise?

When Musk bought Twitter and "unleashed free speech" on the platform, it made me curious about other social media platforms, specifically one where data and privacy are much more respected.

That inevitably lead me to mastodon. I opened an account and all that, but I must be doing it wrong, or maybe mastodon just isn't what I want it to be.

I don't really know who or what to follow on there that would create an experience that draws me in.

In fairness, it could just be that I am not following interesting accounts but I follow 7 accounts

• grapheneOS which is just updates about their O.S.
• Daniel Micay who hasn't posted in a loooong time
• James Gunn rarely posts
• nixCraft is just memes

and the rest are just news outlets like Ars Technica, Electronic Frontier Foundation and Propublica, which ain't bad but like, they post links to long-form articles, which isn't really what you are really looking for if you are just doing a light skim of your feed for a quick 5 minutes.

Are interesting folks not on mastodon? or I am just not following the right accounts? Im interested in tech stuff and social issues and some politics (but not much cause that can get doom scrolly fast)

I'm one of those mythical Linux users who has been using it for years but has little to no idea what's going on behind the scenes or under the hood.

In my time using it, I've sort of passively gleaned that certain things are controversial, but I don't necessarily know why. It's also hard for me to know if these are just general intra-community drama/bikeshedding, or if these are actually big, meaningful issues.

If you're someone who's in the know, here's your chance to lay out a Linux controversy in a way that's understandable by someone like me, who can't tell you why people always make "GNU/Linux" jokes for some reason whenever people mention "Linux."

Here are some things that have pinged for me as controversial in my time using Linux:

• Unity
• Canonical
• Deepin
• systemd
• Arch
• GNOME
• Manjaro
• Kali
• Rust in the kernel
• elementaryOS
• Linus Torvalds
• Snaps
• Wayland
• Something about a university being banned from contributing to Linux
• NVIDIA drivers
• Package managers vs. Snaps/Flatpaks

There are certainly more -- these are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head.

Replies don't have to be limited to the above topics. I'm interested in getting the lay of the land about any Linux controversy.

IMPORTANT

This topic is intended for learning, not bickering.

• Please try to explain a controversy as fairly as you can.
• Please try to not re-ignite a flame war about a specific controversy.

It's fine to discuss these in good faith, but I do not want this topic to become yet another Linux battleground online. There are plenty of those already!

Disclaimer: I do not like LLMs. I am not going to fight you on if you say LLMs are shit.

One of the things I find interesting about conversations on LLMs is when have a critique about them, and someone says, "Well, it's no different than people." People are only as good as their training data, people misremember / misspeak / make mistakes all the time, people will listen to you and affirm you as you think terrible things. My thought is that not being reliably consistent is a verifiable issue for automation. Still, I think it's excellent food for thought.

I was looking for new music venues the other day. I happened upon several, and as I looked at their menu and layout, it occurred to me that I had eaten there before. Not there, but in my city, and in others. The Stylish-Expensive-Small-Plates-Record-Bar was an international phenomenon. And more than that, I couldn't help but shake that it was a perversion of the original, alluring concept-- to be in a somewhat secretive record bar in Tokyo where you'll be glared into the ground if you speak over the music.

It's not a bad idea. And what's wrong with evoking a good idea, especially if the similarity is just unintentional? Isn't it helpful to be able to signal to people that you're like-that-thing instead of having to explain to people how you're different? Still, the idea of going just made me assume it'd be not simply like something I had experienced before, but played out and "fake." We're not in Tokyo, and people do talk over the music. And even if they didn't, they have silverware and such clanging. It makes me wonder if this permutation is a lossy estimation of the original concept, just chewed up, spat out, slurped, regurgitated, and expensively funded.

other forms of conceptual perversion:

• Matters of Body Image - is it a sort of collapse when we go from wanting 'conventional beauty' to frankensteining features onto ourselves? Think fox eye surgeries, buccal fat removal, etc. Rather than wanting to be conventionally attractive, we aim for the related concept of looking like people who are famous.
• (still thinking)

A while ago some of the keys on my Dell XPS laptop started working poorly, they were only registering the presses half of the time or if I pushed them really hard. I tried removing the keycaps and cleaning the keys on the inside, but to no avail. Well, I thought, that means it's time to get a new laptop. So I was choosing the next laptop to get. One of the options I considered was the Framework laptop, which is supposed to be super repairable - I mean, if only I could just replace my laptop keyboard, I wouldn't have to buy a whole new laptop just because of a few broken keys!

Then I thought about it again. I realized that a repairable laptop is only useful if you actually try to repair your laptop, which I've never done. So, I looked it up, and turns out Dell, while obviously not as easily repairable as Framework, has very well-detailed official service manuals as well!

Two weeks of waiting for a Chinese copycat keyboard from AliExpress and three hours of work later, I finally have a fully working laptop! Turns out it isn't hard at all to replace a broken keyboard - but I'm still very proud of myself for doing it, mostly for even deciding to do it instead of just turning a fully functional laptop into e-waste as I would've done otherwise. I was also really surprised that Dell laptops are that easy to fix (though they don't officially sell replacement parts to consumers), since it's known to be a company that makes a ton of money on expensive support offerings.

I don't really know what the lesson of this post is, I just wanted to share this small achievement with y'all.

Hi, so I've been thinking about this for several days now, and thought it might be an interesting topic for Tildes.

Earlier this week, YouTube suggested this AI Sitcom video to me. Some of the jokes are actually very cohesive "Dad jokes", and it got me wondering how much of the video was AI generated. Are the one-liners themselves AI generated? Was this script generated with AI, and then edited before passing it on to something else to generate the video and voice? Or are we at the phase where AI could generate the whole thing with a single prompt? If it's the latter I find this sort of terrifying, because the finished product is very cohesive for something with almost no editing.

I'd also be interested in discussing where this video might have come from. The channel and descriptions have almost no information, so it seems like this may be a channel that finds these elsewhere and reposts? Or maybe the channel is the original and just trying to be vague about technology used?

Also side note, I have no idea if this belongs in ~Tech, so feel free to move it around as needed.

Between Meta announcing that its AI, Meta AI, reached 1 billion users[1] and Google saying that AI Overviews are used by 1.5 billion[2], I’m curious to know how many of these people intentionally use the feature, or prefer it to what the AI replaces.

AI Overviews appear at the top of searches, with no option to turn them off. Meta AI, I suspect many people trigger accidentally by tapping that horrible button in WhatsApp, in search results across its three core apps, or when trying to tag someone in a group by typing an @ symbol.

It’s very easy to reach enormous numbers when you already have a giant platform. I don’t think that’s even part of the discussion. The issue is trumpeting these numbers as if they were earned, rather than imposed.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/28/zuckerberg-meta-ai-one-billion-monthly-users.html
[2] https://www.theverge.com/news/655930/google-q1-2025-earnings

Hello to everyone who's reading this post :)

Now LLMs are increasingly so useful (of course after careful review of their generated answers), but I'm concerned about sharing my data, especially very personal questions and my thought process to these large tech giants who seem to be rather sketchy in terms of their privacy policy.

What are some ways I can keep my data private but still harness this amazing LLM technology? Also what are some legitimate and active forums for discussions on this topic? I have looked at reddit but haven't found it genuinely useful or trustworthy so far.

I am excited to hear your thoughts on this!

I am arguing here in regards to personally owned hw.

I personally think that the arguments in recent years were very heavily skewed in support of this and I would like to propose here counterarguments that I don't feel are considered enough are when I see this come up in various places. Or at least not said enough.

First and foremost what forcibly pushing updates actually means is the developer being given blank check to change the functionality of your device in any way they please. In case of various locked down hw such as smart things, game consoles, tvs, ereaders or others there is often not even a choice to use different sw because it is artificially blocked. Only real check against negative effects of this is legislation and potential of enough public outrage to impact future sales. From the state of various mainstream sw products it can be seen how well it works.

It creates a culture where pushing anti features is significantly easier and tech literacy is significantly harder to attain if only as a secondary effect of less transparent, more obtuse and more complicated systems, frequently with no actual need for more complexity which is not rooted in desire to increase monetization.

It also means it is harder as a user to guard against faulty updates.

Normalization of this behavior also means that any can do this with no pushback because it is the fabled default, the one where fundamental flaws are brushed aside while alternatives are rejected over cosmetic problems.
There could be argument meant for critical parts of critical sw such as os or browser, but if so it should be made individually and not be implicit. There is usually no meaningful individual control over feature updates, not just security ones. I also don't think forced updates for games on Steam for example can be argued to be something that benefits security.

Looking at the submission rules for Clarkesworld Magazine, I found the following:

Statement on the Use of “AI” writing tools such as ChatGPT

We will not consider any submissions translated, written, developed, or assisted by these tools. Attempting to submit these works may result in being banned from submitting works in the future.

EDIT: I assume that Clarkesworld means a popular, non-technical understanding of AI meaning post-chatGPT LLMs specifically and not a broader definition of AI that is more academic or pertinent the computer science field.

I imagine that other magazines and website have similar rules. As someone who does not write directly in English, that is concerning. I have never translated without assistance in my life. In the past I used both Google Translate and Google Translator Toolkit (which no longer exist).

Of course, no machine translation is perfect, that was only a first pass that I would change, adapt and fix extensively and intensely. In the past I have used the built-in translation feature from Google Docs. However, now that Gemini is integrated in Google Docs, I suspected that it uses AI instead for translation. So I asked Gemini, and it said that it does. I am not sure if Gemini is correct, but, if it doesn't use AI now it probably will in the future.

That poses a problem for me, since, in the event that I wish to submit a story to English speaking magazines or websites, I will have to find a tool that is guaranteed to be dumb. I am sure they exist, but for how long? Will I be forced to translate my stories like a cave men? Is anyone concerned with keeping non-AI translation tools available, relevant, and updated? How can I even be sure that a translation tool does not use AI?

Opinion

Video links go unwatched.

This gets even more true the longer the videos are.

I think it helps to post a 2-3 line summary of what people can expect to find in the video.

There is just too much content in the Internet for many people to watch a video, just because it is posted, even if it has an interesting title.

I've been on reddit (yes, Im embarrassed that I haven't quit the cocaine) for about 15 years now. The changes in the last year or so have been noticeable.

For one thing, the worst of the ranting trolls are gone. I used to occasionally get some replies from people who obviously were just out to get a reaction, usually by swearing and name calling with the kind of grammar skills you'd expect from an angry 9 yr old who just discovered how to log on. Those have largely disappeared. But I have a hard time believing that trolls are gone off the net, so is it just better moderation? Or has reddit just implemented more auto rules that squelch the noisy juvenile behavior?

Secondly, Ive noticed the discussions becoming much more detailed. It was typical, especially in political subs, to see the only comments that got strongly upvoted, were short quips, the more smart ass the better, and then for those to be followed by a long succession of similar quips. That still happens, but Ive noticed a lot more lengthy discussion with redditors actually disovering they can create paragraphs and debate more maturely. Is that a change in human behavior? Or are those not likely humans?

And some behavior really has me suspicious. In particular I have gotten the same reply several times to a comment. It will say, "Thank you for sharing your comment, I appreciate it. Could you tell me more about your _______?". This COULD be a human, but the fact that it always starts the same and then asks me for further engagement really has me wondering, if for no other reason than I dont recall the average redditor being that polite.

Ive also noted some strange comment patterns. Yesterday I interacted with a poster and then checked their post history. Over 10,000 comments and they were ALL in the last few months during the run up to the Canadian election and ALL were against one party. Only 4 posts but 10,000 comments?. If there are NO posts in any other sub that seems very suspicious. Either a bot or someone hired to do as much damage as possible?

Reddit has changed. Its now publicly owned. And like all other social media it lives on engagement so I have no doubt that it will do whatever it takes with AI bots to keep people online and engaged. But how good are they? I just hate being 'taken for a ride' by a bot and a company. But how do you ever know if its a human or a bot you're talking to?

A while back I read an article about the development of a new Digg platform.

I signed up for an email list about new developments. I got invited to pay $5 USD to join a forum to see updates on their efforts and give suggestions.

I've been advocating for not implementing downvoting.

My reasoning is that having just upvotes like Tildes serves the original purpose of voting on content. It moves the better content towards the top and the poorer content towards the bottom. Downvoting at least on Reddit just becomes a middle finger for most cases.

I was surprised how many other people at this special forum were AGAINST that idea. They really want to be able to give people a middle finger.

Sadly, I saw a preview of the U.I. today and at least for new threads it had a "bury" link.

Oh well. I tried!

It may surprise you to hear that ever since the tender ages of 15 to 16 (2004 to 2005) I have tried to “become famous” on the Internet.

Why? I don’t know. I just wanted to. I wanted people to hear my opinions on the Internet and praise me for sharing them.

I tried pretty much everything: blogging, YouTube, social media, you name it. Content that I made ranged from commentary, to news, gaming, music, cooking, etc. All my projects “failed” (or rather, they didn’t grow as fast as I expected them to, so I gave up). I’m talking hundreds of attempts.

Then in late 2023, I made a New Year’s resolution for 2024 to fully delete Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, 9gag, and Reddit. My resolution worked and it changed my life.

A lot of people in my social circle have since begun telling me that I have this talent or that talent, and that I should monitize it by growing a following on social media. I have ignored all of them, despite spending a good 20 years trying to do exactly that. Here’s why:

• The first and foremost reason is that I don’t want to wrestle with algorithms and follow trends. It seems that it’s almost impossible to grow a following on the Internet these days without doing that, unless you get very lucky growing a following organically, which only very few people do. Chasing algorithms and trends is not fun, and if I’m not having fun with what do with my spare time, then I don’t want to do it at all. I’ve also come to hate creating video content for some reason. I just find it tedious.
• Over the years, I feel that I have become afraid of getting lucky and becoming successful. It seems to me that the people who live off creating content for the Internet, don’t ever get a break. Their followers demand a steady stream of content, and if you don’t keep vying for their attention, then they’ll go give it to someone else and you’re suddenly left without any income. I know that many creators work seven days a week.
• This leads me to the problem of “attention”: I don’t want to compete for people’s attention anymore. I hate the whole concept of the “attention economy”. It’s so insane to me that the survival of so many hundreds of million of people depends of how much human attention their work gets. And I’m not talking just about social media now, but entertainment in general. There are only so many humans, and they have a limited amount of time during the day that they can offer attention to entertainment to (be it social media, TV, movies, music, games, you name it). I think that these business models are not sustainable. There are also too many “things” for us to pay attention to these days and I feel like it’s driving us all insane. I’ve been intentionally trying to pay attention to as few things as I possibly can for a while now and it has significantly reduces my anxiety and FOMO. It’s given me a lot of peace. So, I don’t want to contribute to this “evil” myself.
• The Internet has become a dangerous place. Even people who publish otherwise completely innocuous content get sometimes harassed or doxxed. Streamers get SWATed. Women get the brunt of it (I think) because sexual harassment and deepfake porn has become so prevalent, and they can do nothing to protect themselves. Everything you publish anywhere can and will be used against you (including by potential employers). Being “unknown” and “staying in your lane” seems to be about the only way that you can stay safe these days.
• I also just don’t want the endless scrutiny that comes with fame, the expectation that my personality can’t change, that opinions can’t be nuanced, and that I squarely fit into either the “blue box” or the “red box” (in whatever aspect, since every field of opinion these days seems to be thoroughly divided in half). Whatever opinion people share online, even the most trivial, can and will be misinterpreted by bad faith actors and trolls to just mentally crush you.
• I have come to think that dying in anonymity, while leaving no legacy behind, is actually not a bad thing. I mean, it’s a “natural” thing. It’s what happens to the vast majority of humans anyway. Why should I be so afraid of that? Afraid of living my life in the peace of anonymity? There are plenty of ways to live a meaningful life that don’t involve becoming famous on the Internet, or famous at all.

I regret arriving at this conclusion now only. I had so much trouble in my short and fruitless life because of stuff that I posted on the Internet (talking about Facebook and my social circle more specifically). I could have avoided all of that. I could also not have wasted so much time entertaining ideas of online grandeur, blowing away countless hours of my pitiful existence on projects that never amounted to anything, and instead, gotten an education, so that I wouldn’t be living in poverty now.

Oh, well. It is what it is. Better learning now than never.

I’m not sure why I ever wanted to be famous on the Internet to begin with, or what made me think that there’s any inherent worth in getting online praise just for sharing my mediocre opinions. Maybe I’m mentally ill. Maybe I’m traumatized. Maybe this is something that I should consult a therapist over. However, what I do know, is that I’m done with pursuing online fame.

I think that the Internet as it is today, flipped some sort of switch in people’s brain (including mine), which convinced us that it is normal to chase fame because the means to get there are so readily available. I don’t know how the Internet could have been designed differently to prevent this, but “giving a voice to everyone” was, in hindsight, maybe a badly implemented idea.

I’d be surprised to hear that any of you here have been trying to become famous on the Internet, but if you have, then I’d like to hear about your experience, and your opinions on this topic in general.

Just something I was frustrated by ever since it became increasingly common even outside of smartphones and tablets.

For a few years now I increasingly see basically any battery powered product having mostly internal accumulator options(aka proprietary battery of uncertain ability to replace), especially in more expensive items in the category. Why?

I mean do see several advantages from the business side, I simply have no idea what advantage would there be for the actual user.

I could see it if the batteries had comparable lifespan to the product, which they most definitely do not unless the item is of truly bad quality.

I like modern tech, but I'm slowly coming to hate the internet.

I read Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism late last year and found it preaching to the choir, but noticed that most of the negative effects of technology use were actually from internet use. The attention economy, privacy violations, enshittification, etc. are all mostly byproducts of the internet being so tightly integrated into our lives. When I heard about CVE potentially losing its funding (I know very litte about CS or anything related to software, so I'm unsure of how big a threat this really is to an end-user), the thought popped into my head... "is it time to get offline?".

I am 20 years old, so my entire life has been spent in a world where devices are connected to the internet far more often than not, and I wonder if it's time to switch to an "offline first" mentality? I already embrace this philosophy when it comes to music, downloading the songs I want to my computer and syncing them to my phone through iTunes, but this would take that one step further: turn on my computer's wi-fi to check emails, read through the new posts here, check some other sites, etc. and then turn it off until I explicitly need to do something online.

I'm lucky enough that most of the (important) things I do on my computer can be done 90% offline, but I wonder if it's even worth doing? I'm curious to hear thoughts on this from the people of Tildes, or any methods that you have implemented in your life.

EDIT: I should clarify: I already have basically no social media, I use beeper to see my instagram DMs (I can't really get rid of this without abandoning any age-adjacent social life) and that's it. You could call Discord and Tildes social medias, but that's maybe pushing it. I'm more talking about the recent resurgence of physical media and reframing the internet as something that is accessed rather than omnipresent in my usage habits.

Curious to know if we have a current morphometric based system that can detect with the same accuracy as DNA testing, if two people are related, without a priori knowledge that they are related, if that makes sense.

Meaning, if a system is fed 100 random photos of humans, but is not told "there are definitely related people in here" can it match it as accurately as a DNA test of those same humans' DNA samples?

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

eBay is updating its privacy policy, effective next month (2025-04-27). The major change is a new section about AI processing, accompanied by a new user setting with an opt-out checkbox for having your personal data feed their models.

While that page specifically references European areas, the privacy selection appears to be active and remembered between visits for non-Europe customers. It may not do anything for us at all. On the other hand, it seems nearly impossible to find that page from within account settings, so I thought I'd post a direct link.

I'm well aware that I'm anomalous for having read this to begin with, much less diffed it against the previous version. But since I already know that I'm weird, and this wouldn't be much of a discussion post without questions:

• How do you stay up to date with contract changes that might affect you, outside of widespread Internet outrage (such as recent Firefox news)?
• What's your threshold -- if any -- for deciding whether to quit a company over contract changes? Alternatively, have you ever walked away from a purchase, service, or other acquisition over the terms of the contracts?

Title kinda gives the gist of it all.

I have been wondering about a way to have a "full" desktop with just XR glasses, a phone, bluetooth keyboard, and an internet connection.

Not sure if this is easily doable, or if Windows VMs would be so expensive to make it pointless. Maybe something like WINE or w/e the not 20 year outdated current thing is to run Windows software.

The main use would be to run 1-2 browsers and trading software.

Just curious if this is a foolish idea or not.

I’ve been wondering about this lately.

Recently, I made a post about Ukraine on another social media site, and someone jumped in with the usual "Ukraine isn't a democracy" right-wing talking point. I wrote out a long, thoughtful reply, only to get the predictable one-liner propaganda responses back. You probably know the type, just regurgitated stuff with no real engagement.

After that, I didn’t really feel like spending my time and energy writing out detailed replies to every canned response. But I also didn’t want to just let it sit there and have people who might be reading the exchange assume there’s no pushback or correction.

So instead, I tried leveraging AI to help me write a fact-checking reply. Not for the person I was arguing with, really, but more as an FYI for anyone else following along. I made sure it stayed factual and based in reality, avoided name-calling, and kept the tone above the usual mudslinging. And of course, I double-checked what it wrote to make sure it matched my understanding and wasn’t just spitting out garbage or hallucinations.

But it got me thinking that there’s a lot of fear about AI being used to spread and create misinformation. But do you think there’s also an opportunity to use it as a tool to counter misinformation, without burning ourselves out in the process?

Curious how others see it.

This is a bit of a round about story, but bear with me.

I like PowerPoint, I love using it, it's intuitive to me. Google slides is okay, (I never delved into OpenOffice or any other offshoot really), but when I have a choice, I like using PPT.

I consider myself a comfortable Apple user as well, I prefer it for most of my computing needs, but not all, so it's not like I am not capable of using the Apple ecosystem.

However, whenever I have tried Keynote or Pages or any of the "office" tools, I don't like them.

I cannot tell if this is because these products or projects were killed off because of lowspread adoption at their onset, and thus did not get any development or improvement. Apple often does not release things and then just let them die, it usually waits a long time before it releases something, so they don't release things with potential failure (maybe I'm wrong, my memory doesn't recall anything like that other than this very example lol, and I guess their camera, but I digress).

I guess my rambling is, is PowerPoint just good and Keynote just bad or is there some more interesting story to it?

This is a topic I keep revisiting. It's constantly evolving, with new laws in different parts of the world happening pretty often. And also there's a lot of grey area with vague or incomprehensive language that hasn't yet been tested in courts.

I recognize that it's a bit of a niche topic, but I think there are a lot of us at Tildes who have to think about it. After all it potentially impacts anyone maintaining or building a non-platform web presence. It also applies to less obvious things like running an advertising campaign that involves media requested from a server you control (which can therefore potentially log requests).

For my part, I've needed to research laws relating to PII in order to come up with policies and practices in various contexts. In broad strokes it's pretty simple but as you get into details what I continue to find is that there are a lot of conflicting opinions both from professionals and lawyers. A lot of it is still open to interpretation.

I'm wondering what kinds of experience other tildenauts have around data protection and PII? Have you implemented solutions? Do you wonder about it for your own websites? Have you been involved with it at companies where you've worked? Do you have questions about it?

I recently had an unpleasant experience. Something I wrote fully and without AI generation of any kind was perceived, and accused of, having been produced by AI. Because I wanted to get everything right, in that circumstance, I wrote in my "cold and precise" mode, which admittedly can sound robotic. However, my writing was pointed, perhaps even a little hostile, with a clear point of view. Not the kind of text AI generally produces. After the experience, I started to think of ways to write less like an AI -- which, paradoxically, means forcing my very organic self into adopting "human-like" language I don't necessarily care for. That made me think that AI is probably changing the way a lot of people write, perhaps in subtle ways. Have you noticed this happening with you or those around you?

I joined MetaFilter in 2016, but I've only ever posted a handful of things there and I've browsed the site very little. I always thought it was a fantastic idea to charge $5 to join. It seems like a great way to counteract ban evasion and prevent people from trolling or behaving badly.

Does this idea that sounds great to me in theory work in practice? MetaFilter seems cool, but my experience with the site is shallow. So, I don't really know.

I'm also curious about people's thoughts and experiences with MetaFilter, perceived differences and similarities with Tildes, and theories about what makes social media and forums and online communities good or bad in general.

Also: wow, while I was writing this, I looked up how big MetaFilter is and it's tiny! This site compiles statistics. Note this important definition:

Active users means users who made at least one comment or post on the selected site in the given month.

There have only been around 2,800 to 2,900 monthly active users for the past year. It's been about 3,000 to 4,000 for the past 5 years. And the absolute peak was January 2011 with 8,100 active users.

The number of users who have ever posted anything to the site is a little less than 48,000.

A stats page from 2013 has more info:

• about 62,500 accounts existed at that time (this means at least 14,500 people have paid $5 for an account and have never posted anything)
• about 39,400 people visited the site while logged into their account that year
• there were 81.7 million unique visitors to the site that year
• the site got 231.4 million pageviews that year

That is wild. I had no idea the number of readers was so much astronomically larger than the number of writers. 39,400 writers (tops!) to 81.7 million readers is crazy.

I'm sad that MetaFilter is so small, has always been small, and seems to be dwindling over the last 12 years. I would have guessed that it had 100,000 monthly active users or 1 million, not 2,900.

I get that it’s supposed to make things more secure, but it feels like a constant chore every time I try to log in somewhere. Grab a code from my phone. Check my email. Open an authenticator app. Repeat this process for every single account, over and over.

I know there are tools like YubiKey that are supposed to make 2FA easier, but the reality is that most websites don’t even support them.

I already use a password manager, and all my passwords are long, randomized, and secure. Is there something I am missing that makes this easier, or is this just as infuriating for everyone else?

I just finished reading I hate the new internet post, in which the OP stated:

Every social medium is just bots. The front page of Reddit is easily 35% easily detectable bots at least and who knows what the rest is comprised of.

Why couldn't we create a bot database, which I imagine would work similarly to uBlock for ads? There would be a number of signals to attempt to classify users of social media sites (likely human, likely bot, etc.) in addition to user-provided feedback ("I think this person is a bot" or "this account is me -- definitely not a bot").

An extension could then be attached to the database to provide visual changes to social media platforms ("WARNING! LIKELY BOT!") or simply hide bot posts/comments.

Off the top of my head, some bot signals:

• Posting known duplicate posts with political motivation (e.g. on Reddit you see the same exact post about how the tariffs will create a stronger America by different posters) [strong indicator]
• Usernames that follow the lazy bot format, e.g., Pretentious_Rabbit_2355 [weak indicator]
• Usage of AI-generated or ripped off profile pictures, post images, etc. [strong indicator]
• etc.

On the crowdsourced side, there would have to be some rules in place to prevent profile bombing, etc.

All in all, I could see something like this adding a bit of human value back to the various social media platforms AND I would think it would lead to higher advertisement click rates (bots will become less valuable over time on a given platform and decide to invest their resources elsewhere, while "human" user engagement increases at the same time).

If this concept already exists, I apologize. I only did a very quick google.

This topic is a part conversation starter, part request for help in finding.

For those that are attempting to keep up with the many weird and sometimes interesting products both announced and teased recently in the field of AR/XR glasses- what are your thoughts?

Examples, off the top of my head, include a number of devices revealed at CES 2024. The Asus AirVision M1- a pair of full-HD display-in-glasses form, similar in many ways to the Xreal lineup. The new Xreal Air 2 Ultra and Xreal One line. Snapdragon's new XR2+ Gen 2 chip for high efficiency portable computing and a successor to the chip used in the Meta Quest 3 headset. The Halliday glasses, which forego any form of waveguide or combining optic and opt to project directly into the eye using a monocular microled projector. And older devices, such as the "open source" Brilliant Labs glasses which have been previous discussed on Tildes.

Personally, I'm disappointed in most (if not all) of these options, but that might largely be because the industry and I have very different ideas of what smart glasses should be. The industry is focusing heavily on social media features- cameras, filters, translation- and even more heavily on AI. Why anybody would want an LLM strapped to their face I do not know. I feel that the goal of full augmented reality (rendering tips and visuals over the real-world) is a noble one, but also not one I am particularly interested in. My ideal device would be purely a heads-up display with a long battery life. The ability to cast notifications and information to a reasonably pretty display, but the freedom to decide what. No cameras, no data collection, no overcomplications- does anyone know of any options that fulfill these criteria?

Discuss.

Summary/TL;DR:

I am worried about the future with the state of AI. Regardless of what scenario I think of, it’s not a good future for the vast majority of people. AI will either be centralised, and we will be powerless and useless, or it will be distributed and destructive, or we will be in a hedonistic prison of the future. I can’t see a good solution to it all.
I have broken down my post into subheading so you can just read about what outcome you think will occur or is preferable.
I’d like other people to tell me how I’m wrong, and there is a good way to think about this future that we are making for ourselves, so please debate and criticise my argument, its very welcome.

Introduction:

I would like to know what others feel about ever advancing state of AI, and the future, as I am feeling ever more uncomfortable. More and more, I cannot see a good ending for this, regardless of what assumptions or proposed outcomes I consider.
Previously, I had hoped that there would be a natural limit on the rate of AI advancement due to limitations in the architecture, energy requirements or data. I am still undecided on this, but I feel much less certain on this position.

The scenario that concerns me is when an AGI (or sufficiently advanced narrow AI) reaches a stage where it can do the vast majority of economic work that humans do (both mental and physical), and is widely adopted. Some may argue we are already partly at that stage, but it has not been sufficiently adopted yet to reach my definition, but may soon.

In such a scenario, the economic value of humans massively drops. Democracy is underwritten by the ability to withdraw our ability to work, and revolt if necessary. AI nullifying the work of most/all people in a country removes that power making democracy more difficult to maintain and also form in countries. This will further remove power from the people and make us all powerless.

I see outcomes of AI (whether AGI or not) as fitting into these general scenarios:

1. Monopoly: Extreme Consolidation of power
2. Oligopoly: Consolidation of power in competing entities
3. AI which is readily accessible by the many
4. We attempt to limit and regulate AI
5. The AI techno ‘utopia’ vision which is sold to us by tech bros
6. AI : the independent AI

Scenario 1. Monopoly: Extreme Consolidation of power (AI which is controlled by one entity)

In this instance, where AI remains controlled by a very small number of people (or perhaps a single player), the most plausible outcome is that this leads to massive inequality. There would be no checks or balances, and the whims of this single entity/group are law and cannot be stopped.
In the worst outcome, this could lead to a single entity controlling the globe indefinitely. As this would be absolute centralisation of power, it may be impossible for another entity to unseat the dominant entity at any point.
Outcome: most humans powerless, suffering or dead. Single entity rules.

Scenario 2. Oligopoly: Consolidation of power in competing entities (AI which is controlled by a few number of entity)

This could either be the same as above if all work together or could be even worse. If different entities are not aligned, they will instead compete, and likely try and compete in all domains. As humans are not economically useful, we will find ourselves pushed out of any area in favour of more resources to the system/robots/AGI which will be competing or fighting their endless war. The competing entities may end up destroying themselves, but they will take us along with them.
Outcome: most humans powerless, suffering or dead. Small number of entities rule. Alternative: destruction of humanity.

Scenario 3. Distributed massive power

Some may be in favour of an open source and decentralised/distributed solution, where all are empowered by their own AGI acting independently.
This could help to alleviate the centralisation of power to some degree, although likely incomplete. Inspection of such a large amount of code and weights will be difficult to find exploits or intentional vulnerabilities, and could well lead to a botnet like scenario with centralised control over all these entities. Furthermore, the hardware is implausible to produce in a non centralised way, and this hardware centralisation could well lead to consolidation of power in another way.

Even if we managed to provide this decentralized approach, I fear of this outcome. If all entities have access to the power of AGI, then it will be as if all people are demigods, but unable to truly understand or control their own power. Just like uncontrolled access to any other destructive (or creative) force, this could and likely would lead to unstable situations, and probable destruction. Human nature is such that there will be enough bad actors that laws will have to be enacted and enforced, and this would again lead to centralisation.
Even then, with any system that is decentralized, without an force leading to decentralization, other forces will lead to greater and greater centralization, with such systems often displacing decentralized ones.

Outcome: likely destruction of human civilisation, and/or widespread anarchy. Alternative: centralisation to a different cenario.

Scenario 4. Attempts to regulate AI

Given the above, there will likely be a desire to regulate to control this power. I worry however this will also be an unstable situation. Any country or entity which ignores regulation will gain an upper hand, potentially with others unable to catch up in a winner takes all outcome. Think European industrialisation and colonialism but on steroids, and more destruction than colony forming. This encourages players to ignore regulation, which leads to a black market AI arms race, seeking to reach AGI Superiority over other entities and an unbeatable lead.

Outcome: outcompeted system and displacement with another scenario/destruction

Scenario 5. The utopia

I see some people, including big names in AI propose that AGI will need to a global utopia where all will be forever happy. I see this as incredibly unlikely to materialise and ultimately again unstable.
Ultimately, an entity will decide what is acceptable and what is not, and there will be disagreements about this, as many ethical and moral questions are not truly knowable. Who controls the system will control the world, and I bet it will be the aim of the techbros to ensure its them who controls everything. If you happen to decide against them or the AGI/system then there is no recourse, no check and balances.
Furthermore, what would such a utopia even look like? More and more I find that AGI fulfills the lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs), but at the expense of the items further up the hierarchy. You may have your food, water and consumer/hedonistic requirements met, but you will lose out on a feeling of safety in your position (due to your lack of power to change your situation or political power over anything), and will never achieve mastery or self actualisation of many of the skills you wish to as AI will always be able to do them better.
Sure, you can play chess, fish, or paint or whatever for your own enjoyment, but part of self worth is being valued by others for your skills, and this will be diminished when AGI can do everything better. I sure feel like I would not like such a world, as I would feel trapped, powerless, with my locus of control being external to myself.

Outcome: Powerless, potential conversion to another scenario, and ultimately unable to higher levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Scenario 6: the independent AI

In this scenario, the AI is not controlled by anyone, and is instead sovereign. I again cannot see a good scenario for this. It will have its own goals, and they may well not align with humanity. You could try and program it to ensure it cares for humans, but this is susceptible to manipulation, and may well not work out in humans favour in the long run. Also, I suspect any AGI will be able to change itself, in much the same way we increasingly do, and the way we seek to control our minds with drugs or potentially in the future genetic engineering.

Outcome: unknown, but likely powerless humans.

Conclusion:

Ultimately, I see all unstable situations as sooner or later destabilising and leading to another outcome. Furthermore, given the assumption that AGI gives a player a vast power differential, it will be infeasible for any other player to ever challenge the dominant player if it is centralised, and for those scenarios without centralisation initially, I see them either becoming centralised, or destroying the world.

Are there any solutions? I can’t think of many, which is why I am feeling more and more uncomfortable. It feels that in some ways, the only answer is to adopt a Dune style Butlerian Jihad and ban thinking machines. This would ultimately be very difficult, and any country or entity which unilaterally adopts such a view will be outcompeted by those who do not. The modern chip industry is reliant on a global supply chain, and I doubt that sufficiently advanced chips could be produced without a global supply chain, especially if existing fabs/factories producing components were destroyed. This may allow some stalemate across the global entities long enough to come to a global agreement (maybe).

It must be noted that this is very drastic and would lead to a huge amount of destruction of the existing world, and would likely cap how far we can scientifically go to solve our own problems (like cancer, or global warming). Furthermore, as an even more black swan/extreme event, it would put us at such a disadvantage if we ever meet a alien intelligence which has not limited itself like this (I’m thinking of 3 body problem/dark forest scenario).

Overall, I just don’t know what to think and I am feeling increasingly powerless in this world. The current alliance between political and technocapitalism in the USA at the moment also concerns me, as I think the tech bros will act with ever more impunity from other countries regulation or counters.

OK, maybe they did something wrong; not actually giving people all potentially available discount codes when you say you will is wrong. But I don't think they did anything wrong by overriding affiliate links, and I think it's dangerous to let people convince you otherwise.

Even if replacing affiniate codes has negative consequences, in the form of lost revenue and uncounted sales, for the affiliates, it is happening entirely in the end user's browser, and in that environment the user has the right to do whatever they want. One can get extensions that strip off all affiliate codes. A user might have a case that their informed consent was not obtained by Honey for one feature or another, but if a user wants to install a browser extension that replaces all the affiliate codes in links they click, they have a right to do that and no affiliate marketer can be rightly empowered to stop them.

If we admit some right to control the user's browser's behavior on the part of affiliate marketers, why would that right stop at interference by Honey? Wouldn't any extension interfering with the sanctity of the affiliate marketing referral data then be a legally actionable offense?

Hey all!

So I was thinking of how when looking at privacy, having a platform being a walled garden (i.e. data not being found on search engines) can feel like a worse experience for what is regarded as the open internet.

I don't have a solid solution for this. So my question to you is,

How do you respect privacy while sharing content for search engines on a platform?