BoxOfRain

I disagree, my problem with claims of machine consciousness is that they are effectively unfalsifiable without both an adequate theory of consciousness and a way of measuring it empirically. We don&#x…

I wonder if more European pirates will appear on medium wave as commercial and state broadcasters abandon the band. Many countries have exited entirely already, meaning it's sometimes possible to…

> The UK had what I think was a really nice set up, although it's now not nearly as palatable. My student loan had an interest rate tied to inflation, and repayment was a fixed amount of my in…

I miss the low-pressure sodium street lights that used to be ubiquitous in Britain. The light was virtually monochromatic, which created a very specific aesthetic at night. Modern white LEDs feel more…

I think we in the West underestimate just how severe the '90s were in Russia. You can observe the fall of the USSR by looking at a graph of average life expectancy in Russia, the scale of state f…

One of my gripes with youtube at the moment is that they break my adblock filters to remove shorts more often than they break the filters stopping the actual ads.

> Genuine use cases for multiuser desktop Linux are exceedingly rare. (Are university computer labs with desktop computers still a thing? Or is it just Wi-Fi and BYOD now?) When I was a student in …

Ironically I built a Linux box for mainly local models with some RGBs because I wanted tasteful accent lights to match the room, but my motherboard isn't supported by OpenRGB so they're stuc…

Also if you want 'Arch with sensible defaults' CachyOS is basically that, people think of it as a 'gaming distro' but that's not an accurate characterisation. I use it as a da…

A better example is perhaps the Charge of the Light Brigade, our most famous war poem is about an cavalry charge in the wrong direction.

Russia's former Lake Karachay was an impressively polluted location, the early Soviet reactors were cooled with an open loop where highly contaminated water was discharged directly into the lake.…

> nuclear-weapon-level-dangerous chatbots I feel this framing in general says more about our attitudes to nuclear weapons than it does about chatbots. The 'Peace Dividend' era which is ra…

I think the following things can both be true at the same time: * LLMs are a useful tool in a variety of circumstances. * Sam Altman is personally incentivised to spout a great deal of hyped-up rubbis…

> Ireland is just a copy of the UK That's certainly a geopolitically contentious take if I've ever seen one.

I quite like IndexTTS2 personally, it does voice cloning and also lets you modulate emotion manually through emotion vectors which I've found quite a powerful tool. It's not necessarily some…

That's not what I mean, I don't like corpo-speak either. I mean just treating people like they're human beings, neither with affected shortness nor affected warmth. I really don't …

Personally I'm not a fan of terse writing; if something's worth saying at all it's worth using suitably expressive language to describe it, and being short and cold with people isn'…

Nah I disagree, tool calling isn't that difficult. I've got my own Cats Effect based model orchestration project I'm working on, and while it's not 100% yet I can do web browse, we…

Yeah I do think if your trust in state institutions is gone for whatever reason (such as living in a dictatorship), it'd be absolute madness to carry around an electronic snitch with you. I'…

Part of why I like sailing is for a similar reason, beyond a certain range the only people who can bother you electronically are other people at sea (and you actually want to listen to them).

Swearing is a good heuristic still I think. The American corporate world remains rather prissy about swearing, so if the post sounds like a hairy docker after 12 pints then it's probably not an L…

I know the very roundabout you mean without having to look it up, I used to cycle in Oxford very often and while I’m sure there’s a tendency on the internet to underrate locals’ stories as hyperbolic,…

> If it is possible, maybe it is what some people supposedly feel as "auras" For what it's worth, I have a disorder that causes me to see "auras" around people quite often.…

I've been experimenting with something similar to this approach recently. IndexTTS2 gives you emotion vectors as an input, I used an external emotion classification model on the LLM output to mod…

I couldn't recommend Patrick O'Brian more, I binged the entire Aubrey-Maturin series during lockdown and was genuinely sad for a week when I reached the end of it.