I am more a lurker than a poster...
What I have noticed is wander. Comments start to wander off topic and "evolve" into comments on some consensus comment rather than the subject of the actual comment.
Having said that it is so hard to make commenters to stick to the subject.
Comments become full discussions, rather than well, just comments.
Is this a concerted effort to kill browsers in favor of proprietary apps?
With proprietary apps the owners have all the power over privacy, advertising search results...basically everything.
Where have we heard "we have to do better" only for the big players to become infinitely worse?
We badly need the federated universe to mature and close out these greedy behemoths controlling social media.
Depends what you define as progress.
On a purely philosophical view point the answer is most certainly no.
From a speed/operational/deployment perspective probably yes.
How and what you consider and measure progress is the problem.
Consider what happens when you use output from LLM as training data for LMMs. If there is any "falsehoods" or "incorrections" then the very processes of LMM training will provide "bias" in it's output. That will then become exponential. That is the disinformation issue you mention. I would submit that this is/will/should be the paramount area for research and hence progress. In that regard there doesn't seem to be much progress at all, except to deny or cover it up.
Just like the self perpetuating myths on Wikipedia, where entries are corrected and then those corrections are repeatedly replaced because people read it in articles quoting previous (bad) information from Wikipedia.
I guess we can have an army of moderators (probably need several hundred thousand) correcting data or "preselecting" only truthful real data for training. That means for the most part its not Artificial Intelligence, its human.
Been there done that and reversed.
Manual labor (of any sort) can be very fulfilling, particularly if you enjoy it.
You can do manual labor that you love, its easy.
But when you look around and see the little old men still doing the same as you and you realize those little old men are only 50 years old and will still be doing it when they are 65, then its an eye opener. If they live to 70 they will probably have arthritis and other wear and tear on their bodies.
Do you want to do that? This is reality check time.
If you are going to do it, do the retirement plan first. Put the nest egg away for retirement, then go for it.
Reckon you can keep working when you have the flu? You can at your present job, but you will ruin your long time health if you do hard physical labor when you are sick.
First think about what ELSE you can use that physics degree for. Sales in finance is probably the low end of using your knowledge.
One other thing to consider, is that if you change your mind 5~10 years down the track (you did once :) )can you go back and put up with the younger brighter more recently experienced who will be your bosses?
Well it looks like Betterbird war is having an affect on Thunderbird itself. While not the same logo, it has a similar "feel" to the Betterbird logo.
Now if Thunderbird will finally make it possible to NOT have threading as the default for new accounts or have an easy button to remove threading, rather than the cumbersome way they do it now, (listen to the endusers guys , not the sponsored contributors), we will all feel a little bit more love for the venerable Thunderbird.
I do like the new logo though.
And when you add a new account you have to do that for all the folders individually.
That doesn't apply to a folders sub folder either.
There is a method to copy all settings to a folder and its sub folders but that does not include sub folders of the sub folder.
So you end up for a while with some folders showing up as threaded and some not.
And you have to do it for each account individually. (some of us have multiple accounts for businesses and personal emails)
Nightmare when deleting, because you may delete a thread rather than an individual email.
For most of us it means threading was foisted on us without notice or discussion.
Ever tried to find out what is being considered? Good luck with that.
Surely a global button to remove all threading can't be all that hard.
assuming that Stephen wasn't playing games with me, GPT-4 not only
gave the best possible answer to my query, it even knew somehow
that I was referring to the Wolfram language.
Given the earlier interactions, is it not possible that the very references to Wolfram in these previous interactions provide a "bias" or inference in answers that ChatGPT gives and as noted in other comments, the need to appear courteous and knowledgeable (even condescending?) makes it provide an answer using wolfram language?
Perhaps it is unanswerable because a truly separate same query by another unrelated user to attempt to remove the bias is no longer possible, the bias in THAT question is now embedded.
Isn't this exactly the problem with these models, they actually can become self biassing based on all their own previous answers?
Perhaps its because of the history and culture of self determination. Dog eat dog if you prefer. No one else was going to help you, you need to help yourself. Individuals must have a job or earn money. sink or swim. Hard lessons embedded in the culture.
Individuals (generally) don't have a safety net like most European countries.
Individual health care is only for the successful (rich). This breeds a culture of perseverance, if you like it weeds out the weak & lazy.
They can't survive in this sort of cultural environment, so they are able to be exploited with low wages and conditions, which in turn allows businesses to thrive.
Add to this a critical mass of people (350 million?) and you have lots of consumers with lots of money to invest/spend. Initially fortunes were made and the country grew economically on super low wages (slavery).
You now have lots of "canon fodder", workers who will do what they are told and must accept wages at any level because they must to survive. Individuals must provide for their old age, no one else will. If you can't then you just keep working. The individual drive to succeed is very strong in this environment,
chances must be taken, failure is not an option.
The only way to pull them selves out of this situation is by innovating and entrepreneurship.
Get at least 1 more email address and keep it only for services you pay for.
The biggest problem with subscribing is the on selling of email addresses.
Get a proton paid mail account and your own domain. Setup a "catchall" address.
Now when you subscribe to "something" then use the name of the "something" with your domain name as the email address.
Example:
to logon to Hacker News use the address hackernews@yourdomaim.com. You do not need to setup an email address the catchall receives your email. If you get spam addressed to hackernews@yourdomain.com you know Hacker News on sold your address. If you don't after a month or so change your hacker news address to your legitimate address.
You cannot send from these catchall addresses, but if you truly need to you setup a legitimate email with that particular address and send it then delete it.
Proton Mail have excellent spam filtering anyway.
There are other providers that do the same.
The biggest problem with "unsubscribe" is that it effectively verifies that email address. You may unsubscribe from one list only to be added to lots of other lists because it is a verified email address.
I found a great way to reduce spam is to have email address that looks like a big company ie google@yourdomain.com or microsoft@yourdomain.com
Your email client needs attention. Make sure you haven't set it to save all incoming addresses and the spam filter to "ignore spam setting for emails in my address book".
I am not familiar with google mail but make sure the same sort of thing is not setup for gmail. (...we don't read your emails we just extract anonymous information for market research purposes..so spam is never an affiliate?)
To solve your present problem set aside at least 1 hour a day and setup block lists.
You need to ruthlessly organize your contacts lists.
The problem will get worse before it gets better.
I found unsubscribing just breeds more. It is going to take weeks or months, but the short term pain will be worth it.
By the way I think gmail may have limits on its spam filtering. (...we don't filter out affiliates....really?)
You could get your corporate IT to setup all lists with separate sender addresses to allow filtering, but they will probably hate you for asking...
Fully agree.
I like the concept, but the concept itself produces multiple instances of any particular subject.
You have to wade through a plethora of almost the same instances and then read the moderation policy on each to find out is this is the one for you, then you have to somehow tell your friends.
Is this a way for Google to add new sites to their search data and advertising infrastructure?
When you go to the link "Chrome and Other Browsers"(from the website above), it takes you to a page which blatantly advertises Chrome, and doesn't mention other browsers. So Google!
If it was harmless or did only what it says, wouldn't it be handled by a consortium with at least Microsoft, Apple, Google, Mozilla and the like.
History tells us that google looks after googles income.
