Why use an LLM as middle-man? If we’re all connected to the network just switch over to real-time direct democracy enabled by your brain implant ala sci-fi.
You don't need a brain implant or even a vote if everyone's influence is limited to such extend that they cant look beyond their self interest - voting is not required.
Direct democracy might be to much of a leap but we may take note of what people think and what ideas and proposals are out there.
You have ideas, you could write them down properly with sources and everything. Who is going to read it? What if you have 20 ideas? What would be the point in doing that? If it is pointless you should stop having ideas. There are countless fun, useful and interesting things to do that all have a point.
Say we all start writing down our poorly thought out ideas. Share our collective political ignorance with the void. If that could be aggregated and combined into something perhaps agreeable or just refutable, then we could at least debunk it and at best consider it.
Everyone can come up with a list of pro's and cons for any topic but if many do we can have the full list and may address the [perceived] misconceptions.
Not use LLM as a middle man (that would put it in charge) but as an aggregator. To construct the questions and answers for a poll for example.
If it works it will become worth having ideas, perhaps even good ideas, perhaps the feedback loop has to run for a while for the good ideas to happen.
Anything is better than pretending to know what the public wants while the public doesn't bother to want anything.
There is also the way we blame the representative for doing the wrong thing. They cant take positions on anything without offending some of their voters. We pretend everything is their idea.
I might be hallucinating, either way it is quite an enjoyable thought.
Of course I know no one will go along with anything until civilization implodes again.
You gotta open the window to find out how hot it is. After noon, stand facing West and see how many hand-widths between the horizon and the sun… each hand-width is an hour until sunset. Source: Boy Scouts
I don’t use FB or IG, but my partner is able to do amazing things with IG. She’s able to market her business and convert to sales. I’m pretty good at finding info but for local topics she frequently finds more up-to-date stuff from IG than I can find through public channels. She connects me to stories about nieces and nephews that aren’t posted elsewhere. I do catch her doing the glazed eye infinite scroll sometimes, but we all need downtime. If it seems excessive or stress inducing, I’ll gently point it out so she can self-moderate.
This isn’t HN material, is it? Still, I’ll bite. Lamentations that this “censoring” ruins enjoyment of books is fully cancelled by those who think that the offensive material ruins enjoyment of books. I’m not offended by either, but my lived experience is unique to me and I respect others might feel differently.
Ultimately, the publisher wants to maximize the profit from this back catalog, whether by stoking controversy , or by making the product more appealing to a 21st century audience, or by avoiding negative publicity. I don’t have the data to speculate.
This is absolutely of interest to many here. It dovetails with plenty of areas explicitly interesting to the tech crowd, such as IP laws, copyright/trademark policy, DRM and remote editing of eBooks, etc.
Fine, those are topics of interest. However, I don’t see any mention of IP laws, copyright/trademark policy or DRM, or remote editing of ebooks in the linked article.
Some of those arguments are the same ones the Gores were making with their PMRC and got roasted by most people, including then progressives and people concerned with 1A rights.
To me, it's not about ruining or enhancing books. It's about falsifying them. They should remain artifacts of their time, so we may have perspective on changing attitudes, and not be gaslit that the sensitivity readers' sensibilities were shared by every author, from every time and place.
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
Is that really the case here, or hyperbole? Is someone taking all the old copies from the used book store and destroying them? Is the library of Congress tossing out their first editions? What about non-sensitivity revisions, wouldn’t those also be Orwellian erasures of history?
The originals weren’t meant to be offensive, now they are to some. Publishers don’t want that. We’re talking childrens books here… people just won’t buy them if they think it will negatively impact a child.
Its culture war propaganda plain and simple. Nobody is dying on a hill over a character’s description in an old Goosebumps rag. I doubt anyone even remembers the character if the character was plump or cheerful, they remember the part about the ghost and the werewolf.
When you notice people making an such efforts to divide and distract, best check your wallet is secure.
> Is someone taking all the old copies from the used book store and destroying them?
"We haven't yet falsified everything, and there are still non-falsified copies remaining, so why worry?" - original versions in some dusty corner of an old book store are no good if the great majority of people is only exposed to fakes, and one in ten people who read those fakes eventually, possibly years later, learns their version was altered in unspecified ways.
This is an example of the slippery slope fallacy. In this case, the outcome is being wildly exaggerated for the purpose of inducing fear. The citation is a work of fiction.
I’m simply not convinced that a few edits to pop culture novels will lead to the downfall of free human society.
The slippery slope fallacy turns out to be accurate far more often than the people who resort to invoking the slippery slope fallacy would care to admit.
> I’m simply not convinced that a few edits to pop culture novels will lead to the downfall of free human society.
Of course not. This is just one nudge, one of many, not towards downfall, but towards change, in whatever average direction those in positions that create or edit culture push. It's just your history, slightly altered, one little lie at a time. So slowly you won't even notice. They used to make new works for this purpose, but now they've moved on to editing old ones. The slippery slope is a fallacy only until a trend line emerges from the data.
[W]e’ve kind of got to tell a lie: we’ll go back into history and there will be black people where, historically, there wouldn’t have been, and we won’t dwell on that. We’ll say, ‘To hell with it, this is the imaginary, better version of the world. By believing in it, we’ll summon it forth.’” - https://www.themarysue.com/steven-moffat-on-doctor-who-diver...
Let's not use the wiggle room for correcting typos or translating from middle to modern English as an excuse to change the meaning of the written words while passing it off as the same book by the same author (and hiding behind "Nth edition" to deceive readers that the changes are insignificant).
And in as much as that falsification has been happening forever, it was just as wrong then as what is happening now.
Translation requires editorial discretion and necessarily changes the meaning from the original language. Variation occurs between different translators of the same source material.
Editions frequently include new or updated information on the topic, not just corrections.
This is a disingenuous argument and I suspect you know it.
> Translation requires editorial discretion and necessarily changes the meaning from the original language.
This is exactly the kind of excuse I was talking about. An honest translator tries to preserve meaning as much as possible. A dishonest one uses translation as an excuse to tweak meaning to their liking, and accuses objectors that it's either that, or a "nonsensical, word-for-word literal translation".
I haven't seen this mentioned yet, but beyond taste/value arguments, there is an argument that the production of lab-grown meat is not able to reach significant scale with the available technology.
> And yet, at a projected cost of $450 million, Good Food Institute (GFI)’s facility might not come any cheaper than a large conventional slaughterhouse. With hundreds of production bioreactors installed, the scope of high-grade equipment would be staggering. According to one estimate, the entire biopharmaceutical industry today boasts roughly 6,300 cubic meters in bioreactor volume. (1 cubic meter is equal to 1,000 liters.) The single, hypothetical facility described by GFI would require nearly a third of that, just to make a sliver of the nation’s meat.
> If cultured protein is going to be even 10 percent of the world’s meat supply by 2030, we will need 4,000 factories like the one GFI envisions, according to an analysis by the trade publication Food Navigator. To meet that deadline, building at a rate of one mega-facility a day would be too slow.
> By GFI’s own admission, the challenges are serious—current costs are 100 to 10,000 times higher than commodity meat, according to the CE Delft analysts.
> There’s another issue: In focusing on micronutrients as the primary cost driver, GFI may have underestimated the cost and complexity of providing macronutrients at scale. Just like other living animals, cultured cells will need amino acids to thrive. In Humbird’s projection, the cost of aminos alone ends up adding about $8 per pound of meat produced—already much more than the average cost of a pound of ground beef.
DuPont discovered PTFE while exploring for new refrigerants. It was used in the Manhattan Project because it could resist flourine used in the gaseous diffusion of uranium, then marketed as Teflon after WWII.
3M discovered PFOS while developing rubber that wouldn't degrade when exposed to jet fuel, then marketed it as Scotchgard.
Technically, Blackrock and Vanguard own the means of production. We gave them the capital to do so through our pensions and 401(k)s. My 401(k) menu doesn't include ESG funds, but those that exist have higher expenses and lower performance than an indiscriminate index fund. If the regulators have been captured by lobbying and revolving doors to industry, the only option left is to vote with your wallet, but that's easier said than done.
Divestment without regulations doesn't work. You dumping your polluting investments is just someone else's opportunity to pick them up for cheap and make a profit.
Voting with your wallet is noble, but pointless. Vote with your actual vote.
> the only option left is to vote with your wallet
I know it’s not popular here but I’ll say it: class analysis. You can vote with your fingers and bones. You can vote with your personal dignity. Your investment portfolios are just part of capitalism and it isn’t predestined.
My grandmother suffered Alzheimer’s, but wasn’t ready to leave her home, so my uncle moved in with her.
She called him at work to ask for her checkbook… two men had knocked on her door, convinced her that a tree on her property needed to be cut down, proceeded to cut it and leave it there, then demanded $400.
Uncle rushed home and ran these guys off, refusing to pay, but it was a dangerous scam. All it would have taken is one to distract her while the other helped himself inside the house.
This is staggering to me for a different reason. Having a single tree cut down (and removed, which I guess they didn’t do) in our neighborhood costs in the vicinity of $4000-$10,000.
If you have a chainsaw, you can pick the tree, and you're not worried about where the tree will land (it's far enough from anything important), cutting down a tree is pretty quick work. Making it land in a small area is difficult, and removing it is laborious.
$4,000 to $10,000 for a single tree removal is incredibly high. In a very high cost of living area I can have a very large tree removed by a licensed insured removal company, the best in the area, for $1,500.
Are you in the Bay Area? NYC? Those are about the only places I could imagine paying $4k or more.
I suspect over the pandemic and lumber boom, a lot of qualified/insured/bonded arborists ended up getting forestry jobs and in-city arborists became scarce, temporarily anyway. Kinda like what happened to shipping container prices.
>>Nothing about that story sounds like a scam to me.
I mean, that's just... naivete? Lack of experience? Wonderful but unwarranted faith in nature of humanity? I was there once myself, so I empathize and understand it, but it's also dangerous.
First, there's no reason random people would be knocking on your door to cut a tree right then and there. EVERYthing about that story should sound like a scam, from the get go.
Second, I'm sure you CAN have tree cutting and removal as different services. As a consumer, why would you, but sure. But - do you really feel this was explained to the buyer ahead of time? Do you believe this tree needed cutting, based on the random strangers' authority? Why were random people walking around with chainsaws?
I get these guys on a weekly basis. "They were just walking down the neighborhood and noticed that [my gutters needed cleaning | my driveway is in disrepair | my roof can use a quick fix | whatever]". Literally every time, as I mentioned, there's an article in local newspaper few weeks later about elderly being scammed.
What honest, reputable businessperson, especially a skilled tradesperson, wastes their time knocking on doors? They are in so much demand they don't even need to advertise, word of mouth and referrals keep them overbusy. We'd all kill for a reputable contractor. Whoever knocks on your door in the middle of the day is not of that persuasion.
Are you in Florida? Trimming and removing trees prior to hurricane season is a completely reasonable thing to do. It's very common here.
The equipment for tree removal is different. A big truck with a crane that lifts debris into the back vs a bucket truck and chainsaws. And stump removal is a whole other thing.
Not every operation is big enough to own multiple trucks.
To drop a, as far as we know, perfectly healthy tree and leave it in the yard?
We had a guy who was doing work in the neighborhood offer to take down a big beautiful Maple tree in our back yard. He tried to instill fear of the tree.
So many people are easily tricked into taking down perfectly healthy trees because they are big. What a loss.
Can’t find the sauce, but MIT published a concept study about putting giant Mylar balloons at the L1 LaGrange point to reflect solar radiation as an alternative to aerosols.
A slight tangent, but there was an interesting experiment by Russia in the 1990s that involved solar reflectors on satellites to shine more light on the Earth. See Znamya (satellite): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Znamya_(satellite)
Jupiter’s grand tack left us with an asteroid belt right in the middle of the solar system. All our civilizational wealth derives from matter and energy, both of which we find in our cosmic backyard. Billionaire space tourism is a blip on the path to space industry.
