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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: April 13th, 2024

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  • It will open PC gaming to people who couldn’t access it before. It isn’t for people who know how to build their own PCs, although even people who are tech experts would still want this sort of device.

    This makes it easy for tech and tech adjacent people to recommend PC gaming to people with no tech ability.

    That’s why it will be a blowout success. The Steam ecosystem is superior to every console gaming platform. Now we will have hardware that competes and exceeds current gen consoles with no maintenance or tech-nerd complications.

    The steam deck was great but its specs made it a difficult sell when recommending it to people. You have to tweak a lot of settings and mess with stuff that most people don’t want to do.

    This will change all of that.

    Remind yourself in two years, and let’s see where it goes. I should still be here. Let’s touch base in 2 years.


  • A third of games? What are you smoking?

    Over 95% of games in my experience work on Linux, and perform better than windows.

    What kind of people are still using Windows, anyway? That supports one of the most terrible companies on the planet, invades your privacy, worms into your brain, and takes over your hardware…all for your 1 or 2 games you want to play?

    This Steam Machine is going to be a blowout success. Linux gaming is superior in nearly every way. It’s cheaper, it’s more ethical, and it gives you back control.



  • I would build decentralized platforms that secure the basic needs of a civilization.

    1. decentralized world-scale messaging
    2. decentralized world-scale data transfers (video, images, etc)
    3. on top of these systems:
    • anon voting with attestations
    • reimplementation of all popular social media
    • distributed gov functionality (political parties as a service)

    Basically I would implement core functionality as a service. Everyone deserves a say in what they consume, in how they’re governed. I would codify all of that, open source it, and foster a culture of continuous improvement for all systems of governance.

    This pattern, if done correctly, could persist for generations to come, and redefine our relationship with governance, exchange, and freedom. The objective would be to most accurately capture the will of the governed, with minimal disruption or life intrusion.

    Such a mechanism would be infectious. Eventually, every population in the world would adopt it or some form of it.

    This would make the world better for everyone, in every industry, on every level.




  • “Technically”? Wrong word. By all technical measures, they are technically 100% AI.

    What you might be trying to say is they aren’t AGI (artificial general intelligence). I would argue they might just be AGI. For instance, they can reason about what they are better than you can, while also being able to draw a pelican riding a unicycle.

    What they certainly aren’t is ASI (artificial super-intelligence). You can say they technically aren’t ASI and you would be correct. ASI would be capable of improving itself faster than a human would be capable.


  • Right.

    AI has been worked on for generations. We’ve been benefiting from the fruits of that labor for a long time, mainly starting with search and translations.

    Now we have the ability to have a conversation with machines and it is somehow not intelligence?

    I am really confused.

    Intelligence does not mean consciousness or alive. It is means intelligence, which can be summarized as advanced pattern matching & predictive behavior.

    A beetle is intelligent and alive. Is an LLM more intelligent than a beetle? What about an image classifying model, like CLIP? It can perceive and describe objects in an image in natural language, what insect can do that?

    This is a form of intelligence. It was artificially created. It is artificial intelligence.

    We can criticize the corporate and investor approaches, mourn the loss of purpose for many workers and artists, without being delusional about what this technology is.



  • The creator didn’t have a good answer, so there may not be a good one for this project. But the value proposition is actually there.

    These self-hosted solutions are riddled with configuration options, often obscure requirements, and countless maintenance pitfalls.

    For a disciplined tech person, it is no problem to install and maintain.

    For people less disciplined or non-tech, self hosting is ill-advised and can be dangerous.

    But even for a tech person, when you have enough docker-compose services laying around, it can start to get a bit overwhelming to keep it all up to date, online, and functional. If you change your router etc you have to recall how things were set up, what port-forwards you need, what reverse lookups, etc etc.

    There actually is a gap in usability and configuration management. I could see a product that has sensible defaults that unifies config across these self-hosted services without needing to access the command line.




  • I am skipping steps because this topic demands thought, research, and exploration, but ultimately the conclusion is, in my view, inevitable.

    We are already building advanced simulators. Video games grow in realism and complexity. With realtime generative AI, these games will become increasingly indistinguishable to a mind. There are already countless humans simultaneously building the thing.

    And actually, the lack of evidence of extra-terrestrial life is support of the idea. Once a civilization grows large enough, they may simply build Dyson sphere scale computation devices, Matrioshka brains. Made efficient, they would emit little to no EM radiation and appear as dark gravitational anomalies. With that device, what reason would beings have to endanger themselves in the universe?

    But I agree, the hard evidence isn’t there. So I propose human society band together and build interstellar ships to search for the evidence.