yes I’m using my regular email and messaging family members using theirs.

It’s working fine, except for the occasional issue like I mentioned, i.e. sending multiple emails for one message.

I don’t know what it’s doing about encryption - it seems to use it when it knows the other party supports it, but that’s not my priority at this point, my aim is to encourage people to move off WhatsApp (this is what all my chatting takes place on). I’m kind of using the family chat as guinea pigs really.

Nice, I’ll give it a whirl. Their their website says, “ArcaneChat is a Delta Chat client” so maybe it deals with the issues I’ve had better.

bug reporting

I’m looking for projects I can contribute to in some way, so definitely not averse to bug reporting. From some discussions on the forum, the way I’m using it isn’t really supported and they’re really aimed at people who want to chat securely without being tied to proprietary networks. But I’m certainly not the only one who would prefer not to use proprietary chat protocols like WhatsApp, but there’s just too many other people I’d have to convince to switch to yet another chat app. Delta Chat / ArcaneChat really seem to offer a way forward for people like me, but the chat experience for people using regular email clients has to be very good - people get annoyed quickly if they receive 5 emails in a row each containing a single picture followed by a 6th email that just contains text (which is how my attempt at a message sharing some photos came through for email users)

what is this, is it anything like Delta Chat? (i.e. the UI of a chat app but using email for sending/receiving messages)

I’ve been trying out Delta Chat for messaging my family. It’s a bit kludgy and messy though, at least when interacting with others who are using regular email clients. For instance, it sometimes sends multiple emails rather than bundling it up as one.

Firefox has Firefox Relay, which lets you create aliases (they call them masks) for one destination email for free

https://relay.firefox.com/

No need for “AI”

whisper is AI, it’s even made by the Big Bad, OpenAI themselves <cue boos and hissing from the peanut gallery>

Pretty sure you can do this from normal settings too - make sure “Show search suggestions in address bar results” is unchecked:

I’ve always had a separate Search box alongside the address bar, but it does seem like it’s getting harder and harder to enable that

Secondly, amyloid is increased in response to viral infections, to protect neurons. This is why full vaccinated elderly have signficantly less dementia.

Sorry I don’t understand this? If beta amyloid deposits in brain do not correlate with AD, why does vaccination make a difference?

How many people listed in the credits of your favorite show do you truly think own one, much less multiple Porsches?

I don’t think those people are responsible for pricing. The Porsche comment was a flippant way of pointing out the whole parasitic machine that sits atop the actual creatives - the actors, the set designers, the script writers, all those people that you and I do want to support. All those people are not involved in pricing decisions or exclusivity contracts, and they’re mostly paid a salary so by the time a movie or series is out, they’re already on to the next job. By refusing to subscribe to all the myriad streaming services, you are mainly putting pressure on those executives to make a more appealing product.

I think you’re right in that it’s very reminiscent of US tipping culture (I’m not in the US), in that the people at the bottom are the ones who do the real work and yet they don’t get a fair share of the profits and instead have to take on unfair risk (i.e. the risk of not being tipped).

That said, I need to confess that I’m partly playing devil’s advocate, I pay for Netflix and just the other day I paid YouTube to “buy” a digital copy of a movie - for the exact reasons you said, I want to support the creative people behind the shows & movies I enjoy. I just don’t think it’s accurate to say that there’s a moral requirement to pay for entertainment, especially given how unfair the system currently is.

what would happen if nobody paid and everybody pirated

they wouldn’t just slowly starve to death you know. they’d start making the price more competitive and the service more user-friendly before they’d even had to pawn a single Porsche.

In all locations presumably? Do you know if it’s indistinguishable from you being at your main residence? Like are there any technical ways a service you’re connecting to could tell that you’re going through a VPN? (Just curious BTW!)

it’s somewhat overdramatic to call VW of today a Nazi company, but not completely baseless.

They originated as the people’s car - it’s what Volkswagen literally means. The original beetle was the result of the Nazi government’s requirement for a German-built car that was accessible to the people i.e. white, German people.

You’re missing the essential element of this thought experiment - the poison gas canister in the box which releases the gas when an atom decays. That atomic decay is a quantum event that cannot be predicted even if one has perfect knowledge of the atom concerned, and in fact whether it has actually decayed or not only becomes real when it is measured ie observed. Thus, according to this experiment, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead at once, up until the box is opened and an observation made.

If you don’t have that atomic decay, then the cat’s health is merely unknown - it is either alive or dead, not both at once, but the scientist simply doesn’t know which.

yeah well I’ll just wear two dozen sunglasses. that’ll make me twenty four times as cool as you, Mir Science Man.

You think if people who publish their work publicly didn’t research things like this, they would just never be discovered?

At least this way, we all know about the possibility, and further research can be done to see what can mitigate it.

well obviously it won’t, that’s why you need ethical output restrictions

Sharing knowledge. Lots of people are not primarily motivated by greed.

FYI I’ve had this issue on my old XFCE laptop for a while, and I’m still using X there. I thought it was a sign of failing hardware, given that it happens at the very last point of shutdown (and also, if the system was going into hibernation, it wakes up from it successfully even though I had to force poweroff the machine).

I thought we switched to libre

Maybe some people did. Thing is there’s a whole rest-of-the-world out there, and they didn’t necessarily get the memo or are happy with the existing way.

I commend this guy for sticking by his principles. I remember feeling shocked and let down when walking into my uni’s computer department for the first time and finding out that the main lab was the Windows lab, with the Linux lab being smaller and hidden away.

He must have tried the patience of his professors though, with his refusal to even use non-free JavaScript - for instance he wouldn’t use the Zoom video conferencing web client. Given that you don’t have to install anything on your machine and JS is heavily sandboxed, that does seem a bit too idealistic!

But hopefully he made his professors think a little and maybe they’ll even opt for true FOSS solutions in future. Like this Jitsi Meet that I’d never heard of before - I’m looking forward to trying it instead of Google Meet next chance I get.

In case you haven’t seen it, the paper is here - https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-thinking (PDF linked on the left).

The puzzles the researchers have chosen are spatial and logical reasoning puzzles - so certainly not the natural domain of LLMs. The paper doesn’t unfortunately give a clear definition of reasoning, I think I might surmise it as “analysing a scenario and extracting rules that allow you to achieve a desired outcome”.

They also don’t provide the prompts they use - not even for the cases where they say they provide the algorithm in the prompt, which makes that aspect less convincing to me.

What I did find noteworthy was how the models were able to provide around 100 steps correctly for larger Tower of Hanoi problems, but only 4 or 5 correct steps for larger River Crossing problems. I think the River Crossing problem is like the one where you have a boatman who wants to get a fox, a chicken and a bag of rice across a river, but can only take two in his boat at one time? In any case, the researchers suggest that this could be because there will be plenty of examples of Towers of Hanoi with larger numbers of disks, while not so many examples of the River Crossing with a lot more than the typical number of items being ferried across. This being more evidence that the LLMs (and LRMs) are merely recalling examples they’ve seen, rather than genuinely working them out.