“algorithm” just means “set of instructions”, it is a bit unfortunate that it’s become the default term for talking about this kind of thing.

I think that youtube wants to maximize watch time, if you just watch subscriptions you might get “done” at some point but with the home feed you can just keep watching forever

People have scrutinized what chatgpt for example is allowed and not allowed to say by its programmers. I think the difference here is that there is lower hanging fruit to grab because the Chinese state has a different relationship to censorship than a lot of other states.

I also associate Sinophobia with being prejudiced against Chinese people or Chinese culture, however being critical or skeptical of the Chinese state is actually perfectly reasonable. I’m also very critical of the US state and this isn’t because I’m “americaphobic” or some nonsense.

Please explain how this is Sinophobic.

Sure, what I’m saying is that they’re both editors that you need to invest time in. A bit less so with helix since it has better defaults so you don’t need to spend as much time configuring it, but I don’t think that makes a huge difference.

Helix has better defaults for sure and I get why people might prefer it but I have a very hard time imagining it being a better choice than vim in every situation even with a lot more development.

Also, if you work with programming for example your editor is going to be one of your main tools and I think that “reading guides” is an acceptable amount of effort to put in to learning such a tool. Vim has a higher barrier of entry than it needs to (this can to some extent be explained with backwards compatability) but with Helix you still have to put some time in to understanding the editing model anyway.

The biggest thing missing from helix right now imo is plugin support, so a lot of plugins that I really like wouldn’t be available. I use fugitive a lot for working with git for example.

Another one is the quickfix list in combination with ex commands. One thing you can do for example is setup :make to run your compiler and then when you get compilation errors they’ll show up in your quickfix list. You can then use :Cfilter to focus on one type of error and then :cdo to for example do a find and replace on the remaining lines.

In general, if I don’t have an lsp available for whatever reason (I work in cmake a fair amount at my $DAYJOB for example) I would much rather use vim, in particular because of the stuff that you can do with ex commands that I mentioned above (also works great with grep) but also because of the ctags support.

Helix can do a lot of nice things out of the box for a lot of cases of software editing, but it’s not nearly as broad or as customizable of a tool as vim

I don’t really see the point in a “facebook competitior” since the only appeal of facebook is that it’s “normal” and “evryone” is on it, something that just isn’t going to be true for e.g. some fediverse product. Everyone should stop using facebook if possible though, I’m trying to persuade different messenger groupchats that I’m part of to switch to something else left and right personally

Vim still has a lot of advantages over helix. Being modern doesn’t automatically make a tool better

I’ve been wanting a phone with a keyboard for a long time, I don’t think I’ll get this one (I specifically got a fairphone in part so I wouldn’t have to think about buying a new phone for a couple of years) but I think that this could be really nice for some specific usecases that are underserved today.

With arch, I’d recommend just jumping in the deep and and installing it, looking things up on the wiki when something goes wrong. Just do it in a virtual machine or on an old laptop or something to start with. I broke my previous distro (mint) by doing some really stupid stuff, and I decided to just go fuck it and install arch. I don’t think I’ve ever learned as much about linux as that weekend.

I suppose that I was already pretty comfortable with the terminal since I was studying computer science at the time so I had a lot of reason to use it. I think the best way to use the terminal is to force yourself to use it, programming is great for this but you can try e.g. sorting your photos or mp3 files or something as practice too.

It can be hard to bootstrap yourself up from zero followers. I’d recommend posting something just so that people have an idea of the kind of thing they can expect if they follow you from checking out your profile. But you probably won’t get much engagement from your own posts at first, so it will probably be more fun to just reply to other accounts.

Bluesky has a feature where you can set up customized feeds to filter for any kind of content you want. The person who saw your post might have seen it in the “newskies” feed which just contains every first post that any account makes for example. So one way to get engagement can be to write posts that show up in a certain feed that people follow, like there exist some feeds that are based around certain topics that usually trigger based on your post containing certain keywords. Most people just use the following feed though, I think.

Bluesky is funny because they genuinely have some great user based moderation tools but on the official moderation side they’re really bad in all honesty. The sum of these two parts are a better experience than most websited on the internet at the end of the day

Twitter has historically been used as a platform by a lot of different fandoms and the network effect is strong enough that they haven’t managed to leave en masse until now

As long as you have your windows license key you can change your mind later so really you can do whatever. I’d recommend giving 100% linux a try if that seems fun. Obviously you’re gonna want to back up any interesting files that you have on windows either way.

No, the podcast can absolutely missrepresent the thing that it’s sumarizing. The podcast also adds commentary, and I think it’s especially this commentary that I find unreliable.

I think that it is impressive, but not necessarily that useful? In particular, you can’t really trust what they’re saying to be accurate so it doesn’t actually give you that much usable information.

Very cool, but I’m not sure what I would actually use it for.

Yeah thought that might be the case! It’s just a thing that a lot of people have misconceptions about so it’s something that I have a bit of a knee jerk reaction to.

There are a couple of reasons that might not work:

• Maybe we’ll asymptotically approach a point that is lower than human-level cognitive capabilities
• Gradual improvements are susceptible to getting stuck in a local maxima. This is a problem in evolution as well. A lot of animals could in theory evolve, say, human level intelligence in principle, but to reach that point they’d have to go through a bunch of intermediate steps that lead to worse fitness. Gradual scientific improvements are a bit like evolution in this way.
• We also lose knowledge over time. Something as dramatic as a nuclear war would significantly set back the progress in developing AGI, but something less dramatic might also lead to us forgetting things that we’ve already learned.

To be clear, most of the arguments I’m making aren’t really about AGI specifically but about humanities capability to develop arbitrary in principle feasible technologies in general.

Another possibility is that humans just aren’t smart enough to figure out AGI. While I’m sure that we will continue incrementally improving technology in some form, it’s not at all self-evident that these improvements will eventually add up to AGI.