And that’s why Sora sucks, because it’s censored, closed weights, totally opaque, largely toolless, and peddled like spam.

I mean, I’m as big a ML fans as you’ll find on Lemmy, but this is a slop machine to build some Altman hype.

A controllable, integrated version as a tool, with augmentations like VACE or SDXLs controlnet would be neat. Thats also great because it’s not so easy for 1 click zero effort automated spam, which is by far Sora’s largest market as is.

…And guess what. We have that, it’s neat already, it’s open weights, it’s improving, and it’s not so controversial/abused because there’s an actual tiny barrier of entry to using it, like Davinci Resolve vs instagram filters.

No, I just skimmed the transcript because it’s an hour long, heh.

I did get that bit about SETI and the original paper, which is interesting, and also agree that astronomers looking for them over the paper is hilarious and stupid.

Man, I miss my jailbroken iPhone 5.

It was like having your cake and eating it, and somehow its stock (much less tweaked) UI is less clunky than whatever TF Apple has done to my discount 16. Maybe it’s because I was using Android in between, but still…

With the caveat that I only read the transcripts, I don’t find that compelling at all.

The initial sentiment is correct; folks like Sam Altman responding to existential problems like “oh we can just build a Dyson Sphere in 30 years” should be in freaking jail instead of power.

But the only other justification I see is “well, this is stupidly impractical in the context of current humans.” Things like:

• “What, we make all those nanobots and get all that energy with fusion and use it to disassemble Jupiter?”

• “Why don’t we just use that energy to leave the solar system?”

• “Say it’s a Dyson Swarm; what do we do living on all those solar satellites?”

She’s fallen into the same trap of “existing sci fi” she accuses other of falling into.

We’re not talking about a bunch of people in space looking to expand a habit. At this point, we’re talking about some AI that’s already converted an entire moons worth of mass into computronium, can upload folks to VR and simulate realities, that can reconfigure atomic nuclei into ultradense strings of matter or construct and control tiny black holes to generate energy and elements.

It’s left the solar system loooong ago.

Its capabilities, needs, and goals are completely umhuman, and at that point pondering how to efficiently capture the output of all this stellar mass sustainably is absolutely practical to plan. A Dyson Sphere (or more practically a swarm) isn’t the only way, but it’s not the worst idea for a “young” intelligence. And in OA, at a certain point, the Sephrotics seem to construct “sci fi” dyson spheres as habitats for aesthetic reasons, whereas their actual industrial/computational bases are more utilitarian arrangements of masses.

Yeah, I buy the filter (or at least a big filter) being early. That does seem like a freak accident, even with all that time for it.

But on the spread of civilization, this is why I love Orion’s arm: it posits that if a civilization like ours makes it another few thousand years, it’ll expanded in a bubble at a significant fraction of the speed of light and be extremely difficult to extinguish at that point, meaning civilization should have spread across galaxies by now:

https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/49333a6b7d29f

That makes a lot of sense to me.

And the fiction, even as wild as it is, gives the still somewhat unsolved Fermi Paradox a lot of thought:

https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/464d087672fe7

I particularly like the ‘Ginnungagap Theory’ that, perhaps, there’s some unknown barrier to expansion.

https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/464e942db2789

“Even with all the equipment available in the Civilized Galaxy and beyond the amount of the Universe which can be examined in detail is tiny. Imagine our own Galaxy as a deep sea fish, with very sharp but tiny eyes, peering at the other galaxies with trepidation.”

I have, but I’m also concerned that humanity got “lucky” so far and that this won’t happen again. There are theories positing that there are several blocking “gates” to civilization, and humanity passed an exceptional number of them already.

It’s reasonable to assert that’s a misleading, human centric perspective; but I’d also point out that the Fermi Paradox supports it. Either:

• The conditions that gave birth to our civilization are not exceptional, and spread intelligent life is hiding from us (unlikely at this point, I think)

• They are exceptional, and we just happened to have passed many unlikely hurdles so far (hence it is critical we don’t trip up at the end here).

• They are not that exceptional (eg more intelligent vertebrates will rise, and would rise on other planets), but there is some gate we are not aware of yet (which I have heard called the Great Filter).

Another suspicious coincidence I’d point out is that we are, seemingly, the only advanced civilization from Earth so far. If we died out soon, other vertebrates that rise would find evidence of us by this point, wouldn’t they? Hence odds are we wouldnt be the first and we would have found precursors if ‘vertebrates rising and then killing themselves off’ was a likely scenario.

TL;DR: I suspect vertebrates -> our tech level is a difficult jump.

Humanity survived though. Even with ‘humans’ dying out, I’d like some form of life to expand and go on.

My biggest fear is Earth ‘fizzling’ and never expanding before the Sun eats it, and the odds of that happening are pretty high.

Billionaire seem to have a… unscientific view of a sci fi future. Especially Musk, since he thinks he’s so transcendental, but apparently Bezos can’t help himself now either.

It doesn’t look like Star Trek.

It doesn’t look like a Cyberpunk movie.

I’d recommend diving into this for a more scientifically ‘thought out’ and optimistic extrapolation: https://www.orionsarm.com/

Interestingly, this is a neat idea waaay down the line, in the way a Dyson Swarm is interesting. But not anytime in the near future, not until humanity is very, very different (assuming we survive that long).

YES. That’s a HUGE one, for the maser in particular. I can’t even think of a precedent for operating (and cooling) something so high power in space, so its likely to fail, too.

It’s honestly all a bad idea, lol. It’s way less safe than nuclear, way more expensive than ground solar, so…

That’s a more interesting idea but still quite questionable, given how expensive sending anything to space is, and then maintaining it.

It made more sense with solar was expensive per square mm, but that is no longer the case.

Also, transmission is a huge problem. It’s easy to say ‘make a maser,’ but making giant one and aiming it reliably (lest one fries nearby terrain as the satellite moves to track the sun), and making a receiver big enough from how much the laser spreads out from geosync orbit is a tall order. Geosync is super far away.

There’s plenty of space on the ground, for now.

You are overestimating how technical most folks are. I know kids and older adults, on either side of my age, that have no concept of a filesystem, a URL, an APK to download, things like that, because they’ve never needed any of that.

Attention is finite.

Hence, web app’s aren’t really blocked by iOS/Android, but that’s still a basically insurmountable hurdle simply because it’s not the usual procedure for operating a phone. Defaults and accessibility are king (and Apple/Google know it).

It uses a modified version of its engine and its own filter source. It’s not commercial ABP: https://github.com/uazo/cromite/blob/master/docs/ADBLOCKING.md

Why was AdBlock Plus used rather than uBlock?

ADB is developed in c++ while uBlock is an extension in javascript. Currently, support for extensions is not active in Android. ADB in Cromite is enhanced with support for cname uncloaking and blocking even in workers (a unique feature of Cromite). Support for “acceptable ads” has been completely removed.

I view this as a huge plus, as (theoretically) a C++ engine is faster than a javascript one.

Barrier to entry.

Many (dare I say most) folks don’t know how to use a web browser, much less find a web app. Installing an App Store app is much easier.

It’s also much lower visibility for those who do know.

And that’s especially critical for this app, which relies on tons of people using it.

It wouldn’t help.

In this case, even if the app was side-loadable and had a web app, that’s enough of a technical hurdle to kill its critical mass.

In other words, it doesn’t have to be banned; suppressing ICEBlock is basically enough to kill it.

It’s not that bad, IMO.

That being said, you sould 100% be using Cromite if you’re on android. Not only is its adblocking/antifingerprinting basically state-of-the-art, but its (unfortunately) way faster than firefox.

Killing sideloading might kill it though…

It’s absolutely insane that anyone pretends Google Play and the App Store are fine though.

Has anyone scrolled through any search and not seen a sea of heavily marketed scam apps?

Thing is, Play Store is already filled with malware or near-malware from seemingly verified developers. I ran into several scam clone apps just today. It’s even snuck in through OEM apps.

Same on iOS, which supposedly verifies devs.

If ‘verification’ and curation is their idea of security, well… It appears their system is already overloaded, yet they want to expand it?

AFAIK Huawei already forks Android (and the Play Store) for their stuff, but I have zero knowledge beyond that.

What’s China going to do? Fork Android more officially?