I heard that the reason why no one uses the ID card option is that the privatized post office lobbied the government to make it so expensive as not to compete with their service.

That may be part of the reason they are doing this. There’s a noticeable push for more regulation and enforcement.

You never want to know how the sausage is made.

When I saw a model trained on DOOM 1-2 years ago, I didn’t think this would be going anywhere. I have to admit, I was wrong. Now, the amazing potential is obvious.

Genie, quit livin’ on dreams

Genie, life is not what it seems

Genie!

Oh. So that’s the same tom as in atom.

Oh come on. Going all the way back to PIE doesn’t count. Like, both has to do with insides. But enterology does not inherit the suggestion of entry, which would have been funny.

Etymology note: The word enterology does not seem related to the word enter.

@TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works You made me look this up.

There are also people who can’t distinguish between entomology and enterology.

No offense. I just never know how widely understood such facts are. People do not seem to appreciate that open social media requires that the data be stored anywhere.

That’s something that may cause some grief in Europe. Moderation in ATproto is opt-in. You don’t have to subscribe to a US moderation service or any moderation service. One will probably want someone to filter spam, harassment, or content that one finds objectionable. But moderation according to EU regulations is about removing content that other people don’t want you to see. I’m not sure if that’s going to be super popular.

how the data is used and stored

That’s a tricky one and will potentially cause a lot of problems to open social media in Europe. Just know that there is no such thing as “looking” at a post, comment, or profile. It gets downloaded to your device and stored for as long as it’s needed, or maybe longer.

Y’all will enjoy this: https://w-social.eu/

The company Bluesky Social PBC created the microblogging service Bluesky and the ATProtocol. It’s like the company Mastodon created the microblogging service Mastodon. There are other services built on ATproto that are EG like Reddit/Lemmy. But these have not taken off significantly.

The ecosystem is mature enough so that you can participate in Bluesky without using services offered by Bluesky Social PBC and without making sacrifices. For the most part, you can move without abandoning your account.

It is true that the servers are mostly run by the Bluesky company, but so what? Email is mostly run by Google and no one seems to think that’s a problem.

The option to self-host your identity piggybacks on the DNS-system. A certain domain name resolves to the server where you store your ATProto identity. As long as you control the domain name, you control your identity. The ATProto identity is simply a pointer to where you currently store your data that your followers/contacts can use to find your content (IIRC).

The non-selfhosted alternative is a central identity service run by Bluesky. Unfortunately, the identity cannot be moved for obvious reasons. It would be good if there were some more options there. In principle, if the ATProto identity was tied to the government identity, that would make it moveable and non-hijackable. For some people, celebrities and such, that would be a good option.

Regardless of whether you selfhost your identity, you can selfhost a Personal Data Server (PDS), which stores your data and makes it available to the network. The PDS can move, cause that’s what the identity is for.

Feeds and other stuff is again independent.

The basic building block of the Fediverse is the instance, right? Every instance is its own self-contained, centralized social media service that optionally interacts with other instances. EG Trump’s Truth Social is a Mastodon instance that does not federate.

ATProto takes a more radical approach. Everything is modular. There is no instance or anything that is complete in itself. It’s more like the WWW. You can make websites in different ways. These are made findable through search engines like Google or Bing, which are not affiliated with companies offering web hosting.

ATProto takes everything apart. It tries to avoid choke points or lock-in as far as possible to thwart monopolies. You have a server that stores your data (posts, etc …), called a PDS. You can move your data to a different server. An identity provider tells others where your account is at any moment. A relay collects all the posts that people make and makes them available for further processing. This can be used to create algorithmic feeds, or moderation (aka labelling). These things are independent of each other and can be independently offered by different parties. You can pick and chose which to use, though there isn’t a whole lot of choice yet.

ETA: No idea what W wants to offer in that regard.

Looks like W is being built on ATProto.

https://atprotocol.dev/w-for-atproto/

https://bsky.app/profile/ducky.ws/post/3md2b73w3g22j

I wasn’t clear enough. Turing was wondering if machines can think. But there is no sufficiently clear definition of the word “thinking” that could be used to answer the question.

If you want to know if LLMs are AI, you can just look up the definition of AI and check if LLMs meet the criteria. You cannot do that to answer if they are thinking.

So let’s take a task, which we agree takes thinking, and see if a machine can do it as well as a human. If it can, then the machine must be able to think. That’s how you think as a scientist.

The test itself is similar to modern, placebo-controlled medical trials. That was not SOTA at the time, showing how clear thinking he was. Perhaps the WP entry on RCTs helps to understand how logic and reason may be applied in the face of uncertainty.

But of course the test revolves around the definition of a word. Such definitions are fundamentally arbitrary. That means that the test itself is arbitrary. Science is rarely concerned with colloquial definitions. Usually you come up with some sort of operational definition that you use for the purpose of inquiry. The only question is, if that definition is useful.

When Turing proposed the test, he was talking philosophically about whether machines can think. He observed that we are not likely to agree on what “thinking” means. So we cannot simply test if a machine does that.

He proposed that we might instead agree that some task requires thinking. If a machine can perform that task, then the machine can think. Turing told of a three-person party game called the “imitation game”, in which an interrogator asks questions of a man and a woman in another room in order to determine the correct sex of the two players.

It’s very rational, very scientific. In the words of William James: "A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all."

In light of his sexuality, It’s interesting that he chose that game. Looking at the transgender issue today, I think it’s a given that he wouldn’t have chosen that example now. Or believed that people are rational enough to be swayed by facts and logic.

I think that tech companies taking a stand on what their employees and/or users believe in is a reasonable thing.

How would that actually work? Like, you’d have pro-Trump and anti-Trump companies that only employ pro- and anti-Trump employees and only serve pro- and anti-Trump customers? What happens when someone who is basically pro-Trump thinks that ICE goes too far?