For my immediate family I’ve made a small self-hosted Matrix server before, although it has its own bundle of issues… if I were to do it again maybe I would choose Signal. But yeah from a pure technical standpoint there are lots of viable insta-messaging alternatives

Sadly you hit the nail on the head regarding the social media “network effect”… I also came from a non-US country that has been dominated by an instachat app that doesn’t respect privacy whatsoever, but good luck convincing a group of ppl to switch to a different software. Sooo… most likely even if you really do get permabanned from Whatsapp, ppl you know in real life might just keep using Whatsapp without you anyway

But anyways, if you don’t mind giving a bit of a white lie… the excuse you gave (“permabanned from Whatsapp”) actually doesn’t sound to bad to me IMO

So to get the obvious out of the way… Becoming an American or a Canadien citizen are both difficult and highly demanding tasks during normal times. We are not in normal times… so I wouldn’t exactly advise it. But:

I don’t believe the communities have migrated out of Reddit yet, but you might have some luck going through Reddit’s r/immigration and r/immigrationcanada first. They both have pretty well-documented wikis and are both reasonably active, can try to register a burner account to ask if you have any questions not answered by anyone else

Cost is probably not an issue since it’s borderline impossible to immigrate to either US or Canada without some type of familial relationship or highly-demanded professional skills. If it is the latter, fairly certain it will be possible to save up to $10k for immigration processing so… And if I do not have familial ties or in-demand skills, it would be close to impossible to immigrate to these two countries in the first place

IMO if I have no affiliations with US/Canada whatsoever, I might try my luck with Europe first… a lot of European countries have a policy of 5 years legal residence -> permanent residence/green card. Canada does have a fast-track points system but it is quite competitive now; US immigration is quite nightmarish, and the country is not very welcoming due to recent developments

Edit: as mentioned below… Eurozone is not a single country. The 5 year thing is just what I observed several (not all) countries in EU adhere to, but yeah please do check the specific rules! Also Switzerland’s immigration policy is somewhat uniquely restrictive by EU standards if it helps.

Thanks! You put this better than I could. I was thinking that this has to be something philosophers have figured out or at least seriously investigated… I will look into these concepts

IMO this is the asklemmy community and I came here asking for opinions so… I think your opinion is quite valid

Carbon monoxide poisoning when I was like 8 or 9… Just chilling out at a relative’s house, then I just blacked out, next thing I knew there was cold air blowing at my face and I was outdoors. I’ve experienced other terrible things but this is probably the closest “near death” experience I have so…

Frankly I agree. From my personal experience, every single native Chicagoan has been calling that particular building “Sears Tower”. Even though the name has been officially changed for more than 15 years by this point…

And I thin OSM actually handled this quite well! The original Sears Tower name is still available as an “alt_name” tag on OSM as well, I just double-checked and yep it’s still searchable on the map

I don’t think this is good advice by any means, but I dropped my previous car at a car dealership for $500. They only were able to give me $500 because 1) it was an ex-police car and they apparently couldn’t sell it under normal circumstances, and 2) the car was pretty beaten up and probably have to be scrapped for parts.

This information is 2-3 years old so maybe things have changed… but back then I believe car dealerships would be willing to take a car for at least $500, since they can probably make a profit by auctioning the car or scrapping it for parts that way. So if I really just want to get rid of something, it’s not a bad option. However, most second-hand cars are worth way more than that, especially if I’m willing to put in a bit of effort, so… take this information as you will. I agree with the other comments that a used car can go for much higher if I’m willing to try.

Interesting… A coworker of mine previously worked on a fintech project that needed to use open models. Apparently their team found the Llama models to be much better than anything Mistral had at the time… I’m hoping Mistral’s new model (the one featured in the news article) is better. Not sure if Le Chat is open weights like the Mistral/Mixtral lines though…

Conventional AI/ML: I… don’t think so, unless they are models specially designed for playing games (with extreme examples being the likes of AlphaZero for chess/shogi/go). Actually I guess you could say that whatever DeepMind was doing was technically training/improving their models using video games? Case in point, their innovation on AlphaZero led to AlphaFold (which literally got a Nobel Prize) and the recent weather prediction tool

Generative AI: The field seems to have a major existential crisis due to running out of high-quality training data. So maybe there would be a way to use games to augment training data? I’m not an expert in Generative AI/LLM training so I’m not sure of the details

AGI: I’m certain an AGI model can be improved using video games but I don’t think researchers even remotely have a concept of how to build an AGI model yet

Sadly nothing yet, maybe just a couple of T-shirts… Mainly because I had to move/relocate every 1-2 years for my entire adult life until now & had to sell/give/throw away anything I couldn’t bring with me every time I move

Technically my primary computer activities are gaming, but these days I game exclusively on the Steam Deck or the tablet (for mobile games)…

My most speced-out computer was actually purchased for work related reasons. I wanted a decent GPU because I thought I’d be working in deep learning. Well current job doesn’t require training models and I was required to use a dedicated work laptop so… This high-spec one I mainly use for just about everything else other than gaming

Yeah no joke. The biomedical community is probably in collective ourage now, since NIH straight up cancelled most grant reviews and all types of outreach… which is unprecedented

The official NIH website banning specific words is just… cherry on the cake, I suppose. Hence only mildly infuriating

… which is why I never considered French press “inconvenient”… but from what I’ve heard from other coffee enthusiasts, they all found French press inconvenient precisely because they don’t just pour the grounds down the drain & had to dispose it in the trash bin (and deal with the mess). Maybe I’m ill-informed somewhere, maybe something else… I’m not against just flushing the grounds though.

Currently live in a condo, I think every unit in the building came with one

The biggest advantage I could find is that they are insanely convenient for making French press coffee! French presses are otherwise a pain to clean (since there’s no filter to aggegate the grounds), but having an in-sink disposal means I can just flush the coffee grounds directly into the sink. Besides this though I’m pretty indifferent to them

Probably in K-12? Like seriously everyone in my “friend” groups and half of my classes knew something about me was off, and I believe I was known as the eccentric genius throughout middle/high school (and my HS had a lot of smart students). But the broader culture I was in didn’t believe in mental health so…

Other than that… there were two people I relate to very well on Mastodon (when I first joined), one of whom is very openly autistic; hence why I got tested. That’s probably as obvious as it gets

Not great… I’m not a US citizen yet so voting isn’t possible. Only thing I could do is vote with my feet… so I moved out of Texas for good earlier this year. I think my current location is as safe as it gets in regards to avoiding political violence (since I’m not exactly in a group that the right isn’t threatening) so there’s that

Other than that? Nothing… If the worst happens I’ll just hole-up in the building and ask my boss for permission to work from home

This again??

This time once archive.org is back online again… is it possible to get torrents of some of their popular data storage? For example I wouldn’t imagine their catalog of books with expired copyright to be very big. Would love a community way to keep the data alive if something even worse happens in the future (and their track record isn’t looking good now)

I am not joking; the only thing I can imagine is for some bizarre reason a bowling ball noise followed by a comical noise of striking pins. I know there is a person but I couldn’t imagine that person

This is a good point… I strongly prefer nonfiction over fiction, but it could just be Autism. I really only read fiction if it is really, really good… but I read them in the same way as I would read a nonfiction book as well, I’d be more interested in the themes of the book

Oh my! I didn’t know what to expect, and I have to say… I was quite surprised by some of your answers. Also confirmed to me that I am definitely not normal

Not many replies that are indicative of Aphantasia so… here goes nothing. I tried really hard at this okay

I genuinely don’t know… there doesn’t seem to be any ongoing discussion of who or why are these people targeting IA. There are other people who are trying to rescue data stored on IA

Hope this would be over soon…