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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I don’t know that it’s the “algorithms”: a lot of people just use their following feed on twitter and although it changed a while back that was the default feed on bluesky for a long time. I think that there is a fairly large portion of bluesky users who mostly just look at following and still don’t really like mastodon.

    Imo, a big reason why bluesky has been a more successful twitter competitor than mastodon is cultural: mastodon has been around for years before musk bought twitter, and a big selling point was that it wasn’t like twitter, for example that its “less toxic”. A large part of mastodons userbase never liked pre-musk twitter that much and will tell you of for acting like you would there. Bluesky on the other hand has a large portion of users who liked pre-musk twitter and are happy to follow pretty similar social norms as they did in pre-musk twitter.

    This is to some extent reflected in the functions of the different sites as well, for example you can’t quote retweet on mastodon which iirc is deliberate because qrt dunking is “toxic”. Bluesky has quote retweets (although they allow you to untag yourself from a qrt).









  • One problem with this question is that UBI can be implemented in different ways and the way that it is implemented is very important.

    I think that the way most people think about UBI is that you would get enough money to not have to work. I don’t think that this is compatible with capitalism, because the main reason why people work is because they are pressured into it for economic reasons so removing that without providing people with some other reason to work will just cause the economy to collapse.

    Even if people work for some other reason than money, you will still have the problem that UBI undermines itself. As less people work for money, the money you get from the UBI program will also mean less. Not only do you need a different way to encourage people to work, but you also need a new way to distribute the products of that work if you want to ensure that everyone has access to basics like food and housing.

    For these reasons I don’t think that a UBI that offers people the option of not working is compatible with capitalism. Capitalism is the system that we use to distribute work and resources and if we implement UBI we will have to invent new systems to do those things instead.

    It is still possible to have a smaller UBI under capitalism if your goal is to for example prevent money from getting to concentrated among the rich and instead stimulate the economy, or something.


  • 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.







  • 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.



  • A breakthrough in quantum computing wouldn’t necessarily help. QC isn’t faster than classical computing in the general case, it just happens to be for a few specific algorithms (e.g. factoring numbers). It’s not impossible that a QC breakthrough might speed up training AI models (although to my knowledge we don’t have any reason to believe that it would) and maybe that’s what you’re referring to, but there’s a widespread misconception that Quantum computers are essentially non-deterministic turing machines that “evaluate all possible states at the same time” which isn’t the case.