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no the primary cause was that the main xorg project wasn't accepting the devs patches any more.


... because this dev's patches broke master, multiple times.

I feel this is an important detail to keep in mind while choosing a fork.


which mattered because everyone pulls from master, because xorg stopped doing proper releases. it's certainly something to bear in mind if you intend to run xlibre though.


I don't think "everyone" pulls from master - "everyone" run the distributions, and they always pin to the specific git commits. Only people who run xorg master are the ones who want bleeding edge, and those would be using it no matter release or not.

And it's not like metux will suddenly become more careful just because he does not have to worry about other anymore. If anything, I expect there to be much faster changes and much more breaking things... Here is a great quote [0]

> @metux that you've had to fix this bug twice (!1844 (merged), !1845 (merged)) shows a lack of attention and care. This was a known regression, with clear reproduction steps, and at first glance, it does not look like you tested your PR at all.

> And that goes in general; I really haven't seen the level of care and attention I would expect to see in these patches; several of them had obvious buffer overflow issues that would have easily been caught if tested.

[0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1797#no...


I'm not even trying to say they shouldn't have kicked him out, just that it had nothing to do with wokeness, and more to do with philosophy of how the project should be run.


And he blamed wokeness.


sure, he's a bit of a kook, but wokeness itself is really incidental to the whole thing.


> OpenAI knows that if AGI arrives, it won't be through them. Otherwise, why would they be pushing for an IPO so soon?

an ipo is a way to seek more capital. they don't think they can achieve agi solely through private investment.


> an ipo is a way to seek more capital. they don't think they can achieve agi solely through private investment.

private deals are becoming bigger than public deals recently. so perhaps the IPO market is not a larger source of capital. different untapped capital, maybe, but probably not larger.


> In my opinion, the fact erotic literature exists is proof aphantasia is not normal. Words cannot be arousing if you cannot imagine things "in your mind's eye".

The opposite seems to follow? erotic literature is proof you don't need images to be aroused.


Hmm, no? The words must elicit images and sensations, otherwise they wouldn't work as erotica. Words are just words. If you cannot picture what they are describing, you cannot get aroused.


> If you cannot picture what they are describing, you cannot get aroused.

This is your thesis. In the first place, the existence of erotic literature doesn't prove this is true, like you claimed. I would furthermore claim that it calls this assumption into question. If the goal was imagery, the more straightforward approach would be to draw an image. If that wasn't possible, you would instead describe the image you wanted to draw in words in great detail. But this isn't at all what most erotica consists of.


> In the first place, the existence of erotic literature doesn't prove this is true, like you claimed

Everything we are discussing in this comments section must be understood in an informal way. I obviously did not "prove" anything; I don't think anything can be proven about this anyway. Whenever I say "proof", read my statements as "[in my opinion] this is strong evidence that [thing]".

It's a figure of speech: "this cannot be so!", "it must be like this other thing", etc. It's informal conversation.

> If the goal was imagery, the more straightforward approach would be to draw an image.

Maybe straightforward, but as with anything related to the phenomenon of closure (as in Scott McCloud's closure), drawing an image closes doors. If you describe but don't draw an image, the reader is free to conjure their own image. Maybe they visualize a more attractive person than the artist would have drawn, or simply the kind of person they would be more attracted to.

Have you never seen a movie adaptation after reading the book and thought "wait, this wasn't how I imagined this character"?

> If that wasn't possible, you would instead describe the image you wanted to draw in words in great detail. But this isn't at all what most erotica consists of.

That's such a mechanistic description! Words don't work like this. Sometimes describing less is better, because the human brain fills in the gaps. You don't simply list physical attributes in an analytical way, you instead conjure sensory stimulus for the reader.

(If talking about sex and adjacent activities makes anybody nervous, simply replace this with literature about food. In order to make somebody's mouth water you cannot simply list ingredients; you must evoke imagery and taste. Then again, some people -- aphantasiacs -- simply cannot "taste" the food in textual descriptions!).


> Whenever I say "proof", read my statements as "[in my opinion] this is strong evidence that [thing]".

read my statement as "it isn't any evidence at all"


Well, that's easy: your statement is wrong.


They're remarkably standoffish outside of the city. They'll scurry as soon as you come close, unless they're nesting, at which point they stand forlorn a marked distance away from their nest waiting for you to leave.


Oddly enough, within town, they're remarkably tame. Maybe with enough humans around, they learn that we're not a threat, and it's costly to evade a non threat. Likewise the turkeys. My daily bike commute goes past a public golf course, and there's usually a pair of cranes there, sometimes with little ones. They ignore me.


I suspect that depends on the nesting status. Long ago I worked in an office building where a mated pair would frequently raise their chicks outside the front door, and before the eggs hatched they would aggressively harass anyone walking to the building.


there's an extension called "ad nauseum". this is it's goal. it doesn't seem to have destroyed the ad economy yet, but maybe if more people install it it will

for whatever reason you can't get it on the chrome addon store.


Ahhh, interesting, hadn't heard of it. I think that an extension-based approach is too easy to mitigate, though. I think to be effective, it would need to be people clicking on the adds themselves, because it would be much harder to separate their traffic from legitimate traffic. When people are manually clicking ads, their traffic looks organic, whereas an extension clicking everything in rapid succession probably looks programmatic and would be trivial to filter out.


the improvements since 2021 are minor at best. ai thus far has been trained to imitate humans by training it on text written by humans. it's unlikely that you will make something as smart as a human by training it to imitate a human. imitation is a lossy process, you lose knowledge of the "why", you only imitate the outcome. to get beyond this state, we'll need a new technique. so far we've used gradient descent to teach an ai to reproduce a function. to teach it new behaviours will probably take evolutionary approaches. this will take orders of magnitude more compute to get to the same point. so yes it could take 20 years.


It has to do with the lindy effect. If you have $X, statistically you will quit trying to accumulate money when you have $2X. Hence you are safe to entrust some reasonable fraction of $X in without fear of you running away with it. Someone with substantially less than $X will see that as the most money they will ever see in their lifetime and immediately being trying to cash out.


They could say "notionally aimed at". The accusation of detractors would certainly include that that isn't the real goal, so to repeat it uncritically is a bit odd.


> But if we’d actually done an ICO, you’d have lost all your money anyways.

tru tru


We can draw analogy between any two things. An encrypted chat is not a letter in the mail or a call on the telephone. It is an entirely new thing. Backdooring such chats is not "bringing technology in line with existing laws" it is, very clearly, passing new laws, and creating new invasions of privacy. It must be justified anew. The justification for wiretapping was not that there was no way to fight crime without it. Otherwise, when the criminals became wise to it, and began to hold their conversations offline, there would have been a new law, requiring that all rooms be fitted with microphones that the police could tap into as necessary. No such law was passed. Instead, the justification for wiretapping was simply that, once police had identified some transmission as relating to the committing of a crime, they could obtain a warrant, and then tap into the communication. The physical capacity without any effort by uninvolved individuals was the entire justification. That capacity does not exist with encrypted chats. The analogy is therefore much closer to the "mandated microphones" described above. Everyone is being required to take action to reduce their own privacy, regardless of whether they are subject to a warrant.

What is most striking about our "mandated microphone" analogy is the utter futility of it. Criminals have no issue breaking the law, and hence have no issue outfitting a room with no microphones in which to carry out their dealings. The same is true of any law targeting encrypted chats.


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