I guess that’s the word I was really thinking of. Persuasion sounds more neutral.

That term has some negative baggage. I think we need to use a neutral word l like persuasion or influencing when talking about situations that don’t involve malicious intent. The way I see it, all of these terms still involve the same kinds of tools and methods. More often than not, changing an emotion results in the desired action.

If you’re trying to convince a child to wash their hands, does that count as manipulation? You’re essentially trying to persuade someone to do something they don’t want to do. Sure, the intention isn’t malicious, but the methods are clearly manipulative.

Thank you, Kindly.

Initially, you just need to survive. I can imagine that next you’ll start building small communities and fulfilling their needs.

If you can’t get water purification running, the small village won’t grow to a town. If you can’t make your own tools and shelters, it’s going to stay in the tribal stage.

That made me think about what it would actually take to start rebuilding after a zombie apocalypse or some other disaster like that.

First of all, you would need to restart various bits of infrastructure, like water and electricity. On top of that, you would also need to restart the factories that manufacture the spare parts for all the machiens. Those factories also require raw materials, like metals, so initially metal recycling might be the easiest way to do it. No need to start mining new metals until you’ve already used up all the broken cars and sky scrapers littering the landscape.

So, basically you need to get all sorts of heavy industry up and running again. Those data hoarders can help out with the necessary engineering literature, but having some tools is also required.

How about a pool of mercury or tetrabromoethane? Who said it has to be non-toxic. Besides, mercury comes with extra bling.

Like, how do you even discover you have such a superpower? It’s not every day that you even think of trying something like that.

Oh, thanks. It’s been many years since I’ve seen that movie. Had completely forgotten the name too.

There was a sci-fi movie where surrogate robot bodies were used for everything. Only very few people actually lived their lives using their real body. Was a pretty cool concept.

Washing the dishes. VR edition. While you’re playing the game, the maid bot does the household chores. Just try not to drop anything valuable in VR, because the bot might break something IRL.

In a mostly theoretical sense. America can’t fix its politics without making some radical changes to the voting system, but I don’t expect that to happen anytime soon.

The current system naturally gravitates towards a two-party system, which isn’t quite what I would consider a coalition government. If you have three or four parties actively negotiating about major decisions, that’s when you begin to see the benefits.

Have you considered forming a coalition government? That’s how much of Europe has been working for a while now. There’s usually a little bit of blue, red and green in the mix. Maybe some other colors too.

It’s also possible to speak to two audiences simultaneously. Just vaguely allude to some values without being too specific about anything. With this clever hack you are basically doubling the bandwidth.

Here’s an example: “We stand at a pivotal moment where the choices we make about the resources beneath our feet will shape the world above for generations to come. Our shared future depends on managing what we value with foresight and responsibility.”

So, was I promoting the fossil fuel industry or opposing it? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Either way, both sides are happy to hear this kind of talk.

Yeah, the LLM is ok, but nothing amazing. When you have a moderately hard problem, the LLM won’t provide a magic solution. For example, finding a specific movie based on a long description instead of the name, seems to be almost impossible. I have problems like this rather frequently, because I tend to forget the name of the movie but still remember fragments of the plot.

When the LLM screws up movie searches like this, I just end up watching the wrong movie.

It’s a problem if you still use Google. Somewhere around 2015 I switched to DDG, and it quickly replaced Google for me. Since then, I’ve been experimenting with some other search engines too, and currently I’m using Qwant on my laptop.

I rely on smart devices to tell the time, but it’s easy to notice DST when the few dumb devices I have are out of sync. If I didn’t have any of those, I would have missed the switch entirely.

Can’t wait to see someone shove AI into egg times, flashlights and calculators. This kind of innovation just makes me sad.

Those were the days… :-)

Oh, I totally forgot the www thing. That was super annoying. Good riddance!