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Unpopular opinion: I have deep reservations about policing misinformation. I’m a big believer in the demarcation problem: in the general case, there’s no shortcut to determining objective truth. It’s similar to the halting problem in computer science: if we want to know whether a claim is true, we have to go through the scientific method. […]
a year ago

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More from essay – snarfed.org

Interactive navigation in embedding space

tdjgordon, Pixabay Discussed a fascinating idea for a foundation model tool at lunch today: interactive navigation in embedding space. Right now, you prompt most generative models with human language. That works, but it’s imprecise and coarse. If you’re generating an image of an outside scene, and you want the sunlight ever so slightly brighter, you […]

a month ago 42 votes
Tech pace layers

I’ve been a fan of Stewart Brand‘s Pace Layering for decades now. Really great framework for thinking about how different ecosystems and emergent forces interact. I’ve been thinking about a tech version of it for the better part of a year, and I finally took advantage of the holiday break to bang out a rough […]

2 months ago 58 votes
Possible futures for Bridgy Fed

Tomorrowland / Walt Disney People regularly ask me whether Bridgy Fed is ready to scale and support more users. It’s a technical question, but their underlying motivation is usually broader: they believe in the social web, and the fediverse(s), and they want them to connect everyone who’s willing, across instances and networks and protocols. Right […]

4 months ago 38 votes
Sleep is so weird

Ian Dyball Our bodies are designed such that we need to lose consciousness, entirely, for a full third of every day. This is evidently necessary for some kind of regular brain maintenance, maybe forming long term memories, who knows what else. If we don’t sleep, we quickly become groggy and non-functional. Really? Evolutionarily, this is […]

a year ago 34 votes
Moderate people, not code

Dixit / Marie Cardouat The scope of the fediverse has been hotly debated recently. Are we a big fedi? Or a small fedi? Are instances just nodes? Or networked communities? Which Camp of Mastodon are we in? How far should our replies travel? How about our blog posts and Bluesky skeets? Should we welcome Threads? […]

a year ago 31 votes

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