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I’m going to hazard a guess it’s a combination of falling budget and an over reliance on autocorrect. If it’s like other industries, they’re trying to get more articles out with fewer people.

I know that I often have an atrocious number of typos - but some are entirely the fault of autocorrect either changing a correct word to something else or correcting a typo to a word that makes no sense in the context of the sentence. I’m hoping that the next generation will improve this.

If anything a now - not typo at least indicates that it was written by a human. LLM errors generally don’t involve that sort of thing.

That’s pretty much what all of the site aggregators were. I ran a couple of communities on yahoo and some other sites. There were also services like Archie, gopher, and wais, and I am pretty sure my Usenet client had some searching on it (it might have been emacs - I can’t remember anymore). I remember when Google debuted on Stanford.edu/google and realized that everything was about to change.

No, because he’s actually quite mad and belongs nowhere near any kind of power. I can see his conspiracy theories appealing to the Q type, but most of them are going to go for Trump. He’s polling this highly because he’s an unknown. As more people start paying attention to who he actually is, he will be the Herman Cain of the race.

I do this for a living. Seasonality as a generic term refers to temporally periodic signals but can even be extended to talk about non-temporal aspects of a signal. The same math used in areas like econometrics to remove periodicity in annual data can be applied to multiple domains. The main motivation to removing or isolating periodicity is to allow for investigation into the underlying phenomena, or to allow the investigation of the sources of periodicity independently of other drivers. In every case, though, seasonality is an acceptable term in everything I’ve written, read, and worked on.

This is seasonality.

Seasonality is a characteristic of a time series and refers to periodic and generally regular and predictable changes that occur over a year.

To make it more generic, drop the “over a year” and just refer to the periodic signal over time idea. You can find additional signals by how you bin the data, eg monthly or day of week.

He went from looking like The Mandarin from Iron Man to wish.com late stage Tyrion.

It strikes me as exactly the kind of engineering call that Elon has tended to make, time after time. With zero training in an area, he gets a solution in his head crufted up from some set of pre-existing notions or points of view and then pushes to have them implemented. He will also go on to fire anyone who disagrees with him. I spoke with an engineer who worked on the gull wing doors, which the team had objected to, and not only did he force them through, he burst in on one of the finalization meetings where they had finally reached a design consensus and insisted they change the hinge. Given similar reports on his behavior regarding other products (including especially twitter), I have no reason to disbelieve this person.

Negative tip value.

A 1971 Chrysler Newport.

The thing was a boat. You’d hit a bump in the road, and the car would act like you crested a wave and bob front to back a few times. It was wider than most pickup trucks and probably heavier. Not only could it not fit in most parking spots, it could hardly fit in some lanes. Required leaded gas, which was getting hard to find at that point. If you needed to go uphill you had to build up speed because you would slow down, even with the gas pedal floored.

The best part is that when I finally brought it in for service, the mechanic came out and said “You’ve been driving that thing??” Three out of four motor mounts had broken and the last one was about rusted through.

It did have an 8-track though, and came with a bunch of Elvis tapes.

I hated Elvis, but did manage to find an 8-track of Peter Paul and Mary.

I kind of close with that thought. A “good idea” in evolutionary biology is one that leads to reproductive success. Obviously, it’s possible to have so much reproductive success that you overrun the carrying capacity of your environment. That doesn’t happen as often when we’re looking at them in their natural environments - because species and environments co-evolve, and so each adaptation has time to be matched by other adaptations.

It’s always tempting to look backward through time and interpret a direct causal development from the bow and arrow to industrial manufacturing and spaceflight. But we can see by looking at all of the different societies and cultures around us that any particular path isn’t dictated by the human brain per se. The Yanomami and the Yoruba are populated with people exactly as intelligent as in any other human society. They are adaptable and clever, but never developed mass manufacturing or rocket technology. There are countless other civilizations that arose, gained a high degree of sophistication and power, and then disappeared while others have survived.

I do not believe in free will. That means I believe in strict causality. If you wanted to argue that the development of modern western political economies are a direct result of the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment itself was a direct result of the world of ideas that came before it, you’d find a sympathetic ear (although I do believe that determinism is different from predictability, and that this complex system we call our society is more complex than any individual just as a human is more complex and less predictable than an ant).

In any case, it’s possible the “lethal mutation” that might lead to our demise (along with a good swath of the rest of life on earth) might have been a techno-cultural mutation rather than a biological one.

Those are very good questions. First, I was distinguishing between multiple types of intelligence, rather than ranking them. However, there are several aspects of human intelligence that we’d probably be justified in saying something like “By these metrics, humans are more intelligent than any other species on the planet.” Those include the sophistication of technology, the amount and complexity of of information exchanged between persons, the ability to learn, and so on. Other animals can learn through accident or experimentation and adopt a new behavior. Some even exhibit social learning, as when a troop of baboons learned to wash their food by observing the matriarch, who had discovered it on her own. Most other species have languages, whether vocal, visual, or chemical. But most learning occurs over evolutionary time rather than at the individual level, and most of those languages are fairly hard coded.

The answer is definitely yes for the second question, with the eusocial animals like ants and bees being the obvious examples. The queen is not the “brain” of the colony. She is more like the reproductive organ. The brain emerges from of all the ants collectively interacting with each other and the environment. I agree with EO Wilson that humans are also eusocial, and so by extension carry out collective computation - information processing and learning - at the social level using what we might think of as an emergent brain layered on top of your individual brains.

Evolutionary biologist here. I think it’s highly unlikely.

It has taken about 4 billion years for intelligent life to have appeared on our planet (if you include the earth forming part), or 3.5 billion years (if you include when life first formed) to get our first “intelligent life.” By intelligent life here, I’m talking about technology in tool using and civilization building, to be clear. It’s a label I’d apply to our many of our ancestral and most closely related species. I believe much of life on earth is intelligent to the point of having things like theory of mind (the knowledge that one is a thinking individual interacting with other thinking individuals), including some birds and octopuses. The birds and octopuses part is important because it means that ToM evolved multiple times independently. That means that a) it’s a “good idea” (it has potentially significant adaptive value) and b) it’s possible to discover it along multiple pathways. Take eyes for example. Last time I looked, we believe eyes have evolved independently at least 24 times. They also exist at every stage of complexity and in a very wide variety of forms, and even something as as simple as being able to tell light from darkness has value.

However, in that 3.5 billion year history, intelligent life evolved exactly once, from a single line of descent. Intelligence such as ours is obviously a good idea. We went from being relatively unremarkable hominids to being the dominant life form on the planet, for better and for worse. Evolution is not moving all species to intelligence. Humans aren’t the point of evolution, any more than sharks or jellyfish are the point of evolution.

When such a manifestly good idea only evolves once, from a single line, the conclusion is that it’s pretty difficult to evolve. It might require a chain of preliminary mutations, or a particular environment. Being hominids, for example, we can make tools and carry fire, which dolphins and octopuses cannot. Of course, there are other hominids out there who do not do those things, and they’ve been around for millions of years. Depending on where you want to start the clock, they’ve been around for about ten times longer than modern humans - about 400k years, give or take. And the technology and civilization part has only been around for the last tenth of that, and has to evolve along its own, non-biological selection - and even those things differ wildly between different places and cultures. And even will all that, it’s become increasingly obvious that this might be a terminal mutation as the very drivers of our short term success may lead to our extinction.

I believe that extra-solar life probably exists. Whether it exists as bacterial mats or multicellular life, whether it’s discovered its own form of photosynthesis or has some other way of gathering life from its environment, whether it draws a distinction between its informational (eg, dna) and physical components - I have ideas but obviously no data.

In any case, that’s why I don’t believe that anyone has ever seen an extraterrestrial-origin ufo. I don’t believe the universe ever was nor will ever be teeming with civilizations.

All of that said, though, we’re dealing with an n of 1. We can make the best inferences possible based on what we can observe, but I would be delighted to be proven wrong tomorrow. I’m a sci fi nerd - I want there to be aliens. Even the discovery of a bacterial mat would revolutionize biology.

I have a 3p app that still seems to be working. I don’t log in, so I only read occasionally, but I have to say that the number of upvotes seem much higher than when I was using the site. I was a very active user who quit during the exodus (when Apollo went dark), but I don’t remember the number of upvotes being regularly in the thousands to tens of thousands.

It makes me wonder whether they’re artificially boosting traffic ahead of the IPO, to be honest. I mean, if they are, it probably would have leaked by now - but it still feels like it doesn’t line up with the third party traffic reports.

In any case, I think that going public is just going to increase the pressure for monetization, and Spez has already said how much he admires what Elon did with Twitter, so I think we know where it’s heading. It’s really just waiting for a replacement. Whether lemmy can be it or not is yet to be determined, but the enshittification has started and the migration will come as soon as someone drops a couple of billion building a service and app that’s a real substitute for the casual users.

Smalltalk would probably make more sense than C++.

Uno Reverse

Thanks!

I have always loved the OED. As a kid I used to sit in the library and just read it. It was always a dream of mine to buy my own copy and just have it the way people used to have encyclopedias.

That’s exactly my perspective.

I came of age with the birth of the web. I was using systems like Usenet, gopher, wais, and that sort of thing. I was very much into the whole cypherpunk, “information wants to be free” philosophy that thought that the more information people had, the more they could talk to each other, the better the world would be.

Boy, was I wrong.

But you can’t put the genie back into the bottle. So now, in addition to having NPR online, we have kids eating tide pods and getting recruited into fascist ideologies. And of course it’s not just kids. It’s tough to see how the anti-vax movement or QAnon could have grown without the internet (which obviously has search engines as a major driver of traffic).

I think you’re better off teaching critical thinking, and even demonstrating the failings of ChatGPT by showing them how bad it is at answering questions. There’s plenty of resources you can find that should give you a starting point. Ironically, you can find them using a search engine.

That was amazing! I can’t believe this is the first time I’ve seen this.

“Every customer should be greeted when they walk into the store.”

The singular “they” is traditional in English - it is very much proper English and has been around (iirc) since the 17th century. It’s only a big deal now because conservatives want to make gender a factor in elections.