Try this: get the travel version of a water pick / flosser. They’re like $30 and you refill them from a tap. Now put it in your shower and make it part of your shower routine.
No mess. Easy to fill. No discomfort. Almost impossible not to use at that point.
I find it's good to blow the food out of your teeth, but I'm not sure it's as good as flossing. Not that I know much about flossing. I'm lazy and only do it if there is food stuck in my teeth.
So he did what… made a boom bap, cat-in-the-hat rap musical and put it in midtown to save them the drive?
Lin-Manuel Miranda loves letting people think he came from the streets when his Dad is a political consultant that worked for multiple mayors and presidential campaigns and his mom is a psychologist. Lin Manuel went to one of the most prestigious magnet schools in the Upper East Side and then went Wesleyan, which is one of the most prestigious private liberal arts colleges.
My criticism of Hamilton is usually that the premise, setting the story of the founding of the US to <gasp>rap</gasp> feels like something an edgy high school teacher would do on a 90's family sitcom.
If you've ever seen someone that naturally takes to gambling - like they play, lose, and immediately think they must be due to win now! - that's probably a good analogy as any for how some brains can be more likely to get addicted to activities like this.
Discord is fun and useful, but it's doesn't feel the same way that IRC did 30 years ago.
Gone are the days when the "owner" of a channel or name was the person who got there first (or the person who was friends with a server admin), and DCC chats and file transfers, clever customizable scripts that would alter the entire interface to be closer to one's liking, a wide choice of clients, alternate nicks to use today because someone else was using yours (maybe deliberately, maybe not), and with netsplits just adding an element of chaos to the mix, and a seemingly-universal avoidance of getting money involved in the game at all.
(And maybe we're better without some of those aspects, but it's still not the same.)
> Gone are the days when the "owner" of a channel or name was the person who got there first (or the person who was friends with a server admin)
That’s exactly how discord servers are made
> clever customizable scripts that would alter the entire interface to be closer to one's liking, a wide choice of clients
While not official, discord has several third party clients.
The discord client is an electron app, so it’s just using discords api.
Not to say discord is perfect or the be all end all, but it shows a strong trend back towards real time interaction and away from posts.
I hope matrix picks up when discord starts playing ads.
But Discord "servers" are completely different things compared to either IRC servers or IRC channels.
"Apples and oranges have similarities" is a cool story and all, but they're still apples and they're still oranges.
>While not official, discord has several third party clients. The discord client is an electron app, so it’s just using discords api.
IRC never really had this "official" or "first-party" problem to contend with at all. After it escaped the University of Oulu, people all over were creating their own incarnations of both clients and servers -- and running them independently, without centralized control. (This happened over the span of only a few months.)
>Not to say discord is perfect or the be all end all, but it shows a strong trend back towards [...]
...something that is useful and fun, and that is not like IRC.
That’s all well and good, but I never said anything about discord being like IRC, just that it’s popularity demonstrates the return of internet chat rooms
I'd argue it's far closer unstructured to IRC than AIM. I don't recall being invited to different AIM servers, etc. To me, Discord is like packaging IRC functionality in an ICQ box, which, for some reason, everyone seems to have forgotten about in these discussions.
I had the same problem while designing an AI related tool and the solution is simple: ask the user a clarifying question as to whether they want a specific ethnic background or default to random.
No matter what technical solution they come up with, even if there were one, it will be a PR disaster. But if they just make the user choose the problem is solved.
I’ve never succeeded with slack chat. Basically I just have to remember when a conversation happened and go to that time and scroll until I see it. Even if I remember most of the words of a message I’m searching for.
Outlook is the reigning champion of terrible search, but don’t Slack is the runner up.
My understanding is that when people are talking about search, they are talking about outside of the community/client itself.
I can search Reddit with Google. I can’t search Slack with google. So if you are using it as a repository for information or troubleshooting or what have you, it is completely worthless outside of its use for the people in the actual community/on that client, e.g. slack/discord. Whereas a thread on Reddit, HN, etc. that addresses some issue I am having is discoverable to everybody.
Let me put it to you another way: how many tech problems have you solved by searching Google and finding a Reddit thread, and how many times have you solved one by finding something on a Slack or Discord server you weren’t already a part of?
Come on. Discord or slack is like a forum where you have every post ever made on a topic in a single thread, 92,000 pages long. Sure, you can use search, but the nature of chat means that once you find one message (say, where a question was asked) you have to then skim through other discussions also going on at the time — often many of them — wondering if anyone answered the question, or if the discussion might continue after each interruption.
It’s okay for some applications I guess, but it’s the worst replacement for a forum, wiki, or knowledge base I’ve ever seen.
It's a bit disingenuous to pretend like they're the same thing. Explicit design for threaded discussion encourages a different style of communication than design primarily intended for real-time chat. Even if the information exists somewhere in Discord/Slack, it's often harder to find, harder to link to, provides less context, requires login and access to a specific community, isn't indexed by search engines, etc.
> What exactly is the problem here? Is a non-profit expected to exclusively help impoverished communities or something?
Yes. Yes and more yes.
That is why, at least in the U.S., we have given non-profits exemptions from taxation. Because they are supposed to be improving society, not profiting from it.
Ostensibly, all three of your examples do exist to improve society. The NFL exists to support a widely popular sport, the Heritage Foundation is there to propose changes that they theoretically believe are better for society, and Scientology is a religion that will save us all from our bad thetans or whatever cockamamie story they sell.
A non-profit has to have the intention of improving society. Whether their chosen means is (1) effective and (2) truthful are separate discussions. But an entity can actually lose non-profit status if it is found to be operated for the sole benefit of its higher ups, and is untruthful in its mission. It is typically very hard to prove though, just like it's very hard to successfully sue a for-profit CEO/president for breach of fiduciary duty.
It would be nice if we held organizations to their stated missions. We don't.
Perhaps there simply shouldn't be a tax break. After all if your org spends all its income on charity, it won't pay any tax anyway. If it sells cookies for more than what it costs to make and distribute them, why does it matter whether it was for a charity?
Plus, we already believe that for-profit orgs can benefit society, in fact part of the reason for creating them as legal entities is that we think there's some sort of benefit, whether it be feeding us or creating toys. So why have a special charity sector?
> OpenAIs goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. OpenAI believes that artificial intelligence technology has the potential to have a profound, positive impact on the world, so the companys goal is to develop and responsibly deploy safe AI technology, ensuring that its benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible.
Would you not object if someone characterized google as a non-profit because part of the org (the Google foundation) is non-profit? (Not a perfect analogy (nothing ever is, really).)
> The NFL, Heritage Foundation and Scientology are all non-profits and none of them improve society; they all profit from it.
At least for Scientology, the government actually tried to pull the rug, but it didn't work out because they managed to achieve the unthinkable - they successfully extorted the US government to keep their tax-exempt status.
You appear to be struggling with the idea that the law as enacted does not accomplish the goal it was created to accomplish and are working backwards to say that because it is not accomplishing this goal that couldn't have been why it was enacted.
Non-profits are supposed to benefit their community. Could the law be better? Sure, but that doesn't change the purpose behind it.
Sure you can, but I wouldn't make that argument about the NFL. They exist to enrich 30 owners and Roger Goodell. They don't even live up to their own mission statement - most fans deride it as the No Fun League.
Fast fashion and fashion industry in general is useless to society. But rich jobless people need a place to hangout so they create an activity to justify.
fashion allows people to optimize their appearance so as to get more positive attention from others. Or, put more crudely, it helps people look good so they can get laid.
Not sure that it's net positive for society as a whole, but individual humans certainly benefit from the fashion industry. Ask anyone who has ever received a compliment on their outfit.
This is true for rich people as well as not so rich people - having spent some time working as a salesman at H&M, I can tell you that lower income members of society (like, for example, H&M employees making minimum wage) are very happy to spend a fair percentage of their income on clothing.
It goes even deeper than getting laid if you study Costume History and its psychological importance.
It is a powerful medium of self-expression and social identity yes, deeply rooted in human history where costumes and attire have always signified cultural, social, and economic status.
Drawing from tribal psychology, it fulfills an innate human desire for belonging and individuality, enabling people to communicate their affiliation, status, and personal values through their choice of clothing.
It has always been and will always be part of humanity, even if its industrialization in Capitalistic societies like ours have hidden this fact.
Clothing is important in that sense, but fashion as a changing thing and especially fast fashion isn't. I suppose it can be a nice hobby for some, but for society as a whole it's at best a wasteful zero-sum pursuit.
There was a tweet by Elon which said that we are optimizing for short term pleasure. OnlyFans exists just for this. Pleasure industry creates jobs as well but do we need so much of it?
> fashion industry in general is useless to society
> rich jobless people need a place to hangout
You're talking about an industry that generates approximately $1.5 trillion globally, employing more than 60 million people globally, from multi-disciplinary skills in fashion design, illustration, web development, e-commerce, AI, digital marketing.
I don’t think OpenAI ever reported to be profitable. They are allowed and should make money so they can stay alive. ChatGPT has already had a tremendous positive impact on society. The cause of safe AGI is going to take a lot of money in more research.
Fair enough, I should have said, it’s my opinion that it has had a positive impact. I still think it’s easy to see them as a non profit. Even with everything they announced at AI day.
Can anyone make an argument against it? Or just downvote because you don’t agree.
- It's been used unethically for psychological and medical purposes (with insufficient testing and insufficient consent, and possible psychological and physical harms).
- It has been used to distort educational attainment and undermine the current basis of some credentials as a result.
- It has been used to create synthetic content that has been released unmarked into the internet distorting and biasing future models trained on that content.
- It has been used to support criminal activity (scams).
- It has been used to create propaganda & fake news.
- It has devalued and replaced the work of people who relied on that work for their incomes.
> - It has been used to distort educational attainment and undermine the current basis of some credentials as a result.
I'm going to go ahead and call this a positive. If the means for measuring ability in some fields is beaten by a stochastic parrot then these fields need to adapt their methods so that testing measures understanding in a variety of ways.
I'm only slightly bitter because I was always rubbish at long form essays. Thankfully in CS these were mostly an afterthought.
What if the credentials in question are a high school certificate? ChatGPT has certainly made life more difficult for high school and middle school teachers.
In which ways it it more difficult? Presumably a high school certificate encompasses more than just writing long form essays? You presumably have to show an understanding in worked examples in maths, physics, chemistry, biology etc?
I feel like the invention of calculators probably came with the same worries about how kids would ever learn to count.
> It has devalued and replaced the work of people who relied on that work for their incomes.
Many people (myself included) would argue that is true for almost all technological progress and adds more value to society as a whole than it takes away.
Obviously the comparisons are not exact, and have been made many times already, but you can just pick one of countless examples that devalued certain workers wages but made so many more people better off.
Well then, are we in agreement that you can't use the argument that ChatGPT replaced some people's work as an overall negative without a lot more qualification?
I think it's fair to say that after a lot of empty promises, AI research finally delivered something that can "wow" the general population, and has been demonstrated to be useful for more than an single use case.
I know a law firm that tried ChatGPT to write a legal letter, and they were shocked that it use the same structure that they were told to use in law school (little surprise here, actually).
I used it to respond to a summons which, due to postal delays, I had to get in the mail that afternoon. I typed my "wtf is this" story into ChatGPT, it came up with a response and asked for dismissal. I did some light editing to remove/edit claims that weren't quite true or I felt were dramatically exaggerated, and a week later, the case was dismissed (without prejudice).
It was total nonsense anyway, and the path to dismissal was obvious and straightforward, starting with jurisdiction, so I'm not sure how effective it would be in a "real" situation. I definitely see it being great for boilerplate or templating though.
Depends on what you define as positive impact. Helping programmers write boiler plate code faster? Summarize a document for lazy fuckers who can't get themselves to read two page? Ok, not sure if this is what I would consider "positive impact".
For a list of negative impacts, see the sister comments. I'd also like to add that the energy usage of LLMs like ChatGPT is immensely high, and this in a time where we need to cut carbon emissions. And mostly used for shits and gigles by some boomers.
Not arguing either way, but it is conceivable that reading comprehension (which is not stellar in general) can get even worse. Saving time for the same quality would be a positive. Saving time for a different quality might depend on the use-case. For a rough summary of a novel it might be ok, for a legal/medical use, might literally kill you.
"Positive impact" for me would be things like improve social injustice, reduce poverty, reduce CO2 emissions, etc. Not saying that it's a negative impact to make programmers more productive, but it's not like ChatGPT is saving the world.
REST Client extension in VSCode. Just a file that makes requests and lives in your repo. No totally unnecessary SaaS business with per user licensing fees.
reply