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robotbikes commented on How to talk to anyone and why you should   theguardian.com/lifeandst... · Posted by u/Looky1173
jjav · 11 days ago
> I highly recommend talking to strangers! People are lovely. Go out and try it.

Which country are you in?

I'm from a latin country and the norm is that you end up chatting about life the universe and everything with any random people you share a space with for more than one minute.

But in the USA that doesn't really fly. Talking is transactional, either a business deal is going on or shut up. I've been in the USA for a long time and as an introverted person I'm mostly ok with that, but whenever I'm back home I realize how much I miss talking to random people.

robotbikes · 11 days ago
I think a lot of it has to do with the somewhat complicated engagement protocol, if everyone assumes that nobody else wants to talk then it's easier to just keep your head down and at best nod or even avert eye contact but when someone extends a level of conversational courtesy I think people often respond in kind. My challenge is that I don't often have the impulse to break the ice but when I do and feel genuinely outgoing people tend to appreciate the chit chat even if it's just about the weather but I also have many moments of standing awkwardly in elevators silently ascending or walking down the street silently and even feeling awkward ordering food. Being able to consistently be outgoing I feel would be a net positive but I'm not sure what the trick is to just turn it on without it feeling forced.
robotbikes commented on Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS   motorolanews.com/motorola... · Posted by u/km
roysting · 11 days ago
> Motorola makes great hardware too

Do they? I genuinely don’t know because I don’t think I have ever seen a Motorola smartphone in the wild and their heavy involvement with the police and surveillance state has my attention piqued a bit. I’m just saying GrapheneOS partnering with possibly the biggest police state surveillance solutions provider? What’s that all about?

robotbikes · 11 days ago
I remember when they were briefly owned by Google (I think) and assembled the MotoX in the US so you could buy a bamboo or customized case. It had one of the first low power always listening CPUs to listen for you to say Ok Google. Once that didn't work out Lenovo bought them and they had decent but not many flagship midrange phones. Moving forward a phone with decent security running grapheneOS that isn't a Pixel sounds good especially considering how other manufacturers such as OnePlus are embracing AI integrations. I think a number of people get sold on Apple devices based on their purported security so this collab could bolster some sales, let's hope they make it work and keep it open. I'd buy another one especially if I could get a bamboo case.
robotbikes commented on The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice   bbc.com/culture/article/2... · Posted by u/1659447091
gwbas1c · 3 months ago
> as are they everywhere else, presumably!

They aren't "all over the place" in the US, and I certainly don't have a local archaeologist that I can just call up.

FWIW: The Northeastern US is quite recent with human presence. It wasn't settled until after the last ice age. Pretty much anything old is celebrated because there is so little of anything old.

robotbikes · 3 months ago
Ohio was populated with numerous earthworks, the Hopewell Earthworks finally being recognized as a UNESCO world heritage spot after being preserved for years by being used as a golf course. Unfortunately many of these have been lost as European settlers destroyed many of them. This continues to this day as Google is building a data center in central Ohio a top of land that was home to numerous native american burial mounds - https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-breaks-gro...
robotbikes commented on Backing up Spotify   annas-archive.li/blog/bac... · Posted by u/vitplister
syntaxing · 3 months ago
Moral and legal discussion aside, this is technically very impressive. I also wouldn’t be surprised if this somehow kickstarts open source music generative AI from China.
robotbikes · 3 months ago
This already exists and is interesting to play around with - https://github.com/ASLP-lab/DiffRhythm
robotbikes commented on Global Village Construction Set   opensourceecology.org/gvc... · Posted by u/jacquesm
vkou · 5 months ago
> My concern is around how these tools essentially accelerate planetary resource extraction, with from what I can see no discussion or attempt to addesss this potential impact/dynamic.

You can't meaningfully address that at a grassroots level because of the tragedy of the commons.

You have to engage with that problem at a higher level of organization. (National/Transnational).

robotbikes · 5 months ago
The commons were actually fairly well regulated by community norms that were well documented and established. The creation of the notion of the tragedy of the commons was quite possibly propaganda so that large land owners could consolidate and enclosed the commons under the guise that they could manage it better especially after traditions were disrupted.
robotbikes commented on Will Smith's concert crowds are real, but AI is blurring the lines   waxy.org/2025/08/will-smi... · Posted by u/jay_kyburz
ulrikrasmussen · 6 months ago
I think AI-"upscaled" videos are as jarring to look at as a newly bought TV before frame smoothing has been disabled. Who seriously thinks this looks better, even if the original is a slightly grainy recording from the 90's?

I was recently sent a link to this recording of a David Bowie & Nine Inch Nails concert, and I got a serious uneasy feeling as if I was on a psychedelic and couldn't quite trust my perception, especially at the 2:00 mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Yyx31HPgfs&list=RD7Yyx31HPg...

It turned out that the video was "AI-upscaled" from an original which is really blurry and sometimes has a low frame rate. These are artistic choices, and I think the original, despite being low resolution, captures the intended atmosphere much better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1X6KF1IkkIc&list=RD1X6KF1Ikk...

We have pretty good cameras and lenses now. We don't need AI to "improve" the quality.

robotbikes · 6 months ago
This reminds me of colorized black and white movies from the 90s although I can know imagine AI being used to do that and upscale the past creating new hyper-real versions of the past.

Dead Comment

robotbikes commented on Copyparty – Turn almost any device into a file server   github.com/9001/copyparty... · Posted by u/saint11
henry700 · 7 months ago
Anyone remember DAP, Download Accelerator Plus? The colorful bars were nice. A part of my childhood, downloading shareware Windows games through dial-up.
robotbikes · 7 months ago
I remember that...
robotbikes commented on Snorting the AGI with Claude Code   kadekillary.work/blog/#20... · Posted by u/beigebrucewayne
rbren · 9 months ago
I’m biased [0], but I think we should be scripting around LLM-agnostic open source agents. This technology is changing software development at its foundations—-we need to ensure we continue to control how we work.

[0] https://github.com/all-hands-ai/openhands

robotbikes · 9 months ago
This looks like a good resource. There are some pretty powerful models that will run on a Nvidia 4090 w/ 24gb of RAM. Devstral and Queen 3. Ollama makes it simple to run them on your own hardware, but the cost of the GPU is a significant investment. But if you are paying $250 a month for a proprietary tool it would pay for itself pretty quickly.
robotbikes commented on I let Claude Code write an entire book   github.com/JayDoubleu/age... · Posted by u/JayD0ubleu
robotbikes · 9 months ago
I really found the story in chapter 14 (recursive self-improvement) about the guy who got so addicted to self-improvement that he ended up in his own meta-reality unable to understand even himself because he was getting so much better and hacking his learning. A completely fabricated story with no basis in reality that I'm aware of but man there are a lot of bullet points to make it seem factual. What are we going to do about the worrying trend of 10X hackers self-improving so much that they aren't able to exist in the real world. Here's an excerpt

"The Addiction to Acceleration The fourth uncomfortable truth is how recursive improvement becomes compulsive. Kenji can’t stop because each day of not improving his improvement feels like stagnation. When you’re accelerating, constant velocity feels like moving backward.

This addiction manifests as: • Inability to accept plateau phases • Anxiety when not optimizing optimization • Devaluing of steady-state excellence • Compulsion to add meta-levels • Fear of falling behind yourself Recursive improvement can become its own trap."

I find that this criticism is far less applicable to say individuals but perhaps it could be levied against the way companies are currently treating AI. Which of course is where this comes from.

robotbikes · 9 months ago
Honestly there are some interesting concepts and broad overviews of them but this is hardly a "book" but just a verbose LLM document that briefly lists a lot of concepts without sufficiently or consistently fleshing them out into actual meaningful chapters. Not to say that this sort of thing isn't potentially useful but it seems more like the starting point of an outline of a book rather than anything resembling a finished published book.

u/robotbikes

KarmaCake day851September 4, 2014View Original