Because people aren’t objects.

Just to play devil’s advocate, I have found prediction markets genuinely useful despite never placing a bet.

In 2024 all of my social media feed was convinced the US election was going to go the other way. I have left wing politics and accordingly the algorithm wraps me in a bubble. It was all videos of empty trump rallies and Kamala hype. Polymarket was the main counter signal I had that the election wasn’t going to go the way I hoped.

Similarly when the room temperature super-conductor hype was happening in 2023, the prediction market for it being real never went above 25%. It’s extremely useful to be able to look at that as a layman and go “ok this probably isn’t real”.

The em dashes are the only thing making it look AI-written. I think it was human written by someone who likes em dashes.

I am indeed a human. The variable quality of my contributions here ought to attest to that!

My grandfather was a typesetter and print designer. My other grandfather was part of Gill’s circle and his bookplate was inscribed by him. My first and only kickstarter in which I participated was Linotype: The Movie. I am currently reading Jury’s Type Designers of the Twentieth Century. I also have Peace’s catalogue of Gill’s inscriptions on my desk. Justin Knopp from Typoretum set my personal card from his digitized collection of rare founts. I’m interested in type and page design and I do like em dashes.

But I also just really like iOS’s automatic replacement of 2x hyphens with a dash.

Heavy use of /rewind helps with this - it's much better to remove the bad information from the context entirely instead of trying to tell the model "actually, ignore the previous approach and try this instead"

> All of this just to let Dolphin play online with real Wii consoles in a game whose official servers are since long dead and whose replacement servers have a peak of only 15 concurrent online players.

Knowing there's people out that who have such absurd levels of dedication makes me so happy.

Imagine what humanity could achieve if we worked together. If robots/AI work out and we do have 100% spare time then you’d hope there would be more of this sort of thing.

Such a shame that it’ll probably just mean more inequality, at least in the short term.

> If robots/AI work out and we do have 100% spare time then you’d hope there would be more of this sort of thing.

If robots/AI work out we will need to use 100% of our spare time to work what few jobs are still available to humans so we can earn enough money to pay rent.

No, that's an example of robots/AI not working out. Yes, this means that "making robots/AI work out" is a political and economic problem, not just a technical one.

It's really unfortunate that the people who run the biggest AI companies don't share your definition of success.

It is imperative for game preservation though.

If the game is fully or even partially unplayable due to an a bug in the emulator, this really impacts the ability for future generations to experience these games, or these modes in these games.

As you said, its fantastic that people care this much.

I had a genuine feeling of dread reading that, wow.

It takes some of the fun out of imagining eternal digital life, doesn't it :-)

This was my experience too. The USA is the only country I've ever been to where random strangers will strike up a conversation with me completely out of the blue, and I've travelled quite a lot.

Using the source code to ask questions about poorly documented features in projects you have no experience is my favourite thing that LLMs make possible (of course you could do this before but it would take way, way more time). There are so many little annoyances that I’ve been able to patch and, thanks to NixOS, have the patched software permanently available to me.

In fact NixOS + LLMs feels like the full promise of open source software is finally available to me. Everything is within reach. If you don’t like something, patch it out. If you want to change a default, patch that in.

No need to know the language, the weird build process, or the custom tooling. Idea to working binary in minutes. I love it so much.

Yes, the idea that you can meaningfully modify the program for your own purposes (one of Stallman's four freedoms) was quite unrealistic except for the most skilled and invested among users. LLMs change this. I mean, as long as you use open models. I fear that in the future, corporate models may start to refuse building software like this that is inconvenient for them. Like possible future-Gemini saying, "oh I see you're patching chromium to continue working with adblockers, this is harmful activity, I cannot help you and reported your account to Google. Cease and desist from these plans or you lose your Gmail!"

Today is the honeymoon phase, enshittification will come later when the pie stops growing and the aspect of control comes more into focus.

It's just too good to be true. Most people still don't know that you can now do what you just described. Once people in the suits understand this, the propaganda will start about how unsafe this all is and that platforms must be locked down at the hardware level, subscriptions cut off if building unapproved software etc.

Investor confidence is far more important to them than cashflow, and the best way to shake investor confidence is with the magic words "user numbers are down".

I don’t really understand the point of sandboxing if you’re going to give it access to all your accounts (which it needs to do anything useful). It reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1200/

Yeah I have been planning to give it its own accounts on my self hosted services.

I think the big challenge here is that I'd like my agent to be able to read my emails, but... Most of my accounts have Auth fallbacks via email :/

So really what I want is some sort of galaxy brained proxy where it can ask me for access to certain subsets of my inbox. No idea how to set that up though.

> So really what I want is some sort of galaxy brained proxy where it can ask me for access to certain subsets of my inbox. No idea how to set that up though.

Though of the same idea. You could run a proxy that IMAP downloads the emails and then filters and acts as IMAP server. SMTP could be done the same limited to certain email addresses. You could run an independent AI harmful detector just in case.

Yeah I think for SMTP it's easy since it's perfectly scalable to do manual approval for each mail.

But not really sure how to set up safe search. One idea I had was to say "nobody would ever put a secret in the subject line, right..?". Then you could let the agent read all the headers and just have it ask permission to see the body.

That's still not entirely safe since if you can search the body you can eventually infer the presence of arbitrary strings. But I think you could probably mitigate that risk by just setting up alerts for if the agent starts spamming loads of searches?

Because you don't give it access to all your accounts, you choose what. And files on your PC may be private and you don't want to risk exposing them.

A use case may be for example give it access to your side project support email address, a test account on your site and web access.