ashleyn

SP was often discussed in lucid dreaming forums. It's unpleasant but not really dangerous. I've induced it a handful of times; it's a state between wakefulness and sleep and the value of inducing it is that you can just roll out of bed into a dream version of your room.

Hah! We were doing this on lucid dreaming forums back in the 2000s, it was called "reality checking" or "RCs". Basically you want to build the habit of noticing anything even slightly "off" and remembering to do a RC when you do that. Eventually you would make enough of a habit of this that you would do it in a dream, and you would "go lucid". Worked very well for me.

The dream journaling bit is important too, you often forget your dreams waking up and there's no sense in having a lucid dream if you don't remember it. Dream journaling helps you build "dream recall".

(As a side note, repurposing the concept of reality checking helped me greatly when I was experimenting with substances and it went very badly.)

Interesting to see this approach validated in a formal study. There are a whole host of other induction techniques that were discussed as well: "WILD", "MILD", and a lot of other acronyms ending in "-ILD". Stephen LaBerge may have even studied them in the 1990s.

It's worth noting that often, the email can be correlated with other breaches to get your real name. People can do that relatively easily on osint websites. I wasn't terribly pleased when I found my teenage furaffinity account show up in an identity theft monitoring app. Other people have turned up in breaches of far more objectionable websites.

If your email provider offers email aliases, you should really get familiar with how to use them, and use a unique email alias per website.

WebP stands on its own merits but it's profoundly annoying that as of Pop OS 22.04 I still have to open them up in Firefox instead of Eye of Gnome. Compatibility issues like this are littered everywhere. This laziness on the part of supporting WebP is a significant driver of continued use of PNG.

Tech companies used to demand warrants/subpoenas for these kinds of things. Now it seems they just gladly hand it over with a wide smile on their face. Am I the only one to notice this shift?

It's really cute. I wonder if we'll see a significant market for plain MP3 players with the whole digital detox fad lining up with the nostalgia. There's already a lot of people buying refurb and bluetooth-modded modded ipod classics.

As someone who makes well over $150k a year, wholly agree

At some point we need to have a tough conversation about collective civic engagement and societal dysfunction and not just individually running from it or routing around it. All these institutional problems have been stacking up for the past twenty years, they're only continuing to get worse and worse, and the most common reaction I see from it is some variation on "try to just stay out of its way".

There's a tendency for people to react to institutional problems like this by saying they'll just move over here to a blue state, or they'll monitor their accounts closer on reporting bureaus, or they'll just have a lawyer on retainer, etc, etc. If a legal system in a red state is this dysfunctional, you can't simply hide away in a blue state with better-run systems. The underlying problem - the social decay of much of the US and the broader world - needs to be directly engaged with and confronted.

That's even crazier. You have to question if they even understand what they're investigating. I expect this to be thrown out in court, although I also have declining faith in our court system.

Police never thought to subpoena the ISP for the IP address associated with the cashapp login? This seems like an egregious omission in the investigation. Even if it were a VPN, you could subpoena her email to find payment receipts to the provider, etc. Even that may not necessarily prove guilt if there are no logs. That's all an enormous leap of evidence to assume the account is genuinely hers, especially given how endemic identity theft is.

I've heard someone mention using Chexsystems but I'm not sure if that's available to ordinary consumers or how you'd be able to just go and do that. Or if it would show something like Cashapp.

>So our rule is simple: No AI generated articles or illustrations in the magazine!

This is, I think, as close to ideal as an AI policy for media can possibly be. For certain things - visual art, music, storywriting, game design, and public communications - I think consumers will continue to value the human element and demand it. The optimistic take is that this will line up with the capitalist incentive as well, no matter how much AI reduces the cost of production to nearly zero. People just won't want to engage with slop.

>Nothing in our rules prohibits writers from using a new tool to help them research something, or prevents an artist from using a tool to, say, add a texture or change a color, or make some kind of small element. But we need, first, to ensure that technologies are a tool used by workers to help them, rather than a tool used to replace workers. And, second, we need to make sure that readers aren’t being fed things that look like people’s genuine thoughts and creative expression but are in fact the product of disembodied mathematical formulas.

This is another W as far as their AI policy goes. While skeptical of "slop" and other kinds of lazily-generated, low-quality output, I also remain highly critical of anti-AI absolutism. Generally these are the types of arguments you see bandied about on places like Bluesky which lean hard on the environmental impact/third-worldist perspectives, argue for AI-driven skills loss, make tenuous and contrived connections of AI with their hot-button cultural issue, or only seem to view AI through the lens of their own job security. None of these issues are inherent to AI or are insurmountable, and hardliners make an incorrect assumption that the technology can simply be banned or boycotted away. Many of them are feverishly waiting for "the bubble pop", which is barked with the same optimism as evangelical predictions of the Rapture. Some of these people are so obsessive about being anti-AI that they wield whatever diminutive influence they may have to ban your IP address from their website if their server ever catches Claude doing a web search on it.

>They hoped the vote will hurt liberals, blue states, trans people and others they hate and dont consider real. But not themselves.

Even if you work by the logic of respecting the median voter's position as legitimate and worthy of equal consideration by mere virtue of it being democratically held (a viewpoint I don't necessarily subscribe to), it seems as if the median voter got an own goal this cycle.

I'm trans. I'm also smart, wealthy, and live in America - an intersection of categories that essentially mean you can do almost anything you want to do with your life. I've barely felt any of the consequences of the election because I can afford to move to somewhere where the legislative climate is more friendly, can afford to have a social life among people who are not hostile, can afford to pay out of pocket for every new medication of mine that gets banned off insurance, and largely shrug off fuel and food inflation. I'm not feeling the consequences of the current regime half as bad as the people who voted enthusiastically for it. If the goal was to obstruct or ruin my life for being a member of a given suspect class, then the goal failed.

Culture war is nonsense and nothing can ever supersede material conditions.

There is no solution to this problem other than electing a candidate who will raise taxes, fund infrastructure, and stabilise prices. I don't care what party they come from. I don't have optimism we'll get anyone like this on the national stage within the next decade - NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani is the closest I've seen yet to a candidate who espouses the positions I'd like to see in someone who is qualified to run for president.

>Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while.

Amid all the discussion of sigmoid curves, and where the "LLM wall" will materialise, I think few people would have predicted that the real wall in LLMs would end up being humans' capacity to verify the output.

What I fear is that people simply eschew human review altogether, considering we're talking about the industry that came up with the "move fast and break things" credo. Human review of LLM-produced code where I work is already a farce, and we're not special enough to be one of Karpathy's 5,000. I do my best to manually review anything that's my responsibility, but I'm literally one of very few people left working on my team, so in practice what happens is I submit PRs that are at best glossed over by completely unrelated teams for security, malware/prompt injection, and other serious concerns. Quality insofar as vetting others' code has completely gone out the window and it shows in the number of bug reports that come back, often themselves written in Claudease. This is all on top of everyone cynically phoning it in in the first place, due to the omnipresent sword of Damocles that is additional AI-driven layoffs.

Worse yet all the incentives point to this being the most economically viable thing individual companies can do. I think it goes without saying some type of regulation here is urgently needed, and that an unexpected cause of an AI bubble pop may end up being that humans simply aren't able to keep up with the pace of the output - leading either to precautionary plateauing of capability, or major liability risks related to a decline in quality.