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Our jackdaw regular will tear up things around it and throw them around when it gets frustrated (such as when it wants a treat without having to put in any effort).

It could simply be bold and really frustrated.

While it’s possible that this is the case, we don’t actually know that because the people with the right skills aren’t spending a lot of time and resources on experimenting with new ideas and concepts unless there’s profit to be made from it.

Chances of coming up with an idea for a new kind of OS that will bring great return on investment in terms of profit and market share are very low, so entrepreneurs are spending their time thinking about more lucrative ventures.

If we lived in a post-scarcity Communist society where everyone is free to do what they feel is important and fulfilling to them, we’d be more likely to see new and novel ways of interfacing with computers (and technology in general).

But we don’t.

Edit: Also, operating systems are a lot of work.

That seems like it should work in theory, but having used Perplexity for a while now, it doesn’t quite solve the problem.

The biggest fundamental problem is that it doesn’t understand in any meaningful capacity what it is saying. It can try to restate something it sourced from a real website, but because it doesn’t understand the content it doesn’t always preserve the essence of what the source said. It will also frequently repeat or contradict itself in as little as two paragraphs based on two sources without acknowledging it, which further confirms the severe lack of understanding. No amount of grounding can overcome this.

Then there is the problem of how LLMs don’t understand negation. You can’t reliably reason with it using negated statements. You also can’t ask it to tell you about things that do not have a particular property. It can’t filter based on statements like “the first game in the series, not the sequel”, or “Game, not Game II: Sequel” (however you put it, you will often get results pertaining to the sequel snucked in).

Well I don’t know what you are referring to, but I’m not going to argue about your perception. I listened to the whole thing again (there are usually things that pass me by the first time, so I don’t mind doing that for the interesting episodes) and I don’t know how he could have done a better job at steering the conversation. He’s a podcast host; he needs to pick at the parts that are of particular interest to him and his audience in a limited amount of time, as well as keeping the level of technicality just right so as to be digestible.

For someone familiar with the topic, it’s natural to feel like they could have gone on about something at a more advanced level, and for someone entirely unfamiliar, it’s natural that they would want to linger on things they don’t quite get instead of moving on to something else.

Anyway, I’m not really going anywhere with this. Just curious about your perception since I tend to think of SC as someone quite smooth and approachable around people (unlike me). I guess even he can’t be smooth enough for everybody all the time.

I’m relistening to that episode now because I’m curious about what it is you perceived.

He interjects sometimes to help tie things together (“and this is interesting because of [earlier observation]”) or to adjust the level of technicality to suit his intended audience (“we’re allowed to use the word torus here”). Not all Mindscape guests have a solid feel for the podcast and default to giving popscience breakdowns with analogies and leaving out technical jargon, and so he has to set the bar a bit by explicitly allowing the introduction of technical terms and bringing together of complex related topics.

Don’t know if that’s what made you feel like he was trying to show off.

Climate change denial is too common here. Our third (nearly second) largest political party is neofascist and “sceptical” of climate change. Lot’s of conspiracy theories and “alternative truths” floating around in that demographic.

Watching others having fun together oddly helps me a bit. I might binge a youtube channel like Corridor Crew, for example. Sometimes I even prefer being “a fly on the wall” because I don’t have to participate and be drained of energy. I also don’t have to worry about feeling rejected or offending anyone (and thus no “social hangover”).

I also want in on this rock. Mine isn’t nearly big enough.

A game can offer an experience that leaves the player feeling satisfied or at least content with how they spent their time. There is a large space of possible interactive experiences that extend far beyond the simple dichotomy of fun vs educational or productive.

A game can certainly be considered predatory if it exploits psychological vulnerabilities to hook someone on engaging gameplay that gives the player very little in return in terms of fulfillment or mental recovery. Whether or not it takes the opportunity to swindle the player on top of that is a matter of degree in severity. Wasting a player’s time (or worse, induce stress or other harmful mental states for no good reason) is not a particularly nice thing to do.

and a console

Thank you for this! I’ve been reluctantly using Grammarly because I thought there were no alternatives.

Specifically conflating private and personal property.

It is! I’m very glad I stuck with it though. It really pays off.

NixOS. I distrohopped for years but now I’ve landed and it has been several years since I felt any urge to explore alternatives (maybe with the exception of Guix, which is basically the same idea but everything is in Guile Scheme (Lisp)).

I’m never going back to a mutable OS if I can help it.