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Using my phone in grayscale convinced me of the power of shiny colours. It is shocking how boring my phone feels in grayscale.

This really does help break any feeling of attachment to the device and the solutions in this post really do make it more practical. It does kind of suck using the camera in grayscale.


Why do you think Pokemon makes the cards super bright and shiny :)

No need to get specific. Look at any retail packaging. Look at any advertisement. Bright and shiny always gets the attention. You've never read anyone reply "ooh, grayscale". It's always "Ooooh, shiny"

Apple does a pretty good job of extracting dopamine from black and white packaging.

It's just for the fans, I doubt it's appealing to someone who doesn't recognize it.

> blocking a referendum because they didn't consult indigenous groups

The requirement to do so is in our constitution, the Charter. It's not optional and not absurd to anyone with proper historical understanding of Canadian history.


Americans may have trouble understanding that the constitution means something given what is going on there right now.


Sedition, technically.


A referendum is neither of those.


There's something to be said about first impressions and the GnuCash website's first impression does not give confidence in its ability to handle finances.

Ironically for this thread, I think an AI redesigned website would do wonders here.


A conventionally well-designed site is actually much less trustworthy for me.

GNU cash website immediately tells that it is not a Saas and doesn't need to upsell the latest trendy addons, for it to survive.

It tells that it is not "investing" in marketing to eventually turn a profit.

It is not looking for acquisition opportunities or next funding rounds.

If you want to see what a trustworthy website looks like, take a look at SQLite or postgresql or even this website itself.


When the leading CEOs are saying the next generation will be unemployed due to AI... uh yeah, you're gonna lose them!


Isn't it bad now that Sam Altman and the others are backpedaling on this and going "jobs are going to still exist you just can't imagine them!" because the PR problem was getting so big? [1]

Like don't we want people running these companies to be honest to the public rather than misdirection?

[1]. https://www.platformer.news/sam-altman-ai-backlash/


> "jobs are going to still exist you just can't imagine them!"

Ironically, this makes even less sense.

If (ostensibly) the goal of developing LLMs was so we can all create more while working less, but he also assures us there will be just as much work in the future, then what was the point of this tech in the first place?


I am by no means defending Sam Altman here, but it's roughly the same value proposition as every productivity enhancing technology. Creating more even if you don't end up working less means at the end of the day we all still have more. There are certainly potential problems when it comes to how that "more" is distributed, among other issues, but things that increase human productivity tend to go along with increases in quality of life even if it doesn't mean you get a bunch more free time to sit on the beach drinking Mai Tais.

And truthfully those productivity enhancements mean that you probably could indeed work less, as long as you're willing to also forgo the standard of living improvements that go along with them. The idea of the digital nomad living in some incredibly cheap but less than advanced country is based on exactly this concept. But a lot of people aren't willing to do that, nor should they feel compelled to. Working the same 40 hours a week while making more stuff seems perfectly reasonable.


From the article:

> This is a good instinct: one of the virtues of democracy is the way that it gives people a feeling of control over their own lives. People who believe that they can rein in AI companies through votes and laws and regulations will be much less likely to turn to violence.

I like how this is entirely put in terms of "feelings" and "beliefs" with the ultimate goal being to keep people from resorting to violence. It doesn't seem to play any role how much control people actually have.


> don't we want people running these companies to be honest

What about any of these folks’ biographies hints that they’re capable of being honest?


Which one of those things he said do you consider "honest" and not PR? Both of them sound like PR to me, just aimed at different audiences


I think before he thought OpenAI was going to make him a trillionaire he was more honest about X Risk and job displacement since he didn't have the incentive to lie. Most early AI thinkers saw AI as more dangerous than nukes.

> We founded Anthropic because we believe the impact of AI might be comparable to that of the industrial and scientific revolutions, but we aren’t confident it will go well. [1]

[1]. https://www.anthropic.com/news/core-views-on-ai-safety


How exactly is OpenAI going to make him a trillionaire? He doesn’t own any equity. I’m sure he owns some indirectly via funds he’s an investor in, but nowhere near enough to make him a trillionaire.

So where did this idea that Altman is aiming for a financial payoff come from? He could easily have taken equity, and didn’t. Why? What part of the evil master plan is that?


A very well done type system + native code performance, with the ease of use of Ruby is a massive selling point, IMO.


That is very high. Not sure who they are using for processing, but I know Stripe will give registered charities a (very small) cut on their fees, I'm not sure about non-profits. But even with market rates, the average fees through Stripe would be well below 10%, IME.


So, if Thunderbird instead asked for users to sign up for an annual software subscription, it'd be fine?


If Thunderbird required users to sign up for an annual subscription, then that specific problem -- not being able to tell what good one's payment would do -- would go away. There would be a very specific reason to pay the money.

(In practice, they presumably couldn't do that, at least not effectively, because the code is open source and someone else could fork it. But let's imagine that somehow they could require all Thunderbird users to pay them.)

That doesn't, of course, mean that it would be better overall. Thunderbird users would go from getting Thunderbird for free and maybe having reason to donate some money, to having to pay some money just to keep the ability to use Thunderbird: obviously worse for them. There'd probably be more money available for Thunderbird development, which would be good. The overall result might be either good or bad. But it would, indeed, no longer be unclear whether and why a Thunderbird user might choose to pay money to the Thunderbird project.


Aside, they should. This thread is a good example of how groveling for donations distorts what should be a simple transaction.

Instead, people act like they're buying in to a 50% share with their $5 and then act like they cofounded the project forever after the donation.


> Instead, people act like they're buying in to a 50% share with their $5 and then act like they cofounded the project forever after the donation.

You've twisted the timing. My comment is about

"Give me money." "Okay, tell me why I should give you money."

not

"I gave you money. Tell me what you did with it." It's a big difference. It's easy for me to just not give them money if I don't know what I'm donating to.


Those two examples map to the first and second parts of my claim.

Though I'm making a general reflection rather than trying to antagonize any individual here. I was already thinking about this when clicking into TFA to see that yes, it's another donation beg.

The answer to the person I replied to is basically: yes.

There's a nit in human psychology between mutual transactions (even lopsided against our favor) and voluntary unilateral ones (like donations) where the latter results in disproportionate scrutiny and entitlement compared to the former.

I once started accepting donations on my forum. I noticed people acted like they were about to make the grandest gesture in the world, would I be so lucky to deserve it after answering their questions despite having built a forum they spend four hours a day on. (They gave me $5)

And once they donated, they saw themselves as a boardmember-like persona with veto power and a disproportionate say on what I do, often pointing out that they're a donor. (They gave me $5)

I'm exaggerating a bit to paint a picture of what I mean. I think it's all unintentional, and they might be embarrassed if I'd told them this.

But I ended up refunding everyone after a while.

Yet when I charged $5 to let users expand their PM inbox size or max avatar resolution, nobody ever brought it up. They understood the transaction ended there. What is the $5 used for? -- What do you mean? It doubled my PM inbox size.

It's a funny quirk of our brain. I think a license purchase aligns expectations much more than groveling for donations, and it creates a natural freemium model for open source (or source-available rather?) projects.


How many space telescopes better than anything we currently have can we put up when launch costs are <$50m?

A huge synthetic telescope in orbit with an aperture the size of the planet?

How many private earth observation satellites?

The market is huge when weight constraints largely go away and $/kg drops so hard.


The question is whether those markets are not already adequately served by Falcon 9. Once again, just because you have a jumbo jet that can fly 500 people from New York to London does not mean that everyone flying out of New York wants to go to London, and it doesn't mean that it's worth flying that jumbo jet from New York to Pierre, South Dakota with only one passenger on board.


> The question is whether those markets are not already adequately served by Falcon 9

What does that even mean? Almost every single Falcon 9 customer will prefer launching on Starship if/when it is available, because the cost will be much lower. A very small segment who have payloads that are exactly Falcon 9 sized and want a very particular orbit might still be better served by F9, but maybe not.

Beyond that, much lower cost unlocks previously untenable opportunities that you have not sufficiently imagined, as stated earlier.


It may not even be cheaper when it works; upper stage reuse still isn't there.

(I'd like it to be, but until it is, it isn't).


The argument was "why do you even need Starship?", not "will it be fully re-usable at the end of the day?"


> Almost every single Falcon 9 customer will prefer launching on Starship if/when it is available, because the cost will be much lower

Cost reduction depends on it being fully reusable.


Not actually sure that is true. Entirely possible that just by re-using Superheavy and expending Starship they could get to a price point lower than F9 (which also has an expendable upper stage).


Perhaps. But until it is demonstrated, unfortunately because Musk has been overstating future costs of a lot of things for a while now, we can't rely on his optimistic statements for forecasts of our own.

I'm only saying your previous "will be" is too strong a claim, not that it's completely unthinkable that it may come to be.

That said, it's not like other billionaires aren't working on the same basic idea, even if they're copying what was already proven with the Falcon 9, which is great for people who want to go to space but not so much for SpaceX investors.


> novel path

Reusing Apollo-style stack, reusing Shuttle engines, reusing Shuttle-style SRBs. Novel?


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