> majority of my suggestions were Jordan B Peterson
I'm interested in psychology and philosophy, so I'll watch videos on those subjects every so often. Naturally, the Algorithm™ becomes obsessed with recommending me Peterson videos soon after. I'm 98% sure the "Do not recommend" and "Not interested" buttons are just there for show, because I keep seeing those suggestions whenever I wander off into psychology and philosophy videos.
I always enjoyed the X-Files-style alien conspiracies. Abductions, Roswell, the Men in Black, crop circles, Area 51, that sort of stuff. Unfortunately, those seem to have fallen out of favour in recent years.
To this day, one of my favourite things to do for relaxation is playing Euro Truck Simulator 2 while listening to old Coast to Coast AM shows from the 1990s about aliens, or demonic possessions, the Georgia Guidestones, or doomsday prophecies about some catastrophic, civilisation-ending event happening at the turn of the millennium. It's better than watching a movie or a TV show for me.
Maybe it's because I don't keep up with this stuff anymore, but it feels like modern conspiracies have a very heavy political (and partisan) component, and that sort of thing just repels me. Used to be that governments, no matter their political leanings, were part of the cover-up and not to be trusted. Now it seems like half of the conspiracies are political ads for one side or the other.
I keep seeing talk of artificial consciousness with nothing more than a vague outline of what said "consciousness" would entail, or a hand-wavy "we'll know it when we see it." This is, of course, not that surprising considering we don't have those answers for our own consciousness.
At this stage I'd say we're way more likely to end up developing a system that can trick us into believing it is conscious, à la LaMDA and Blake Lemoine, than an actual conscious entity (whatever that means, exactly). And, if that were to happen, I don't think we'd have a way of knowing that's the case. We could just carry on believing we created artificial consciousness because our not-at-all-conscious robots are too good at saying the right thing with the right prompt.
Well interestingly we do the same with every other human on the planet. I basically assume that because I know I’m conscious and you and everyone else are the same chemical design as me, and because you act the same as me, then I just assume you too are conscious. But I have know direct way of proving that. It’s 100% speculation.
It’s entirely possible that you are just acting like a conscious being would act but there is no actual subjective experience inside you.
Sure, that's a useful heuristic, but I'd say it works because we deal with other humans. It's safe to assume that, being members of our own species, they are likely to have an inner experience and consciousness too. How do you apply that to an entity that is completely different—chemically, mechanically, etc.—to you and any other conscious being you've ever met?
A few days ago I was going through an old Gmail account, and decided to get my data through Takeout. Told me it'd take a few hours, and the next day I had a link ready. Click the link, enter the password, it tells me I need a verification code that it wants to send to an address that stopped existing 15 years ago.
As it turns out, Google is not sufficiently convinced that I am in fact the owner of the account, so it refuses to let me download the data. I don't feel inclined to spend time trying to figure out this nonsense, but thankfully none of the information in that account is particularly important. I'll take it as a sign that I should just move away from Google, because next time the information on an account could be actually important, and I'd be screwed.
Takeout is a feature that Google was kind of forced to implement because of GDPR compliance. But they still try their best to make it so bad that people won't think of using it.
First, getting to a point where you can actually schedule the creation of a zip takes a lot of clicking around - just to make sure that people won't bump into it unless they're explicitly searching for it.
Second, the process is painfully slow (on purpose). Last time I used it was to download my YouTube subscriptions and playlists to import them into my Piped instance. Even though I only have about 100 subscriptions, and only two playlists with about 20 items each, the process took almost two days to complete. By then I had already made a script that scraped the content from their HTML (and it only took me 5 minutes), and another one that did the same but using the YouTube API. If it takes less than a second to get the playlists and subscriptions of a user, I don't see a single reason why generating a Takeout CSV with the same information should take 2 days. I was determined (and tech-savvy) enough to script my way out of it, but many users just get discouraged and give up the idea of exporting their Google data entirely.
If you use a cloud storage provider Takeout supports (Dropbox, OneDrive, Box), it can be configured to auto export on a cadence. I have Takeout scheduled to export every two months to my Dropbox /apps path (you have to renew this schedule every year unfortunately).
> Automatically create an archive of your selected data every 2 months for one year. The first archive will be created immediately.
I tried Takeout on my main account, and I have to say I'm surprised. Took about an hour to process and it allowed me to download everything.
While I was waiting on that, I finally paid for a proper email service and migrated my domain, so I have a copy of my Gmail data and a working, Google-free email service now.
Would you be OK to find yourself in this situation[0] in the future? Personally, I feel like putting all your digital eggs in one basket, be it Apple's, Google's, Microsoft's, or anyone else's, is asking for trouble. And the deeper you get into any specific ecosystem, the harder it is to free yourself later if you need or want to for whatever reason.
> treat your customers well. Supporting Linux is treating his customers well.
It's really won me over, I can say that much. When I was using Windows, I favoured buying games from GOG over Steam whenever possible. DRM and all that.
Ever since I moved to Linux, it's been the opposite. GOG couldn't care less about Linux compatibility, and while you can get their stuff going through some combination of Wine/Lutris scripts, the experience I get with Steam is so much better.
I wouldn't put GOG in the same basket as other stores like EGS though, they did make some efforts and officially packaged and distributed games for Linux quite early. It's not the same effort as Valve but it's still to their credit (I'm saying that as a Linux user).
Nowdays, Heroic Game Launcher is the easiest option to play GOG games though (as well as EGS ones) https://heroicgameslauncher.com/
I'm sure GOG would care if they had more resources. Valve's push into Linux is because Microsoft is making a big push towards there being a single walled garden store: Microsoft's. Valve is doing this ultimately to benefit themselves. That's of course the case with GOG too, but GOG has very little money to put into any sort of Linux push so they have to lean on Valve's investments.
They’re not even leaning. They’re doing literally nothing. They could easily provide proton wrappers for their games with no effort. But they don’t, it’s all up to the user. Then you spend more time configuring the game than playing it.
[0] https://www.vx-underground.org/