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This is very welcome as a parent in the USA. It is also sound legally, and was a long time coming. Nothing of great value is being lost and in a year users will have moved on to something else.

There are two positive effects here: 1. A company that is meaningfully foreign is losing control of a mass media asset. 2. Children and young adults are losing access to a product that is not good for them.

A country should not allow foreign powers to control platforms with so much reach--full stop. We do not allow foreign entities to own radio stations... Imagine how much deeper these platforms penetrate a person's mind, and how much larger their audiences are. We should all be MUCH more concerned about how these apps are stretching the social fabric (throughout the world) and how every society's ability to function is effected. I challenge anyone voicing discontent at this result to question whose interests they are voicing.

American manipulation of American minds... Yea! That's the point. I'd rather have someone with interests as aligned as possible with mine working for, owning and ultimately making business decisions at these companies. Regulation as appropriate to further align them.

Which leads me into my next point: I think that everyone here would argue that TikTok is in a class of its own with regard to very engaging short form content and rapid feedback feed training. I would argue that these attributes make it necessarily vapid and reactionary, providing little to no net benefit to either the individual or society to begin with.

If you disagree, what is the value of this product to the user and to society? Does it make people's lives better? I think that when the harms are considered, the answer to both is ultimately no. There are very well-documented negative effects on focus, happiness, and anxiety in children, which persist into adulthood from social media[1]. I don't think it can be argued that something that makes you feel good and connected in the moment but disconnects you from your immediate neighbors and friends and is highly correlated with mental illness is good.

Social platforms (TikTok included) are putting our children at a disadvantage mentally compared to previous generations and need to be more regulated. If these platforms (TikTok and other short-form rapid feedback products most of all) are of dubious value to begin with, what is the harm being done here?

Finally, I conjecture that we've only gotten a taste so far of how power can be wielded through these instruments. Even if Elon decides NOT wield his asset overtly during this administration, I believe we'll see more overt demonstrations of the power of social media sites in the next few years if relations with China continue to deteriorate and Russia becomes more desperate, with Meta clearly becoming less scrupulous.

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1. https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/research/the-evidence


For years people have dogged on North Korea, Iran, China and Russia talking about how the government controls information by banning apps and by creating firewalls blocking access to parts of the internet. Now when the US introduces censorship people like you welcome it with open arms. Something of value is lost, our ability to access information freely


Think of it like Oreos:

- Text-based blogging platforms: regular Oreos

- Image-based blogging platforms: Double Stuff Oreos

- Short-form video blogging platforms: Mega Stuff Oreos

There are still plenty of high-quality and addictive ways to share information without Tik-tok.

Everyone will be better off without Mega Stuff Oreos, they were an abomination to begin with


This is so obviously the nail on the head. Shocked how far I had to scroll


Bluetooth 5.2 was supposed to fix this issue. Indeed, my S22 phone with Jabra Elite 8s sounds great in calls.

MacBooks newer than 2023 SHOULD have better call quality. They have Bluetooth 5.3¹. Can anybody confirm this? I have been meaning to try pairing my earbuds with a floor model at a store and testing audio quality but's only to satisfy a curiosity for me.

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1. https://support.apple.com/en-us/111838


Neither are exactly a 1:1 replacement, but check out backblaze and syncthing. A combination (syncthing for device sync, backblaze for offsite backup) might suit you.

I was impressed with syncthing when I used it ~2 years ago and I assume it's matured since then.


The only issue with syncthing is that it is prone to conflicts if you modify from multiple devices (such as some notes from phone and laptop) and you don't have at least one device always online syncing. For offsite backup, Hetzner has some very cheap storage boxes.


A 1/8 chance of fixing a bug at the cost of a careful review and some corrections is not bad.

0% -> 12% improvement is not bad for two years either (I'm somewhat arbitrary picking the release date of ChatGPT). If this can be kept up for a few years we will have some extremely useful tooling. The cost can be relatively high as well, since engineering time is currently orders of magnitude more expensive than these tools.


It's still abysmal from POV of actually using it in production, but it's a very impressive rate of improvement. Given what happened with LLMs and image generation in the last few years, we can probably assume that these systems will be able to fix most trivial bugs pretty soon.


I still don't know. I feel like there are many ways where GPT will write some code or fix a bug in a way that makes it significantly harder to debug. Even for relatively simple tasks, it's kind of like machine-generated code that I would not want to touch.


It is a bit worrisome but we manage to deal with subpar human code as well. Often the boilerplate generated by ChatGPT is already better than what an unexperienced coder would string together. I‘m sure it will not be a free lunch but the the benefits will probably outweigh the downsides.

Interesting scalability questions will arise wrt to security when scaling the already unmanagably large code bases by another magnitude (or two), though.


These „benchmark“ are tuned around reporting some exciting result, once you look inside, all the „fixes“ are trash.


If someone submitted 8 PRs and 7 of them were bullshit, I would close anything else they submitted in the future without even bothering to review.


Western American wilderness is different than Europe--it has very few human improvements.

Personally I'd love to see it retain that character and I think this is the wrong direction.

Imo if you want a European experience you should go to Europe.


Yeah the European via ferratas you can see villages and cities once you get to the top. Not so much for the American ones.


The one counterpoint I'd like to make here is tat. Imo it's better to leave minimal high quality, long lived gear than soft goods that deteriorate over time that can make for a dangerous descent and produce a fair bit of garbage.


The stuff I saw pictured looks like rebar bent into rungs, so now you have steel left out that will deteriorate, possibly in an undetectable manner(remember, your anchor point is in the rock face).

Also you are drilling into the rock. So much for leave no trace.


Sector67 is still healthy! They have a smart, incredibly dedicated and frugal BDFL who got them through some lean times.

I think in general it only works if there is a strong community / third place thing going. I always saw that as their biggest offering--a way to get out of the house without drinking or spending money. The making / hacking thing is just something to enjoy together.


Noctua makes some nice, slightly ruggedized 12v high static pressure fans.


There are also AliExpress storefronts for high static pressure fans(blower and axial), easily 10x as powerful compared to computer case fans.


- Amazing translations (this alone is a game changer)

- Language learning... The ability to improvise realistic conversations is huge. I can ask to talk about cooking a specific dish or a sport!

- As others have noted, refining documents similar to grammarly

- Looking for a product with extremely specific features (though it isn't very good at comparing yet)

- Searches that are too vague and complicated to articulate to a search engine or use exact matching ...


I don’t think people dismissing AI have access to GPT-4 yet. GPT-3.5 did feel like a gimmick.

GPT-4 feels like a team of really capable human interns.

The potential really goes wild once you connect it to the internet and use stuff like autoGPT


This makes a ton of sense.

I've been struggling to reconcile my personal experience with what I'm reading - it was so strange reading such dismissive comments by such a knowledgeable community about a new technology that's such an obvious game changer.

GPT-3.5 was easy to dismiss, but GPT-4 is incredible.


Didn't we have amazing translations for a long time?

I do not notice a significant improvement between new models and last year's deepl/Google translate.


Sounds like you're a native english speaker? Translations to english often worked "well enough" with google. But as soon as you tried the other way arround, or from one non english language to another, the results where often fully incomprehensive. Btw. the same goes for t2s and s2t. It only got slightly usable in the last few years, therefore wasn't really adopted in many non english countries. As you can see, there is a huge market opening up. Then take voice synthesis into the picture. I think the simple amount of recent changes, including LLMs, will steamroll a totally new media envoirenment and with it substantial social and economical changes.

For me its less the capabilities of LLMs, but the speed and the inevitability of change. You can choose to ignore it, but you soon will be outdated then. Just like if someone would try to work an office job without using digital machines. Maybe you can still do it, but who would hire you?


No, I'm an Italian native speaker mostly translating to Hungarian :), it's less good than English but it seems to me it works well enough with both.

First time I tried chatgpt with Hungarian it actually refused to work, so I'm not sure it can be that much better.


Language pairing is important. Machine translation between English and German/Nederlands has been excellent for years. English and Korean/Japanese: Awful for years. On the last couple, did it get much better. I am sure ChatGPT12 will have virtually native level translation. Maybe it will be integrated into Kindle so you that can buy books in 25 diff languages, then get a ChatGPT-translated version with one button click.


DeepL is really good, better than Google Trandlate. ChatGPT is about the same, but it can also explain the translation and the grammar. It might sometimes be wrong but it’s usually good enough at explaining things to point in the right direction.


For translations, I use Google translate. Should I switch?


Yo, check this out! DeepL is like way better than Google Translate, so you should totally use it. But, GPT-4 is like a game-changer, dude! It's obvi way better than DeepL, and it can do all sorts of stuff like rewording, explaining in detail, and changing up the style. This text was translated from Japanese to gamer-style English by ChatGPT-4, no joke!


This passes for “gamer-style” English?


For something machine translated from Japanese? Yes, it's astonishing, actually.


I had to read GP twice, plus your comment to realise it might been generated by a GPT-ish service. Damn, this stuff is getting good.


LLMs are better at context - as far as I can tell Google Translate only does one sentence at a time.

With GPT-3 it infers things like gender and formality from earlier context.

Not clear yet how good GPT-4 is as OpenAI won’t say what training data it has, even rough volumes, in each human language.

Needs some thorough research testing it.


DeepL [1] usually does better in my experience, but I suspect Google Translate has gotten better since last time I used it.

[1] www.deepl.com


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