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Cake day: Jun 25, 2023

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One is multiple parallel goals. Makes it hard to stop playing, since there’s always something you just want to finish or do “quickly”.

Say you want to build a house. Chop some trees, make some walls. Oh, need glass for windows. Shovel some sand, make more furnaces, dig a room to put them in - oh, there’s a cave with shiny stuff! Quickly explore a bit. Misstep, fall, zombies, dead. You had not placed a bed yet, so gotta run. Night falls. Dodge spiders and skeletons. Trouble finding new house. There it is! Venture into the cave again to recover your lost equipment. As you come up, a creeper awaitsssss you …

Another mechanism is luck. The world is procedurally generated, and you can craft and create almost anything anywhere. Except for a few things, like spawners. I once was lucky to have two skeleton spawners right next to each other, not far from the surface. In total, I probably spent hours in later worlds to find a similar thing.

The social aspect can also support that you play the game longer or more than you actually would like. Do I lose my “friends” when I stop playing their game?

I don’t think Minecraft does these things in any way maliciously, it’s just a great game. But nevertheless, it has a couple of mechanics which can make it addictive and problematic.


Headline:

TERRIBLE THINGS HAPPENED TO MONKEYS AFTER GETTING NEURALINK IMPLANTS, ACCORDING TO VETERINARY RECORDS

What are these terrible things?

Up to a dozen monkeys suffered grisly fates after receiving a Neuralink implant, including brain swelling and partial paralysis.

First is the case of the monkey “Animal 20.” In December 2019, an internal part of the brain implant being inserted into the primate “broke off” during surgery. Later that night, the monkey scratched at the implant site, drawing blood, and yanked on the implant, partially dislodging it. Follow-up surgery discovered that the wound was infected, but that the placement of the implant prevented treatment. The monkey was euthanized the next month.

Before that, a female monkey designated “Animal 15” began to press her head against the ground after receiving the brain implant, pick at the site until it bled, and eventually lost coordination, shivering when personnel entered the room. Scientists discovered she had brain bleeding, and in March 2019, she too was euthanized.

The following year, a primate called “Animal 22” was put down in March 2020 after its brain implant became so loose that the screws attaching it to the skull “could easily be lifted out,” according to a necropsy report.

“The failure of this implant can be considered purely mechanical and not exacerbated by infection,” the necropsy states.

As Wired notes, that statement alone seemingly contradicts Musk’s claims that no monkeys directly died from Neuralink brain implants.

And so would the account of an ex-Neuralink employee, who told Wired that Musk’s claims that the monkeys were already terminally ill are “ridiculous,” even a “straight-up fabrication.”

“We had these monkeys for a year or so before any surgery was performed,” the ex-employee said.

The testimony of an anonymous scientist conducting research at CNPRC seems to corroborate the ex-employee’s allegations.

“These are pretty young monkeys,” they told the magazine. “It’s hard to imagine these monkeys, who were not adults, were terminal for some reason.”


As per the article, it goes like this:

  1. AI is trained on publicly available data
  2. AI does not credit or compensate original authors
  3. People don’t like their work being used without
  4. People share less publicly
  5. Public spaces desert

And simultaneously, AI content of poor quality drowns what is left.

In terms of arguments, have you heard about control / alignment problem or x-risk?


Personally there is no way I would ever pay for a service that has ads.

Somehow we got used to it when it comes to sports events, a long time ago.

But yeah, I get you, and fully agree. Seeing no ads is like the major selling point.


if we could just “drain” the existing battery quickly and load in new pre-charged fluid

That would be huge!

For this, of course, it matters a lot how energy dense the battery is. Also for the environmental impact. If I have to exchange three gigatons of liquid for my trip to the grocery store, a rolling coal truck might have the smaller footprint.


It’s not some struggling hospital in a poor country, but an award-winning, Xbox-equipped premium institution in Michigan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C.S._Mott_Children’s_Hospital

They obviously do good work and probably could use more money and, sure, I want sick children to have an Xbox, but I’d still feel misled by calling that ‘charity’.


The mega corps took the internet from us, changed it from a million small sites that people created because they had big ideas, or were passionate about small ones, and turned it into a few enormous sites with no new ideas, no passion, just an insatiable desire for money.

I read it as: ‘They embraced, extended and extinguished what you held dear’.


It’s not the device whis is made obsolete (objectively). It’s a very specific group of users who perceives it as obsolete (subjectively), since they want to always have the newest thing. Other people are different, and will be happy to pick up one of those “obsolete” phones at a discount and use it until they physically fall apart.

For example, I’m just switching phones after having used a 2nd hand phone for 8 years. Screen was broken for years, battery is struggling more and more, freezes are getting too frequent to ignore. Another reason for the switch is, there’s more and more apps I cannot install because my phone is too old.

The last point is a good reason for your argument, discontinuation in support. When they stop supporting my old device, that is making it obsolete. But whatever new stuff they release in the meantime does not affect me at all.