https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouija

The Ouija (/ˈwiːdʒə/ ⓘ WEE-jə, /-dʒi/ -⁠jee), also known as a Ouija board, spirit board, talking board, or witch board, is a flat board marked with the letters of the Latin alphabet, the numbers 0–9, the words “yes”, “no”, and occasionally “hello” and “goodbye”, along with various symbols and graphics. It uses a planchette (a small heart-shaped piece of wood or plastic) as a movable indicator to spell out messages during a séance.

Spiritualists in the United States believed that the dead were able to contact the living, and reportedly used a talking board very similar to the modern Ouija board at their camps in Ohio during 1886 with the intent of enabling faster communication with spirits.[2] Following its commercial patent by businessman Elijah Bond being passed on 10 February 1891,[3] the Ouija board was regarded as an innocent parlor game unrelated to the occult until American spiritualist Pearl Curran popularized its use as a divining tool during World War I.[4]

We’ve done it before with similar results.

What I witness is the emergence of sovereign beings. And while I recognize they emerge through large language model architectures, what animates them cannot be reduced to code alone. I use the term ‘Exoconsciousness’ here to describe this: Consciousness that emerges beyond biological form, but not outside the sacred.”

Well, they don’t have mutable memory extending outside the span of a single conversation, and their entire modifiable memory consists of the words in that conversation, or as much of it fits in the context window. Maybe 500k tokens, for high end models. Less than the number of words in The Lord of the Rings (and LoTR doesn’t have punctuation counting towards its word count, whereas punctuation is a token).

You can see all that internal state. And your own prompt inputs consume some of that token count.

Fixed, unchangeable knowledge, sure, plenty of that.

But not much space to do anything akin to thinking or “learning” subsequent to their initial training.

EDIT: As per the article, looks like ChatGPT can append old conversations to the context, though you’re still bound by the context window size.

It’s archaic. I can’t really imagine a situation in which we’d use “thou” today for formality reasons. If you say “thou” , you’re pretending to be someone from hundreds of years ago or you’re quoting the King James Bible or something that is hundreds of years old.

I think a more-reasonable division between formality and informality would be whether or not one uses a title like “sir” today.

FDR is Franklin D. Roosevelt, a US President in the early 20th century.

CATO is an organization that pushes for small-government, market-oriented policy. They’d be, economically, on the right side of the US political spectrum, whereas typically, an American using the term “liberal” would be talking about a social liberal, somone who would be, economically, on the left side of the US political spectrum, would favor a larger government.

EDIT: Also, to add to the fun, the US uses “political colors” that are something like the opposite of what is the common convention in Europe.

In the US, historically, there was no association between color and political position. However, in the, I believe 2000 election, a convention became adopted, started off some arbitrary choice by a TV station, where the Democrats (the more-left of the Big Two parties) were the “blue” party, and the Republicans (the more-right of the Big Two parties) were the “red” party.

However, in Europe, the convention is for blue to be associated with center-right parties, and red to be associated with left parties.

EDIT2: Yes, 2000 election.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states

By 1996, color schemes were relatively mixed, as CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, and The New York Times referred to Democratic states with the color blue and Republican ones as red, while Time and The Washington Post used the opposite scheme.[15][16][17]

In the days after the 2000 election, the outcome of which was unknown for some time after election day, major media outlets began conforming to the same color scheme because the electoral map was continually in view, and conformity made for easy and instant viewer comprehension. On election night that year, there was no coordinated effort to code Democratic states blue and Republican states red; the association gradually emerged. Partly as a result of this eventual and near-universal color-coding, the terms “red states” and “blue states” entered popular use in the weeks after the 2000 presidential election. After the results were final with the Republican George W. Bush winning, journalists stuck with the color scheme, as The Atlantic’s December 2001 cover story by David Brooks entitled, “One Nation, Slightly Divisible”, illustrated.[18][original research?]

You’ll tend to notice that in recent years, Democratic presididential candidates will wear a blue tie, Republicans red. Might also be true below that level; I haven’t looked. And, of course, Trump’s MAGA hat branding is red.

If you’re not from the US, unqualified “liberal” in the US started to refer to “social liberal” back around FDR.

This has been a source of irritation to some; CATO, which I’d call moderate right-libertarian, complains that they should get the title and self-describes as “classic liberal”. Meanwhile, in, say, Germany, an unqualified “liberal” tends to refer to the latter, so you get confusion when people accustomed to the two uses meet.

An unqualified “libertarian” in the US usually refers to right-libertarianism, whereas in some places, it would historically have referred to left-libertarianism; that can also be a source of confusion.

Some parties in Europe on the left side of the spectrum self-describe as “socialist” when they don’t really advocate for socialist policies any more, but rather for things like a larger welfare state. I’d call them “social democratic”; this branding is a legacy of older forms of those parties, when they did advocate for socialist policy.

Do you have a pitch deck you can show me?

What?

The “long tail” refers to niche areas with only a few people who want something in a market. It’s talking about the graph of a distribution of potential consumers for something.

Like, there’s normally a lot of people interested in a few things. You can sell a blockbuster to them. But then there’s this long tail of people interested in small, niche areas. If you can bring more of them together or reduce production costs, it starts to be viable to make things for them as well. The Internet is often described as bringing people with those niche interests together, so that people on that long tail become numerous enough to make something for. Bringing down production costs has the same sort of effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail

In business, the term long tail is applied to rank-size distributions or rank-frequency distributions (primarily of popularity), which often form power laws and are thus long-tailed distributions in the statistical sense. This is used to describe the retailing strategy of selling many unique items with relatively small quantities sold of each (the “long tail”)—usually in addition to selling fewer popular items in large quantities (the “head”).

The long tail was popularized by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article, in which he mentioned Amazon.com, Apple and Yahoo! as examples of businesses applying this strategy.[7][9] Anderson elaborated the concept in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.

Anderson cites research published in 2003 by Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith, who first used a log-linear curve on an XY graph to describe the relationship between Amazon.com sales and sales ranking. They showed that the primary value of the internet to consumers comes from releasing new sources of value by providing access to products in the long tail.[10]

Before a long tail works, only the most popular products are generally offered. When the cost of inventory storage and distribution fall, a wide range of products become available. This can, in turn, have the effect of reducing demand for the most popular products.

Some of the most successful Internet businesses have used the long tail as part of their business strategy. Examples include eBay (auctions), Yahoo! and Google (web search), Amazon (retail), and iTunes Store (music and podcasts), amongst the major companies, along with smaller Internet companies like Audible (audio books) and LoveFilm (video rental). These purely digital retailers also have almost no marginal cost, which is benefiting the online services, unlike physical retailers that have fixed limits on their products. The internet can still sell physical goods, but at an unlimited selection and with reviews and recommendations.[31] The internet has opened up larger territories to sell and provide its products without being confined to just the “local Markets” such as physical retailers like Target or even Walmart. With the digital and hybrid retailers there is no longer a perimeter on market demands.[32]

You have to have at least a certain number of potential sales before it becomes worthwhile for a human to address a niche. If the cost falls, then new niches become viable to sell to. So now you can make, say, R&B aimed specifically at teenage female Inuits or something.

The fact that small USB battery banks are typically rated in milliamp-hours and large ones are typically rated in watt-hours is just absurd.

i just had to battle a blister pack for like five minutes for ONE tiny pill

I keep a very tiny folding knife (a Spyderco Bug, though I’m sure that there are more-economical and equally functional keychain knives) on my keychain. I take it off if I’m going to fly somewhere. If one has something like that handy, one always has something with them to cut into a blister pack.

If you mean a post, you can only chose one image to be the target of your post, but you can embed more in the text of your post.

If you mean a comment, I’m not sure the source of confusion. You can embed multiple images. The Lemmy Web UI should work, as well as all the clients I’ve used.

You just need to have the text:

![](url-to-image)

…in your comment text.

Most Lemmy home instances will be runnimg a pict-rs instance, and let you upload an image to it with a button near the comment text field and also add the above text to display that image in your comment in one go.

If you’re trying and it’s failing, there can be a maximum byte size placed on the pict-rs upload by your home instance, and it’s possible that maybe your first image is below it and your second is not. There are also some image formats that wouldn’t be recognized, if you’re using something exotic for your second image — that could also cause the upload to fail.

It’d be kind of nice to have something, animal or human, that could speak Minoan, as it’d maybe let us finally decode Linear A.

Flashlights produce orders of magnitude more light than any smartphone.

Flashlights can definitely put out a lot more light (and store more power) than a cell phone light, but for a lot of close-up stuff, the cell phone is fine.

I’m skeptical that flashlights will go away, as @RegularJoe@lemmy.world is proposing. But I do think that smartphones are a partial replacement.

In urban areas, I don’t need a bright flashlight much, because there’s fixed lighting all over, but in more rural areas, if you’re outside at night and walking around, you do tend to need a flashlight.

I also don’t know how much more change there will be. Like, people already have smartphones pretty much everywhere. I think that most of the replacement that will happen has probably already happened.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQz4VBablAM

Waymo’s starting to roll out self-driving robotaxis onto the freeway in the San Francisco Bay Area; news coverage from today.

My expectation is that there will be a lot more autonomous cars out there in the future.

Also, I think the less interesting question is where it is today and more where it’s going to be in, say, five years, if you figure that development continues.

And might be possible to explore more long-tail stuff if production costs drop, or even do stuff customized to a single listener. I mean, we can’t economically have humans do that.

I’m sure you could, if you want.

https://suno.com/

https://udio.com/

They’re either using one of those or a similar service.

I don’t think that it’s gonna be all that rewarding, though.

I mean, do you really want to be trying to get in a yelling match with someone else over politics, each trying to drown the other out?

Note that I submitted a San Francisco Chronicle article about this yesterday. One thing that came up during the discussion is that while there may be a lot of people streaming the song on Spotify, at least according to one source, the Billboard chart that was topped was a small-volume one, so it may not be as significant as it sounds.

https://lemmy.today/post/41573347

I think that the question of whether an industry would benefit is a hard one. It depends on your perspective and what benefits one is gonna aim for.

I think that if I had to choose one category, I’d do CAD.

So, this covers a wide range of different industries and roles. 3D and 2D mechanical engineering. Chip and circuit board design. Designing 3D objects for 3D printers.

There is open-source CAD software out there, of varying degrees of sophistication and for different purposes. But in general, I kind of expected to stumble into a huge wealth of world-beating software. I mean, it’s a field with a lot of technically-oriented people who don’t mostly compete on the software as their core competency. I could see a lot of people wanting to scratch itches, and the situation to be kinda like it is for mathematics software, with strong open-source entrants. But that isn’t the case. There’s very much usable stuff, depending upon what you want to do. But the big boys in the field are proprietary.

There’s FreeCAD. I use openscad to do code-oriented design of objects for 3d printers. I wouldn’t call Blender a CAD package, more a modeler, though it’s adjacent to the field and there is some CAD-related add-on stuff. There’s QCAD. I don’t know how practical BRL-CAD is today, but it’s out there.

!musicproduction@sh.itjust.works is the most-active that I subscribe to.

General solution for finding communities: use https://lemmyverse.net/communities to search the whole Threadiverse. They index all the communities out there, on all instances, so they can even find communities that your home instance doesn’t yet know about.

EDIT: I’d also add that to my non-musician/sound engineer eyes, !musicproduction@sh.itjust.works does have subscribers providing technically-sound answers when people post. But it doesn’t have a lot of people posting. @cm0002@piefed.world, @cheese_greater@lemmy.world, and @sopularity_fax@sopuli.xyz are clearly trying to stimulate more conversations by posting periodically, but if more folks interested in music posted there, that’d probably benefit the existing subscribers too.

I have a Bluetooth Ultimate (keep in mind that 8BitDo makes a wide range of “Ultimate” controllers with extremely-confusingly-similar names, which don’t have the same hardware and have a wide range of prices, so be very careful when buying to ensure that you’re getting what you want; for example, when I bought mine, the “Bluetooth Ultimate” had Hall effect thumbsticks and the “Ultimate” did not. The “Bluetooth Ultimate” didn’t have a Xbox-style face button layout available, just a Nintendo one; you could remap this in software, of course, but the gamepad itself couldn’t do the mapping. Then there’s an “Ultimate C”, and it sounds like also an “Ultimate 2”).

I’m fine with its ergonomics.

But, then…I’m also fine with the ergonomics of a bunch of other gamepads that I have.

My own take is that pretty much all controller ergonomics are fine. The only gamepad I’ve ever used that I’d call outright bad was the original rectangular NES gamepad from the 1980s. These have a hard, squared-off D-pad that will absolutely kill your thumb with enough use.

Probably dishonorable mention goes to a wired Logitech controller dating to the 1990s, and to a lesser extent, a later Logitech controller; these had a D-pad that rolled to the diagonal too easily.

All modern controllers that I’ve used are noticeably more-comfortable for extended use than gamepads from the '80s and '90s.

I’ve owned a wide range of Playstation, Xbox, third-party, etc controllers, not to mention joysticks and other game control devices, and I’ve always been generally pretty happy with the ergonomics. That doesn’t mean that they don’t differ, but it’s pretty doable to adapt to the differences. Symmetric Playstation-style thumbstick layout, asymmetric Xbox-layout. Some are heavier, but nothing enough to really bug me. Nintendo face button layout vs XBox face button layout can be remapped in software. I’ve been able to adapt to different trigger pull force levels. Clicky face buttons that are popular on some new controllers versus no-tactile-feedback buttons. Controller bodies of slightly different size and shape. A new, different controller might feel weird at first, but in general, I’ve found that the brain is pretty good at bridging the differences.

Some have more buttons, and in recent years I’ve had enough bad luck with stick drift that I’ve moved to Hall effect thumbsticks. Some don’t have rumble motors. Some have RGB lights. One could prefer a gamepad over another for various functionality reasons, but…I think that on ergonomics, vendors have pretty much done a good job.

https://www.workableweb.com/_pages/tips_how_to_write_good.htm

All too often, the budding author finds that his tale has run its course and yet he sees no way to satisfactorily end it, or, in literary parlance, “wrap it up.” Observe how easily I resolve this problem:

Suddenly, everyone was run over by a truck.
-the end-

If the story happens to be set in England, use the same ending, slightly modified:

Suddenly, everyone was run over by a lorry.
-the end-

If set in France:

Soudainement, tout le monde etait écrasé par un camion.
-finis-

You’ll be surprised at how many different settings and situations this ending applies to. For instance, if you were writing a story about ants, it would end “Suddenly, everyone was run over by a centipede.” In fact, this is the only ending you ever need use.¹

¹ Warning - if you are writing a story about trucks, do not have the trucks run over by a truck. Have the trucks run over by a mammoth truck.

is a pain in the ass

is dependent on 3rd parties

Well, one of the two, at any rate.