It’s the new hyped up version of “no-code” or low-code solutions, but with AI so you have more flexibility to footgun.

Not any lazier. Script kiddies didn’t write the code themselves, either.

It was already known before the whistleblower that:

1. Siri inputs (all STT at that time, really) were processed off device
2. Siri had false activations

The “sinister” thing that we learned was that Apple was reviewing those activations to see if they were false, with the stated intent (as confirmed by the whistleblower) of using them to reduce false activations.

There are also black box methods to verify that data isn’t being sent and that particular hardware (like the microphone) isn’t being used, and there are people who look for vulnerabilities as a hobby. If the microphones on the most/second most popular phone brand (iPhone, Samsung) were secretly recording all the time, evidence of that would be easy to find and would be a huge scoop - why haven’t we heard about it yet?

Snowden and Wikileaks dumped a huge amount of info about governments spying, but nothing in there involved always on microphones in our cell phones.

To be fair, an individual phone is a single compromise away from actually listening to you, so it still makes sense to avoid having sensitive conversations within earshot of a wirelessly connected microphone. But generally that’s not the concern most people should have.

Advertising tracking is much more sinister and complicated and harder to wrap your head around than “my phone is listening to me” and as a result makes for a much less glamorous story, but there are dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of stories out there about how invasive advertising companies’ methods are, about how they know too much, etc… Think about what LLMs do with text. The level of prediction that they can do. That’s what ML algorithms can do with your behavior.

If you’re misattributing what advertisers know about you to the phone listening and reporting back, then you’re not paying attention to what they’re actually doing.

So yes - be vigilant. Just be vigilant about the right thing.

proven by a whistleblower from apple

Assuming you have an iPhone. And even then, the whistleblower you’re referencing was part of a team who reviewed utterances by users with the “Hey Siri” wake word feature enabled. If you had Siri disabled entirely or had the wake word feature disabled, you weren’t impacted at all.

This may have been limited to impacting only users who also had some option like “Improve Siri and Dictation” enabled, but it’s not clear. Today, the Privacy Policy explicitly says that Apple can have employees review your interactions with Siri and Dictation (my understanding is the reason for the settlement is that they were not explicit that human review was occurring). I strongly recommend disabling that setting, particularly if you have a wake word enabled.

If you have wake words enabled on your phone or device, your phone has to listen to be able to react to them. At that point, of course the phone is listening. Whether it’s sending the info back somewhere is a different story, and there isn’t any evidence that I’m aware of that any major phone company does this.

Sure - Wikipedia says it better than I could hope to:

As English-linguist Larry Andrews describes it, descriptive grammar is the linguistic approach which studies what a language is like, as opposed to prescriptive, which declares what a language should be like.[11]: 25  In other words, descriptive grammarians focus analysis on how all kinds of people in all sorts of environments, usually in more casual, everyday settings, communicate, whereas prescriptive grammarians focus on the grammatical rules and structures predetermined by linguistic registers and figures of power. An example that Andrews uses in his book is fewer than vs less than.[11]: 26  A descriptive grammarian would state that both statements are equally valid, as long as the meaning behind the statement can be understood. A prescriptive grammarian would analyze the rules and conventions behind both statements to determine which statement is correct or otherwise preferable. Andrews also believes that, although most linguists would be descriptive grammarians, most public school teachers tend to be prescriptive.[11]: 26

You might be interested in reading up on the debate of “Prescriptive vs Descriptive” approaches in a linguistics context.

What would moving your account here from Reddit entail? What would transfer with you? Your posts? Comments? Followed and moderated subreddits? Upvotes and downvotes?

I think the better question than “Does the experience system sound like it has potential,” then, is “Does the overall concept / system have potential?”

My gut is probably, but it depends a lot more on what you’re willing to put into it and what you want out of it. What’s your metric for success? If it’s something you want to run yourself and to share online to have a few groups use it, then that’s a lot more achievable than being able to get a publishing deal, for example. And in-between, publishing on drivethrurpg or something similar, at a nominal cost (like $2-$5), would take more effort than the former and less than the latter; and the higher the cost and the higher the number of players you’d want, the higher the effort you need to put in (and a lot of that isn’t just in system building, but in art, community building, marketing, etc.).

From what you’ve shared, it sounds like an interesting system. I could especially see it working in an academy setting where grinding skills to be able to pass practical exams is one of the players’ goals. I also could see it working well by a loosely GMed play by post system, with the players self-enforcing (or possibly leveraging some tools built into the site to track resource pools, experience, rolling, etc.), though I haven’t played in a forum game myself, so I might be way off-base.

Did your system have classes or was it completely free-form in terms of gaining access to those skill trees?

I run a Monster of the Week game and my players get experience throughout sessions, as well as at the end. The mechanics are basically:

• It takes 5 experience points to level up.
• If you fail a roll, you get an experience point.
• If you level up, you get the benefit immediately.
• At the end of the session, everyone gets 0-2 experience points.

I think other PbtA (Powered by the Apocalypse - systems inspired by Apocalypse World) systems do something similar.

I grew increasingly frustrated with the system of only distributing advancement/experience points at the end of a session.

Isn’t the simple fix to this to just distribute experience points as soon as they’re earned?

At some point, I started to divise a play system that relied on a split experience atribution system, with players being able to automatically rack experience points from directly using their skills/habilties, while the DM would keep a tally of points from goals/missions achieved, distributable at session end.

Your system sounds like the way that skill-based video game RPGs (Elder Scrolls games and Arcanum come to mind) handle experience.

In a lot of games I’ve played, I’d rather get experience for in-game accomplishments immediately and to be able to train skills like this during downtime - generally between games.

To those with more experience in TTRPGs: would this be feaseable? Or enticing? Interesting?

I could see people being interested in it. You get instant gratification and a bit of extra crunchiness. A lot of players enjoy that.

With the right skill system I could see this being useful. My main concern is that if you put this on top of a system with relatively few skills, it could encourage people to game it by grinding. There are ways to mitigate that, though.

In a system with fewer skills, instead of just being experience points, the “currency” you earned this way could be used for temporary power ups related to the skill in question.

You could also limit it so you only rewarded players for story-related tasks.

I’d recommend Colemak Mod-DH, personally - it seems ergonomically superior and switching later is a bit of a pain.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is probably the tech you’d want. It basically involves a knowledge library being built from the documents you upload, which is then indexed when you ask questions.

NotebookLM by Google is an off the shelf tool that is specialized in this, but you can upload documents to ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, etc., and get the same benefit.

If you self hosted, Open WebUI with Ollama supports this, but far from the only one.

If you dislike decentralization, then that’s like being on an instance that’s banned every other instance.

Do you mean that you dislike defederation?

You said, and I quote “Find a better way.” I don’t agree with your premise - this is the better way - but I gave you a straightforward, reasonable way to achieve something important to you… and now you’re saying that “This is a discussion of principle.”

You’ve just proven that it doesn’t take a moderator to turn a conversation into a bad joke - you can do it on your own.

It’s a discussion of principle.

This is a foreign concept?

It appears to be a foreign concept for you.

I don’t believe that it’s a fundamentally bad thing to converse in moderated spaces; you do. You say “giving somebody the power to arbitrarily censor and modify our conversation is a fundamentally bad thing” like it’s a fact, indicating you believe this, but you’ve been given the tools to avoid giving others the power to moderate your conversation and you have chosen not to use them. This means that you are saying “I have chosen to do a thing that I believe is fundamentally bad.” Why would anyone trust such a person?

For that matter, is this even a discussion? People clearly don’t agree with you and you haven’t explained your reasoning. If a moderator’s actions are logged and visible to users, and users have the choice of engaging under the purview of a moderator or moving elsewhere, what’s the problem?

It is deeply bad that…

Why?

Yes, I know, trolls, etc…

In other words, “let me ignore valid arguments for why moderation is needed.”

But such action turns any conversation into a bad joke.

It doesn’t.

And anybody who trusts a moderator is a fool.

In places where moderator’s actions are unlogged and they’re not accountable to the community, sure - and that’s true on mainstream social media. Here, moderators are performing a service for the benefit of the community.

Have you never heard the phrase “Trust, but verify?”

Find a better way.

This is the better way.

Then why are you doing that, and why aren’t you at least hosting your own instance?

Yes, I know, trolls etc. But such action turns any conversation into a bad joke. And anybody who trusts a moderator is a fool.

Not just trolls - there’s much worse content out there, some of which can get you sent to jail in most (all?) jurisdictions.

And even ignoring that, many users like their communities to remain focused on a given topic. Moderation allows this to happen without requiring a vetting process prior to posting. Maybe you don’t want that, but most users do.

Find a better way.

Here’s an option: you can code a fork or client that automatically parses the modlog, finds comments and posts that have been removed, and makes them visible in your feed. You could even implement the ability to reply by hosting replies on a different instance or community.

For you and anyone who uses your fork, it’ll be as though they were never removed.

Do you have issues with the above approach?

As a user, you can:

• Review instance and community rules prior to participating
• Review the moderator logs to confirm that moderation activities have been in line with the rules
• If you notice a discrepancy, e.g., over-moderation, you can hold the mods accountable and draw attention to it or simply choose not to engage in that instance or community
• Host your own instance
• Create communities in an existing instance or your own instance

If you host your own instance and communities within that instance, then at that point, you have full control, right? Other instances can de-federate from yours.

Not directly, but indirectly. You gerrymander the district-based positions, which allow you to pass legislation enabling you to suppress enough votes to win the statewide elections, too.

That sounds like something someone who’s never heard of gerrymandering or voter suppression would say.

From https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/covid-vaccines-reduce-long-covid-risk-new-study-shows

At the pandemic’s onset, approximately 10% of people who suffered COVID-19 infections went on to develop Long COVID. Now, the risk of getting Long COVID has dropped to about 3.5% among vaccinated people (primary series).

…

Then, the team conducted analyses to uncover the reasons for the observed decline in Long COVID cases from the pre-Delta to Omicron eras. About 70% of the decline was attributable to vaccination, they found.