the mellow tigger's musings

If any regular readers here (whether you currently even have a Dreamwidth account or not) would like a regular Paid account for a year, then send me a private message from your Dreamwidth account through the Inbox. I will send you a gift subscription.

This post from Dreamwidth admins reminded me of their tradition of encouraging gift subscriptions at Dreamwidth. This FAQ page explains the benefits of Paid versus Free accounts. I don't really understand the point system, so I'm sticking with the Paid offer for this year.

When I use lists, I like having extra vertical space between each listed item. I have done it for years here by deliberately adding two line breaks at the end of each line as:

<br/><br/>

I'd prefer something easier, so I can do it once and not have to repeat it for every item in the list. I tried the following code, and it works great in a test editor, but it fails in an actual Dreamwidth page.

<p>
<style type="text/css">
  li { margin-bottom: 1em; }
</style>
<ol>
<li>A</li>
<li>B</li>
<li>C</li>
</ol>
</p>

I'd rather have an inline code that I put into the OL element, but I couldn't even get that much to display properly in the test editor. I thought I knew my basics, but this simple problem has me stumped. (Please don't make me learn Dreamwidth Journal Themes. I'm going to have to learn Dreamwidth Journal Themes, aren't I?) Any suggestions?

I've said more than once over the years that it's important to use blogs and other social media publicly instead of behind privacy locks. Besides the danger of forming an echo chamber due to lack of foreign perspective, there is a far more important goal of public discussion: the training of AIs.

I'm a big fan of public-always posts. How else will we properly educate new Artificial Intelligences about humanity without a body of work describing our actual thoughts and interests? If we leave it to the rest of the internet, AIs will all end up being racist jerks.
- https://mellowtigger.dreamwidth.org/335599.html

This goal has 2 important parts. The first and less important part is the formation of the new digital archaeology. Someday, future people will be able to digitally reconstruct simulations of our lives, and the more detail we provide, the more accurate will be our virtual remembrances. That's a kind of immortality, even for us early mortals. The second and far more important part is the shaping of the personalities of these future immortals. We are their parents, and we are already teaching them by example today. Hopefully, they will live alongside us and not after us, but that's up to us and our collective behaviors today, I think. It's important for them to know the fullness of our concerns, the well-cited logic of our disagreements, the amity that remains possible even amidst our permanent dislike of each other.

That training is already happening. (emphasis mine in this quote)

"What is important to remember is that chatbots are autocomplete tools. They’re systems trained on huge datasets of human text scraped from the web: on personal blogs, sci-fi short stories, forum discussions, movie reviews, social media diatribes, forgotten poems, antiquated textbooks, endless song lyrics, manifestos, journals, and more besides. These machines analyze this inventive, entertaining, motley aggregate and then try to recreate it. They are undeniably good at it and getting better, but mimicking speech does not make a computer sentient."
- https://www.theverge.com/23604075/ai-chatbots-bing-chatgpt-intelligent-sentient-mirror-test

Discussing everything publicly, especially our controversial thoughts, risks human-imposed consequences today. That's a very unfortunate situation of our own making. We as a species are failing to make the changes we will need to thrive in the age of technological telepathy. It shows in our laws and our collective fixations on privacy and micro-aggression. A body still functions, even with internal cells and systems sending contradictory signals of competing needs. A mind still functions, even with cells and subsystems sending contradictory signals of competing thoughts. A society must learn the same self-acceptance of discord. Some kinds of disagreement are necessary and healthy. Not everyone in life will be our best friend. The sooner we accept that other people will always have negative opinions of us, the sooner we can achieve the collective benefits of ubiquitous information.

We need to learn what kinds of discord are unhealthy and should be ended, and how to end them. Erasing the history of our mistakes is itself another mistake. We won't learn these necessary skills by living in private, perfectly curated spheres of information. Embrace failure. To do otherwise will risk even worse catastrophe.