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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I think it helps to think of browsing as a basic form of searching. Everything you can do in a browsing context, you can by definition do in a searching context…if the client doesn’t suck. The information needed to browse is embedded in the tags.

    So this strikes me as entirely dependent on your client software. A good client should let you browse by tags. You could add Dewey numbers as tags to start with, so you can browse that way if you want, then add any other tags that might be useful (like genres, for example) on top of that.

    The only difference with tags in this context is that books will appear in multiple places.



  • For all the talk of regulating AI, I think the only meaningful regulation is very simple: hold the people implementing it accountable.

    You want to use AI instead of a real certified professional? Go nuts. Let it write your legal contracts, file your taxes, diagnose your patients. But be prepared to get sued into oblivion when it makes a mistake that real professionals spend years of expensive training learning to avoid. Let the insurance industry do the risk assessment and see how unviable it is to replace human experts when there’s human accountability.




  • The problem I had with that scene (and the whole series, really, especially season 3) was that it framed human culture of the future as being generally oppressive and backwards. Acceptance shouldn’t be portrayed as radical or exceptional. It should be normal and taken for granted among humans in the future. Like in TOS, Uhura’s role was a big deal for viewers specifically because it was not a big deal for the characters. They just showed us a better future, where a black woman in a respected professional position was normal.

    Discovery didn’t show us a better future. It showed us a shitty future with a handful of decent people in it. This is just one example, but it’s one that stuck in my mind as well.







  • There are a few ways this could work, but it hardly seems worth the effort if it’s not phoning home.

    They could have an on-device database of red flags and use on-device voice recognition against that database. But then what? Pop up a “scam likely” screen while you’re already mid-call? Maybe include an option to report scams back to Google with a transcript? I guess that could be useful.

    Any more more than that would be a privacy nightmare. I don’t want Google’s AI deciding which of my conversations are private and which get sent back to Google. Any non-zero false positive rate would simply be unacceptable.

    Maybe this is the first look at a new cat and mouse game: AI to detect AI-generated voices? AI-generated voice scams are already out there in the wild and will only become more common as time goes on.





  • I came here with exactly this episode in mind. I think it is representative in a few ways:

    1. It involves an alien of the week.
    2. The alien species is culturally similar to human societies we, as viewers, are familiar with.
    3. It demonstrates what the Federation is all about, including the Prime Directive, respectfully dealing with less developed civilizations, and solving problems without violence (especially when the problems are your own fault).
    4. It’s more or less self-contained. Whether this is “representative” is debatable, I guess. I think it’s a big part of Star Trek even though there’s a larger focus on season-long storylines in later series.

  • I had some CD-Rs that rotted within a few years. I was devastated, because at the time CD-Rs were hyped up as the most durable of any consumer media, and storage was expensive. I had tons of stuff that was ONLY on CD or DVD. That’s how I archived everything.

    There was an old site that did a comprehensive analysis and ranked different brands of CD-R and DVD-R discs into tiers. My main takeaway at the time was Verbatim or bust. There were some other brands that got discs from the same manufacturer, but not consistently so it was something of a gamble. IIRC Sony was one of the better ones, but Verbatim was the safest choice.

    I can’t say I’ve tested any of my old discs in the past 10 or maybe even 15 years. I copied my most important data into newer media, but I still have a ton of discs I should probably clone to my NAS. One of these years…

    Then came M-discs, which as far as I know are still considered legit. They never really caught on, and production has either halted entirely or is at least limited. I never used them myself.


  • It’s nutty that we haven’t had a proper offline mode in like 20, maybe 25 years. This was something every browser had in the 90s. Loading from cache was the default, even. Now it’s like, I’m not sure why Firefox even has a cache folder. They bend over backwards to prevent you from using it.

    Before you tell me that Firefox has an offline mode, yeah, I know. It’s basically useless.

    I would love a way to have my browser automatically store a local, static copy of everything I view.



  • For people ages 0 to 2, the model often classified them as being between 12 and 18 years old.

    I guess they’re just not training with baby pictures then? I mean, this seems like it should be the easiest distinction to make.

    Doesn’t seem like there’s any information on the purpose of this analysis. Google Photos has been doing face recognition and other classification for a long time, and it’s genuinely useful because it lets you sort your photo collection by person. It also categorizes pet photos and does a halfway-decent job of distinguishing one pet from another. I’d genuinely appreciate similar functionality in the open-source photo apps I use. This seems like a natural fit for Instagram. Not sure about TikTok, but honestly, I’m too old and ornery to understand how people actually use TikTok.