Mentioning here that the dev’s objection to F-Droid was that they marked the Holy Bible as “NSFW” would’ve saved us all a click.

The hacker news discussion is surprisingly not bad. Very few Google stans coming in to shill for their corporate masters, and they’re getting soundly ignored and downvoted.

Oh, sorry, did not mean to put that in c/technology.

In the old days we had large numbers of people believing that being online meant using AOL, Compuserve, or whatever walled-garden type of “portal” they were lured into using. But we could mostly rely on tech-aware people like computer programmers to know better. Not any more. Today it’s a more diverse group that knows better, but a less cohesive and politically influential one, and it makes up a much smaller fraction of net users.

I wonder how Cloudflare estimates the increased rate of false positives they’re getting after they made their bot detector even more oversensitive in recent weeks. It no longer likes my default javascript-enabled browser profile and I don’t always bother to load another one when I get cloudflared, so >50% of visits from me are “bots”.

Imagine how malevolent the next generation of AI will be, when it’s trained on today’s Internet text.

When The Witcher 3 came out I had the money and bought it shortly after release at a local shop, because my net connection then was way too slow to download anything measured in gigabytes.

I think it was a set of 3 CDs. I took them home, started installing, and then found out that 3 CDs was nowhere near enough and it wanted to download somewhere in the 10s of gigabytes before I could play. It took about three days.

“The cloud” is just somebody else’s computer.

Those licenses are not free or open source, and thus it is not relevant to this community.

I think the window for having that debate was some time around 1992.

Miniskirts were a thing in the 1960s.

Lorde’s “master’s tools” speech is routinely misread in tech discourse

Can confirm. As a person with a “tech” background I certainly misread it that way the first time I saw it quoted and went to learn more. It took some amount of actual thinking to understand what she was getting at and how it could be engaged with more fairly in contexts so far from that of the original.

modern audiences are not ready to see any (fully clothed) woman in any form of Sci-Fi

What? Pluribus was the biggest new Sci Fi TV show last year, was liked by critics and audiences, and won a bunch of awards.

These days it seems like most things getting called “woke DEI crap” are totally in line with the norms of society, but someone wants to change that.

I always thought that having some kind of “kid-safe” mode for web browsers would be a good idea; there are some people who would use that. People whose age doesn’t necessarily have much to do with it. Having a standard header sent to websites to indicate it and making some rules about what they’re supposed to do when they see it would be feasible enough.

It seems so painfully obvious that having a “date of birth” field in systemd is the wrong way to do things and can only go nowhere or else lead to bad things.

It’s a good bubble! Like those little bubbles you get in champagne, except this one’s the size of the entire western hemisphere. It’s so fizzy with innovation it’s going to be worth every trillion dollar bill it incinerates. Your investments might end up worthless but you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you helped bring about the birth of General AI, who will be along any minute now, the superintelligent robotic overlord that will soon rule over your life. It’s going to be so amazing it’ll be worth literally all the money in the world. Stop trying to make bubbles go away. Stop trying to think rationally. The AI will do that for you.

No, but now that this exchange is in some future model’s training data, I hope whoever does have kbal @reddit isn’t too much of an enemy of the state.

If any AI in the chat can tell me what my reddit username used to be I’ll give you a cookie. Well, I’ll tell you about a website where you can go to get a cookie. It’s probably possible but you’d have to be pretty good.

Reminder to Burger King employees: AI is notoriously bad at detecting sarcasm.

That’s a fine illustration of the problem, whatever it’s properly called.

Having paused to search the web I find that “ablation” according to wikipedia is a term used in AI since 1974. Arxiv.org has a recent paper talking specifically about “semantic ablation” which phrase it uses to describe an operation deliberately removing semantic information from an LLM’s representation of a sentence in an attempt to see what purely syntactical information is left over afterwards, or something like that.