backgroundcow

Cortana is/was by far the best name of the digital assistants - probably because it was created by sci-fi story writers rather than a marketing department. They should just have upgraded her with the latest AI tech and trained her to show the same kind of sassy personality as in the games and it would have been perfect.

Who in their right mind thinks "Bing copilot" is a better name? It makes me picture something like the blow-up autopilot from Airplane!

There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.

A few things:

• Unity is still bleeding money. They have a product that could be the basis for a reasonably profitable company, but spending billions on a microtransaction company means it is not sufficient for their current leadership. It doesn't seem wise to build your bussniess on the product of a company whose bussniess plan you fundamentally disagree with.

• It would be the best for the long term health of bussniess-to-bussnies services if we as a community manages to send the message that it doesn't matter what any contract says - just trying to introduce retroactive fees is unforgivable and a death sentence to the company that tries it.

Better yet, demand loudly to get a refund. When they say there is nothing to refund, insist that you have an email confirming a booking.

So, what you are saying is that by checking this trust API, we can filter out everyone running unaltered big-media approved browsers and hardware? We'd end up splitting the web into two disjoint parts, one for big corporate and sheeple - and one more akin to the web of old comprised by skilled tech people and hobbyists? A rift that could finally bring an end to eternal September? ... Are we sure this proposal a bad thing?

Was this around the time right after "custom GPTs" was introduced? I've seen posts since basically the beginning of ChatGPT claming it got stupid and thinking it was just confirmation bias. But somewhere around that point I felt a shift myself in GPT4:s ability to program; where it before found clever solutions to difficult problems, it now often struggles with basics.

"I've created this amazing program that more or less precisely mimics the response of a human to any question!"

"What if I ask it a question where humans are well known to apply all kinds of biases? Will it give a completely unbiased answer, like some kind of paragon of virtue?"

"No"

The industrial revolution is an illusion created by 14:th century wizards.

I really wish there were an "adult difficulty" setting to pick instead of 'easy'. I don't have hours to waste on hordes of "difficult" enemies that just slows progress and pads the playtime. Nor do I want a walking simulator where the boss just falls over with no need for anything beyond the most basic game mechanics. Give me an option to experience the story with an interesting challenge without wasting my time, dammit!

No technology actually works, it is all a magical illusion. You may think a steam engine works with heated water and pressure; a computer with circuits and electrons; etc.; well, that is all gobbledygook, and what actually makes any of these things do things that occasionally seem useful is nothing but powerful illusion magic. If the assembly of mages decide to dispell the illusion, we'll be back in the middle ages. For one thing, it seems they never really got the illusion to work quite right for printers.

AND add a clause to the TOS banning retroactive updates of TOS to existing games.

How the f**k do we have functional AI that speaks like a human and solves general problems on the level of a university student, but somehow household chores are still done with tech that was invented 50-100 years ago?! Why isn't there just a hole in my kitchen counter where I can dump dirty dinnerware, pots, pans; the machine sorts it out, washes it, and returns it to the cupboard? Why doesn't my washing machine sort by color, wash, dry, fold, and stack my clothes? Why do I still have to clean surfaces in my house by manually rubbing a wet sponge at them for hours?

I'll tell you what I think: inequality. Women did house chores, men invented shit that was fun and useful to them. Maybe as the world moves, hopefully, toward more equality we will find that people who shares their time between chores and inventing stuff will start to actually tackle the problem of simplifying boring chores.

This whole rapey lingo needs to fucking die already.

Maybe widely name-calling this practice for what it is could help steer companies away from this disgusting pattern.

Should we start refering to pop-ups that give no option to say "no" as something like "rape-ups"?

AutoNomous Ultra inStinct ram

This is my guess as well. They have been limiting new signups for the paid service for a long time, which must mean they are overloaded; and then it makes a lot of sense to just degrade the quality of GPT-4 so they can serve all paying users. I just wish there was a way to know the "quality level" the service is operating at.

Pants

As a different, more techy, solution that can work depending on the people you collaborate with, is to use a hosted Git service for collaboration (if you want to stay completely open source, a self-hosted GitLab).

Then, change your publication workflow to write in Markdown, ReST, or one of the other ascii formats that previews correctly, and set up your CI to render the documents automatically into, e.g., pdf:s using a converter. There are all kinds of converters from Markdown/ReST -> docs, presentation, etc. formats that are as competent - if not more so - than the usual office suites. This setup offers both online editing in the GitLab instance and offline by local cloning of the Git repo.

The side effect is that this system very seriously records and preserve your document history. You can see exactly who, at what point, changed, added, and removed things. For some types of documents, this can be very important.

Especially if the media is readily available elsewhere which is always the case for movies you "bought" digitally.

Except when they aren't. Especially if located outside the US, it is far from obvious that a given movie is available through another service.

After checking that you can open port 53 udp yourself with, say, nc (which you tried), strace the binary that tries to open port 53 and fails, and find the system call that fails. You can compare it with an strace on nc to see how it differs.

If this doesn't clue you in (e.g., you see two attempts to listen to the same port...) Next step would be to find in the source code where it fails (look for the error message printout) and start adding diagnostic printouts before the failing system call and compile and run your edited version.

While a broad concept, in the context of your question, science is a metod to derive knowledge from observations.

Alternatives to the scientific method is to guess or to obtain knowledge from others. (Most other ways I can come up with, e.g. "religion" can still be sorted under these two.)

Obtaining knowledge from others is great, but may not always be available, and the quality of the knowledge derived this way depends on the reliability of the source.

For the other alternative, every sensible metric shows how science is a better method than guessing to derive knowledge.

The industrial military complex is built on funding for proxy wars with Russia. I wonder if the issue this time is that they are worried that with Russia directly involved instead of by proxy, this war may end up breaking Russia if they lose. Dismantling the perpetual antagonist that motivates further funding of the war machine is not in the interest of those who make money on wars.

I like calling it "x-twitter", as it is short and makes sense when reading it out.

Refunding the sale price is still theft.

What did you lose in this theft?

Is there really nothing in your home right now you would be sad if someone took and just gave you the money you paid for it?

Even a digital copy of a movie may not be so easy to replace on the services I have access to.

Stores are not allowed to go home to people and take back the stuff they sold, even if they refund the price. Neither should a company that advertise "pay this price and own this movie" rather than "pay this price and rent it for an indeterminate time".

The replacement for "this is retarded" I've started to use is ~ "I guess someone had to leave early for the weekend. 'Good enough, let's ship this and go home.'" with me gesturing like Khaby Lame at, e.g., obviously broken email validation field.

It isn't quite as snappy, but at least my disappointment tend to come across.

I understand LLaMA and some other models come with instructions that say that they cannot be used commercially. But, unless the creators can show that you have formally accepted a license agreement to that effect, on what legal grounds can that be enforceable?

If we look at the direction US law is moving, it seems the current legal theory is that AI generated works fall in the public domain. That means restricting their use commercially should be impossible regardless of other circumstances - public domain means that anyone can use them for anything. (But it also means that your commercial use isn't protected from others likewise using the exact same output).

If we instead look at what possible legal grounds restrictions on the output of these models could be based on if you didn't agree to a license agreement to access the model. Copyright don't restrict use, it restricts redistribution. The creators of LLMs cannot reasonably take the position that output created from their models is a derivative work of the model, when their model itself is created from copyrighted works, many of which they have no right to redistribute. The whole basis of LLMs rest on that "training data" -> "model" produces a model that isn't encumbered by the copyright of the training data. How can one take that position and simultaneously belive "model" -> "inferred output" produces copyright encumbered output? That would be a fundamentally inconsistent view.

(Note: the above is not legal advice, only free-form discussion.)

I was incredibly confused why everyone seemed to think the YouTube channel with fun physics videos was the scum of the earth, until I realized they are named Veritasium and not Veritas.