That sounds like an improbable attempt to leverage the notion that minors can't enter into a legally binding contract into a loophole to get anything for free by simply having your kid order it.

There are stories after stories of students getting shafted by gullible teachers who took one of those AI detectors at face value and decided their students were cheating based solely on their output.

And somehow those teachers are not getting the message that they're relying on snake oil to harm their students. They certainly won't see this post, and there just isn't enough mainstream pushback explaining that AI detectors are entirely inappropriate tools to decide whether to punish a student.

Running strange software grabbed from unknown sources will never not be a risky proposition.

Uploading the .exe you just grabbed to virustotal and getting the all clear can indicate two very different things: It's either actually safe, or it hasn't yet been detected as malware.

You should expect that malware writers had already uploaded some variant of their work to virustotal before seeding it to ensure maximum impact.
Getting happy results from virustotal could simply mean the malware author simply tweaked their work until they saw those same results.

Notice I said "yet" above. Malware tends to eventually get flagged as such, even when it has a headstart of not being recognized correctly.
You can use that to somewhat lower the odds of getting infected, by waiting. Don't grab the latest crack that just dropped for the hottest game or whatever.
Wait a few weeks. Let other people get infected first and have antiviruses DBs recognize a new malware. Then maybe give it a shot.

And of course, the notion that keygens will often be flagged as "bad" software by unhelpful antivirus just further muddies the waters since it teaches you to ignore or altogether disable your antivirus in one of the most risky situation you'll put yourself into.

Let's be clear: There's nothing safe about any of this, and if you do this on a computer that has access to anything you wouldn't want to lose, you are living dangerously indeed.

Honestly, it depends on your job.
Some jobs will fire you for taking too long in the restroom.
Those are not good jobs.

At other jobs, nobody will flinch if you send a quick note saying you gotta leave now for personal reasons and just take off.

You can list every man page installed on your system with man -k . , or just apropos .
But that's a lot of random junk. If you only want "executable programs or shell commands", only grab man pages in section 1 with a apropos -s 1 .

You can get the path of a man page by using whereis -m pwd (replace pwd with your page name.)

You can convert a man page to html with man2html (may require apt get man2html or whatever equivalent applies to your distro.)
That tool adds a couple of useless lines at the beginning of each file, so we'll want to pipe its output into a | tail +3 to get rid of them.

Combine all of these together in a questionable incantation, and you might end up with something like this:

mkdir -p tmp ; cd tmp
apropos -s 1 . | cut -d' ' -f1 | while read page; do whereis -m "$page" ; done | while read id path rest; do man2html "$path" | tail +3 > "${id::-1}.html"; done

List every command in section 1, extract the id only. For each one, get a file path. For each id and file path (ignore the rest), convert to html and save it as a file named $id.html.

It might take a little while to run, but then you could run firefox . or whatever and browse the resulting mess.

Or keep tweaking all of this until it's just right for you.

Instead of simply blurring them, it'd be technically possible to feed their images through a stable diffusion prompt, like "humanoid lizards" or "frantic lemmings"..
Also, I understand that a large language model could be made to rewrite articles about them with a matching prompt.

That would be very silly, of course.

I'll note that there are plenty of models out there that aren't LLMs and that are also being trained on large datasets gathered from public sources.

Image generation models, music generation models, etc.
Heck, it doesn't even need to be about generation. Music recognition and image recognition models can also be trained on the same sort of datasets, and arguably come with similar IP right questions.

It's definitely a broader topic than just LLMs, and attempting to enumerate exhaustively the flavors of AIs/models/whatever that should be part of this discussion is fairly futile given the fast evolving nature of the field.

It is time for the mainland to come back into the fold.

I agree the mainland should be allowed to maintain some amount of self rule during the transition.

One of my guilty pleasures is to rewrite trivial functions to be statements free.

Since I'd be too self-conscious to put those in a PR, I keep those mostly to myself.

For example, here's an XPath wrapper:

const $$$ = (q,d=document,x=d.evaluate(q,d),a=[],n=x.iterateNext()) => n ? (a.push(n), $$$(q,d,x,a)) : a;

Which you can use as $$$("//*[contains(@class, 'post-')]//*[text()[contains(.,'fedilink')]]/../../..") to get an array of matching nodes.

If I was paid to write this, it'd probably look like this instead:

function queryAllXPath(query, doc = document) {
    const array = [];
    const result = doc.evaluate(query, doc);
    let node= result.iterateNext();
    while (node) {
        array.push(node);
        n = result.iterateNext();
    }
    return array;
}

Seriously boring stuff.

Anyway, since var/let/const are statements, I have no choice but to use optional parameters instead, and since loops are statements as well, recursion saves the day.

Would my quality of life improve if the lambda body could be written as => if n then a.push(n), $$$(q,d,x,a) else a ? Obviously, yes.

Several times now, I've sent people I knew links to articles that looked perfectly fine to me, but turned out to be unusable ad-ridden garbage to them.

Since then, I try to remember to disable uBlock Origin to check what they'll actually see before I share any links.

I was watching the network traffic sent by Twitter the other day, as one does, and apparently whenever you stop scrolling for a few seconds, whatever post is visible on screen at that time gets added to a little pile that then gets "subscribed to" because it generated "engagement", no click needed.
This whole insidious recommendation nonsense was probably a subplot in the classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus.

Almost entirely unrelated, but I've been playing The Algorithm (part of the Tenet OST, by Ludwig Göransson) on repeat for a bit now. It's also become my ring tone, and if I can infect at least one other hapless soul with it, I'll be satisfied.

The only clue we have is that the desk reflections look really plausible.

But yeah, it's real: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-president-is-shilling-beans

To push back on that a bit, many Reddit "aged accounts" are used to push scams to the great unwashed masses.

I'm not sure it's morally okay to turn a blind eye from who's buying those accounts or why.

Presumably because they don't have a single delivery employee. They just provide "tech" that lets drivers and customers find each others.

Of course if those companies were to become responsible for providing a living wage to their "gig workers", then it becomes harder to still call them mere "tech" companies (and some might argue that an article using that label to describe them is in fact implicitly picking a side in that lawsuit.)

ViolentMonkey is open source, TamperMonkey is not.

You don't have to, but it'd be a lot cooler if you did.

"I'm not X but <position statement that clearly requires them to be X" and "I don't want to Y but <proceeds to do exactly Y>" are used by people that mistakenly believe a disclaimer provides instant absolution.

On the other hand, I've never had anybody threaten to yuck my yum in exactly those terms, and I'm slightly intrigued by the prospect.

More appropriate tools to detect AI generated text you mean?

It's not a thing. I don't think it will ever be a thing. Certainly not reliably, and never as a 100% certainty tool.

The punishment for a teacher deciding you cheated on a test or an assignment? I don't know, but I imagine it sucks. Best case, you'd probably be at risk of failing the class and potentially the grade/semester. Worst case you might get expelled for being a filthy cheater. Because an unreliable tool said so and an unreliable teacher chose to believe it.

If you're asking what's the answer teachers should know to defend against AI generated content, I'm afraid I don't have one. It's akin to giving students math homework assignments but demanding that they don't use calculators. That could have been reasonable before calculators were a thing, but not anymore and so teachers don't expect that to make sense and don't put those rules on students.

Is that even an actual lemming? Where is the green hair?

He literally just fixed it, and he learned nothing from this, Dunning-Kruger as strong as always.

There are a near infinity of those out there, many of which just grab other scanlation groups' output and slap their ads on top of it.

Mangadex is generally my happy place, but you'll have to wander out and about for various specific mangas.

Several of the groups that post on Mangadex also have their own website and you may find more stuff there.

For example right now I've landed on asurascans.com, which has a bunch of Korean and Chinese long strips, with generally good quality translations.

The usual sticky points with all those manga sites is the ability to track where you are in a series and continue where you left off when new chapters are posted.
Even Mangadex struggles with that, their "Updates" page is the closest thing they have to doing that and it's still not very good.

If you're going to stick to one site for any length of time, and you happen to be comfortable with userscripts, Id' suggest you head over to greasyfork.org, search for the manga domain you're using, and look for scripts that might improve your binging experience there.

That mirrors the tension many reddit mods struggled with recently.. It's difficult to push back against Reddit without also punishing its active users in some real way.

The folks using Reddit are still real human beings. But I get that not everybody is going to draw the line in the same spot.

No idea.

I honestly don't know. The only advice I'd have for the layman would be "just don't do this", but I understand that's little more than an invitation to be ignored.

Darn AI and its filthy mind! What will it think of next?

No True Christian would ever activate a fully automated sentry killbot that doesn't use at least one of its compute cores to pray to the Almighty on a loop.

It's weirdly difficult to remap the "office" key so that pressing it won't open an ad for ms office 365 and pressing office+L won't open linkedin.com, and a few more equally valuable core OS features.

In the end I just had to grab a small bit of C code from GitHub, compile it, move the exe to the startup folder, have Windows Defender yell at me for having obviously installed a particularly nasty brand of trojan, and make Windows Defender put the executive I had just compiled back.

But really, I deserve this for using a Microsoft natural keyboard in the first place.

The term AI was coined many decades ago to encompass a broad set of difficult problems, many of which have become less difficult over time.

There's a natural temptation to remove solved problems from the set of AI problems, so playing chess is no longer AI, diagnosing diseases through a set of expert system rules is no longer AI, processing natural language is no longer AI, and maybe training and using large models is no longer AI nowadays.

Maybe we do this because we view intelligence as a fundamentally magical property, and anything that has been fully described has necessarily lost all its magic in the process.
But that means that "AI" can never be used to label anything that actually exists, only to gesture broadly at the horizon of what might come.

Pixel 7 with a barely customized Nova Launcher, because I'm basic but I need rounded square icons.
The background looks iffy in the shot, but it's a live wallpaper from Shader Editor running Machine DNA's GLSL shader with minimal tweaks needed to make it fit on the phone.
That weird twitter icon is a Firefox PWA running twitter.com with various userscripts installed, to remove antifeatures and bad logos.

Next (2007), starring the One True God, alongside Julianne Moore and Jessica Biel.

It's a brilliant movie (loosely) based on a Philip K Dick short story. It's been nominated and won actual awards (Worst Actor and Worst Supporting Actress from the prestigious Razzie Awards, Worst Foreign Actor from the Yoga Awards), and it stands the test of time comfortably at 28% on the tomatometer.

I wish I was kidding. I've watched this over a dozen times. I can't stop. Send help.

You can either go full bonzai and aggressively trim any little branch that pokes out of place to try to keep a meticulously maintained tree at all times, or you can just let the tree grows as it will, and if a branch becomes an obvious issue, then just cut the entire branch and graft it somewhere else.

If I was a mod here, I would do the latter, maybe even setup an /c/AIAww or whatever in anticipation for what might come.
That's probably my laziness speaking.

I like it.
The site feels a lot better to me, and seems significantly gentler in terms of browser resource consumption.

I'm still occasionally browsing spezworld in read only mode and I thought I was doing okay but I just found old.lemmy.world and now it feels like I've relapsed.

There have been efforts to build reputation systems that don't rely on central servers, like early day bitcoin's Web of Trust, which allowed folks to rate other folks with public key crypto, thus ensuring an accurate and fair trust rating for participants, without the possibility of a middle-man putting their thumb on the scale.

One problem with it is that it was still perfectly practical for bad actors to accumulate good ratings, then cash out their hard-earned reputation into large scams, such as the "Bitcoin Savings & Trust" (for $40 million in that particular case), which quite possibly made it measurably worse than not having a system that induced participants into making faulty judgments in the first place.

I think the main practical value of something like reddit's karma is an indication of age and account activity, both of which can probably be measured in other, if less gamified ways.

In the desktop web site, if I click on your user id, there's a "Send Message" button on the top right area of your profile page.

I just tried sending you something with it.

No idea about clients tho.

I've been an immigrant for about 25 years now. Not sure if that counts, but I've been slacking and haven't gotten a citizenship yet, so.. probably?

I can confirm that I've up until now always been on one of the health plans my employer made available to me. It certainly made things easier that I was never out of job, and all of those jobs provided great benefits (typical white collar computer nerd stuff.)

However, I stopped working last year, and my 18 months of COBRA (a continuation of employer-provided coverage after leaving a job, except you pay yourself the premiums your employer was paying (about ~$2000/month for me)) are running out very soon, so I'm discovering the bizarro world that is US healthcare without an employer plan.

I've contacted some insurance brokers to help me find a new plan, and each one of them has tried to push weird non-ACA-compliant plans to me under false pretenses (ie. they've actively lied to me about what the plans were.)
Sometimes the awful stereotypes about a profession are awful for a reason.

Which leaves me with the ACA marketplace, where every single plan is significantly worse than anything any of my employers ever offered, both in terms of breath of network, prescription coverage, and geographical coverage. I didn't mention the famously terrible mental health insurance coverage because it was already impossible for me to get in-network care there even with my employer plan.

And then if you figure out which is the least bad plan in the 100+ sad plans offered to you, and you commit the faux-pas of googling them, you'll get a deluge of screaming victims of those plans wishing they had picked anything else because their experience was a literal nightmare.

So that's encouraging.

In specific terms, the ACA healthcare.gov site I linked above lets you put a list of doctors and medications to see which plans support them, and the answer for me is "none." None of the plans available would cover all the medical care me and my wife are getting on an ongoing basis.
So it becomes a matter of picking and choosing what I'm going to pay out of pocket.
For example, right now I pay $0 for various insulin pens, but a great number of those plans won't cover those, or cover a little bottle of insulin instead you're expected to use with disposable needles each time you'll fill yourself and inject yourself with, and hopefully not fuck it up. Out of pocket, with some "discount card" (GoodRX or whatever), a month supply of the pens would add up to roughly $800. So something that was "free" to us (if you ignore the large insurance premiums) is going to feel like quite the luxury instead.

One of the aforementioned lovable insurance brokers suggested that I create a fake company in order to be eligible for reasonable employer-sponsored plans and avoid this nonsense. Sounds great, except for the whole fraud thing and the risk of getting found out and denied at the time when I'd need it the most (which would probably also be when an insurance provider would look the closest to try to find any reasons to deny a large claim.)

And then, there's the quasi-scam that targets religious (and/or desperate) people, known as "health care sharing ministries."
They appear to be very affordable plans with great coverage, managed by "faith-based organizations."
They are not insurance, and ostensibly claim to simply "share the burden" of healthcare across all their members.
Notably, they are not actually obligated to meet any of the (low) bars set by the ACA, or to simply pay any of the insurance claims their members send them, and so sometimes they don't. Tough break.

At the end of the day, I'm still going to pick an ACA plan and just pay out of pocket whatever isn't covered. I just have to settle on a plan, which feels like picking from a set of shrunken and half torn blankets the one to use on my bed.

Anyway.. what would I change? Nothing obviously. All is for the best in the best of possible worlds.

I've been having fun writing a dumb userscript to help me cope with this.

Yes, it can put back a bird of your choosing as a logo, but why stop there.

Instead of tweeting on Twitter, I can now spez on Reddit, skeet on Bluesky, or just eXecrate on X, the Elon way.

It's ridiculous and pointless, and I'm not sorry.

since defederating from lemmy.world

Oh. I think I maybe figured out why my subscriptions to beehaw communities are still pending.

Dang it. Am I really going to have to write a thoughtful essay to get an account there? I hate writing. Thoughtfully, anyhow.

I have a small userscript/style tweak to remove all input fields from reddit, so I'm still allowing myself to browse reddit in read-only mode on desktop, with no mobile access.

It's a gentle way to wean myself off. I'm still waiting for my GDPR data dump anyway, so I need to check reddit fairly regularly to be able to grab it when/if it arrives.

I'd say, let's have everyone brainstorm the best way to go about this, and let a thousand flowers bloom!

Yes, there's an underlying taste of "oh my god look how they massacred a great idea" to it, but I've learned to swish it in my mouth and savor it by now.