Joined the Mayqueeze.

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  • 39 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • They aren’t under any obligation to provide the fruit of their labour free of charge.

    As far as I can see their subscription prices have also only gone up over the years. Why? Do you think a Mr Burns like figure is sitting behind the scenes asking Smithers to relese the hounds? Or because running the linguistic operation, the database, and a website that people all over the world look at as the de facto authority of the language and gets queried thousands of times per day just cost shitloads of money? And they no longer get enough funding another way?

    Did they ever put ads on their website? Do you run uBlock or similar plugins on your browser?




  • I used to be more judgmental about this stuff too. Having little terrorists of my own has mellowed me. I do prefer a kid watching YouTube videos on a tablet over the kid throwing a temper tantrum at the cafe. All parents need a break. And I feel like if my parents had had the opportunity to let me watch sesame street on a handheld device in the 80s at a restaurant, they would have in a heartbeat. There were for sure other grownups heavily judging my folks for allowing me to play Tetris on the Gameboy in the 90s while we waited for our food! And I still managed to get a bachelor’s degree.

    At the same time, they thought watching too much TV wouldn’t be good for you and I don’t think that has turned out the way they feared. All gamers would automatically become sociopathic killers and they didn’t. I do think “social” media has proven to be detrimental. But the internet is vaster than that BS. Most pacifying tablet use will not turn kids’ brains into a rotting mess.

    And as they get older you need to have numerous talks. The sex one, the online predator one, now the weird AI/chatbot one, the one that contextualizes pornography and other disturbing shit on the internet one. And at a certain point, maybe 16 or thereabouts, you have to let go and hope for the best. They will find all this stuff anyway. You probably did as well. I know I did. The only thing that has changed is ease of availability for most of this stuff. So that’s what we need to prepare them for and then cross our fingers.




  • Now, Melon Usk is a dick and Xwitter and Grok can go eff themselves. And at the same time: the mother has worked as a journalist, had given no consideration to which of the “personalities” of Grok to choose to let her offspring talk to in her Tesla, had neither engaged the NSFW nor the child mode settings. In her defense, she didn’t let the kid do this unattended. And of course the chatbot should not ask no one for nudes. Or genocide. Or any of the other missteps this version of so-called AI has made already.

    I’m having a real hard time to picking only one side to blame here. Even if you’re not a journalist, you must have picked up enough stuff by osmosis to know that this isn’t something you should let your kid do without prior research and a look at the settings available.


  • The only pope who probably would have had a chance to comment meaningfully on this development would have been his predecessor Francis, a Jesuit - they are the guys who desperately try to believe in the big man and the scientific method at the same time. He was relatively more at ease with modern tech. He was also old an infirm before he was recalled, which is the time when OpenAI burst onto the scene. This new guy is from a less science-minded order of Catholicism. So it isn’t that surprising that he is sceptical in public about it and we maybe didn’t hear that much about it from his predecessors.


  • I hear you. I’d still be hesitant to let school age kids learn with an LLM companion. If the grownups think they’re talking with a sentient gigabyte, I think the danger is too great to expose kids to this. Which brings me to my big picture opinion: the general public doesn’t need to have access to most of these models. We don’t need to cook polar bears alive to make 5 second video memes, slop, or disinformation. You can just read your emails. No one needs ChatGPT plan their next trip. No one should consider an LLM a substitute for a trained therapist. There are good applications in the field of accessibility, probably medical as well. The rest can stay in a digital lab until they’ve worked out how not to tell teenagers to kill themselves, not to eat rocks to help your digestion, or insert any other bullshit so-called AI headline you have read recently here. It’s not good for people, the environment, and it’s forming a dangerous bubble that will have shades of subprime mortgages 2007/8 when it bursts. The negatives outweigh the positives.






  • Yes, you must have missed it. And so it begins.

    Google is moving to make Android less open source. I’m not sure more devs following suit is going be good for them or their users. The G doesn’t give an F.

    What we need is an OS fork that gets maintained. If not that, some other workaround that fools the Google servers. Because you can bet money that nobody made from flesh and blood is going to look at this inside Google.

    Maybe devs can band together and form Middle Finger Corp. and designate one willing person as their contact to serve as registered dev for a gazillion apps. Follow the letter of the law, not the misguided spirit of it, in a manner of speaking.

    If you are sitting on a mobile OS and you were afraid to fail like Windows, maybe now is the time to give it a go?



  • This is another cut, among thousands. It’s bad because we can see the motivation behind it. Free speech only for one team.

    I don’t want to be victim-blaming when I say expecting any big US corp to protect your privacy is futile. I know they want the reach of Insta and that’s of course not a bad thing. But it’s a threat considering who runs it. Another threat is editorializing the content. Don’t put music on it, don’t opine on the shamefulness of what the jackboots are doing, just post it. It’s the best chance of this dying in the courts before the independence of the judiciary has completely gone. Constant dripping wears the stone and the MAGAs are pissing on it full force.

    Another consideration must be at this point to host or mirror your content on servers outside the US. Countries that already didn’t give an eff about the US or cooperating with its authorities. If you run your digital opposition on US-run/controlled infrastructure, you’ll be shut down soon.


  • Guys, I’m like her. I learned to trust my gut and stand on my own two feet. And I think they are mad and most of what they say ought to be ignored.

    The inch I would give them is that governments all over this planet have probably overreacted during the pandy. Which is easy to bitch about in hindsight but becomes often very easily comprehensible when you look at how decisions had to be made quickly, under pressure, never with all the information at hand, and being driven by erring on the side of caution. They may have been the stopped clock that was right twice a day on some of those pandemic restrictions. That doesn’t mean they are right about everything else. And we might need the magic castle to become the ground zero for a massive outbreak of easily avoidable diseases for more people to realize that. Aided by chem trails, I guess. JFC.

    The voices I hear tell me to look forward to hearing about the skeletons in the Ladapo closet. He might have an extramarital affair; she might be sniffing glue. Or they imprison their cleaner. A tax dodge at the very least. It’s going to be something even the angels couldn’t warn her about.


  • (We are) committed to continually improving safeguards against harmful or inappropriate uses of the platform.

    Effing funny. Turn it off then. It’s not unintended use of the platform. It’s at this point in time an uncontrollable operation.

    Meanwhile, experts behind the latest investigation are appalled at Character’s inability to ward off harmful content for underage users.

    I must point out here that the first bulwark of corrective action is the purview of parents/guardians. You can blame these effing companies for having minor-grooming chat bots, which they should not have. Not even in a testing phase. But we cannot just work this one angle. We cannot let parents et al off the hook. You have to have a least three talks now with the kids. Birds and bees, social media and online bullying/predators, and so-called AI. As bad as I feel for the parents of teenagers who took their own life: it wasn’t just the chat bot, was it.