The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.

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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: January 12th, 2024

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  • The backlash to this is going to be fun.

    In some cases it’s already happening - since the bubble forces AI-invested corporations to shove it down everywhere. Cue to Microsoft Recall, and the outrage against it.

    It has virtually no non-fraud real world applications that don’t reflect the underlying uselessness of the activity it can do.

    It is not completely useless but it’s oversold as fuck. Like selling you a bicycle with the claim that you can go to the Moon with it, plus a “trust me = be gullible, eventually bikes will reach Mars!” A bike is still useful, even if they’re building a scam around it.

    Here’s three practical examples:

    1. I use ChatGPT as a translation aid. Mostly to list potential translations for a specific word, or as conjugation/declension table. Also as a second layer of spell-proofing. I can’t use it to translate full texts without it shitting its own virtual pants - it inserts extraneous info, repeats sentences, removes key details from the text, butcher the tone, etc.
    2. I was looking for papers concerning a very specific topic, and got a huge pile (~150) of them. Too much text to read on my own. So I used the titles to pre-select a few of them into a “must check” pile, then asked Gemini to provide me three paragraphs summaries for the rest. A few of them were useful; without Gemini I’d probably have missed them.
    3. [Note: reported use.] I’ve seen programmers claiming that they do something similar to #1, with code instead. Basically asking Copilot how a function works, or to write extremely simple code (if you ask it to generate complex code it starts lying/assuming/making up non-existent libraries).

    None of those activities is underlyingly useless; but they have some common grounds - they don’t require you to trust the output of the bot at all. It’s either things that you wouldn’t use otherwise (#2) or things that you can reliably say “yup, that’s bullshit” (#1, #3).



  • It’s interesting how interconnected those points are.

    Generative A"I" drives GPU prices up. NVidia now cares more about it than about graphics. AMD feels no pressure to improve GPUs.

    Stagnant hardware means that game studios, who used to rely on “our game currently runs like shit but future hardware will handle it” and similar assumptions get wrecked. And gen A"I" hits them directly due to FOMO + corporates buying trends without understanding how the underlying tech works, so wasting talent by firing people under the hopes that A"I" can replace it.

    Large game companies are also suffering due to their investment on the mobile market. A good example of is Ishihara; sure, Nintendo simply ignored his views on phones replacing consoles, but how many game company CEOs thought the same and rolled with it?

    I’m predicting that everything will go down once it becomes common knowledge that LLMs and diffusion models are 20% actual usage, 80% bubble.



  • You know, the ban here was enlightening for me, about certain people from my social circles. Four examples:

    1. Resumed Twitter shitposting in Bluesky. Different URL. No mention of Twitter.
    2. Cheering Twitter being gone, as they were only using it due to their contacts, but felt like shit for doing it. Criticising how Moraes did it, but not the goal itself.
    3. LARPs as against fascism but screeches nonstop in Bluesky about Twitter being gone, as they think that the world revolves around their own convenience.
    4. Left microblogging altogether.

    But I digress (as this has barely anything to do with the OP). Those people like Musk are bound to “creatively reinterpret” the words: in one situation orange is yellow, in another it’s red, both, neither. Sometimes it isn’t “ackshyually” related to red or yellow, it’s “inverted blue”. And suckers fall for it. That’s what Musk is doing with fascism.




  • It’s the result of the “bombastic” mix of false dichotomy, assumptions, and social media dynamics.

    False dichotomy prevents you from noticing nuances, complexities, third sides, or gradations. Under a false dichotomy, there’s no such thing as “Alice and Bob are bad, but Alice is worse than Bob”; no, either they’re equally bad (thus both deserve to die), or one of them is good.

    In the meantime, assumptions prevent you from handling uncertainties, as the person “fills the blanks” of the missing info with whatever crap supports their conclusion. For example you don’t know if Bob kills puppies or not, but you do know that he jaywalks, right? So you assume that he kills puppies too, thus deserving death.

    I’m from the firm belief that people who consistent and egregiously engage in discourse showing both things are muppets causing harm to society, and deserve to be treated as such. (Note: “consistent and egregiously” are key words here. A brainfart or two is fine, as long as there’s at least the attempt of handling additional bits of info and/or complexity.)

    Then there are the social media dynamics. I feel like a lot of users here already addressed them really well, but to keep it short: social media gives undue exposure to idiots doing the above due to anonymity, detachment from the situation, self-reinforcing loops (“circlejerks”), so goes on.


  • My prediction is different: I think that, in the long term, banning targetted ads will have almost no impact on the viability of ad-supported services, or the amount of ads per page.

    Advertisement is an arms race; everyone needs to use the most efficient technique available, not just to increase their sales but to prevent them from decreasing - as your competitor using that technique will get the sales instead.

    But once a certain technique is banned, you aren’t the only one who can’t use it; your competitors can’t either.

    And the price of the ad slot is intrinsically tied to that. When targetted ads were introduced, advertisers became less willing to pay for non-targetted ads; decreased demand led to lower prices, and thus lower revenue to people offering those ad slots on their pages, forcing those people to offer ad slots with targetted advertisement instead. Banning targetted ads will simply revert this process, placing the market value of non-targetted ad slots back where it used to be.



  • The difference is sort of like the difference between a qualified ESL teacher and a native English speaker […]

    This example is perfect - native teachers (regardless of the language being taught) are often clueless on which parts of their languages are hard to master, because they simply take it for granted. Just like zoomers with tech - they take for granted that there’s some “app”, that you download it, without any further thought on where it’s stored or how it’s programmed or anything like that.


  • As others highlighted this is not surprising given that Gen Z uses phones a lot more than computers, and writing in one is completely different than in the other.

    [Discussion from multiple comments ITT] It’s also damn slower to write in a phone screen, simply because it’s smaller - you need a bit more precision to hit the keys, and there’s no room to use all the fingers (unlike in a physical keyboard).

    Swiping helps, but it brings up its own problems - the keyboard application needs to “guess” what you’re typing, and correcting mistakes consumes time; you need to look at the word being “guessed” instead of either the keyboard or the text being written, so your accuracy goes down (increasing the odds of wrong “guesses”); and eventually you need to tap write a few words anyway, so you’re basically required to type well two ways instead of just one to get any semblance of speed.



  • I don’t know for sure. I’ll voice a strong belief in this regard, but take it with a grain of salt.

    I think that Hexbear’s views on Russia is a specific case of a general tendency that you see all across social media (not just HB or Lemmy): to dichotomise complex matters into exactly one good side and exactly one bad side, while assuming that everyone belongs to those two bags. It should go like:

    1. NATO bad.
    2. NATO fights Russia.
    3. Criticism against Russia assumed to be NATO support.
    4. Since NATO bad, NATO supporter bad.
    5. Anyone who would otherwise criticise both NATO and Russia gets screeched at, and eventually shuts up.
    6. “Russia good” becomes part of a local consensus.

    It gets messier when you add Ukraine into the equation, or consider people conflating governments and populations, but it should give you an idea - it starts with somewhat sane premises but quickly devolves into insane lack of logic.

    It explains nicely why they’re supporting Palestine, even with the apparent contradiction: Israel is associated with USA and thus with NATO.

    IMO their dichotomy in this topic is idiotic. However it is not just from their part, and blaming specifically Hexbear for this, like some people would do, would be unjust (and a self-demonstrating example). We, people using the internet in the 20s, are collectively doing it.

    By the way, you see another example of the general phenomenon in this comment chain. Ctrl+F “elephant shit” and look at the comment I was replying to - “you either treat two types of bad as the same, or you’re defending one.”

    [Now I probably drew the ire of all sides at the same time. Frankly? I don’t give a fuck; I’m too old and grumpy to play along.]


  • This is bad on three levels. Don’t use AI:

    1. to output info, decisions or advice where nobody will check its output. Will anyone actually check if the AI is accurate at identifying why the kids aren’t learning? (No; it’s a teacherless class.)
    2. use AI where its outcome might have a strong impact on human lives. Dunno about you guys, but teens education looks kind like a big deal. /s
    3. where nobody will take responsibility for it. “I did nothing, the AI did it, not my fault”. School environment is all about that blaming someone else, now something else.

    In addition to that I dug some info on the school. By comparing this map with this one, it seems to me that the target students of the school are people from one of the poorest areas of London, the Tower Hamlets borough. “Yay”, using poor people as guinea pigs /s



  • Travelling 1600km by bus is… urgh, a bit painful. Even if you get a nice bus, where you can comfortably sleep, with plenty stops, lacking annoying loud people, you’ll probably feel glad once you hop off. Doubly true when returning home.

    If you’re still doing it: a book, a fully charged phone and/or laptop (remember earplugs!), comfy clothes makes it more bearable. Don’t assume the person next seat wants to chitchat, or can chitchat about interesting topics.

    It’s a good idea to have a water bottle and something to snack on, even if you can stop midway to buy food. My go-to snack was nutrient bars - they take almost no space, they’re discreet¹ and filling enough.

    so I assume young people and public facing employees at the bus exchanges to speak some of it…

    Don’t assume; look for that info. Preferably on a city level if possible/available, but if you can’t find it at least on country level.

    Also take in mind that plenty people don’t feel morally obligated to shift languages based on outsiders’ convenience, even if they do speak it².

    1. A big “fuck you” to the muppet on a 600km bus travel that I did, who decided to eat pork rinds while in the bus. That “CRUNCH CRUNCH CRUNCH” was aggravating.
    2. I’ve seen this two times. In two different countries. I’ve seen the opposite too, people going the extra length to help you out, so don’t take it as a general rule, just keep it in mind.