I wish their stuff didn’t get as widely marketed as it did. They seem like luxury little hardware toys and exactly like something that can stimulate me back into making more projects. But they are universally known as “those hacking things for thieves”, so even importing one can get me into hot water probably.

Nice step up, so this is the Pi Zero one if the Zero was the Pico one (try saying that three times quickly). Cool

I mean this is an extreme case. The booing warms my heart but everyone I know who is in teaching is either 100% on the Kool Aid IV drip or absolutely crashing out over what they feel is the end of organized society.

An old friend of mine was a younger, well liked middle school teacher who was very motivated to get the kids interested in actually wanting to seek out more stuff and to nurture that, since our curricula here are ancient. She quit this year. Outright. Mid fucking year. She says that in French the chatbots are even more repetitive and every student from the most inattentive to the “best” seems incapable to hand in any essay without at least running it through the slop machine for good measure.

The infinitesimally thin silver lining is that I’m not just hearing of AI fatigue online.

But the kids call it lies, they say “that’s AI” to mean that’s a hoax, they call their memes brainrot, so the self awareness is there. Then they completely fall apart on writing and researching. I was a dreadfully unfocused categorically shit student with a bad work ethic at school and even I’m offended

The post text is dripping with it but I haven’t looked at the code. A lot of my complaining about slop is how people for whom English is not a strong language over-depend on it, kind of never developing a voice over time. Instead sounding like the Burger King support bot.

I wouldn’t even know if the code was machine generated. I never tried that so I don’t recognize it if it’s not glaring.

Code is out there though so maybe someone can port it into a Thunderbird addon or something. I think this is a very cool project

“Semantic search” / “semantic indexing”. Yes. Would be a great thing to optionally have. But you don’t need to hook it up to a prompt and have it spit out natural language output.

It could be just like a standard search with search results, just with a backend that looks at more stuff based on meaning not just explicit word matching. And search engines have worked like this for years to be fair.

But I agree, the general purpose chatbots are probably helpful to get a foothold on looking something up when you don’t really know what it’s called or how to concisely describe it. The problem is that the companies that make them have every incentive to feed you their explanation too, not just point you in the right direction and have you leave their service.

Not creating and searching as far as I understand (or as far as I’m willing to allow it to in this case) but more summarizing, truncating, some but not all types of rewording (not technical parts for example).

They’re getting better at extracting information out of a closed set of data, but it’s still literally impossible to guarantee that it won’t generate a contradictory or unwanted piece of text that looks very close to the right thing, based off the training data inherent to the model.

But the “best” case is something closed ended where you know what the output is. So cleaning up a tiny piece of code, summarizing something that you provide in its entirety, translating a block of text, that’s all a good use case. Using it to distill the entire web’s information into a chatbot format? Fuck no

The entire problem is people thinking this tool that can turn text input into soup and reliably pull text back out of said soup is something it just is not.

Most of the models I’ve played with before the boom were not instruct models. So you didn’t prompt them and have them churn out slop that sounds like the answer to your question. Instead you just wrote text (story, article heading, etc) and it would continue the pattern. The results were “worse” in quality, but because we only thought to use it a specific way, it felt like a very powerful new tool.

My enthusiasm for this shit has fallen through the floor in 2022 and presently is about 18% through the earth’s outer crust

You’re absolutely right — wth indeed does that! And it also just… even mean too. You’re not just nodding along, you’re following this mystery to the end!

Remember to stay hydrated while you’re exercising those neurons too — something you can totally do in a new way by checking out SodaStream™ — or another healthy water source. But I guarantee you that the alternatives can’t be bought with the exclusive #LitaniIsOurs colorway! Water is more than just a natural necessity — it’s something you should always keep as your strategic and tactical objective.

This one is uniquely vicious and targeted, and also happened in our borders, not in a place they have carte blanche to tick off crimes one by one. This was the big news story here for the past 48 hours.

Typically when the attack is this targeted it’s on a paramilitary leader and not a regular civilian woman. This is very deliberate terrorism to also discourage journalists from going to the South and feeling safe with the typical press protection status.

They really don’t think we’re people. I wish I had anything more to say.

Right now, we don’t give a fuck about their interceptors. They are murdering normal people from the sky and are clearly preparing to finally annex the south again, permanently this time. If they run out of bombs they’ll drop barrels of oil, if they run out of oil they’ll drop barrels of concrete, if they run out of jet fuel they’ll tear their toys apart and catapult the metal into our homes. There is nothing more viscerally horrifying than feeling like your days are being counted down by something that only exists to kill you. Maybe it’s their propaganda making me feel hopeless. Maybe it’s the fact that there’s less people fighting back. Maybe it’s the way I was able to volunteer my time and money in the 2024 war to help the displaced, compared to not having the financial means to do that this time, when the war is much worse.

I wake up to obituaries of EMTs and names of towns every day and I just want it to fucking end. I haven’t lost any friends this time yet but many of my friends are grieving for someone. I swear they could have gotten a docile comprador society out of us if they weren’t hellbent on being so abjectly evil.

There’s something depressing about all the world news being about some shrapnel falling in Dubai instead of over a million people displaced, many for the second time in two years. There’s a stupid pun about Lebensraum/Lebanon and they’re precisely that right now and the best thing the tactical geniuses online (I only use Lemmy and this place is guilty too) can say is “Beard man terror scary! This is inevitable!”.

I’ve expressed this a few times already on Lemmy to little fanfare to say the least, but I use YouTube a lot. I use it a lot on my phone. I’d use it offline on planes. I want to pay for it. But I’m a yucky VPN user and I’m not even allowed to pay a blanket inflated price for it.

The algorithm is still absolutely amazing for music discovery. I already have channels I automatically yank things via YT-DLG from, but like using the service normally is nice too. I don’t see ads on my computer, but I suspect they might be feeding me extra ads on the phone to compensate. Because if this is the standard ad density for phone users it is vomitingly absurd.

Theoretically the folks you watch get paid from the fee. I don’t hate that system. I’m willing to pay, my payment is ready, I’m willing to pay 5 or 20 or however many bucks for it. But using a VPN to watch YouTube on a paid account can get your account banned. Incredible stuff. This is just about the only media subscription I can see myself using. And they’re cutting off all VPN users like that.

I’ve had to use Office a lot professionally and I have to say you do get to learn its quirks over time if you’re stubborn enough to figure out what triggers each unexpected behavior. Ironically learning LaTeX really helped me figure out what’s happening internally in Word in some of those situations, just understanding how the breaks and spaces might be stored gives you a little extra insight.

AFAIK you can do something similar to what you’re describing in outline mode but I could be completely misremembering.

All the Office suite is bloated but LibreOffice still feels a long way off.

I thought the Notepad > Wordpad > MS Word progression was pretty much perfect. A zero complication plaintext editor, something with a bit more formatting, and outright typesetting for print.

Granted I use a combination of Notepad++, Obsidian, and haphazard LaTeX venvs now so who am I to talk. I don’t represent most Windows users and especially not the Linux daily drivers. I’d like to think there’s still a lot of people in my situation.

It says a lot that none of the reasons I like Notepad++ were brought into Notepad when they changed it. A copilot button in the place where I write immediate notes and edit batch files? What could possibly be the use case? I just need it to be able to open massive text files and have a decent search UI and that’s it

I love/hate that this is a common experience. Someone did this to me too, although this was sort of a work friend taking the piss.

I have straight up backhandedly implied people senior to me who get paid 5x more than I do are throwing any possible expertise they might have out of the window. To their face. My stance on these slop extruders is well known among my colleagues.

I’ve even told people who used them in front of me, in a gentle but unflinching way, that their willingness to use them uncritically is a red flag for me and that comparing my genuine work to general machine output is something I can’t simply decide not to take as an insult. Including people who are supposed to review my work. As a professional I have to do something that exceeds the first page of Google in specificity. I do the long yards. Why is that suddenly a problem? If our work was this simple why are we getting paid to do it?

Some of these people trust me enough that they’re getting queasy about the whole AI thing after initially giving in. Yeah it’s decent at summarizing mass emails from corporate. Summarizing mass emails from corporate is not our fucking job. At least two people were paid subscribers to OpenAI’s product and no longer pay for chatbots. Proselytizing against the death of critical thinking is not a lost cause.

I have to get the fuck out of corporate.

I have a lot of 90s - aughts edutainment stuff that might be of interest to some people in my life. This might be a half decent way to preserve my old PC library for this stuff. I feel like virtual machines are pretty hit and miss and non-technical people don’t seem to enjoy messing around with them

"My method is I read an article about something, you know, and I get convinced that, oh, I gotta have this stuff,” he said. “And then I get it and then six months later I’m still taking it. I don’t remember what the article said. So, I end up with a big crate of vitamins that I’m taking, and I don’t even know why.”

I feel like this is a lot of people’s experience, we all know someone like this. I know that’s not the kind of thing the Lemmy demographic would look very kindly at, but this is a type of person. Some of them are batshit and others just had a lot of bad luck with the field of medicine.

I really feel like if this guy had a kinder worldview and wasn’t genuinely fucking bonkers he would be a much-needed voice that could speak reason to people who have lost their trust in medical science. Instead he’s this. So he isn’t that.

That quote could have come from someone who has come to a good realization about their understanding of health. Okay, you got sold a crate of vitamins big boy. Are you fixed yet?

But I really feel like the only ones who talk nicely to those people are industrial suppliers of snake oil and that just makes the world worse. Especially now that they’re at the wheel.

Demoscene, baby. People made things, shared them anonymously, and almost turned their nose at building a reputation or a brand.

The internet I fell in love with years ago is nothing like the pathetic shadow of it we live with today.

Macroblank has a fun compilation of remixed demo music, many of the original tracks are mostly known for being used in keygens. It’s called Keygen, obviously.

There was an idea tooted over on Mastodon

It’ll just be called Microsoft Copilot.

None of you are in an abusive relationship with the cruel mistress that is Windows and her accursed family and it shows.

Personally I’m excited for when they rerelease regedit as Windows Copilot, MFS as (Co)Pilot, and Purble Place as Copilot Kids Demo.

Has Z Lib just been down for a while? I think I remember using it not that long ago

I’m writing Lebanese Arabic so the vowels are all a bit off, mind you. Here is the standard Arabic and the Lebanese dialect equivalents, alongside what I would consider a relatively unambiguous non-IPA transcription.

إمّايَة = /ʔmːaːja/ (MSA) = Immaya(h) (MSA) ≈ /ʔmːeːje/ (LA) = Imméyé (LA)

خِزّانات = /xizːaːnaːt/ (MSA) = Khizzanat (MSA) ≈ /xizːeːneːt/ = Khizzénét

The ء below the ا is basically an ـِ for it, and the ز is easily confused for a ذ. Thanks for playing!

My kidneys hurt just reading this. I guess that makes sense. I knew about the mineral layer and the lead being “fine” if left alone, but it’s really hard to shake off the thought of drinking water having to run through so much surface area being a liability. Shows you how little you know about things you take for granted as just how the world works.