🎵 It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine. 🎵 (Seriously, if I had a nickel for every time someone said or implied that . . .)

I’ve never understood the whole “fear of missing out” thing, probably because I’ve spent my entire life “missing out” by most people’s standards and am aware that it isn’t the end of the world.

If it won’t wait by the conveyor belt to collect your checked luggage, there’s still a boring, repetitive task it doesn’t cover.

My guess is that they’re surfacing something from Bing rather than doing this themselves. Still Not Good, though.

Provided you’re paying them, I can’t see why you would need to feel uncomfortable. Many of them would probably be overjoyed to collect some cash doing something they like doing anyway—seniors whose income was just enough pre-COVID are really struggling now.

Unfortunately, no one’s yet succeeded in making a workable checker (AI-written text and the writing of English-as-foreign-language speakers are awkwardly similar along many axes, apparently, so existing checkers have a lot of false positives).

While a nicely-bound blank book with heavy paper isn’t worth $500, it isn’t entirely worthless, either. To really rip buyers off, it has to be an ebook or print-on-demand. As has already been demonstrated.

Probably riffing on the fact that the Pi people hired (some time ago) an ex-cop who had used their devices in surveillance.

I believe there’s an act covering presidential disability, dating from long before Reagan, due to a president’s wife having effectively run the country for a couple of years while her husband was too ill to get out of bed. That would probably cover obvious and serious dementia as well. (Not my country, though, so I may have it wrong.) Problem with the recent Republican presidents is that their insanity is plausibly deniable, if your worldview is damaged enough already.

Pale Moon still supports XUL, if you want to play with it.

Sounds like that shop may have gone out of business for a reason.

I don’t know. Every time I think that there’s some level to which no sane human being would stoop, this guy manages to surprise me. And not in a good way.

Sorry to break it to you, but it doesn’t “know” anything except what text is most likely to come after the text you just typed. It’s an autocomplete. A very sophisticated one, granted, but it has no notion of “fact” and no real understanding of the content of what it’s saying.

Saying that it knows what it’s spouting back to you is exactly what I warned against up above: anthropomorphization. People did this with ELIZA too, and it’s even more dangerous now than it was then.

One could equally claim that the toaster was ahead, because it does something useful in the physical world. Hmm. Is a robot dog more alive than a Tamagotchi?

Let’s be clear on where the responsibility belongs, here. LLMs are neither alive nor sapient. They themselves have no more “rights” than a toaster. The question is whether the humans training the AIs have the right to feed them such-and-such data.

The real problem is the way these systems are being anthropomorphized. Keep your attention firmly on the man behind the curtain.

Myspace is very much still there.

Even if the article’s title were literally true, 70% of . . . what, hundreds of millions of users? A billion plus? Regardless, that isn’t rock bottom, that’s “balanced awkwardly on the edge of the roof of that ridiculously tall building in Dubai after parachuting out of an aircraft”. There’s still a lot of “down” to cover.

Bit too much of a moving target, I think—you’d have to adjust the list for the currently running popular shows and their major characters, every three months for the rest of eternity. And even if you did that, some posts consisting only of an image, meme, or video wouldn’t get blocked.

What I’d like to do is block all meme posts in communities that aren’t specifically about memes or humour. Maybe when hell freezes over.

That . . . really looks like a game of DNS chicken. In Cloudflare’s place, I’d just shrug, provide garbage EDNS data that meets the technical requirements (probably pointing at archive.is’s own location), and move on, but they’re apparently too wrapped up in their principles to blink first.

From the point of view of anyone not working in (or at least interested in) the AI field, “AI” means the same thing as “artificial general intelligence”. Much like “theory” means something different to the average person than it does to a scientist.