palordrolap

That this happened around April Fools’ makes me think that someone forgot to instruct it not to partake in any activities associated with that date. The fact it chose The Simpsons’ address in its (feigned?) confusion is a dead giveaway (to me) that it was trying to be funny.

Or rather, imitating people being funny without any understanding of how to do that properly.

Its explanation afterwards reads like a poor imitation of someone pretending to not know that there was a joke going on.

I’m one of those people with a low tolerance for depressing reality. I’m on medication for depression and anxiety, for what good they do me. Wires and chips in the brain is a step too far.

The reason I’m in the state I’m in is that I suffered a work-stress related breakdown, but the cracks have always been there. As you might imagine I am not ready to be forced back into work which I will find unbearable. Combine that with body horror and you might be able to understand my reaction and stance to this.

I’m one of those people with a low tolerance for depressing reality. I’m on medication for depression and anxiety, for what good they do me. Wires and chips in the brain is a step too far.

The reason I’m in the state I’m in is that I suffered a work-stress related breakdown, but the cracks have always been there. As you might imagine I am not ready to be forced back into work which I will find unbearable. Combine that with body horror and you might be able to understand my reaction and stance to this.

How about cultivating a world that is less depressing before jamming wires into people’s skulls to “fix” a problem that might not originate there?

Oh no, that won’t do, the people who have low tolerance for depressing reality have to be turned into drones for the corporate machine just like everyone else. If we can turn off the emotions that derive from a sense of self-preservation, they’ll be more willing workers for the constant grind.

In before employers require that their applicants must have one of these implants. People without will not be hired.

By the 24th century we won’t be Star Trek’s Federation, we’ll be an unholy hybrid of the Ferengi and the Borg.

And yet, paradoxically, it is far more intelligent than those people who think it is intelligent.

If you’re looking for someone else famous who might actually be worth celebrating today, try Mel Brooks, born this day in 1926.

Updating databases to support anything other than that which would run on a 1970s mainframe costs the sort of money that eats into C-level’s yacht funds, so it won’t happen. These are the people who when faced with the “pick two from done right, done quick and done cheap” will never pick the first one.

Or in other words, if your name contains something outside the English alphabet’s A-Z, you’re out of luck. They’ll give you an approximation you don’t want and you’ll like it. Lower case? What’s that? You’re Irish and your surname has an apostrophe? F**k you, that’s in the bin, you’re OBRIEN now.

I was about to suggest SHXWMATHKWAYAMASAM as something that would be bound to work, but it’s 18 characters, and, being two more than a power of two, that all but guarantees that someone will truncate it at 16. Sigh.

When you’ve been around a while, you begin to notice certain trends.

This particular trend being the one where the young, bright, ethical start-up turns into the sort of monster they originally rallied against, ensh*ttifying their product and spouting all the same reasons for it.

Signal is relatively young, bright and ethical. The cynic says “for now”.

They have backups. Even if your old comments and posts stop resurrecting and permanently become invisible to the web, Reddit can do what they please with their backups, including selling them to AI companies. It stops the scrapers, sure, but then Reddit wants the scrapers to stop as well.

GDPR removal requests are worth a try, but they technically only cover personally identifying information, so you’d have to make a strong case that your comments in whole or in part could be tied back to your real self. And they could get around most of the edge cases there if they were to anonymise that information further, such as by disconnecting each of your comments from any commonality.

This is part of the reason I never bothered to delete anything over there. No point closing that stable door. Those horses are long gone.

There have been periods where one of my accounts was getting an ad-length black screen with buffering throbber (I hate that name) and, the most recent time, it was accompanied by a pop-up asking me if I’d like to find out why that was happening. Yeah. I know why that’s happening, thanks.

Then that stopped happening again. Either they gave up or UBo have worked around it somehow. Never ending arms race.

FYI: Depending on your politics, you may also want to avoid Proton.

Fair point. From what I can tell, refined tungsten is actually an order of magnitude cheaper(!) than refined silicon, but molybdenum is over two orders or magnitude more expensive. ~300USD per ton, ~2000USD per ton and ~60000USD per ton respectively.

I assume that if this got up to scale industrially, savings could be made by recycling high purity molybdenum waste, but yes, it’s not going to be cheap.

The article seems to imply that the intention is to replace silicon entirely, but agreed, there might be niches where it can replace silicon even if full replacement might be unrealistic.

A promising start, but a thousand transistors at 25 kilohertz puts it where silicon tech was 60 years ago, so they’ve a long, long way to go.

If it scales, they can use modern tech and know-how to accelerate their progress and they can get funding, maybe this will be viable in a decade or so.

Surely you jest. Gates has almost nothing to do with Microsoft these days, let alone interface design. In fact, he’d probably be the one to roast any stupid design decisions if he was still active there.

“France considers requiring Musk’s X to get users to lie about their age”

FTFY

In before this hotline is closed down or subverted.

Ah, but the clueless code monkeys, script kiddies and C-levels who are responsible for writing the AI companies’ processing code only know how to scrape from someone else’s website. They can’t even ask their (respective) company’s AI for help because it hasn’t been trained yet. (Not that Wikipedia’s content will necessarily help).

They’re not even capable of taking the ZIP file and hosting the contents on localhost to allow the scraper code they got working to operate on something it understands.

So hammer Wikipedia they must, because it’s the limit of their competence.

I feel like this is comparing (bad) apples with (bad) oranges. Yes, Reddit has always sucked, but the way in which it sucked has changed.

They got rid of the bad apples, but then they carried through with that momentum and managed to turn everything else bad in an entirely new way.

Hard to say. I feel like it’s about as likely he would have found LLMs to be an overcomplicated false prophet or false god.

This was a man whose operating system turned a PC into something not unlike an advanced Commodore 64, after all. He liked the simplicity and lack of layers the older computers provided. LLMs are literally layers upon layers of obfuscation and pseudo-neural wiring. That’s not simple or beautiful.

It might all boil down to whether the inherent randomness of an LLM could be (made to be) sufficiently influenced by a higher power or not. He often treated random number outcomes as the influence of God, and it’s hard to say how seriously he took that on any given day.