Gregory's Server
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@plexus I "sort of" disagree. LLMs are a search tool, much in the same way dictionaries and thesauruses are. While these two tools have rigor applied to their construction, there is always a layer of subjectivity that is attributed to the human being(s) that compiled them. When all that is taken into account, they can still be used to augment a process that is creative and authentic.So - I only "sort of" disagree because your critique nails all the ways this critical concept is most often lost. “Let me Google it for you” was a bad reply back in the days; these days telling somebody “to google something” is insulting because we all know how aggravating it is to spend time and energy against privacy invasions and sifting through the AI slop and the grifters. Life is short and there’s no time for this. Some days Internet search feels like we’re at the capitalist optimum where everything is as painful as possible but not prohibitive. Can’t live without it (to find those link farms, advice sites, public archives) but also can’t find the private websites and blogs. Hi, if you want to “save children”, instead of performative bullshit how about you ban guns, make paid parental leave mandatory, have single-payer healthcare for everyone, provide free daycare and kindergarten, ban corporal punishment at schools, make higher education free and make food free at schools. Temperature changes for Zürich based on https://showyourstripes.info/ You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction.
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@AuthorJMac it's being pushed where it doesn't belong and it's all because of capitalism @AuthorJMac I don't actually think that this particular thing was anyone's fault really. It just happened to empirically turn out that it's easier to train AI to make superficially passable prose or an illustration than it is to build a robot that can (cheaply) fold laundry. Like, people are developing these kinds of robots that you ask for. But doing laundry is a lot harder than writing computer code is for example. So I have a mechanical keyboard and I have a maintenance question: I'm noticing that some keys on the left hand side have started to develop a slight tendency to rreeepeat or – in the case of the control key – to not activate. What's the recommended procedure, now? Pull off all the keycaps, pull out all the switches (?), use the vacuum cleaner to suck up hair, dust and whatever else lives down there, then reassemble? No lubricant required? Can the switches stay in there? Solstice is at 20:50 UTC and today in the northern hemisphere is the longest day of the year before we start the long slow slide to winter. It also marks the start of summer. Happy #solstice everyone! @X31Andy The summer solstice always makes me sad. From now on days get less wonderful every day, for the rest of the year. 😢 @acdw just told me on IRC that the belief, that the US at one point considered to make German an official language was apocryphal.
Recommended read: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/ Moneyquote (one among many): This isn't a recipe for disaster, it's a cookbook for someone looking to prepare a twelve course fucking catastrophe. A nice subthread on why quotes might be a good thing, actually. If only I could … quote boost it! :angry_laugh: I used to be in the other camp, thinking that quote boosts facilitated pile-ons. But in the intervening years I've seen a few pile-ons and I guess pilers are gona pile on. It's the people that are more important. Needless to say, using automated bias machines should be outlawed. We don't want it from people, and we certainly don't want to from more people, at a faster rate, mediated by machines, with no warnings and no recourse. Ugh. Why is this even something that needs to be said. Sometimes I think I’m just stuck in my old music tastes. I don’t listen to the radio anymore – not even my old-time favourite Sounds! on Swiss Radio. I don’t talk to friends and acquaintances about music. The starting points are so different. Or unknown. It feels like a very intimate question. So here I am, listening to Tricky’s Maxinquaye. You? Also drinking coffee, for science. I had heard that when making Mokka coffee, the last part is actually not so good. So I’ve poured the first half into a cup and the second half into a different cup. Since I’m an animal I added sugar and cream. And there is a difference! The first cup has more acidity and fruity flavour. The second cup is more bitter. I will have to repeat this experiment. ☕️☕️
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  It depends on who you ask, whom the problem hurts the most, and whether an *effective* non-technical "solution" has any chance of being found and *implemented*. E.g., multiple harassment problems here have been solved for me by using the mute and block features of Mastodon. Requiring me to consider this "not a solution" until the Fediverse, society or whoever has *effectively* dealt with it would have persisted the problem indefinitely, for me. A gentle reminder that the Pentagon has been a villain in the very recent past and not just the distant past: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covid-propaganda/ Bluesky has reply-gating (you can set who can reply to a post, like people you follow or a given list or no one) and is now testing out post-publication reply locking. I just want to yell for a second about how humane and consent-forward these features are, especially after seeing some people here losing their minds when someone asked for gating recently because they felt (alas, not a paraphrase) entitled to always be able to respond.
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 @kissane The problem with reply gating is that it encourages bullying or even unfair comments that can’t be challenged. It’s different from blocking because at least with blocking you can’t see the comments. So personally, I find reply gating problematic. It encourages poor behaviour such as personal attacks and also allows people to live in enclosed niches where directed hatred can fester. @kissane On a semi-related note, what's your take on social media companies basically omitting a 'dislike' button on posts? YouTube removed theirs awhile ago to the benefit of corporations more than anything. Is it healthy for the users of a platform to be presented this ideal wonderland where any 'negative' thought is discouraged? @kissane Agree. Last year European Parliament and national parliaments rejected the “EU child porn scanner” that was set to be installed on every phone. Apparently this week we’re going to ignore all that parliamentary action and mandate such a scanner once more. Here’s what I wrote earlier on how this super scary thing would work in practice: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/client-side-scanning-dutch-parliament/ I have made a web tool that can import Mastodon lists into a different instance. Hopefully this will be added into the actual app, but it was faster to make an external tool. https://www.eliotlash.com/masto-list-importer/ A #CommandLine tool is also available if you click through to the GitHub Page. #MastoDev #MastoMeta #MastoMigration #MastodonMigration #OpenSource  @kerim @vruz @jakehamilton @tmccormick @jschmittwdc @is_googling @neet FYI, since you expressed interest in my list importer tool in the past, I wanted to let you know I have released a rudimentary web UI that should be much easier for non-technical people to use. If anyone uses it I'd love to hear how it goes. |
@HunkThunderzone and frankly, some people are so rude that it’s pretty obvious interaction is pointless.
@HunkThunderzone It’s time to bring back the *rest* of the First Amendment, Freedom of Association!
@HunkThunderzone I've been a major fan of blocking functionality since 1980s BBSs. At that time, my question was "Why should I have to deal with this guy just because he owns a modem?"