Yep. It sends me to fsf.org. If the link goes here or anywhere else and such things bother you, fix your “referer” settings.

“Judge not convinced by flimsy excuse” doesn’t really strike me as worthy of the Onion.

I’m shocked! — shocked to find that LLMs aren’t superhuman intelligences that will soon enslave us all. Other things they’re not good at:

• Summarizing news articles. Instead of an actual summary they’ll shorten the text by just leaving things out, without any understanding of which parts are important.
• Answering questions about anything controversial. Based on subtle hints in the wording of your question they’ll reflect your own biases back at you.
• Answering questions about well-known facts. Seemingly at random when your question isn’t phrased exactly the right way they’ll start hallucinating and make up plausible bullshit in place of actual answers.
• Writing a letter. They’ll use the wrong tone, use language that is bland and generic to a degree that makes it almost offensive, and if you care about quality the whole thing will need so much re-writing that it’s quicker to do it yourself from the start.
• Telling jokes. They don’t really get humour. Their jokes tend to have things that superficially look as if they should be punchlines but aren’t funny at all.
• Writing computer code. Correcting their mistakes is even more laborious in computer languages. Most of the time they’re almost as bad at it as they are at playing chess.

Still they are amazingly clever in some ways and pretty good for coming up with random ideas when you’ve got writer’s block or something.

Well that’s an interesting development, which people seem to have begun experimenting with in the past few weeks. Of course for the time being I suppose it’s made somewhat easier for the relays by 99% of the users being hosted on the small collection of official bsky.network PDS servers.

Some more discussion of it in which there may be hints as to how atproto people might slowly progress towards reinventing some of the things we take for granted on the fediverse.

If they don’t crawl the entire network then most of the network cannot contact them at all? Which makes it … not really a network. That’s where federation would come in.

Really? I thought there were only two. How are the small ones able to afford the bandwidth to monitor everything from every PDS?

Right… it did take me a minute to remember how the relays work. Well, when there are a few hundred of them we’ll see how it goes.

Hmm, let’s see if I remember the terminology correctly:

Client apps have nothing to do with it, obviously.

Alternate appviews have nothing to do with it, except in that they’d presumably need to work with whatever form of atproto federation exists, if any did.

Alternate relays aren’t federated unless there’s some protocol for routing messages between them — such as ActivityPub.

That’s the benefit of Bluesky being totally centralized, not built with any capability for federation: When they decide to add some, they can hardly fail to see that it’s best to go with ActivityPub.

The time when it would’ve seemed to everyone an unacceptable intrusion to make routine demands that travellers show their ID anywhere other than at international borders is still within living memory.

We have Mod Organizer for that. Giant game retailers that want exclusive deals to distribute the hottest mods in order to force more people to sign up for accounts on their service can fuck right off. I’d be less inclined to complain if GOG Galaxy had a linux version.

Wait… do you guys not have a favourite rock?

Sure that would be technically more correct, more tasteful, and less confusing. But some people may not know the words “port” and “starboard.” Frequent train users would become accustomed to it soon enough but you’ll always have some people from out of town whose first language is not English, and their limited vocabulary is more likely to include “left” and “right.” On a utilitarian basis we must weigh their needs in the equation when considering this problem. Then again there are also some people who can’t tell left from right either. We could paint one side of the train green and the other red, but then we might have a problem with the colourblind train users’ lobby. What’s really needed is 15 million dollars and a six-month user experience design study to decide on the best approach.

There are lots of new Skyrim mods since the last time you played it. Even if that was only last week.

I’m mean sure they’ll still kill a few people along the way, but they’re not going to contribute as much to the downfall of all civilization as they might if they weren’t constantly revealing their utter mindlessness. Even as it is smart people can be fooled, at least temporarily, into thinking that LLMs understand things and are reliable partners in life.

This slightly diminishes my fears about the dangers of AI. If they’re obviously wrong a lot of the time, in the long run they’ll do less damage than they could by being subtly wrong and slightly biased most of the time.

Addicted to coffee? Try just a pinch of meth instead, you’ll feel better than ever in no time.

Eating only carbohydrates is low carb? I don’t get it.

Alexander von Humboldt would disagree

Is it a big spoiler, or did you mean to say “protagonist” instead of antagonist?