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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 29th, 2024

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  • This would do two things. One, it would (possibly) prove that AI cannot fully replace human writers. Two (and not mutually exclusive to the previous point), it would give you an alternate-reality version of the first story, and that could be interesting.

    this is just “imagine if chatbots were actually useful” fan-fiction

    who the hell would want to actually read both the actual King story and the LLM slop version?

    at best you’d have LLM fanboys ask their chatbot to summarize the differences between the two, and stroke their neckbeards and say “hmm, isn’t that interesting”

    4 emdashes in that paragraph, btw. did you write those yourself?


  • some important context: this is the 2nd confirmed case in Florida of a disease that is widespread among deer in the rest of North America.

    if you only read the headline (which uses “zombie deer” clickbait instead of the actual name of the disease) you might come away with the mistaken impression of this being a wholly new disease (especially with the mention of Florida - there are other examples of diseases migrating north from the tropics due to climate change, but this is not one of them)

    from Wikipedia:

    The disease was first identified in 1967 in a closed herd of captive mule deer in contiguous portions of northeastern Colorado. In 1980, the disease was determined to be a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy. It was first identified in wild elk and mule deer and white-tailed deer in the early 1980s in Colorado and Wyoming, and in farmed elk in 1997. The disease did not affect Canada until 1996.

    In 2022, it had been recorded that outbreaks of CWD had shown themselves in both the United States and Canada. CWD was present in 29 states, infecting herds of moose, deer and elk in 391 different counties. Alabama (1), Arkansas (19), Colorado (27), Idaho (1), Illinois (19), Iowa (12), Kansas (49), Louisiana (1), Maryland (1), Michigan (9), Minnesota (7), Mississippi (9), Missouri (21), Montana (23), Nebraska (43), New Mexico (3), New York (1), North Carolina (1), North Dakota (7), Ohio (2), Pennsylvania (14), South Dakota (19), Tennessee (14), Texas (7), Utah (7), Virginia (10), West Virginia (5), Wisconsin (37) and Wyoming (22).



  • This is an inflammatory way of saying the guy got served papers.

    ehh…yes and no.

    they could have served the subpoena using registered mail.

    or they could have used a civilian process server.

    instead they chose to have a sheriff’s deputy do it.

    from the guy’s twitter thread:

    OpenAI went beyond just subpoenaing Encode about Elon. OpenAI could (and did!) send a subpoena to Encode’s corporate address asking about our funders or communications with Elon (which don’t exist).

    If OpenAI had stopped there, maybe you could argue it was in good faith.

    But they didn’t stop there.

    They also sent a sheriff’s deputy to my home and asked for me to turn over private texts and emails with CA legislators, college students, and former OAI employees.

    This is not normal. OpenAI used an unrelated lawsuit to intimidate advocates of a bill trying to regulate them. While the bill was still being debated.

    in context, the subpoena and the way in which it was served sure smells like an attempt at intimidation.



  • from another AP article:

    This would be the third ceasefire reached since the start of the war. The first, in November 2023, saw more than 100 hostages, mainly women and children, freed in exchange for Palestinian prisoners before it broke down. In the second, in January and February of this year, Palestinian militants released 25 Israeli hostages and the bodies of eight more in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners. Israel ended that ceasefire in March with a surprise bombardment.

    maybe I’m cynical (OK, I’m definitely cynical) but I very much doubt this ceasefire is going to last.

    there are two things in the world that Trump wants more than anything else. one is to fuck his daughter. the other is a Nobel Peace Prize.

    I suspect the timing of this agreement comes from Netanyahu trying to manufacture a justification for Trump to get the Nobel. after the prize is announced (whether Trump receives it or not) they’ll kick the genocide back into high gear again.










  • If it had the power to do so it would have killed someone

    right…the problem isn’t the chatbot, it’s the people giving the chatbot power and the ability to affect the real world.

    thought experiment: I’m paranoid about home security, so I set up a booby-trap in my front yard, such that if someone walks through a laser tripwire they get shot with a gun.

    if it shoots a UPS delivery driver, I am obviously the person culpable for that.

    now, I add a camera to the setup, and configure an “AI” to detect people dressed in UPS uniforms and avoid pulling the trigger in that case.

    but my “AI” is buggy, so a UPS driver gets shot anyway.

    if a news article about that claimed “AI attempts to kill UPS driver” it would obviously be bullshit.

    the actual problem is that I took a loaded gun and gave a computer program the ability to pull the trigger. it doesn’t really matter whether that computer program was 100 lines of Python running on a Raspberry Pi or an “AI” running on 100 GPUs in some datacenter somewhere.



  • Why TF do Kindles and the like even need to exist? I read on my iPhone while the audiobook is playing.

    if you prefer to read on your phone, by all means read on your phone.

    but making the jump from that to “e-readers should not exist” is fucking stupid.

    Do Not Disturb and self control are a thing and have never been a problem for me.

    congratulations. would you like a gold star.

    This isn’t rocket science.

    I have ADHD. regulating my attention sometimes is rocket science.

    obviously that’s not the only reason, I have neurotypical friends and family who love their e-readers, and I’m sure there are people with ADHD who prefer reading on their phones.

    remember that there are 8 billion people in the world, and not all of them have the exact same preferences as you do. that isn’t rocket science.







  • Boeing will only get to issue airworthiness certificates every other week, with the FAA handling things the other half of the time.

    uhh. what.

    I don’t claim to be an expert in aircraft manufacturing…but just as a layman, this “compromise” seems like it might actually be worse than just letting Boeing inspect everything itself?

    doing this week-on/week-off shit, like they’re divorced parents trying to make sure little Jimmy gets to soccer practice, seems like it creates huge opportunities for problems to fall through the cracks.

    if you’re one of the workers doing these safety-critical inspections, you shouldn’t have to change your process based on whether it’s an odd week or an even week. that’s absurd.


  • random totally unrelated fun fact: JD Vance’s venture capital firm is an investor in AcreTrader

    I think the article is correct that a bailout is coming, but I don’t think it will be as big as they’re saying. large in absolute terms, yes, but not necessarily that large relative to the size of the problem they’re claiming to address.

    more likely, they’ll do just enough of a bailout that state-run media outlets like Fox News can push a “Trump is helping soybean farmers who’ve been attacked by the Chinese” talking point. and meanwhile a bunch of farms will go bankrupt and be forced to sell to oligarchs and private equity ghouls.