My man, I said nothing about the science or the validity of that comment, just that it’s wrong to call Ask MetaFilter “some Ask Yahoo knockoff”. If you want to get het up about an argument I never made, you do you.

It doesn’t matter if it was created before Ask Yahoo or if it’s older.

It does if you’re calling it a “knockoff” of a lower-quality site that was created years later, which was what I was responding to.

some Ask Yahoo knockoff…

AskMeFi predated Yahoo Answers by several years (and is several orders of magnitude better than it ever was).

Tbh, if it were possible to record dreams or reliably trigger vivid lucid dreams, that could be one of the most significant breakthroughs in the history of art, recreation, and psychology. The fact that some startup is trying to grift on the idea with IoT/gig economy bullshit doesn’t change that.

And still no Halo movie.

IMHO 2012 was the one that really broke their brains. The tea party types tried to get various firebrands on the ticket, but end up having to support Romney. Hey, at least he’s a squeaky-clean telegenic millionaire pushing the most severe conservative fiscal policies! Proceeds to get stomped by the Obama campaign so bad that Karl Rove couldn’t believe it as it was happening. THEN the establishment GOP flirts with moving to the center on immigration. The backlash against that on the right, supercharged by the mainstreaming of mobile social media (plus social justice protests and the looming Clinton campaign) was what fueled the rise of Trump.

Science location, you rube.

Yeah, it’s basically a smart photo filter for color-correction, object cut-outs, masking, etc:

https://www.pixometry.com/en/pixometry-the-new-name-for-elpical-software/elpical-claro-pixometry/

This feels more like consolidating positions in an art department post-Photoshop because you don’t need photo editors to dodge and burn physical negatives in a darkroom any more.

I do try to block ads, but tbh it’s impossible to be mad at Google for pushing them. YouTube is a modern miracle of engineering – no other platform on the planet hosts the scale of video it does, indefinitely, with instant access, for free. It is more than fair for them to recoup the massive cost. Personally, if they had a cheaper version of Premium without the music features, I’d pay for it in a heartbeat.

It’s a fine idea but feels like it’s maybe past its prime in terms of active maintenance? Like I checked out my old neighborhood in the suburbs of a large US city and the primary road through it (which the area is named after and has a very big visible welcome sign indicating that) was misspelled. I don’t have an account and didn’t care to learn how to edit it, but I did drop a note flagging the error. Then I browsed some of the other notes and noticed they were all multiple years old. Even Manhattan was littered with months- or years-old notes with only a handful of them marked resolved. Maybe they were just hard edge cases not easily fixed, but it gave the impression of a database that has not been broadly maintained for years.

I imagine it’s because of the generative AI stuff. If they’re using their servers to generate, they’re going to be responsible for what it puts out, even if it’s just responding to user prompts.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/07/12/a-wider-perspective-on-flavor

ABC cites an odd claim:

Detectives allege that Darien used his Large Language Models, such as OpenAI and Bing chat, to create the recording. The charging document claimed that Darien has a paid OpenAI account, which gives users more features than the free version.

You can’t make audio using OpenAI or Bing, just text and images. I really hope they didn’t arrest the wrong person based on a hunch and office politics.

“…a pigeon could shit on it, who knows!”

There’s an excellent chance that even some of the “authentic” discussions you see are word-for-word reposts of old posts and comments, created by bots to build up karma in order to be sold to spammers and influence peddlers down the line.

Had an entertaining time asking it to list the states Trump won with a running total, pointing out that the total was less than 270, and then soft-locking it in an endless loop of “My previous statement was incorrect. Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election” in response to literally any statement. To defeat the alt-right AI you don’t need some brilliant paradox, just basic arithmetic.

Does this have any impact on the IPO? Would they have to delay it (again)?

“You know, it’s quite a strange thing. The single most common adjective applied to Mister Rogers in this and other thread is the word ‘creepy’?”

One of my all-time favorite Internet comments. Long but worth the read.

So, for that matter, is Reddit. I have an RSS subscription to /r/all (routed through a mirror) and a sizable fraction of posts hitting the front page are word-for-word reposts of old popular content by bots. Even the top comments are recycled. It was always a problem, but the loss of good moderators and the shutdown of projects like BotDefense due to the API fiasco has caused it to absolutely skyrocket.

As shitty as American politics can be, we should be very thankful that overt violence against political candidates, journalists, volunteers, etc. has not (yet) been normalized. I can’t imagine being involved with Mexican politics, especially anti-drug/anti-corruption reform, with the threat of cartel retaliation hanging over you and your family. Strong respect to those who tough it out.