Right now I could go create 30 sock puppet accounts to respond to this. Is that really a good thing?

Let government offer the service of “here is a way any human can certifiably identify themselves online” and let people decide what providers they want to give that info to.

If you want to use or run anonymous social media, that’s fine.

I don’t.

I know a lot of people are cranky about digital IDs, but realistically there’s no avoiding it at this point: we need real, government-backed, links-to-a-specific-human-with-a-birth-certificate unique digital IDs. Then service providers can (optionally) demand it in order to register, and can prevent you from creating multiple accounts, and can ban you from their service permanently, and can vouch for you to other services that you are indeed a Real Unique Human Being.

Never turn on remote admin. You don’t need to admin your router from outside of your house.

I mean yeah. I’m not disagreeing with any of that (except the fact that AI caused it - search engines got destroyed by SEO before AI textgen started crapflooding).

But it is what it is. The SEO spammers won. They defeated Google and Microsoft and DDG’s respective search algorithms. Traditional search got killed. The internet got worse instead of better.

In light of this miserable new reality, AI-based content synthesizers (particularly ones that can coherently point to the references for their synthesis) are the current solution to SEO spam. Maybe this is another temporary plateau that the SEO spammers will murder. And yes, it’s tragic that this energy-pig of AI is the best solution to something that used to be doable with a simple trie.

But still: there is a real problem today for which an AI-based tech provides the current best solution. In this one specific case, the AI lives up to the hype. It swallows the hellscape of noise of the internet and gives you the signal.

Bing Chat provides its sources.

Absolutely.

Bing Chat Assistant is better than Google, Bing search, or DDG today. If I search for “how do I do X in software Y” on a normal search, I get zillions of dead-link-filled MS pages, some interesting tangentially-related stackoverflow posts, and a bunch of old blogspam.

If I ask the robot, I often get “no, there’s no supported way to do that officially” which is the clear clean answer I can’t find elsewhere. Or sometimes it misunderstands the question and gives me a tangentially-related result, which is bad but is the same thing I get from Google via StackOverflow, except Bing is much more responsive to me saying “no, I didn’t mean that way, I meant this” in which case I often get either the right answer or the “no” answer, which is still good and accurate! The problem is as you iterate, the conversation accumulates cruft and becomes more erratic and hallucinatory.

But right now, with the level of SEO that has ruined all major search engines (ironically partially caused by AI), Bing Chat is the best search on the market now imho. <homer>The cause of and solution to all of life’s problems </homer>

So yeah, in terms of “things where AI has lived up to its potential”? It is winning the search war today. Everything else is something on the horizon in various distances (art, music, text generation, true general AI) but better search for information is here right now.

Except there isn’t much of a Google stealing their thunder. Bing isn’t better. DDG isn’t better.

I have a simple opinion on paywall bypassers:

If it’s possible to bypass the paywall, that means there’s already a class of unauthenticated clients you’re allowing to see it. I have no interest in complying with whatever infrastructure you use to implement this discrimination.

Implementing a true hard paywall is trivial software. The only reason bypassing is possible is because they’re trying to have their cake and eat it too by allowing (eg) search engines to see it unauthenticated.

You know those “X is now older than Y was when X came out”?

Like, in this case: “Pearl Jam Ten is now older than The White Album was when Pearl Jam Ten came out”

That happened in 2014.

Simple question that answers this for me:

Where is the centaur’s junk? That’s where the button-fly goes.

Yeah, this. For people with short commutes and in the market for a compact I strongly recommend the Prius Prime. Having a vehicle that can get to work and back without using gas at all, but also can go on long road trips without range anxiety? Perfect. And as an entry-level into the plug-in world, it’s nice that I can charge it on regular 110 instead of having to think about an upgrade to an oven-port.

So, do you have to have an account to drive a Tesla?

Oh, physical tag. I thought this was going to be about cryptographic data signing.

Like the old joke:

The “S” in IoT is for “Security”.

The secret trick here: nobody will make a new username and password - nor should they. They’ll only log in if they have a convenient login with Google/FB/MS button. Which gives Google premium position in tracking.

Give me back my vertical side-docked taskbar or STFU.

No, I don’t want to deal with Explorer Patcher.

As a software developer: MS has been 100X better to work with under Nadella. He may not know what to do with the operating system side of things, but the .NET/Azure/android/linux etc side has never been healthier.

sounds dystopian.

So does the total death of objective fact.

An end to internet anonymity isn’t great, but given the alternative I’ll take it.

I keep saying: none of this will end until we get a clean, cryptographically secure, government-backed way to ID who is sending us something, and it becomes an expectation to use it all the time for anything important. Which is why I have conspiracy theories about the conspiracy theories about government ID.

On the one hand it’s kind of disgusting, but it’s also heartening: this is a studio that had done nothing but asset flips. Their artists didn’t even know what a rig was. They were completely out of their depth.

And while the game is the most cynical thing I’ve ever seen, its creature designs are blatant mash-ups of Pokemon, and its media hype is absolutely bewildering and somewhat suspicious… but by all accounts it’s decently good fun and looks decent visually too.

So, a studio with no idea what they were doing managed to poop out a moderately good game and smash it out of the park in terms of success.

That should be heartening. That should say “maybe I can do it too” to all the hopeful indie devs out there. That should be a massive endorsement of the tooling that the industry has developed, that a completely unqualified group of guys can make a fun and successful online multiplayer action game.