I guess we should buy more Blu-rays. But I don’t have a good space to library all of them… wait a sec… I have an idea…

AI has a lot more surface knowledge about a lot more things than my parents ever did. I think one of the more insidious things about AI though, is that will a human you can generally tell when they are out of their depth. They grasp for words. Their speech cadence is more hesitant. Their hesitation is palpable. (I think palpable might be considered slop these days, but fuck haters it’s how I write — emdashes and all.)

AI never gives you that hint. It’s like an autistic encyclopedia. “You want to know about the sun? I read just the book. Turns out there’s a god who pulls it across the sky every day.” And then it proceeds to gaslight you when you ask probing questions.

(It has gotten better about this due to the advanced meta prompting behind the scenes and other improvements, but the guardrails are leaky.)

Amidala: Because they’ll gain super powers right? Right?

Anakin: smiles

You cannot simply sprint into Mordor.

Looks like a broken link.

I rode in a Tesla last week. Some of the tech is better than what I’ve experienced in other vehicles. To be fair, a lot of the controls are way worse and key functions are buried in screens and menus that are difficult to find.

I’ll never own a Tesla, but I do hope the always on wireframe view of everything around you comes to other vehicles. It’s way easier to see pedestrians and cross traffic in a parking spot on that screen than it is the 360 camera view on our new Traverse which is only available in reverse and for a few seconds after shifting to forward.

The trick is to log all your activities separately. One 8-hour session can net you 8 hours of wank, 8 of nipple play, and 8 of anal play. I learned that trick from a consultant in '98, but he just did it with customer hours.

My streak has been going since 1984.

users are presented with a clear choice between two paths

There is a third path. Just stop being a user. Maybe that choice isn’t clear enough. Push notifications are fucking evil. I removed the app and use FB as a PWA about once every six months. I might use it more if it had content from my friends or anyone I gave a fuck about, but instead it’s all promotions and suggestions.

Without the little red number creating FOMO on my phone, I have no impulse to check it. Yet I check Lemmy several times a day. I check Bluesky every couple of days. Because every time I open them, someone I want to hear from is posting something I want to see. You should try that, Zuck.

Not sure I like that this headline / research seems to frame the issue as a PR problem. I don’t want to be filled with a bunch of AI slop to try to convince me that AI is not a threat to my job. I think overall I have a pretty balanced view of AI — though how many of us realize when we are unhinged — but I think it’ll eventually settle into a tool which increases efficiency, slightly reduces jobs in certain sectors just like the farm combine did, and not a lot will change overall.

The thing negatively influencing my faith in democracy is so many of the people of the world voting for right-wing and autocratic parties. I feel like democracy has failed us in that respect. On the other hand I don’t know of a better solution. AI isn’t really involved there.

I wonder if there isn’t a more fundamental connection between people who observe the direction of the world and those who see that corporations are falling over themselves to eliminate workers and are deeply worried that they just might succeed to the detriment of all.

Deleted it. My wife then naturally sent me a DM of a thing asking if I could build it cheaper. Reinstalled to see the video, then deleted again.

There are a lot of content creators there I enjoyed but c’est la vie.

Do commenters know they can copy text instead of break web accessibility?

Broken as intended on the Ring website. Couldn’t copy/paste text. Would’ve forced the issue were I on desktop at the time.

As far as I can tell it’s still voluntary. This is their policy. It sounds like if you choose to share photos or video with public safety organizations, that now Flock and hence ICE can access it.

That all said, fuck Flock and I certainly don’t want anything I share (which I never have) to contribute to the profits of a private surveillance company. The solution here appears to be share nothing with public safety at all ever so that contract is worth nothing.

Us. Like always.

Lemmy doesn’t have an algorithm that feeds me just the things I want to see. I have to shape it. I have to block people and subscribe to boards. And I have largely deterministic control over what I see.

But look at Facebook. Look at Twitter. Look at YouTube. Look at … gestures at everything. It’s obvious that personalized services manipulate people to their detriment. They make people hate one another. They make people hate themselves.

But that’s not even my personal objection, really I’m an AI enthusiast. I’ll have entire conversations just to see how it will react. I’ve jailbroken them. I’ve run identical scenarios over and over for countless hours just to tweak prompts to be slightly better. And I want a blank slate when I talk to AI. I want to tell it exactly what it needs to know about me to answer a given question, and no more.

Because as we can see, an algorithm that really understands what we want to see and tweaks every single response to match — is manipulating us. And I don’t want to be manipulated. I want my thoughts, such as they are, to be my own.

I do appreciate

I don’t want

I can’t prove you wrong. If you are happy with a machine picking what you get exposed to, then you’ll do that and be happy. But I know how thoughts can be manipulated, and I know I’m not immune, so yeah, I don’t want AI that I don’t strictly control the context of. I don’t want my thoughts shaped by how the AI believes someone like me could most effectively be steered in a desired direction. Because I look around me and I know it can. If not to me then to thousands of others

But you do you. I wouldn’t presume to tell anyone my opinion is the only correct one.

I can see that, but also if I don’t own the AI, then knowledge it has about me could be used to manipulate me maybe in ways too subtle for me to notice.

Mates, I’m positively effusive about AI compared to your average Lemmster. But I can’t for the life of me figure out why I would want personalized AI any more than I want personalized ads. Which is zero — that’s the amount of corporate-personalized shit I want in my life.

Looks like a planned exit. The private investors behind Threema (Afinum) say they have a 5-7 year investment window after which they sell to lock in profits on their investment. This acquisition would be consistent with that time frame.

Grain of salt: I’ve never heard of any of these companies and just did some quick research because I was curious.

“Why is [free tool] popular for [thing tool does]?”

Fuck, it’s a mystery to me. Better go read some blogvertising to find out.

I don’t even know. Maybe this is a good blog that should be titled Here is a list of good open source load testing tools, but I’m not clicking to find out.

I’m on Matrix. That felt like an epic accomplishment that required both mobile and desktop. I don’t remember why it was so difficult, but the registration/login/association process was awful. Maybe that’s just Matrix.org.

Looking for things to do with my Pi that I’m upgrading today with an SSD. Maybe I’ll run my own Matrix server on it so that there can be something else technically running with no traffic.