In some states, you can’t vote by mail except under specific circumstances, such as being a senior citizen or swearing that you’ll be out of state entirely on election day.

I’ve been able to nix so many intrusive web elements with the ublock picker tool, often without leaving a trace due to modern web design practices. The YouTube shorts shelf is one such case, and it’s shocking how well it worked!

Removing the homepage entirely, replacing the entire UI with the shorts-style format of “view video right now, tap button to see next/previous video”. If you want a specific video, you must search for it.

People developing local models generally have to know what they’re doing on some level, and I’d hope they understand what their model is and isn’t appropriate for by the time they have it up and running.

Don’t get me wrong, I think LLMs can be useful in some scenarios, and can be a worthwhile jumping off point for someone who doesn’t know where to start. My concern is with the cultural issues and expectations/hype surrounding “AI”. With how the tech is marketed, it’s pretty clear that the end goal is for someone to use the product as a virtual assistant endpoint for as much information (and interaction) as it’s possible to shoehorn through.

Addendum: local models can help with this issue, as they’re on one’s own hardware, but still need to be deployed and used with reasonable expectations: that it is a fallible aggregation tool, not to be taken as an authority in any way, shape, or form.

On the whole, maybe LLMs do make these subjects more accessible in a way that’s a net-positive, but there are a lot of monied interests that make positive, transparent design choices unlikely. The companies that create and tweak these generalized models want to make a return in the long run. Consequently, they have deliberately made their products speak in authoritative, neutral tones to make them seem more correct, unbiased and trustworthy to people.

The problem is that LLMs ‘hallucinate’ details as an unavoidable consequence of their design. People can tell untruths as well, but if a person lies or misspeaks about a scientific study, they can be called out on it. An LLM cannot be held accountable in the same way, as it’s essentially a complex statistical prediction algorithm. Non-savvy users can easily be fed misinfo straight from the tap, and bad actors can easily generate correct-sounding misinformation to deliberately try and sway others.

ChatGPT completely fabricating authors, titles, and even (fake) links to studies is a known problem. Far too often, unsuspecting users take its output at face value and believe it to be correct because it sounds correct. This is bad, and part of the issue is marketing these models as though they’re intelligent. They’re very good at generating plausible responses, but this should never be construed as them being good at generating correct ones.

I always found the idea of stable Boltzmann brains fascinating. The idea that on an infinite enough universe, there must exist self-sustaining minds that function on an entirely circumstantial set of rules and logic based on whatever the quantum soup spit up.

It’s also hard to argue while also claiming your god is moral, which is why creationists usually scapegoat the task of planting fossils to Satan.

I always found it funny how they’ll sometimes try to justify their claims scientifically to give it an air of legitimacy. If god created the stars close to one another and expanded them to fill the sky over a single day, the skies would be dark for billions of years. A YEC could easily say “oh well god put the light there to make the stars look like they’ve been in the sky for a long time” but very often they just don’t have an answer because they didn’t think of one. Unfortunately, there’s almost that will stop them from doubling down on their beliefs and just becoming more prepared for the next person they talk to

90 days to cycle private tokens/keys?

Without scarcity, artificial or not, the ruling class loses their grip on power. Capital will manufacture scarcity to whatever degree it is capable of, because without it there’s even less justification for owners to exist at the top of this neat little hierarchy they desperately cling to. They need to have their gated fortresses and their toys, cleanly separated from the rest of us undesirables.

They’ll use AI to bolster the security of their bunkers while drying up the rivers to run them. The whole while, they’ll blame any economic decline on the claim that “nobody wants to work anymore” after having automated all the jobs and offering no replacements.

I’d like to believe an alternative is possible. Perhaps we can come together and push for a better future, but that doesn’t seem to be the way things are going currently.

I’ve heard there are hyper-reflective stickers you can put on/near the plate that basically blind a traffic camera’s view when trying to read it

Advertising is like the Kudzu vine: neat and potentially useful if maintained responsibly, but beyond capable of growing out of control and strangling the very landscape if you don’t constantly keep it in check. I think, for instance, that a podcast or over-the-air show running an ad-read with an affiliate link is fine for the most part, as long as it’s relatively unobtrusive and doesn’t put limitations on what the content would otherwise go over.

The problem is that there needs to be a reset of advertiser expectations. Right now, they expect the return on investment that comes from hyper-specific and invasive data, and I don’t think you can get that same level of effectiveness without it. The current advertising model is entrenched, and the parasitic roots have eroded the foundation. Those roots will always be parasitic because that’s the nature of advertising, and the profit motive in general when unchecked.

“Oops, I can’t immediately find the tools I need. Guess I need to be the badass hero of the day and MacGyver this surgery. In a hospital.”

I think the joke is that one would expect premarital sex to be between partners in a relationship, but technically any sex between two unmarried persons fits the definition? It’s extremely forced, to say the least

Years back, I had that happen on PayPal of all websites. Their account creation and reset pages silently and automatically truncated my password to 16 chars or something before hashing, but the actual login page didn’t, so the password didn’t work at all unless I backspaced it to the character limit. I forgot how I even found that out but it was a very frustrating few hours.

I know this might not be the most convenient solution, but learning to resolder mouse switches means you can just replace the faulty components (and maybe the sliders too) and just keep using the hardware that works for you. As long as you don’t have a mouse with that awful rubber that de-vulcanizes after about 3 years, and don’t mind the visual wear from your hand on the shell over time, you’ll easily 10x the life of most products manufactured with planned obsolescence. Logitech almost always cheaps out on the switches for their gaming mice, unfortunately. After replacing the switches on my g pro wireless when they started double-clicking after 2 years (almost exactly), it’s been smooth sailing ever since.

ifixit almost always has comprehensive teardown and rebuild instructions for popular peripherals. Bonus points is that whenever you take apart something to do a repair, you can clean out all the hard to reach places that collect random dust and debris. Can be kind of gross but is also pretty satisfying. Additional bonus points for being more sustainable with your consumer habits and minimizing e-waste in landfills!

If you’ve got a mechanical keyboard, you can do the same but it’s generally a lot more tedious since most have the switches soldered on, and LEDs double the amount of joints you have to deal with. I recently did just the WASD and a few other high-traffic keys on my board after one one of them failed, and it was a several hour process

Complete side note, I saw your pfp and checked your profile to confirm my suspicions. Thank you for your work on OpenRGB! It’s been a great tool for managing the LEDs on my computer.

Life is suffering. Once you accept that fact wholly, you may ascend

True 😔

We should try and convince them that the Luxor in Las Vegas was actually built by an ancient civilization, but was hollowed out by the CIA in 1945 in order to hide its historical significance. To keep anyone from being able to see it before it was opened to the public, it was hidden from view via sophisticated curtains.

Does it make sense? No. We can just say they’re trying to cover up history.

At least they admit that it doesn’t make sense