Stop stop I can only update my priors so fast!

Aaaah my eyes

The Great City was built on a modular grid system designed to eliminate geography.

This future doesn’t have hexagon city so I already hate it. Hexagons are the bestagons.

I don’t remember (reading it was a bit like a fever dream) but there’s a non-zero chance it has racist vibes in parts you have been warned.

But oh so quotable:

We have been treating the trees on a ten mile radius with an anti-flammatory solution for several years as well, and it is quite impossible to set them on fire.

Project Gutenberg has AI generated summaries?? How the mighty have fallen.

I was researching a bizarre old sci-fi book I once read (don’t judge; bad old sci-fi is a trip), and Gutenberg’s summary claims it was written in the 21st century. There’s actually no accurate information about this book online, as far as I can tell the earliest reference is Project Gutenberg typing it up into a text file in 2003.

Given that it’s in the public domain, no one has any idea where it came from, and it has old sci-fi vibes; I strongly suspect it was written in the 20th century*; making that misinformation. It’s also just a bad summary that, while not wrong, doesn’t really reflect the (amusingly weird) themes of the book.

Anyway someone needs to tell them that no information is leagues better than misinformation.

* maybe the '70s give or take but I’m not a professional date guesser

Oh no it’s more US politics.

So as part of the ongoing administrative coup; federal employees have been receiving stupid emails from what everyone assumes is Elon Musk (since it’s the exact same playbook as the twitter firings). But they apparently royally flubbed up NOAA’s email security in the process so the employees are getting constant spam through an unsecured broadcast address.

Sure is weird how all the people distrustful of ideologies have an ideology.

you can’t invent new pieces during the game

Yeah. That’s what my (chess) captain keeps telling me.

Well I can’t translate it but if you search for it… holy smokes are search engines amusingly bad at indexing federated content.

That random other Lemmy instance is actually doing the right thing here since it includes the right link rel canonical, so I guess Google just hasn’t caught up yet or something. I have no idea why Google chopped off the last byte of the IP address.

(Reposting from the last thread)

Days since last open source issue tracker pollution by annoying nerds: zero

My investigation tracked to you [Outlier.ai] as the source of problems - where your instructional videos are tricking people into creating those issues to - apparently train your AI.

I couldn’t locate these particular instructional videos, but from what I can gather outlier.ai farms out various “tasks” to internet gig workers as part of some sort of AI training scheme.

Bonus terribleness: one of the tasks a few months back was apparently to wear a head mounted camera “device” to record ones every waking moment

P.S. sorry for the linkedin link behind the mastodon link, but shared suffering and all that. I had to read “Uber for AI code data” so now you do too.

Days since last open source issue tracker pollution by annoying nerds: zero

My investigation tracked to you [Outlier.ai] as the source of problems - where your instructional videos are tricking people into creating those issues to - apparently train your AI.

I couldn’t locate these particular instructional videos, but from what I can gather outlier.ai farms out various “tasks” to internet gig workers as part of some sort of AI training scheme.

Bonus terribleness: one of the tasks a few months back was apparently to wear a head mounted camera “device” to record ones every waking moment.

Nights into Dreams. I’d have dreams about that game as a kid.

Yeah production of consumer writeable CDs / DVDs / BDs has basically stopped already. The end is in sight.

Also I’m not sure how much of a problem this is for newer CD drives, but older ones tend to give out sooner or later.

My Sega Saturn*'s drive still works, but I also installed a Satiator** drive emulator in case that changes.

* ^{My username is serious business after all}

** ^{Had to go with this option since it’s the only non-destructive one}

leaked

I mean is it really leaking if you can get access to the dataset without signing anything agreeing to not leak it? When I last checked you could just like look at the questions after checking a box acknowledging that they can see your email address but that’s it.

I’m the weirdo who installs blu-ray drives in all my computers. I’m also the weirdo who has multiple computers. There are currently three or four (I’ve lost count) blu-ray drives in my house.

It’s great being able to buy and own movies without dealing with the horrors of streaming. Unfortunately discs are becoming less and less popular commercially, so a lot of stuff nowadays is streaming only.

Also my car can play MP3 CDs so of course I need to be able to create those from a computer ^{disregard the fact that my car also supports USB which I neglect since it’s less retro.}

Oh yeah I meant “easy” in the sense of “maybe it can get it right from sheer chance by pattern matching training data from the interwebs”

I hope everyone is ready for the constant overlap between politics and AI / Silicon Valley; because I’m not.

Trump Admin Accused of Using AI to Draft Executive Orders (Source Bluesky Thread).

I’m not 100% sure I buy that the EOs were written by AI rather than people who simply don’t care about or don’t know the details; but it certainly looks possible. Especially that example about the Gulf of Mexico. Either way I am heartened that this is the conclusion people jump to.

Aside: I also like how much media is starting to cite bluesky (and activitypub to a lesser extent). I assume a bunch of journalists moved off of twitter or went multi-platform.

You think people would secretly submit easy questions just for the reward money, and that since the question database is so big and inscrutable no one bothered to verify one way or another? No, that could never happen.

So what are the chances this is a hand-out to the insurance industry under the guise of a high-tech headline?

In completely related news I’m strongly considering getting my affairs in order and moving anywhere in the entire world besides the united states somewhere in Europe; as it’s apparently no longer safe for trans people or C++ developers* in the US. So if anyone has any advice (or job leads) please do share.

* This is a memory safety joke

Understatement of the year:

I mean, these [concerns about teenagers having access to guns] are questions that are beyond the scope of Metro Schools but need to be addressed by the broader community

That broader community? Why that’s called the federal government.