Notices by Jer Warren (nyquildotorg@fedia.social)

@tek I did get the wording from your post, but it's basically a thing I've seen other people saying non-ironically

"What good is an AI that can't answer questions about Tiananmen Square?!"
You're getting so close to understanding... Censorship aside, LLMs are not question-answering machines. They can't answer questions about anything.

My hope is that the fear of "China spying on our AI queries" and "China making AI spit out propaganda answers" would be enough to convince people that maybe treating LLMs as question-answering machines is a terrible idea all around.

I just remembered Mogwai's amazing soundtrack to the show Les Revenants (The Returned).

song.link/y/qXLltCtv_9Q

Here's the whole album, which I highly recommend.

album.link/us/i/1492211703

"I came to realize that I am no longer cut out for working at a company in the traditional sense in the tech industry. I just do not care about any company's product. There are some cool gems out there being worked on, but most of them are useless, wasteful, and wouldn't be missed if they did not exist since they are not actually needed."
I feel this so much.

WordPress is going just great.
"We’ve made the decision to reallocate resources due to the lawsuits from WP Engine. This legal action diverts significant time and energy that could otherwise be directed toward supporting WordPress’s growth and health. We remain hopeful that WP Engine will reconsider this legal attack, allowing us to refocus our efforts on contributions that benefit the broader WordPress ecosystem."
Automattic is now going to only contribute the 45 hours a week WP Engine contributes to the open source parts of WordPress, instead spending more time on commercial products.

@ajroach42 aw crap, that moiré though.

@ajroach42 I made you something

@scottjenson you can follow your BookWyrm account with this account, and then can boost it. Not ideal, but then interested people might follow the BookWyrm account too

Luigi and Diddy in the same lockup gets us ever closer to a full roster of incarcerated Mario Kart characters.

“Why on earth would you brag to your users that you've partnered with a bunch of protofascists? You want us all to leave or what?” "There is no such thing as a perfect place on the internet. But it’s possible to avoid the ones that aren’t even pretending to try to be better. The best time to leave Substack was a long time ago. The second best time is now."

I'm as outraged about the sign in Seattle promoting violence as everyone else, but I'm outraged because it should say "fewer," not "less." #WordsMatter

@xgranade I don't have good numbers, but my gut says a very large percentage of the high profile ones were exactly this.

@xgranade a non-zero number of those that "got rich" were just moving eth from one of their wallets into another one of them. No actual money ever changed hands, yet "sales" were registered.

@xgranade one of the bits of the NFT hype cycle I had to admire a little bit, despite how fucked up it was, was the early movement to paint any critique of NFT tech as being against artists getting paid. It was a master stroke of grifting. You'd try to explain to some poor sap how the thing they're involved in isn't doing any of the things they think it is, and you were the villain. Genius.

I live in fear of them figuring out an AI equivalent.

@xgranade yeah, I didn't mean it couldn't be done, just that you'd have to be going out of your way to make it worse in every single way —except you'd get to be propping up the idea of blockchains, which is essentially just crypto evangelism in disguise.

@xgranade maybe I should have said "blockchains," because the "currency" aspect of crypto that it facilitates extremely badly is really the only use case. But everyone in the world was pitching using it for all sorts of things where a regular old database would be better.

@xgranade sounds like crypto. Weird.

Do iOS devices have a built-in way to select and copy text out of anything on the screen like Pixel devices do?

On Pixel, you can drag and select text from any app when you're looking at the app switcher view, and I feel like almost nobody knows about it.

Every time I see people talk about how great the fediverse is because you're able to defederate from instances you don't like, I'm reminded of the time The Simpsons moved to a houseboat.