Notices by Vincent :coffeecup: (vincent@mastodon.coffee)

We just concluded a primary election here in California. It seemed to be a bigger deal outside of California than in. Lots of folks online (and not in CA) were getting heated about the governor primary, and here in the state, it was a pretty boring election.

@unlambda Google translate uses LLMs and has for quite a while. At the inception, "AI" as a term wasn't sexy or vogue.

They've been improving for the same reason that other LLMs are improving. The algorithms are getting better, the hardware is faster, and there are more data to train on. I don't know if they've switched to Generative AI, but there's no need to as that would likely make the translations worse.

Translation LLMs are the only "AI" I find useful, too.

@jonasgeiler @404mediaco You can tell he once got rejected sexually by an actual musician.

@skinnylatte I found them on the map! Next time I'm in Monterey, will check out!

@skinnylatte @fuzzykb Shall we all meet there in the new year?

@skinnylatte As a fun prank, my MIL gave my daughter coins frozen in a brick of ice when she asked for cold hard cash.

@aral Of course! Have you seen the chart of F° C° and K?

@alci I'd be fine if the US moved to the metric system, but I would miss the intuition of Fahrenheit's degrees. 0 COLD. 100 HOT. I would not miss misspelling Fahrenheit every goddamn time.

@GreatBigTable @cstross I would say "Anti Pope Dot Org Forward Slash Charlie"

I'm so sick of the web not working. I have to use uBlockOrigin and uBlacklist and pihole and a custom host file to make the web barely usable.

And when I do that, some websites break and I have to figure out if it broke at the DNS, the ad blocker, or the tracking blocker.

And when it breaks for my WFH spouse, I get panicky, because is it Windows, or pihole, or Firefox being shitty?

The web used to work. I'm not misremembering that. I want that again. Not whatever shit this is.

@potpie @RickiTarr @USelaine Evan Hurst cites it as a meme. It hits close to home for me, too.

https://evanhurst.substack.com/p/tim-walz-is-the-man-whiny-maga-guys

@binarydigit To be fair (which CrowdStrike doesn't deserve), they pushed it out Thursday night TX time, which is Friday morning in about half the world.

@emilygorcenski
All replies view: Yeah, feel like that should be addressed.

Click link to toot: Weirdly won't work in browser, but works exactly as intended in phone Apps.

Posts from followers: Have you checked out lists? That addresses that for me.

All legit criticism. Thanks for letting me know. Have a great day!

@emilygorcenski
I get this 😠

I have spam email accounts. Maybe I'll sign up with that. It didn't let me sign up with a subaddress like <email>+medium\@gmail.

@emilygorcenski Is there a way to read it w/o signing up for medium?

@emilygorcenski IIRC the law happened to him. That stunt was a legal no-no.

I could live a thousand lifetimes, and I'd still never come close to distilling my moral philosophy so succinctly as @emilygorcenski did:

> Effective altruism, longtermism, techno-optimism, fascism, neoreactionaryism, etc are all just variations on a savior mythology.
...
> We shouldn’t be surprised that they’ve simply reinvented Revelations. Silicon Valley hasn’t produced a truly new idea in decades.

https://emilygorcenski.com/post/making-god/

@ygalanter @Popehat @mmasnick @mattblaze

Lots of talk about people moving to BlueSky. What is its advantages over the Fediverse?

@thomasfuchs I hope that DC is tired of bailouts for banks.

If my rep Ro Khanna comes out in favor of bailing SVB out, I'm gonna scream.

I don't have any deep insight into ChatGPT. I used to work at an AI (i.e Machine Learning) company, but not on the math side.

What I learned is that all ML is derivative. It only knows what you teach it, and nothing else. So the ChatGPT and Midjourney products aren't that interesting to me. They are obvious simulacra.

I know the tech is garbage since my gauge, a former co-worker, is gushing about ChatGPT on LI. He is wrong about everything, with the prognostication powers of a dead fish.