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Hurricane Helene and the ‘Fuck It’ Era of AI-Generated Slop
  • One of the points the article makes is that people boost such content despite knowing it’s fake because it confirms what they’re ’feeling’. Want to feel outrage? Here’s an image that will let you and others feel that. Truth? Irrelevant.

    In short: it’s the ‘facts don’t care about your feelings’ crowd doing what they do best: recasting reality as a jumble of vague feelings.

  • ChatGPT teddy bear?
  • Pastes 300k tokens worth of scp and creepy pasta lore into the prompt

    “Sweet dreams, Timmy”

  • me_irl
  • Just a few more years until we’ve fully migrated to SAP’s WiFu system

  • Mozilla is a sinking ship.
  • Vivaldi is chrom_ium_. Been trying out the last month on macOS. Great browser, although it’s funny how for some settings you get taken to a different page that looks 100% like Chrome except with Vivaldi branding.

    Vivaldi on iOS doesn’t feel as great though – less ‘native’. Certain gestures and animations just don’t quite fit.

    Shoutout to Webkit-based Orion for both platforms. Slowly gravitating to that

  • 80% of corporate AI projects fail — twice the rate of other IT projects
  • I agree with you. I just wanted to share some nuance. The point I wanted to make is that it is in fact possible to incorporate LLMs in a fairly controlled way while calculating (estimates of) the risk of failure as well as the associated social and financial costs. I do it every day, but I’m no tech bro and dislike the ‘AI will fix everything’ types as much as everyone here.

  • 80% of corporate AI projects fail — twice the rate of other IT projects
  • Just fyi, that’s not entirely true. If we’re just focusing on LLMs, structured and guided generation exists. Combine that with an eval set (= unit tests), you can at least track how well you’re doing. For sure, prompt engineering misses the feeling of being in control. You’ll also never be able to claim 100% coverage (although even with unit tests that’s not something you can claim, as there are always blind spots). What you gain over traditional coding, however, is that you can tackle problems that might otherwise take an infinite number of years to express in code. For example, how would you define the rules for detecting whether an image shows a bird?

    It’s just a tool like any other. Overuse is currently detestably rife. But its value is there.

    Source: ML engineer who secretly hates a lot about ML but is also in awe at the developments of the last few years.

  • Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
  • Same energy: this legendary comment in an issue on the Docker github repo (by the issue OP, no less)

    https://github.com/docker/cli/issues/267#issuecomment-695149477

  • Thoughts on Hong Kong urbanism?
  • Huh… I had no idea. I lived there as a kid, and now you mention it, yeah – flyovers all over the place and lots of cars. I miss being able to get anywhere cheaply with the combo of KCR/MTR and taxis though.

    Thanks for teaching me something new!

  • Thoughts on Hong Kong urbanism?
  • Row after row of copy-pasted high-rise apartment buildings does not spark joy.

    Unfortunately, Hong Kong has so little buildable land, its terrain hilly with scattered flat patches, that this approach is the only one that gets you enough units for everyone. Last I heard though property prices were absolutely skyrocketing.

    More to the point, a huge mall does not compare with green outdoor space to walk around in. On the other hand, there’s at least four months each year when outside is a fucking steam oven and a mall with air conditioning is 100% where you want to be.

  • Paul Auster died yesterday at the age of 77
  • “For the loneliness you foster I suggest Paul Auster – a book called Timbuktu.”

    Lyric by Fionn Regan that eventually led to Auster being one of my favorite authors throughout my teens and early twenties.

  • Is Memmy dead? No longer available on the Apple App Store
  • Settled on Voyager months ago. Sometimes I wonder if I’m missing out on newer alternatives for iOS but Voyager does everything I need it to and has that comfortable, familiar Apollo aesthetic.

  • Canada's maple syrup reserve almost empty as sap season at risk of becoming another casualty of the winter that wasn't
  • Out of curiosity, do you have to refine it somehow, or is it good to eat straight from the tree?

  • Friends don't let friends buy HiDPI displays
  • I’d love to switch back to Linux but this is why I moved back to macOS for good several years ago. Once I got a taste of reading code at 4k/retina (faux-4k) – not to mention the better font support – there was no going back, for me at least.

    If it’s considered user error for someone to want a high DPI display in 2024, then I can only surmise that people who share that sentiment have convinced themselves that more eye strain is a worthwhile tradeoff for FOSS. Commendable but a tough sell.

  • Worst UI Any% Speedrun
  • You forgot Quora. That site used to be semi-useful. These days I can never tell whether I’m reading an actual answer to the question or just some random recommended post that’s been shoved in in between.

  • Medieval micro
  • I have to force myself to see flags instead of tower-mounted air defense turrets

  • 0AD>AoE3
  • Honest question, from someone who’s recently gotten back into AOE2 (thanks to the Return of Rome DLC): is 0AD worth checking out?