All Your Base is the granddaddy of Internet memes and yet I can’t help feeling that its specific subgenre was sublimated a bit later on, with this, the legend, the joyful, the unforgettable: Yatta!

There are a few, yeah. Whether it’s enough to balance the massive weight of all the externalities, I have no idea. Currently leaning no. Could be wrong about that, who knows.

Basically: we now have the tech to make sense of language and language semantics, and use language as a universal interface. You and I are fine clicking buttons in programs, sure, but you and I are also having this discussion on an obscure federated social media platform the general public has never heard about. Interacting usefully with a computer system through language alone becomes possible in a way that it wasn’t before. I’m not quite sure how valuable this is going to be in the long term, but then, I’m also a tech nerd who is used to clicking buttons and writing command lines.

We can now process large amounts of text fast for data extraction, which is a deceptively hard problem. You can do things like importing itemized PDF bills into an accounting database with no prior knowledge of how those bills are formatted. This extends beyond text. We can now generate a textual description of arbitrary images and videos. That too is a very hard problem. It can now be done on a regular desktop computer using a small local LLM.

It’s an even harder problem when the text is computer code and the data being looked for is the cause for a specific behavior. The process of debugging an obscure issue can now be massively accelerated.

Given a reliable corpus of knowledge, that corpus can be queried more or less instantly using natural language. That’s also something we could not do before.

LLMs suck at designing software but can produce code to spec faster than a human, which means they can be used to increase throughput where a skilled human does the design and is limited only by the speed of implementing it. Given the prevalence of software in the economy, the impact of that alone will be significant.

All of these come with major drawbacks and sometimes intractable problems. Language is squishy and ambiguous. LLMs don’t THINK, they extrude statistically probable continuation tokens. AI content sucks, be it writing, images, videos, because the probable tokens there are the median of the training corpus, and median is a cognate of mediocre for a reason. I hope AI slop goes away. But I don’t think it will. The ability to generate custom porn on demand alone will likely sustain a market.

And I didn’t think we can go back to the world of before. But personally, I wish we could. Because the externalities here are, and remain, enormous.

Successful rolls are mostly not necessary to progress the game. Your guy is many things, including a bit of a loser who just hit rock bottom, but your success as a player of the game is only loosely connected to his success as a character attempting things.

If it gets too much, remember that the arthropods are in silent and meaningless awe of you.

Refucktoring.

That’s an incredible bake for a cheap oven, whoa. Well done!

Dang, it’s gorgeous. What kind of oven do you use?

Neat! Thanks for the explanation. :)

CapyReader (synced to FreshRSS)

Oooh, what does that look like in practice?

I mean, that’d be a major GDPR breach, be hard to extract any signal from because queries will usually be coming from a relay or from behind a NAT so you can’t tell who the query even originates from, and DNS is cached heavily too so you only get a small fraction of the queries anyway. I’m not seeing a way the calculus work in favor, basically.

OTOH the question of why they’d even run a public DNS is interesting, yeah. Running a public DNS is cheap and helps the Internet work better, and they make more money when the Internet works better since that adds up to more page views. Less charitably, though, it’s possibly just a thing from back when they were an engineering company first and foremost and did that kind of stuff, and now they can’t turn it off without breaking a lot of things and causing a lot of costly anger.

I’ll admit I’m not sure what the threat model is with 8.8.8.8.

I’m mildly offended that I can consistently be reduced to a blubbering mess by a show with literal fart-based plot points.

This is abhorrent, yet I’m intrigued.

Among other things: the global perception of the US sunk to unprecedented lows, below even China. The US’s most steadfast allies have all rejected requests for support. This is a different world now and it’s uncertain whether the US can regain its prior standing.

To not comply while superficially pretending to, I suspect, from studying that PR. See my other comment above, where I run my mouth a little longer about this.

I studied at the PR in question and that’s not the conclusion I arrive at. Let me try to explain how this looks to me.

Also keep in mind, I do think we absolutely need to keep the political pressure on and push back on identity-gating policies with all our collective might. In that light the PR itself does the two things I’d absolutely require here: one, it allows the user to put whatever value they want in that field, including none at all, and two, it disallows all apps from reading that field without the user’s active permission.

Basically it’s a superficially valid implementation of a bullshit requirement that still leaves all the power in the user’s hands and therefore renders the requirement meaningless. Or in other words, a huge middle finger to the proponents of age-checking.

Mind you, I feel there’s also value in loud non-compliance and I’m glad some are taking that road – keep it up, folks. But I’m leery of demands that only one single approach be taken. This needs to be fought on every front we can. And to me the PR in question reads like an effective defensive move.

Thanks for the correction, I was indeed wrong about that. I updated my comment accordingly.

Thanks for the correction! I updated my comment to mention it.

I mean, the poll was like as not a publicity stunt, to draw attention to the fact DDG is not doing AI. All the same, the fact they are making “no AI” a selling point is noteworthy.

EDIT: I stand corrected – apparently DDG does do AI presently. Hopefully they’re serious about reconsidering that, then.

Let’s maybe not bring fash comics to Lemmy…

Great article, thanks for posting! Worth noting that swap is also used for tmpfs partitions. Meaning that if you don’t have any swap, temporary files in /tmp will use your actual physical RAM. That’s probably not what you want.