MudMan

We’ll see where it goes. They aren’t exactly transparent about these things, and they’ve been arguing among themselves for a while. We’ll know with the white smoke, I suppose.

I am surpringly annoyed about Americans somehow finding a way to make this about themselves.

In reality I’m much more worried about the likely counterreformist pushback that is likely about to happen. We’re about to find out if a remarkably powerful organization’s leader was able to seed enough support to secure a politically aligned successor, and if the answer is “no” a bunch of organizations are about to get even more ruthlessly conservative at a time when a new strain of fascism is seeking moral support. The Catholic Church has been here before. It didn’t go well.

That’s a good caveat. If you’re getting a new PC with a new GPU and new hardware it’s entirely possible that features or functionality won’t be as well supported and that decision will be made for you.

But if it still works keep it.

Everybody took slaves from prisoners of war from any conflict, not just the Romans. Slavery was ius commune, it had nothing to do with ethnicity and it fit in very different social and anthropological functions across all societies of the period. Everybody stop it with the application of modern, anglocentric concepts to ancient Mediterranean cultures. It was cute when you were just building a whole bunch of anachronistic white marble columns, but that’s as much as I can tolerate.

Frankly, way less annoying than Americans trying to apply a concept of “whiteness” to first century social dynamics.

They actually lampshade this further down the article, at the point where clickbaiting has fulfilled its goal.

It’s almost nostalgic being mildly annoyed at some slightly sub-par journalistic ethics displayed by Gizmodo and company. Feels quaint and nostalgic now. I honestly didn’t know Gizmodo was still running, if I’m perfectly honest. It’s been quite the decade.

Not even the first guy to incel his way to an extremely inaccurate AI virtual girlfriend chatbot based on an inaccessible married celebrity.

Just saying, Geordi is NOT the face you want to use for warnings about ethical generative AI usage.

Hah. Yeah, I’ll do that as soon as you invent a way to freeze time.

For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure it’s less energy efficient to run a local open source LLM than to offload the task to a data center, but the flexibility and privacy are too big of a deal to ignore.

In any case chatbots suck at finding accurate information reliably, but they are actually pretty good at reaching things you already know or can verify at a glance with suprisingly little information. The fact that a piece of tech is being misused often doesn’t mean it’s useless. This simplistic black-and-white stuff is so dumb and social media is so full of it. Speaking of often misused technology, I suppose.

Not to be that guy, but if there’s a fictional character that made a career out of prompt engineering a surprisingly flaky AI it’s Geordi La Forge. The guy hasn’t given the hand to a “Computer!” interaction in his life.

He literally fed his notes to a chatbot to make a custom assistant and then dated the custom assistant.

Honestly that’s because speeding up localizations by having the first pass be machine-made is not something that waited for GenAI to happen. It’s been going on for a while using good old machine translators.

Now, Google Translate and similar tools have been reliant on machine learning for ages, people just weren’t freaking out about it because “AI” hadn’t gone viral. It’s been weird to watch this sort of thing play out.

FWIW, if they are using the same loc workflow and genAI works better than good old machine translations for a first pass go ahead and do GenAI. From what I’ve seen casually it’s not necessarily faster or more reliable, but I’m not working on loc professionally. Maybe that’s what he means when he talks about using it in “backend processes”?

I mean… too late? Face recognition has been part of biometric passport security for years now.

If anything my first flag for this is that about 50% of the time I try it I end up having to call over a security person because it tends to flake out a bunch. I’ve had better luck recently, so maybe it’s ready now?

This becoming an app may be the logical next step, but I do think there’s some value to carrying a physical copy of the biometric data with you. If we’re not losing the paper passport I don’t see why I’d need to double up on recognition software. If you’re already matching my face to my passport and my boarding pass is also matched to my passport it sure seems like we already have all the pieces in place for this without wasting more money on more contractors and giving them more of our data to store.

I mean, to be clear, nepotism is about hiring relatives (etymologically nephews, not sure if people realize that).

You can be hired on influence rather than skill or qualifications even if you’re not blood related. I’m only now realizing that English doesn’t have a derisive word for this practice. Other languages do. In fact, had the school been public at least, the hiring process you describe would have been outright illegal where I live.

I think we’ve stumbled upon one of those cultural differences subtly encoded in language here.

And to be clear, I’m more lenient with it than my compatriots. I find building a team based on personal connection or how well you work with each other, rather than pure objective qualifications, is legitimate and can yield better results in some circumstances. Here it’s generally frowned upon culturally if that connection is pre-existing rather than identified through a recruitment process though, family relations or not.

Igual que los “yankees” con el “a/o”, y funciona igual de mal.

My PC is made from scraps and some of the hardware isn’t that standard. At the same time it’s not new, so I’m not giving Fedora a pass, either. It was not waking up from sleep, getting stuck on some power settings, not taking modifications through the GUI and other stuff. I think I have it working now, we’ll see.

That was on my third attempt, too. I really don’t like distro hopping.

Specifically, how is this news and how is this World News?

I mean, start an Elon watch thing if you’re into minutia about this guy, but this doesn’t belong, as far as I’m concerned.

Hah. I just went with Fedora on a new build, got all the way to setting up all the stuff I need that computer to do and found that it seems the power management is borked and sometimes it just decides to die on a black screen after being left unattended for no discernible reason.

That doesn’t mean anything to you, but I wanted to whine in public about it. If you want to factor in my specific set of bugs feel free to do so, though.

One of the joys of learning languages is getting to be equally annoyed at anglophones thinking ending words in “o” and “a” is hilarious and at Spanish speakers thinking that adding “ing” to random words counts as English.

I mean I, for one, do appreciate the extremely cheap Chinese imports we are about to receive overe here in sanity land. You think nobody in Europe is buying American cars now? Give it a minute, they’ll be giving out BYDs in cereal boxes.

Yep, that’s where things ended up, more or less.

There are more… aggressive workarounds. And zero reason to ever need them in the first place. ISPs are dumb.

I needed a better router. Unfortunately my provider pretends that isn’t a real thing.