tarknassus

And nothing will be done about that until it affects the power brokers in charge*.

* - hopefully, I mean we’ve had a series of ministers embroiled in scandals that would have caused immediate resignations in the past whereas now it’s “Fuck off, I’m working here. I’M IMPORTANT!”

It definitely won’t lead to any surprise defenestrations.

I don’t see a problem here. Maybe Perplexity should consider the reasons WHY Cloudflare have a firewall…?

With how so many services are forcing it upon us, I’d have to disagree.

Maybe we need to add a term for anti-AI psychosis. Like an equivalent of ‘going postal’?

“Vaughan was surprised to find it was often the technical staff…”

Tell me you’re completely out of touch with your company and what it does without telling me you’re completely out of touch with your company and what it does. FFS how is this guy the CEO? Oh, he’s one of the founders? Brilliant.

Vaughan says he didn’t want to force anyone. “You can’t compel people to change, especially if they don’t believe.”

But he did. Change or be fired, basically.

“You multiply people…give people the ability to multiply themselves and do things at a pace,” he said, touting the company’s ability to build new customer-ready products in as little as four days, an unthinkable timeline in the old regime.

Ooh I bet some nefarious hacker types will be salivating at the incredibly rushed code base that is probably a spaghetti mess and as insecure as fuck.

Vaughan disclosed that the company, which he said is in the nine-figure revenue range, finished 2024 at “near 75% Ebitda”—all while completing a major acquisition, Khoros.

I had to look up EBITDA - some interesting points to consider when you look at this metric he used:

A negative EBITDA indicates that a business has fundamental problems with profitability. A positive EBITDA, on the other hand, does not necessarily mean that the business generates cash. This is because the cash generation of a business depends on capital expenditures (needed to replace assets that have broken down), taxes, interest and movements in working capital as well as on EBITDA.
While being a useful metric, one should not rely on EBITDA alone when assessing the performance of a company. The biggest criticism of using EBITDA as a measure to assess company performance is that it ignores the need for capital expenditures in its assessment.

Hmmm… I’m no accountant (I leave that to my actual accountant), but surely if they were being profitable it would sound better to say something like “We’ve remained profitable throughout and our earnings per quarter are on par if not greater than before.”?

You could actually turn Clippy off as well. Copilot doesn’t really go away, and you can’t trust Microshaft to re-enable via updates. Out of the two I’d much prefer the maligned Clippy.

You’re just deluding yourself while experiencing a slow decline due to self-inflicted atrophy.

Chef’s kiss on this last sentence. So eloquently put!

Fortunately DDG are opt out, and short of cookie sessions expiring it seems to stick.

Unlike a certain set of other “search” engines that are slowly changing into AI chat bot outputs with zero opt-out abilities besides using some hacky tricks to avoid it.

This is why you never should skip leg day…

Have they tried deleting their emails?

Have you noticed uBlock Origin being a bit hit and miss on YouTube lately? I’ve had it happen a few times lately where the video won’t play, or an ad comes up but doesn’t play. I’ve had to keep refreshing until it gets to normal where it just plays the damn video.

But it’s so revolutionary we HAD to enable it to access everything, and force everyone to use it too!

Crap I’ve been doing it wrong. I just use a regular hyphen - like this…

Didn’t they introduce a new rapid deletion process? IIRC it’s a seven-day proposal and discussion before deletion. For suspected AI it’s basically a one day thing.

One Samurai (Seven Samurai)

Bad Boy (Bad Boys)

1 Bullet (22 Bullets)

The Man Who Stared At (A) Goat (The Men Who Stare At Goats)

Alien (The sequel to Alien)

All my CD’s got ripped (and re-ripped) to mp3 in increasing bitrates as storage increased. Bandcamp is where almost all my musicians release anyway, and I’ve got over a thousand albums through them, happy in the knowledge I support the artists in a fairly direct way.

Sure, I’ve still got an Apple Music sub (which sucks at times because licensing means a compilation gets split into several albums when whatever deal happens in the background expires). But I’ll easily find new music, grab it and give it a go, and if I like it enough I’ll dig them out on bandcamp. At some point I’m gonna quit that platform.

Planning to get a modern mp3 player to go offline with my music at some point. Or maybe rebuild the old iPod and put Rockbox on it and hook it up to my linux desktop.

Can you think of any other industry where the mass adoption of a product is untested? Like image airlines adding a new autopilot system that allows a single crew flight - but it’s been untested. Or an electrical appliance that is sold without being tested for shock hazards?

Similar with AI - they already tell us they don’t know exactly how it all works (the black box) - yet are content to unleash it on the masses and see what happens. The social and personal effects this will have are being studied already and it’s not looking great.

It’s not even labelled as a beta test either.

When AI assistants eulogise their work in this fashion, it is no wonder that students find it hard to eschew their support, even when, deep down, they must know that this amounts to cheating. AI will never tell you that your work is subpar, your thinking shoddy, your analysis naive. Instead, it will suggest “a polish”, a deeper edit, a sense check for grammar and accuracy. It will offer more ways to get involved and help – as with social media platforms, it wants users hooked and jonesing for their next fix. Like The Terminator, it won’t stop until you’ve killed it, or shut your laptop.

No wonder people are hooked onto this - it’s a saccharine dopamine machine eroding our critical thinking and cognitive processing. It’s designed to be that way.

Speaking of dependence on AI:

Rohan found his summer internship in the finance department of a multinational conglomerate with the help of Chat, but, with one more year of university to go, he thinks it may be time to reduce his reliance on AI. “I’ve always known in my head that it was probably better for me to do the work on my own,” he says. “I’m just a bit worried that using ChatGPT will make my brain kind of atrophy because I’m not using it to its fullest extent.”

Of course, it’s not all about cheating or using the easiest possible methods to submit essays or papers -

For many, talking to a computer is easier than laying one’s soul bare in front of another human, however qualified they may be, and a recent study showed that people actually preferred the therapy offered by ChatGPT to that provided by human counsellors. In March, there were 16.7m posts on TikTok about using ChatGPT as a therapist.

Reminds me of the OMM 0000 from the excellent THX-1138 - “My time is yours.” And not in a good way. I’d rather talk to a professional human being, and have found it somewhat beneficial in the past. They had a knowledge of local support groups or events that I doubt would have been offered by AI.

Finally, it seems that Google’s Gemini adverts may not be far off the mark for seeing how little common sense and logic processing people have these days:

As I read through the thousands of prompts, there are essay plan requests, and domestic crises solved: “How to unblock bathroom sink after I have vomited in it and then filled it up with water?”, “Preventive Tips for Next Time – Avoid using sinks for vomiting when possible. A toilet is easier to clean and less prone to clogging.” Relationship advice is sought, “Write me a text message about ending a casual relationship”, alongside tech queries, “Why is there such an emphasis on not eating near your laptop to maintain laptop health?”. And, then, there are the nonsense prompts: “Can you get drunk if you put alcohol in a humidifier and turn it on?” “Yes, using a humidifier to vaporise alcohol can result in intoxication, but it is extremely dangerous.” I wonder if we’re asking more questions simply because there are more places to ask them. Or, perhaps, as grownups, we feel that we can’t ask other people certain things without our questions being judged. Would anyone ever really need to ask another person to give them “ a list of all kitchen appliances”? I hope that in a server room somewhere ChatGPT had a good chuckle at that one, though its answer shows no hint of pity or condescension.

Gah. Puke in a sink? Get some rubber gloves and push the gunk out or extract it and throw it in the toilet to flush it. This is not rocket science.

My sweet, sweet summer child.

Rule #34: There is porn of it. No exceptions.

See also:

Rule #35: If there is no porn of it, it will be made.

Don’t forget to write to your MP - being polite but angry helps. Explain the issues, shortcomings and why you feel this should be repealed and a better user-friendly and privacy respecting alternative needs to be found BEFORE implementing stupid asinine knee-jerk legislation like this.

My poor MP is getting it in the jugular because they boasted about working in data security and I’m exploiting the hell out of that statement so they can’t easily weasel their way out of it.