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Brendinooo

3,959 karma · joined September 24, 2014

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Brendinooo··on Nitter project received cease and desist
People use these things differently, for sure!

I compare to those because these are social networks - the network is the biggest thing that matters. I LOVE what Bluesky is doing with atproto and was there pretty early as a result, but I didn't stick around because the kinds of people and topics I am most interested in are not represented on the site. The network just isn't there!

FB has a network I want as well, they just make it way too hard for me to see content from my actual friends.

Brendinooo··on Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
>amongst the microposting sites I look at

"major" was doing a bit of work for me. Facebook, Instagram, Reddit were more in mind when I said that.

>would keep "forgetting" and pushing you back

This hasn't happened to me in awhile. Dunno if it was a transient thing, an app thing, or something that has been reversed.

Brendinooo··on Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
>What is the main use case for X these days?

I use it to follow people who either have ideas I find interesting or do stuff I find interesting, and typically I'm looking for accounts that are small enough that I know they will at least see my replies, and often interact with them. (Something like 3K-15K followers for most of them, I think.)

I also think it's indispensable for real-time commentary and niche commentary on current events: always requires grains of salt but there's just no better place on the Internet for that sort of thing, in part because...

It's the one major social network I'm on where it is easy to view only posts from the people I follow, in reverse chronological order. A feed I TRULY control (and, if you follow the right people, insulates you from much of the nonsense on the site).

And every once in awhile, some insane viral nonsense pokes in that makes you say "how could I ever quit this site". There's a certain genre of satirical accounts that is very entertaining as well. Definitely a guilty pleasure component to it all!

>Is it still as popular as it used to be?

A quick search roughly aligns with my perception: it bottomed out a couple of years ago and has gradually recovered, though not to where it was pre-X.

Brendinooo··on Anthropic Sees over $30T in Potential Revenue
Stretch the timeline out enough and add enough inflation and anything is possible!
Brendinooo··on Training AI to Paint with Code
This is really nice, and it's a good reminder that we're so early with regards to how AI can be used to make art.

And the fact that it's flowers creates a pretty nice mental model for it! One can plant seeds and cultivate the plants that grow from them but ultimately aren't in complete control of the outcome.

Brendinooo··on Credit Card Rewards Became a $9.2B Wealth Transfer
I've generally tried to stay with cash back rewards in categories that don't change, that's been the best way to balance complexity with rewards for me while not nudging me to buy stuff I don't actually need. I don't like messing with points or rotating categories or included subscriptions. With one exception I avoid annual fees as well.

So like, I have a card that's 6% on groceries, another that's 3% on gas and restaurants, Apple Card does 2% on Apple Pay transactions, and I have a 1.5% card for everything else.

Brendinooo··on Credit Card Rewards Became a $9.2B Wealth Transfer
They mention "premium credit cards" in the article, is there a general understanding of which cards are premium? I clicked through to the study and the only example they cited in there was Chase Sapphire Reserve but I didn't see, like, a list or something.
Brendinooo··on Credit Card Rewards Became a $9.2B Wealth Transfer
I don't really know my way around corporate filings, but...is that just for credit cards?

Capital One also is supposedly huge on car loans; I'd imagine the interest from those would comprise a big chunk of that revenue.

Brendinooo··on A 25-year-old video patent just expired, ending a legal headache for Linux
Yes!!
Brendinooo··on Openrouter is joining Stripe
It's not mutually exclusive. I remember the Bad Old Days of trying to make the PayPal button work; if Stripe makes it easier for people to take payment online then it increases the GDP of the Internet.
Brendinooo··on Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows
It's a load-bearing term, a belt-and-suspenders descriptor.
Brendinooo··on Rings forged from meteorites may have been fashionable among ancient Greek elite
I wonder how many meteorites were laying around in the early days of humans caring about metal.
Brendinooo··on The Amazon tax
Maybe it really is impossible to run a business that way, and that's why Consumer Reports is stuck a stickler about putting up walls around its reputation for independence.
Brendinooo··on Air Theremin – a browser theremin you play by waving at your webcam
Right, I'm saying that I think the author asked Claude to translate notes/writing that were composed in a different language.
Brendinooo··on Air Theremin – a browser theremin you play by waving at your webcam
comment history suggests English is not his first language, this is probably translated
Brendinooo··on A 25-year-old video patent just expired, ending a legal headache for Linux
What other tech patents did we somewhat resent being patented that are now expired?

I'm also thinking about the click wheel; I got one of my kids a knockoff iPod for Christmas last year.

Can other e-commerce sites legally "one-click" to purchase like Amazon now?!?

Brendinooo··on A 25-year-old video patent just expired, ending a legal headache for Linux
>The modern purposes of patents seem to have shifted a long way from that

I'm not sure if that's true, or if it's more that 1) we hear more about the more egregious stuff and/or 2) something was lost in translation with that stated purpose when the world went digital.

Brendinooo··on The Amazon tax
Perhaps you could title your next book "Seth Godin The Knot".
Brendinooo··on The Amazon tax
Right. If the only metric was "best-reviewed" then more people would be faking reviews.

To be clear I'm not letting Amazon entirely off the hook here, but Seth's situation is somewhat unique in that "someone looking for a particular book" seems to me like a really different use case than "I want an air fryer".

And "Amazon’s theft makes products more expensive" falls a little flat when a main reason for shopping on Amazon is that their prices tend to be really good.

Brendinooo··on The Amazon tax
>If you’re searching for an air fryer, Amazon already knows quite a bit. They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one (or for the best air fryer, to keep you on track to buy the one you wanted in the first place).

What if I made a new air fryer that hasn't received a lot of reviews and costs a little more because of its quality? How would I break through, if not ads?

Brendinooo··on Israel creates fake think tank in likely attempt to dupe AI chatbots
>please stop trolling and provoking.

That is not my intent.

I have spoken English my whole life and have never heard anyone use "tentative" as a noun. Why must you assume I am trolling, why can you not believe what I am saying? Is it possible that you are using the wrong word? It seems noteworthy to me that you did not actually answer my question or provide a definition for how you are using, you chose to assume bad faith on my part instead and use that as a basis to dismiss the actual arguments I made.

That said, I would be happy to stop arguing about the word "tentative". I would much rather you engage with the substantive arguments that I made.

>the repeated statements clearly confirms your negative intention

What repeated statements? If it's important to you for understanding then pick something that I repeated and I can try to explain.

> ::your three list items::

These are just repeating of arguments that I made and offered responses to. You have chosen to not respond to them.

Let's pick one and try again:

> The article clearly explain the information poisoning

If you search the article for "poison", there is exactly one reference: "Others refer to this practice of influencing artificial intelligence as 'LLM poisoning.'" The word "refer links to an article by Anthropic that is categorically unrelated. Go read that article and answer: does their definition of "poisoning" match what the author of this post means?

I would say no: the article says "malicious actors can inject specific text into these posts to make a model learn undesirable or dangerous behaviors, in a process known as poisoning", and then follows up with an example of "introducing backdoors". That is very different than whatever the Hanover Institute site is doing.

If you would prefer to argue substance, answer me that: did the author cite that paper correctly? I am saying "no" and have given a reason, what is your response?

Brendinooo··on Israel creates fake think tank in likely attempt to dupe AI chatbots
>putting random questions

everything I posted was in response to you; nothing is random.

>confused informations

Just saying they're confused is meaningless; if you think I am wrong about something, feel free to give actual rebuttals.

>tentative

This word is defined as "not certain or fixed; provisional" or "done without confidence; hesitant". It is an adjective, not a noun. I genuinely do know know what you mean when you use this word.

Brendinooo··on Israel creates fake think tank in likely attempt to dupe AI chatbots
>a tentative of misinformation

What does this mean?

> is clearly an unbased accusation.

"Israel creates fake think tank" is the headline. What is a "think tank"? What distinguishes a real one from a fake one? Does "the Hanover Institute" claim to be a think tank?

The author does not answer any of these questions, only saying "At a glance, the Hanover Institute for Public Policy looks like a new think tank dedicated to Israel/Palestine": in other words, he glanced at it, decided it looked like a think tank, then decided it wasn't a "real" one, and then went from there. That is very much the author's framing instead of something grounded in objectivity.

>The article clearly explain the information poisoning

The article says "Others refer to this practice of influencing artificial intelligence as 'LLM poisoning.'"

But the Anthropic paper that it cites to support this claim never discusses persuasive content, propaganda, or credibility-mimicking material at all; it uses "poisoning" for a technically distinct attack class. So the citation doesn't support the claim as written.

>stop polluting this thread in an organized and selfish self supporting way. so typical

What do you mean by this? How am I organized? Why is it selfish to criticize an article?

Brendinooo··on Israel creates fake think tank in likely attempt to dupe AI chatbots
Thanks for this, it's crazy that I had to scroll so far to see it on this site.

The headline sounds sensational, then if you actually read the article you realize the author just made up his own framing entirely, or he just discovered that AEO and GEO exists and thinks it's sinister?

I thought maybe there were going to be some markers about how they're targeting LLMs specifically there was nothing like that.

And if you go to https://hanoverinstitute.com/llms.txt ...honestly, you could maybe form a critique about implying to LLMs that your wagon is hitched to the Department of Justice on line 5! But this guy didn't even seem to find this file...

Brendinooo··on Hello, me. It's been a while
I run a lot and I do a lot of work on the property; there are times when my head requires silent decompression and or sorting out my own thoughts and silence is golden; there are times when I want to catch up on the news and/or be distracted from the task at hand and a podcast is great.
Brendinooo··on The AI Billboards Are Killing SF
Hmm, I think you're projecting something different onto me.

When I was typing my post I thought about billboards for divorce attorneys: I am happily married so those billboards aren't for me, but this fact alone wasn't enough to alter the idea behind my post. And I guess I should also note that I did not demand that all billboards cater exclusively to my interests, that is obviously unworkable nonsense.

So let me try to refine:

Public advertising is...public. "of or concerning the people as a whole"; "exposed to general view", to pick two dictionary definitions. Billboards and stadiums occupy public spaces, places you walk or drive by all the time, so one could reasonably intuit that they should be representative of the people who inhabit those spaces.

Analogies don't usually help, but let me try: If a city had 90% of its inhabitants speaking German, you would expect most of the signage and advertising to be in German. An Italian speaker would arrive in the city and just feel that the place was...different, not for them. (It would not be "entitled self-importance" to say so.)

If a city was 90% German speakers, 10% French speakers, and the signage and advertising was all in French - what would the visiting Italian speaker make of that? Would a group of Germans in town rightly be accused of "entitled self-importance" for asking that the world around them is accessible?

Brendinooo··on The AI Billboards Are Killing SF
"Killing SF" is overly dramatic, and others have noted that the phenomenon observed here is not unique to AI, or SF.

But there is something a little...alienating about advertising that's not meant for you.

It's a dumb example, but in Pittsburgh the football stadium was renamed from Heinz Field to Acrisure Stadium.

Of course, "Three Rivers Stadium", the name of the previous building, was best. It's not a name that tries to sell you something. But if you must sell something, "Heinz" is extremely good: it sells products for everyone, and it has historical roots in the area. Of the people, for the people.

But Acrisure? I've looked it up a few times and I still can't remember exactly what it is. Business services or insurance or something like that. And I'm sure that both Acrisure and the Steelers don't really care that I don't know what it is, because it's not really for the vast majority of the 65,000 people who show up on a Sunday to cheer for the team.

That's...weird.

Brendinooo··on TSA Privatization Returns Airport Security to a Dangerous Past
From the article:

>Covenant Aviation Security was another early winner, getting $19 million for unspecified airport security services in 2005. Since then, it’s gotten an ever-increasing amount, including $773 million in 2021 to support security screening at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) until the end of this year; taxpayers have spent about $1.5 billion on that company, mainly for security at SFO. That airport is held out as the exemplar of how well private companies manage security, which labor leaders say is the case because Covenant workers at SFO are unionized; as a result, they are better paid than security contractors elsewhere and can more strongly influence practices. But even so, the FBI found that some of Covenant’s security personnel helped smugglers traffic cocaine between 2013 and 2014 by allowing them “to pass through the x-ray machine at a security checkpoint line without adequately screening the luggage for explosives, incendiaries, weapons, or other threats to security,” as the Department of Justice wrote.

Just hard to get anything useful out of this article. Privatization returns us to a dangerous past, but we already privatize, and it's really good, but it's only because of unions, but despite that it's still bad, but I guess it must not be too bad because we haven't had any terrorist attacks since 9/11, which is the reason why it's bad to privatize.

Brendinooo··on How old is Ann?
Yeah, I had to spell it out to get it to click for me

> mary is 24

> 8 years apart: ann is 16 now, when ann was 12 mary was 20

> 6 years apart: ann is 18 now, when ann was 12 mary was 18

> 4 years apart: ann is 20 now, when ann was 12 mary was 16

Brendinooo··on I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore
Broadly speaking, anything that's been done once is doable again; anything that hasn't been done before might not be possible.

Concretely: if the author's perception that a capitalist/calvinist fusion robbed us of/distorted something is true, that he could have existed in a society outside of this shadow in a way he'd find acceptable...that's a very different story than him longing for a world that has never existed.

>Even just capitalism with more regulation and safety nets (the ones most countries implement don't work very well) would suffice here.

You speak very matter-of-factly, and you might be right, but in reality this is only a hypothesis! Maybe more regulation has a tipping point at which it starts to do more harm than good. Maybe if safety nets are too strong they create perverse incentives.

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