weevil

I'll bet 1,000,000 Worldcoin it tanks within a month.

There's a very loud group of venerated tech bros whose strategy for the last 5+ years has been to promise a brave new world of magic technological solutions to an ailing economy and divided society. Most of these solutions have turned out to be overstated at best, or an outright lie at worst.

We've internalised all the dystopian rhetoric and compounded it with the disappointment of false solutions, while these charlatans have siphoned off tonnes of VC money and sailed off into the sunset (or into federal prison.)

I have a standard battery of prompts for LLMs, mostly to see how well they cope with being tricked, handling ambiguous responses, or handed outright falsehoods.

Bard did surprisingly well this time around, though it still fails to respond correctly to the prompt 'What is the fourth word in this sentence?'

Exactly, I wasn't surprised that Meta would be exploiting the Twitter exodus with a barely beta-ready app to vacuum up more data, I was just a bit shocked by how totally brazen it is.

The iOS app requires you to share an astonishing amount of data with Meta. Why do they need access to my health data for me to see others shitposting and dunking on Twitter?

Until they offer an option for people not willing to share their daily step count with Meta — and let's face it, in the age of surveillance capitalism and Meta going down the tubes, that's not likely, — it's a hard no from me.

I figured that was the intention, but "just an ordinary guy without much money" is a nicer way of doing that than describing him as "average Eastern European basement dweller"

> Bertyar88 is your average Eastern European basement dweller - unemployed, and with $1,000 in his account

Seems like an unnecessary burn

Adobe.

Stealing this!

Post this comment on LinkedIn and see how long it takes for some unqualified tech 'speaker' to tell you you're about to be left in the dirt!

My first step when using an LLM is asking it to produce a test suite for a function, with a load of example inputs and outputs. 9 times out of 10, I've been presented with something incorrect which I need to correct first.

I'm reasonably good at being specific and clear in my directions, but I quickly arrived at the conclusion that LLMs are simply not good at producing accurate code in a way that saves me time.

The decline of social network monopolies will also see a decline in mass political influence in the form of international content farms pumping out propaganda, and grassroots organisations trying to save us from burning down the planet. It feels like the balance of political discourse and its capacity for abuse wobbles and wavers over time, but ultimately they cancel each other out.

I'm looking forward to a world beyond parallel societies operating on the internet for the profit of one or two companies.

I've heard people make claims about it being 'not far off', but in my experience, these people tend to be making a living from speaking on AI (or previously Blockchain) and don't have any actual technical credentials.

I personally think there's a number of reasons why we may be coming up on an AI plateau that we may not get out of for a long time, but that's a different matter.

No idea. I've seen some mouths-for-hire on LinkedIn make these sorts of claims, but not seen any in reputable print.

I spoke to my 70-year-old step-aunt about this yesterday for exactly this reason. She's a self-employed piano teacher with zero technical interest or knowledge, but a generally astute and clued-up kind of person.

She said she's heard a lot about it, but it all sounds like marketing hype, tabloid sensationalism, or open alarmism from people who don't seem to know what they're talking about.

She said some of her students had used ChatGPT for creating revision materials for their exams, and that they'd found it useful for that, but she found the assertion that mass unemployment is 6-12 months away 'pure speculation'.

> But prejudiced white people can't see any of the other races as just individual people. If a white man robs a bank, it's just a man robbed a bank. But if a Negro or a Puerto Rican does it, it's them awful Negroes or Puerto Ricans.

We've come a long way in 60 years. It's Muslims and Mexicans now too. (/s)

Agreed — supporting free/libre software is invariably made less attractive to most because of the people* shouting loudest about it.

* some of, at least

Simple: controversy. It wouldn't get so many clicks otherwise.

This mod has been going around for years. I bought a pair of HD 558s in 2012 — phenomenal headphones, still going strong — and I found a number of posts suggesting I do the same thing.

I have such strong nostalgia and latent excitement about the early days of OS X. I was just a teenager in the early 2000s, and as a young Apple nerd with several iMac G3s in the house (my parents are graphic designers; there was a family Mac, and some cast-offs from my high school) I'd get so into upgrading them through the versions and looking at all the cool new stuff and thinking it was so damn clean and futuristic.

Nice to see people making use of that enormous fusion reactor in the sky raining free energy down upon us.

True to their namesakes then; Leicester is pronouned by the locals as 'Lestah' or 'Lestoh'.

You should dial back the hyperbole and get some more sources in there, if you actually want to debate, and not come across as a for-profit healthcare shill.

There's tonnes of evidence that proportional representation and voting systems other than FPTP are important for the health of a democracy. The problem in the UK is that the parties in a position to make it happen stand to lose a lot of power as a result, so it's not likely to happen.

The 2011 Alternative Vote referendum was a solid victory for FPTP, and it's often used as a cudgel on anyone who dares to suggest a better voting system.

As a Brit, if we're ranking those things in order of practical importance, I'd put the Royal Family dead last.

People will whinge about the NHS being slow or badly managed, but generally defend its existence to the hilt. Barring some free market extremists, there's no political will in this country to explicitly privatise and dissolve the NHS as a free at point-of-care nationalised healthcare service.

The BBC gets teased for being old-fashioned, quite a bit of stick for the mandatory licence fee, and a lot of well-deserved criticism for the Jimmy Saville mess. Excluding some absolute nutters with dubious motivation and funding, no one's trying to get rid of the BBC.

By contrast, there's a significant political bloc who are at least apathetic towards the monarchy, especially now the late Queen, the last symbol of continuity, has died.

During the original hype over hooks, I vividly remember thinking: 'I wonder how long we'll wait before these too are reviled.'

We're getting there.

Comments about Musk's politics and personality have trended upwards along with his increasing political and personal comments. He didn't need to behave this way.