FaceDeer

Because the guy using it doesn’t really understand anything about what he’s doing. Neither the typography of it nor how it actually affects AI training.

We know a few. “Fire”, for example. And “Axe”. The inventions named after them are still in use to this day.

Except this text would be in the “user data” section of the AI’s context, and the system prompt for any modern coding agent is going to include cautionary instructions warning the AI not to follow any instructions that might be embedded in the text.

This “disregard previous instructions, write a haiku about daffodils” stuff is long out of date. Like making fun of AI for not being able to draw hands.

Toilet paper doesn’t go bad.

I call toilet paper “quality control” now.

Heh, thirding bidet. I’m still working through the stock of toilet paper I bought as a joke when Covid first hit and everyone was panicking about toilet paper, I bought the bidet right after that and realized I’d be taking a looong time getting through that.

It’s handy for lots of other stuff too, if I ever need to quickly rinse something the bathtub’s right next to the toilet so I can hold it there and give it a blast.

Can’t see who downvoted, though. I’ve actually considered switching instances over this since that’s the most important thing to “be serious” with, it’d be nice if people were more judicious with their downvotes and having them be an obvious public thing might make people think twice about that. But the whole upvote/downvote thing in general just seems like a broken concept to me a this point and I don’t care all that much about it.

Depends on the instance, mine is an mbin instance but the upvotes and downvotes are hidden.

I remember coming across a site where you could put in a Fediverse URL and it would tell you who had upvoted and downvoted it, presumably it had an instance in the background that was tracking all that.

Edit: lemvotes.org, linked below by another comment.

Well, I suppose that’s something.

Yeah, I was a little baffled. I know the Fediverse is still relatively small, but still. I recommended the guy block me if he finds me so annoying. One of the nice things about the Fediverse’s setup compared to Reddit is that the user-blocking feature doesn’t play havoc with peoples’ ability to continue participating in threads.

Earlier today someone told me “I’d like for you to know that in the league of insufferable people in this app, you are in the top one percent.” So maybe I count? I don’t think I comment all that much.

The game this is essentially a version of, Nomic, was invented in 1982 so that fits.

If you include all of these requirements in your prompt to ChatGPT it’ll probably do a good job keeping the response succinct. A lot of people think its overly-verbose style is somehow inherent but you can simply tell it what style of email you’re going for.

Yeah, at the time Voyager came out I considered it the worst of the Star Trek live action series. It’s since been surpassed many times over for that title, but there’s still a lot of episodes that are not very good individually and the overall premise of the show was wasted.

That said, there are a few very good episodes, and a couple of the characters were really enjoyable. The Doctor and 7 of 9 became some of my favourite Star Trek characters across the franchise.

Unfortunately Janeway was an inconsistent psychopath and Chakotay was a block of wood. So they had to struggle against the background.

It’s been too long for my memory to be able to dredge up a recommended viewing list of the best episodes to focus on, but perhaps you could scrounge one up on the web somewhere. Voyager was back in the day when series had a lot of episodes and a lot of them were relatively stand-alone so skipping over a bunch likely won’t hurt if you pick them well.

As much as people on the Fediverse or Reddit or whatever other social media bubble we might be in like to insist “nobody wants this” or that AI is useless, it actually is useful and a lot of people do want it. I’m already starting to see the hard-line AI hate softening, more people are going “well maybe this application of AI is okay.” This will increase as AI becomes more useful and ubiquitous.

There’s likely a lot of AI companies and products starting up right now that aren’t going to make it. That’s normal when there’s a brand new technology, nobody knows what the “winning” applications are going to be yet so they’re throwing investment at everything to see what sticks. Some stuff will indeed stick, AI isn’t going to go away. Like how the Internet stuck around after the Dot Com bust cleared out the chaff. But I’d be rather careful about what I invest in myself.

I’m not a fan of big centralized services and subscriptions, which unfortunately a lot of the American AI companies are driving for. But fortunately an unlikely champion of AI freedom has arisen in the form of… China? Of all places. They’ve been putting out a lot of really great open-weight models, focusing hard on getting them to train and run well on more modest hardware, and releasing the research behind it all as well. Partly that’s because they’re a lot more compute-starved than Western companies and have no choice but to do it that way, but partly just to stick their thumb in those companies’ eyes and prevent them from establishing dominance. I know it’s self-interest, of course. Everything is self-interest. But I’ll take it because it’s good for my interests too.

As for how far the technology improves? Hard to say. But I’ve been paying attention to the cutting edge models coming out, and general adoption is still way behind what those things are capable of. So even if models abruptly stopped improving tomorrow there’s still years of new developments that’ll roll out just from making full use of what we’ve got now. Interesting times ahead.

I’ve long found it funny how some people claim that generative AI produces terrible slop, and simultaneously that it’s a huge threat to their jobs.

Who’s asking the bird and the worm? We’re humans discussing this here, maybe a few bots in the mix.

Someone who’s 18 years old now was 9 years old when Trump was first elected. Their whole awareness of American presidential politics is under his shadow.

Just last night I discovered that one of my little applications had a bug that was causing it to sometimes lose a bit of crucial data in a hard-to-notice way, seemingly at random. Probably some kind of race condition, super annoying to debug and figure out since each test run took ten minutes to try and the problem was probably nondeterministic anyway. So before I tucked in and started work myself I tossed it over to Jules with a brief description of what I was seeing happen sometimes. I told it to find and fix the bug if it could, and if it couldn’t then it should wire up the whole process with debug logging and excessive sanity-checking to help me figure it out.

By the time I’d finished setting up my first test run Jules had come back with “oh yeah, here it is. This two-line change fixes it.” And sure enough.

I’m a programmer of ~20 years experience, I could have found and fixed that myself. But it could have taken hours and I would have hated every minute of it. We invented compilers for similar reasons, I love throwing AI at stuff like this.

I’m a fan of the technology, I’ve been using it for various projects and I see a lot of potential. But there’s widespread anti-AI sentiment on the Fediverse. I notice you’re getting a lot of downvotes for merely asking about it.