Dave.

Is the ✨sparkly emoji✨ the <BLINK> of the 21st century? Discuss.

But it’s definitely not perfect and tends to add unnecessary changes, I constantly have to review and add new rules.

This is the bit that bugs me. I spend a bit of time to create a relatively simple application in C# with it, and it’s constantly tacking on new features and four extra command line arguments and it’s frothing at the mouth to add Cool Feature X, “just say the word and I’ll do it”.

Just do what I asked. No more. That’s enough. There’s enough mangled code and logic errors lurking in there already, I don’t need any more “features” clouding the water.

There was a point, about 10-12 years ago now, where The Algorithm™ took over social media entirely.

If you were around before that, you would have noticed the shift. Your friend’s comments and posts started to get intermixed with “other stuff” , and eventually you could scroll endlessly and not see anything from your direct friends, or friends of friends. Forever.

What decided what you could see? Why, The Algorithm™ , of course. So, at that point right there, that’s when a direct and consistently biased feed of someone else’s opinion about what you wanted to see got pumped into people’s brains. And you can bet it’s going to be designed to be handing out the most engaging things that it can find for you, to keep you scrolling away on their platform. But it doesn’t matter a fuck if what its handing out i’s mentally harmful to you personally, as long as you’re engaged.

And just like schoolkids in the USA reciting the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, reinforcement of whatever The Algorithm™ wants (simply: more engagement) becomes pretty trivial when it’s crammed into your head consistently from a young age. Lacking any other reference points, children are the ones with the least amount of defenses against all of that shite.

These kinds of laws worldwide are trying to stop that kind of thing from happening, because they can’t stop the source directly. Social media companies hold too much sway over the population and the economy now, it would be political suicide to try and go toe to toe with them.

In my opinion, The Algorithm™ as it stands now is a cancer that needs to be cut out of social media by any means possible. Whether there’s anything left remaining after that is debatable.

I wonder how it goes with AI-generated receipts.

the pursuit of fancy graphics just doesn’t make sense anymore

Their assertion is that fancy graphics doesn’t necessarily equal good gameplay, and the major industry players are focused on ever-increasing frame rates instead of game quality.

Nobody cares if your game is fully immersive and rendered down to the atomic scale if it is boring or the game mechanics are shite. Sure you can wander around and look at stuff and gasp at the physics, but unless the game is titled “Look around and enjoy it” , that’s not the point.

Agreed.

If I have to dislocate my jaw to try and eat the burger then at that point I’d rather use a knife and fork.

The “two guys burger shop burger”.

Maaaate, your burger is shit. It’s a precariously stacked abomination that’s 8 inches tall, has two ruined patties and half a cup of smoky bbq sauce and melted cheese on it, and then you decided that what it really needed was enough chilli on it so that all you can taste is burning.

…so a modest but significant improvement has been achieved, but nowhere near the temps required for melting ore.

Just stack six of these in series, problem solved. /s

Try harder. A simple request to filter out the nonsense in Gemini gives:

After filtering out the “nonsense”—the pop-culture references (Lord of the Rings, IT, Purple People Eater) and the random metaphors (poison, sandwiches)—the core message appears to be a critique of modern data processing or AI training compared to traditional publishing.

The “correct” message hidden in the text is:

The Core Message

It is inefficient and costly to pay humans to fix low-quality or “noisy” data. Instead of spending money to clean up automated nonsense, it would be more effective to invest in high-quality, verified sources (like books) and pay human creators fairly, as the system was originally designed to function.

Breakdown of the “Noise” Removed

“Poison and noise are the way”: Likely a sarcastic opening about the current state of data. “Making a sandwich for those you love”: Irrelevant personal imagery. “Off to take the ring to Mordor”: Lord of the Rings reference. “Clowns in the sewers… red balloon”: Stephen King’s IT reference. “Purple people eater… walking downtown”: Reference to the 1958 novelty song.

The Logic Retained

The Problem: It is “not fruitful” to pay humans to undo/fix “noise” to make it “useful.” The Result: This process ends up forcing people to “ingest fact” (raw data) without proper context. The Solution: “Buy the books and pay people correctly” according to the original “system.”

Would you like me to help you rewrite this message into a formal argument or a professional email?

it is really more useful than Katie from Sales getting skin cancer on a beach in Thailand or that…

A large chunk of air transport is also freight. And business. And regular domestic travel for people going from A to B, travel that doesn’t include holidays for Kate or that drunk dude in Mallorca.

And when you look at those uses, AI is still running a pretty distant second place.

It seems that every new release adds another layer of indirection (misdirection?) between you and the useful stuff you need to access. I use a third party utility to manage IP settings, and it’s one click from its menu to get to the network adapter page. It takes me about 5 minutes of angry clicking around in stock standard win11 before I get to the same place.

The main one I use is the network adaptor settings, where you can enable/disable protocols and most importantly for me, where you can easily add multiple IP addresses on a network adaptor.

The Win 8+ network settings page is an absolute trainwreck. I particularly like how it doesn’t warn about conflicting IP addresses now and just silently accepts your given address and provides an auto-assigned 169.254 address instead if it sees even the smallest hint of another computer out there using the address you want to use.

Guaranteed fun and confusion trying to access/ping things until you finally check the status of the network adaptor and discover the auto assigned address, thanks Microsoft.

Not everyone wants to use dhcp, which is clearly their preferred direction, and there have been bugs where Cisco devices trigger that flip to auto assigned addresses even if things are fine.

Microsoft applied a data-driven approach to find out which features to add now, which features to add later, and which to completely avoid.

Which is why if you dig deep enough into Settings you’ll see WinXP Control Panel UI elements. You know, the elements that are actually useful for power users.

the killswitch is in about:config

Ah yes, the easiest place to put a kill switch for the average user, as opposed to the complexity of a toggle in settings.

Which is worse?

• Entire driver written in a non memory safe language?
• The interface to the rest of the kernel is marked as unsafe and then the other X percent is safe from memory corruption?

Surely if X > 0 then this is still a net improvement?

This is just the cost of doing business for Anthropic.

No particular material harm to the business. Declare the matter settled, everything is fine and dandy, and now they have carte blanche to rape and pillage the next village dataset.

Geoengineering is probably the only way to counteract things now.

But that involves fucking around with the bottom of our food chain in the oceans so there’s obviously a good deal of reluctance to start down that path.

• Algorithm shows a preview of a chaotic scene where the content isn’t easily identified.
• You open / interact / linger on it to figure out what is happening before identifying it as something you don’t want to look at.
• Algorithm detects increased interaction and happily serves up more.

I play a little game with Instagram sometimes. I click on one (1) thirst trap bikini girl post in the search reel. Then I see how many times I have to press the little 3 dot menu and pick “not interested” on allllll the other thirst trap bikini girl posts that immediately appear.

I generally have to press “not interested” about 15 times before my feed reverts to only having bikini girl thirst traps once every 20 or so posts.

Does anyone actually hate systemd?

It’s a little too monolithic and kitchen-sink-including for my liking. It doesn’t feel like the “do one thing and do it well” style, it has a pretty large attack surface as a result.

Oh, and binary log files.

English readily absorbs both the best and worst of all the other languages. If some other language has a word that really hits the mood of even just a small amount of English speakers - bam! - it’s English now, motherfucker!

Add to this, it’s chock-full of complicated and often hidden rules that can - or absolutely cannot - be broken, depending on context. No wonder people learning it as a second language have that permanently confused look on their face.