loobkoob

Yep. LLMs are great for bouncing ideas off, and for getting “soft answers”, but no-one should ever be looking for factual answers from them.

I’ve been separating Chris Brown’s music from his personality for a long time. I hated his music long before I know how terrible his personality is.

I wouldn’t recommend ChatGPT for factual information at all (at least, not without validating for yourself afterwards), but I think it’s quite good for helping you mull over or develop ideas, and for finding “soft answers” to things.

I used it recently to suggest a font to use, for instance, and found it much, much better than trying to use a search engine. My font knowledge isn’t particularly high at all - I know what serif means but that’s about it as far as technical knowledge, and I wouldn’t recognise or categorise most fonts - but I was able to describe what I wanted to ChatGPT and narrow it down:

• “I want something more friendly than that”
• “less professional”
• “more wonky”
• “less rounded”
• “less uncomfortable”

And so on. I could be somewhat abstract with my requests and it still mostly seemed to understand what I meant. Eventually it suggested something that fit my requirements pretty well. Trying to find a similar suggestion via a search engine would have been very difficult, I think, and would basically have just relied on me stumbling on a “top 10 fonts for X” listicle that happened to cover my requirements.

ChatGPT is fantastic within its specific niche (assuming you know how to feed it prompts properly and how to interpret its outputs - it’s a tool thats usefulness very much depends on the operator) but I definitely wouldn’t want it to replace search engines.

I think a lot of people on lemmy use lemmy/kbin/the threadiverse interchangeably. But yeah, I use kbin, too.

I definitely find myself being much, much more active on Discord since the whole reddit thing went down. It has its issues, and it’s not exactly a 1:1 substitution for thread-based forums, but I enjoy the greater sense of community that comes with Discord.

I installed uBlock for someone recently. They complained about all the empty space where the ads used to be. So I removed the empty space by blocking that element with uBlock, which increased the width of the main body of the website, and they then complained that the website was too wide…

Some people are beyond help.

It’s worth pointing out, I think, that TalkTV is Rupert Murdoch’s latest outing, and is owned by his News Corp, which also owns The S*n and The Times. It’s no surprise it’s awful.

If a car can receive OTA updates from the manufacturer, then it can receive harmful OTA updates from an attacker who has compromised the car’s update mechanism or the manufacturer.

There’s potential for a very dystopian future where we see people assassinated, not via car bomb but via the their cars being hacked to remove braking functionality (or something similar). And then a constant game of security whack-a-mole like we see with anti-virus software. And then some brilliant entrepreneur will start selling firewalls for cars. And then it’ll be passed into law that it’s illegal to use a vehicle that doesn’t have an active firewall/anti-virus subscription.

It almost feels like the obvious path things will go down. Yay, capitalism…

I’m not totally opposed to software being used in cars (as long as it’s tested and can be trusted to the degree mechanical components are) but yeah, OTA updates just seem like a terrible idea just for a little convenience. I’d rather see updates delivered via plugging the car in (and not via the charging port - it would need to be a specific data transfer port for security reasons). Alert people when there’s an update, and even allow the car to “refuse to boot” if it detects it’s not on the latest version. But updates should absolutely be done manually and securely.

It’s the length of the combined total working lives of an entire football stadium full of people.

The reason it’s overwhelmingly called “climate change” instead of global warming now is because of language change pushed by billionaire foundations.

I do think “global warming” struggles to convince some more simple people anyway, unfortunately. Because while the average temperature of the globe is increasing and causing the changes in climate that we’re seeing, I’ve come across far too many comments from people saying things like “global warming must be a myth because it snows more than it used to” and things themselves smarter than all climate scientists combined for that observation.

Of course, those same people probably think global warming is good because they like their summer holidays so perhaps their opinions shouldn’t matter much either way!

The Expanse is the first thing that came to mind for me as a counter-example when I read your first comment so I’m glad to see you mention it! It even plays on the exceptionalism idea in book/season 3 and 4 where Holden seems special because >!Miller is appearing to him!< and because >!he isn’t affected by the eye parasites!< only to explain those things away with reasoning stemming from events that already happened in previous books. And any exceptionalism that comes after that is largely due to the reputation or skills characters have built for themselves rather than because they’re “chosen ones”.

If you haven’t read the books, I really recommend them!

I dislike reddit as much as the next scorned ex-redditor, but I can’t really blame them here, regardless of what state reddit is in. if things are going downhill, obviously selling while they can makes sense. And if things are looking good, why not sell now anyway and have some actual money to spend, rather than just holding onto the Monopoly money in case it’s worth more later? It’s still more than enough money for them to be able to live comfortably for the rest of their lives.

Do remember that teachers generally work far, far longer each day than just 9-5. Their paid hours often don’t give them time for lesson planning and marking.

That’s part of it - they don’t want to lose their investment. The other part is that if they do stop propping up Israel, they know another country like Russia or China will happily fill the void and reap all the benefits of the influence in the region. The US could cut ties and not be involved at all but it’s not likely it would change much, unfortunately; Israel would just continue with new backers and the US would be in a worse position.

Not that that justifies the war and all the weapon sales on the US’ part, of course. But I think, with that information, it’s easy to see why there’s some nuance to it, and why the US isn’t keen to sever ties or be too harsh a critic.

Dude, what the fuck kind of comment is this?! I have no love for spez whatsoever, and would happily see him lose all his money and landed gentry status. But your comment is just unhinged.

“He who controls the spice(y content) controls the universe” - Baron Harkonnen in Frank Herbert’s Dune

There certainly was some actual “ethics in video game journalism” discussion early on that I felt was legitimate, but that got drowned out pretty quickly by the misogynists (which, from what I gather, was the entire point - it seems the misogynists started the whole thing and used the “ethics in game journalism” thing as a front to try to legitimise their agenda).

I think the discussion about the personal relationships game journalists have with developers in general was a reasonable one to have. It unfortunately ended up just laser focusing on Zoe Quinn supposedly trading sex for good reviews, which was untrue, sexist and resulted in nasty personal attacks. But I think it was worth at least examining the fact that game journalists and game developers often have close relationships and move in the same circles, and that game journalism can often be a stepping stone to game development. Those are absolutely things that could influence someone’s reviews or articles, consciously or subconsciously.

And another conversation worth having was the fact that gaming outlets like IGN were/are funded by adverts from gaming companies. It makes sense, of course - the Venn diagram of IGN’s (or other gaming outlets’) readers and gaming companies’ target audience is almost a perfect circle, which makes the ad space valuable to the gaming companies. And because it’s valuable to gaming companies, it’s better for the outlets to sell the ad space to them for more money than to sell it to generic advertising platforms. But it does mean it seems valid to ask whether the outlets giving bad reviews or writing critical articles might cause their advertisers to pull out, and therefore they might avoid being too critical.

Now I don’t think the games industry is corrupt or running on cronyism, personally. And I certainly don’t believe it’s all run by a shadowy cabal of woke libruls who are trying to force black people, women (and worse, gasp black women shudder) into games. But I do feel it was worth asking about the relationships between journalists, developers, publishers and review outlets - and honestly, those are the kinds of things that both game journalists and people who read game journalism should constantly be re-evaluating. It’s always good to be aware of potential biases and influences.

The fact that the whole thing almost immediately got twisted into misogyny, death threats and a general hate campaign was both disappointing and horrifying. And the fact that it led to the alt-right, and that you can trace a line from it to Brexit and to Donald Trump becoming US president, is even worse.

I don’t think it’s about capitalism/socialism/communism at all for a lot of them at this point. They have a fairly simple ideology: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And their enemy happens to be their own government.

KOAN Sound - Led By Ancient Light definitely tops my list.

And a couple of King Gizzard and the Wizard Lizard albums, but I’ve seen them mentioned already! I’m sure there are probably some more that I’m blanking on right now - I’ll check my music library and edit this if I think of some more!

Not to excuse his criminal activity, but I don’t think it’s really a surprise he’s not particularly… well-adjusted, given who his mother is. I frankly would have been more shocked if I was told he was a functional, well-adjusted, pleasant human being.

The website whose CEO was a moderator on r/jailbait, the community for sexualizing minors?

I thoroughly dislike spez, and I think there are a lot of reasons to be critical of him, but this isn’t one of them. He was made a moderator of /r/jailbait at a time when people could be added as moderators without being notified or needing to accept any kind of invitation.

I’d rather see him criticised for the many awful things he’s said and done over the years than for some non-reason like that.