FaceDeer

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.

How nice of them to build such beautiful apartment buildings for the Gazans to live in.

The Gazans get to live in Gaza, right?

Ah, low numbers of seeds. Must’ve just not wanted to wait.

Which, as I said, seems strange. Why don’t those businesses just download the torrents?

Seems strange. Anna’s Archive makes their collection available for bulk download as torrent files, they shouldn’t need to “cut a deal” for access to that. Just download the torrent and now you’ve got the whole collection available locally.

Only 12 percent reported both lower costs and higher revenue, while 56 percent saw neither benefit. Twenty-six percent saw reduced costs, but nearly as many experienced cost increases.

So 38% saw benefits from AI, whereas “nearly” 26% saw cost increases from it. One could just as easily write the headline “More companies experience increased benefits from AI than experience increased costs” based on this data but that headline wouldn’t get so many clicks.

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.

Youtube isn’t the way you think it should be, though.

“Why did they take that feature away? I was busy abusing it!”

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 have a sneaking suspicion that the vast majority of the people raging about AIs scraping their data are not raging about it being done inefficiently.

You’re thinking of “model decay”, I take it? That’s not really a thing in practice.