azertyfun @ azertyfun @sh.itjust.works

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660

Joined

2 yr. ago

Of course not. There's glory, there's internal CCP politics, pooh bear's ego, claims over the South China Sea, reducing the US sphere of influence, the fulfilled narrative of a "united China", etc.

China doesn't stand to gain anything pragmatic by invading Taiwan. However humans, and dictators in particular, do not always act perfectly rationally and in the best interest of their nation.

There is without a doubt a connection to ScarJo. They asked her to voice the AI, they asked her again right before release, and the CEO tweeted "her" on release.

The only question is whether, backlash aside, they could technically get away with it (which does not make it right).

There is almost certainly internal communication that basically reads "hey let's get an actress who sounds as close to ScarJo as possible". There's also the CEO tweeting "her" on the day of release.

Is that legal? IANAL, but OpenAI's reaction of immediately shutting that shit down leads me to believe they realized it is, in fact, illegal.

Your comparison is also incorrect. You're not getting a JEJ soundalike, you're getting a JEJ soundalike to do a Darth Vader impersonation. Meaningfully different semantics. They don't just want "white american woman who vaguely sounds like ScarJo I guess" they have proven beyond doubt that they want "The AI from the 2013 movie Her starring Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson".

Also legality aside, it's really fucking weird and ethically wrong. I don't care if it's legal or not, you shouldn't be able to make an AI replicate someone's voice without their consent.

First time that Liège has ever been described as Northern in basically any context. It's in Southeastern Belgium in Western Europe.

"Belgium is in Northern Europe" sounds like something ChatGPT would hallucinate. Or it's bait to drive engagement.

The cruelty is the point.

City with a metropolitan area of 600k:

Yesterday I went to IKEA (i.e. suburb-to-suburb). Google Maps said:

• Car: 20 min
• Public Transit: 1h20min
• Bicycle: 1h

So.... Technically it is possible. However no-one does this unless they are forced to by their circumstances. We've begun building one tram line and the construction process has gone so catastrophically the entire country knows about it. At this rate the urban transition away from the car will be done by 2250.

One thing I've learned as a non-French francophone: whatever you think is going on with the relations between Paris and overseas France, it's about 100x more complicated than you think.

Generally these populations want (and in the case of Nouvelle Calédonie I believe have regularly and recently reaffirmed via referendum) to remain part of France. However, the socio-political situation of each of these overseas territories is unique, complex, and often tense and dividing even for the locals.

For complete strangers to pass a harsh judgement such as "imperialist pigs" based on this article alone would be an ironic form of imperialism/paternalism. If the democratically-elected local government asks for national help, then I would very (!) cautiously agree that it makes sense that they would receive this help.

New notification, old notification, either way it auto-dismisses the system notification after 5 seconds. Why? I guess they don't trust the DE to manage notifications properly??

So my colleagues know if they send me a message I'll get to it when I'll get to it because I probably will have missed the notification.

It makes sense... until you learn about the 13th/14th month of the year. Having to multiply the monthly salary by 13.x (depending on the collective agreement of course) to get the taxable income makes imperial measurements sound logical.

Give me yearly or give me hourly, but monthly makes no sense under the current system.

1. Then don't call it autopilot
2. What's the point of automated steering if you have to remain 100 % attentive? To spare the driver the terrible burden of moving the wheel a couple mm either way? It is well studied and observed that people are less attentive when they're not actively driving, which, FUCKING DUH.

Manufacturers provide this feature for the implicit purpose of enabling distracted driving. Yet they will not accept liability if someone drives distractedly.

Next in We Are Not Liable For How Consumers Use Our Product, Elon will replace the speedometer by Candy Crush with small text that says "pwease do not use while dwiving UwU".

Well someone's done it at least once this century. It looks equal parts awesome and terrifying.

I don't think twitter users in authoritarian hellholes are acting like NPCs going "Glory to Artsotzka" every five minutes.

It's tourism, coupled with low twitter use from the local population. Belgium has a bigger population than Belarus and unlike it isn't an authoritarian hellhole. But it's way more touristy. So Belgium has its own flag as the most used emoji but Belarus doesn't.

You can see this pattern pretty clearly in the ME as well. Jordan, Yemen, or Syria don't have their own flag as their most used emoji (despite being both small and undemocratic), because there ain't any tourists there. Qatar does. (A bit surprised about Cyprus though, do they use twitter a lot?)

The data is probably sound, but the methodology is insane.

So you've never once in your life bought a laptop or prebuilt PC, used or otherwise? Because if you have then you've paid the Windows Tax.

A bunch of countries just have their own flag as an emoji... The author barely managed to identify which emoji tourists use when posting about their trip on twitter.

Well do I have exactly the brand new 1h37min queer video essay for you!

TL;DW: The modern concept of gender as separate from sex was not (originally) a progressive move. It was conservatives' reaction to the medical discoveries of the nebulous nature of biological sex, to justify imposing the gender binary on trans people and especially intersex children.

Conservatives claim to care a lot about protecting trans kids from "radical decisions", but the places that enact legislation to prevent teenagers from using puberty blockers are the same places that still allow and encourage mutilating surgeries on intersex babies.
It is not an accident. It is ideologically consistent with conservatives' drive to impose their religious and cultural vision of the binary gender as a completely fixed universal truth, and they'll use extreme violence to ensure it remains binary, fixed and universal.

I've read the exact same comment a year ago, and the year before, and probably the year before that tbh.

So I'll say what I always say; I'll believe it when I see it.

I know Brave browser has had a lot of controversy in the past regarding their business practices, including rolling out their own crypto-coin.

They apparently make the really bold claim of using their own index exclusively. If true (given their track record I am not 100 % willing to accept that as truth without seeing some independent analysis), that would do wonders for the search ecosystem. I'm definitely interested to see how it pans out.

Wow, looks like they just updated that page and removed all references to their external indexes. Very shady stuff, Kagi. I'd go as far as to say they are now lying by omission.

The archived version of that page from March does open with (emphasis mine):

Our data includes anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Mojeek and Yandex, specialized search engines like Marginalia, and sources of vertical information like Apple, Wikipedia, Open Meteo, and other APIs.

Then it goes on to say:

Kagi's indexes provide unique results that help you discover non-commercial websites and "small web" discussions surrounding a particular topic.

Now reading between the lines, and more importantly knowing how much sheer capital goes into indexing the entire web, I can say with much certainty that Kagi is probably powered mostly by Google since it and Bing (which they aren't using) are basically the only meaningful players in the space. Yandex is for the Russosphere, and Mojeek is nice but nowhere even close to Google or Bing's coverage. By their own admission Teclis is more narrowly focused and not meant to replace Google's index. So I'm going to go ahead and call them big fat liars.

I wouldn't even care that Google is their main index, that's fine and they can't be expected to compete with the billions of dollars Google spends on indexing. But the lack of transparency and shady business practices are a big turn-off for me.

I think it'd be interesting to look at a worldwide map of lead pipes. Not that such a map can even necessarily exist; here in Liège, BE, the director of the water distribution company got fired a couple years ago for severely underreporting the amount of lead pipes left in the network. I can personally attest that lead pipes are still common in the nearby housing.

Lead pipes, like asbestos, were used so liberally that they are basically impossible to fully get rid of without spending a very significant portion of the GDP on it. So we just wait until we have to fully rebuild the street to replace the pipes.

Kagi is just Google's index with fancy features and filtering on top. They include a few other sources but for regular search it's almost always going to be Google's index providing the base results.