itsnotlupus @ itsnotlupus @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

"I'm not X but <position statement that clearly requires them to be X" and "I don't want to Y but

<proceeds to do exactly Y>

On the other hand, I've never had anybody threaten to yuck my yum in exactly those terms, and I'm slightly intrigued by the prospect.

I was watching the network traffic sent by Twitter the other day, as one does, and apparently whenever you stop scrolling for a few seconds, whatever post is visible on screen at that time gets added to a little pile that then gets "subscribed to" because it generated "engagement", no click needed.
This whole insidious recommendation nonsense was probably a subplot in the classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus.

Almost entirely unrelated, but I've been playing The Algorithm (part of the Tenet OST, by Ludwig Göransson) on repeat for a bit now. It's also become my ring tone, and if I can infect at least one other hapless soul with it, I'll be satisfied.

That mirrors the tension many reddit mods struggled with recently.. It's difficult to push back against Reddit without also punishing its active users in some real way.

The folks using Reddit are still real human beings. But I get that not everybody is going to draw the line in the same spot.

To push back on that a bit, many Reddit "aged accounts" are used to push scams to the great unwashed masses.

I'm not sure it's morally okay to turn a blind eye from who's buying those accounts or why.

I honestly don't know. The only advice I'd have for the layman would be "just don't do this", but I understand that's little more than an invitation to be ignored.

Running strange software grabbed from unknown sources will never not be a risky proposition.

Uploading the .exe you just grabbed to virustotal and getting the all clear can indicate two very different things: It's either actually safe, or it hasn't yet been detected as malware.

You should expect that malware writers had already uploaded some variant of their work to virustotal before seeding it to ensure maximum impact.
Getting happy results from virustotal could simply mean the malware author simply tweaked their work until they saw those same results.

Notice I said "yet" above. Malware tends to eventually get flagged as such, even when it has a headstart of not being recognized correctly.
You can use that to somewhat lower the odds of getting infected, by waiting. Don't grab the latest crack that just dropped for the hottest game or whatever.
Wait a few weeks. Let other people get infected first and have antiviruses DBs recognize a new malware. Then maybe give it a shot.

And of course, the notion that keygens will often be flagged as "bad" software by unhelpful antivirus just further muddies the waters since it teaches you to ignore or altogether disable your antivirus in one of the most risky situation you'll put yourself into.

Let's be clear: There's nothing safe about any of this, and if you do this on a computer that has access to anything you wouldn't want to lose, you are living dangerously indeed.

Several times now, I've sent people I knew links to articles that looked perfectly fine to me, but turned out to be unusable ad-ridden garbage to them.

Since then, I try to remember to disable uBlock Origin to check what they'll actually see before I share any links.

There are a near infinity of those out there, many of which just grab other scanlation groups' output and slap their ads on top of it.

Mangadex is generally my happy place, but you'll have to wander out and about for various specific mangas.

Several of the groups that post on Mangadex also have their own website and you may find more stuff there.

For example right now I've landed on asurascans.com, which has a bunch of Korean and Chinese long strips, with generally good quality translations.

The usual sticky points with all those manga sites is the ability to track where you are in a series and continue where you left off when new chapters are posted.
Even Mangadex struggles with that, their "Updates" page is the closest thing they have to doing that and it's still not very good.

If you're going to stick to one site for any length of time, and you happen to be comfortable with userscripts, Id' suggest you head over to greasyfork.org, search for the manga domain you're using, and look for scripts that might improve your binging experience there.

No idea.

Presumably because they don't have a single delivery employee. They just provide "tech" that lets drivers and customers find each others.

Of course if those companies were to become responsible for providing a living wage to their "gig workers", then it becomes harder to still call them mere "tech" companies (and some might argue that an article using that label to describe them is in fact implicitly picking a side in that lawsuit.)

The term AI was coined many decades ago to encompass a broad set of difficult problems, many of which have become less difficult over time.

There's a natural temptation to remove solved problems from the set of AI problems, so playing chess is no longer AI, diagnosing diseases through a set of expert system rules is no longer AI, processing natural language is no longer AI, and maybe training and using large models is no longer AI nowadays.

Maybe we do this because we view intelligence as a fundamentally magical property, and anything that has been fully described has necessarily lost all its magic in the process.
But that means that "AI" can never be used to label anything that actually exists, only to gesture broadly at the horizon of what might come.

That sounds like an improbable attempt to leverage the notion that minors can't enter into a legally binding contract into a loophole to get anything for free by simply having your kid order it.

I'll note that there are plenty of models out there that aren't LLMs and that are also being trained on large datasets gathered from public sources.

Image generation models, music generation models, etc.
Heck, it doesn't even need to be about generation. Music recognition and image recognition models can also be trained on the same sort of datasets, and arguably come with similar IP right questions.

It's definitely a broader topic than just LLMs, and attempting to enumerate exhaustively the flavors of AIs/models/whatever that should be part of this discussion is fairly futile given the fast evolving nature of the field.

One of my guilty pleasures is to rewrite trivial functions to be statements free.

Since I'd be too self-conscious to put those in a PR, I keep those mostly to myself.

For example, here's an XPath wrapper:

        const $$$ = (q,d=document,x=d.evaluate(q,d),a=[],n=x.iterateNext()) => n ? (a.push(n), $$$(q,d,x,a)) : a;


  

Which you can use as $$$("//*[contains(@class, 'post-')]//*[text()[contains(.,'fedilink')]]/../../..") to get an array of matching nodes.

If I was paid to write this, it'd probably look like this instead:

        function queryAllXPath(query, doc = document) {
        const array = [];
        const result = doc.evaluate(query, doc);
        let node= result.iterateNext();
        while (node) {
            array.push(node);
            n = result.iterateNext();
        }
        return array;
    }


  

Seriously boring stuff.

Anyway, since var/let/const are statements, I have no choice but to use optional parameters instead, and since loops are statements as well, recursion saves the day.

Would my quality of life improve if the lambda body could be written as => if n then a.push(n), $$$(q,d,x,a) else a ? Obviously, yes.

You can either go full bonzai and aggressively trim any little branch that pokes out of place to try to keep a meticulously maintained tree at all times, or you can just let the tree grows as it will, and if a branch becomes an obvious issue, then just cut the entire branch and graft it somewhere else.

If I was a mod here, I would do the latter, maybe even setup an /c/AIAww or whatever in anticipation for what might come.
That's probably my laziness speaking.

The only clue we have is that the desk reflections look really plausible.

But yeah, it's real: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-president-is-shilling-beans

There have been efforts to build reputation systems that don't rely on central servers, like early day bitcoin's Web of Trust, which allowed folks to rate other folks with public key crypto, thus ensuring an accurate and fair trust rating for participants, without the possibility of a middle-man putting their thumb on the scale.

One problem with it is that it was still perfectly practical for bad actors to accumulate good ratings, then cash out their hard-earned reputation into large scams, such as the "Bitcoin Savings & Trust" (for $40 million in that particular case), which quite possibly made it measurably worse than not having a system that induced participants into making faulty judgments in the first place.

I think the main practical value of something like reddit's karma is an indication of age and account activity, both of which can probably be measured in other, if less gamified ways.