Oh god, Sabine “capitalism is when people buy things and academia is basically communism” Hossenfelder has opinions about AI now.

The corporate dickriding over at Reddit about this is exhausting.

When you use Firefox or really any browser, you’re giving it information like website addresses, form data, or uploaded files. The browser uses this information to make it easier to interact with websites and online services. That’s all it is saying.

How on Earth did I use Firefox to interact with websites and services in the last 20+ years then without that permission?

Luckily the majority opinion even over there seems to be that this sucks bad, which might to be in no small part due to a lot of Firefox’s remaining userbase being privacy-conscious nerds like me. So, hey, they’re pissing on the boots on even more of their users and hope no one will care. And the worst part? It will probably work because anything Chromium-based is completely fucking useless now that they’ve gutted uBlock Origin (and even the projects that retain Manifest v2 support don’t work as well as Firefox, especially when it comes to blocking YouTube ads), and most Webkit-based projects have either switched to Chromium or disappeared (RIP Midori).

I can’t comprehensively express how much I despise what Discord has done to the internet. Support communities are gone from the open web (as in, you can’t use a search engine to search Discord servers, neither can you easily log them to processable text files like you can with IRC), tons of communities are now insulated to a point where you can’t even get in if you want to, because unless you’re large enough or have enough booster points (which, to no one’s surprise, cost money, and only last for a limited time) you can’t generate permanent invite links, so you gotta know someone to get in.

And all of that for a proprietary app that is an accessibility nightmare (for fuck’s sake let me change that ugly-ass font to something readable, because God forbid that one of your users might be dyslexic, you absolute munted dickheads), doesn’t listen to any user feedback but is constantly adding absolute bottom-of-the-barrel features, many of which are behind a paywall, and is now adding LLMs to the mix?

Okay, rant over, but I just needed to get that out.

optifye.ai

When the normal -fy startup nomenclature isn’t even enough.

I looked at their website and they’re not even attempting to mask their dystopian shitshow. And of course it’s all in the name of productivity and efficiency.

I hate those ghouls so much.

google are implementing security policies on their devices that cannot be implemented on grapheneos and will prevent certain apps (notably banking ones) from working

That is concerning. Tbh, banking apps are probably the main reason I use a smartphone at all, because there’s no way anymore, at least where I live, to get a TAN without their stupid apps since they have all deprecated SMS TAN. Some still sell you physical token generators for ridiculous prices, but that’s going away, too.

And on the main topic of this thread: can Xwitter in general just fucking die already?

Peter thiel looks like if nosferatu never hit puberty

This image will now forever live in my head. Thanks, random YT commenter.

Fcitx is an input method editor used to type different languages, especially those that need to be composed from context (Chinese, Japanese, Thai, etc.) I believe it comes preinstalled with KDE (at least in kde-full it does, unsure about the smaller packages), but it should be totally safe to remove if you don’t need this functionality.

Some time ago in an article or YouTube video i stumbled upon, someone asked Elon a question why he got interested in space. He answered that he read a book which kindled his interest.

I wonder if it was this. It would make so much sense.

Making AI helpful for everyone

Where “helpful” means profitable and “everyone” means their shareholders.

The only thing that comes to mind is medical applications, drug research, etc. But that might just be a skewed perspective on my end because I know literally nothing about that industry or how AI technology is deployed there. I’ve just read research has been assisted by those tools and that seems, at least on the surface level, like a good thing.

What comes to mind is The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, a maritime adventure novel for children, which is, I believe, the first “real” book (as in, not those short kids books you can finish in an hour) I ever read by myself. I picked that for a book report in school, where the assignment was to write like a mini summary for our favorite books. Me, not having read much at that point except for those kids books, which I didn’t want to do, went to the bookstore and just idly browsed around, and for some reason that book caught my attention because of the title (it’s called “Salz im Haar” [Salt in my Hair] in the German translation) and the badass cover art of the edition I own has, so I picked that and ended up really liking it.

Ever since I’ve been a sucker for maritime fantasy.

That book also got me into reading more in general. I’m a huge fantasy nerd, so other books that will always warm me up inside are the first fantasy novels I read: Lord of the Rings, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle.

Yeah. I ran without an account for the longest time (and used alternative frontends like Freetube, Invidious, yt-dlp, etc.) but I caved and made one just so I could curate my feed.

I wish YouTube would ban this shit wholesale, but it’s Google and of course they won’t.

Aside: I’ve been hammering “Don’t recommend this channel” on every video that remotely smells like AI slop for a while and so far that seems to keep the feed fairly clean.

Which AI models, though? Your synthetic text extruder LLMs that can’t accurately surpass humans at anything unless you train them specifically to do that and which are kinda shite even then unless you look at it exactly the right way? Or that fabled brain simulation AI that doesn’t even exist?

Instead, he prefers to describe future AI systems as a “country of geniuses in a data center,” […] [and] that such systems would need to be “smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields.”

Ah, “future” AI systems. As in the ones we haven’t built yet, don’t know how to build, and don’t even know whether we can build them. But let’s just feed more shit into Habsburg GPT in the meantime, maybe one will magically pop out.

Good news, everyone: critihype is canceled until the next tweet.

https://xcancel.com/sama/status/1881258443669172470#m

9:13 of Coffeezilla having an existential crisis.

Oh well. Nothing screams healthy business like force-feeding your product to every customer who can’t hammer the conveniently hidden opt-out button fast enough. I’m sure Gemini is doing great.

Filen does photos too, so you could consolidate 2 and 3 into one. I went and bought 500 GB lifetime storage on their Black Friday offer. Let’s see if they stick around. So far the experience has been smooth.

And if you mention mailbox.org, let me throw Posteo.com into the mix. Basically the same offer, but where mailbox presents itself a bit more business-like, Posteo seems to market itself towards individuals. I moved my mails there and are quite happy with it, but you have to roll encryption yourself. No auto solutions like Proton or Tuta.

Bryan Lunduke

Holy shit, the Linux Action Show guy? I remember listening to that podcast occasionally fifteen years ago and found it quite entertaining.

I had no idea he was even still around, let alone going techfash.

[The] SEO space, an industry known for making the web better.

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