lvxferre

We’re removing some underutilized features in Google Assistant to focus on delivering the best possible user experience.

Is this the non sequitur used nowadays to explain removal of features? "We're removing it to give you a better experience"??? That's bloody hilarious.

Be honest at least dammit. If you don't want to maintain a feature, because it's against your best interests, say so. Users are not stupid, and should not be implied to be stupid with this idiotic "it's for you lol" discourse.

(I don't even use Botnet Assistant.)

The settlement is right at the border of what would be controlled by the Inca government, two millenniums later. It shows that there's some decent access to the region from the west than you'd be led to believe, with the Andes in the way.

As such, if they find other cities further east, I'm predicting that, culturally speaking, they'll resemble nothing this one; even if they happen to be roughly the same size.

People ate maize and sweet potato, and probably drank "chicha", a type of sweet beer.

"If you don't have chicha, any small thing will do." (reference to a certain song)

Serious now. Potentially yucca too - it grows right next door, and if they got maize from North America then they likely traded for crops.

4chan was always called the asshole of the internet, but it's more like the mouth of an extremely drunk internet ready to vomit on you.

I agree too much with the text to comment anything meaningful about it. So let's see the comments...

One aspect of the spread of LLMs is that we have lost a useful heuristic. Poor spelling and grammar used to be a signal used to quickly filter out worthless posts. [...]

Although I agree with the title, I also don't think the internet is that significantly different from before GPTs 4, 3, or 2. Articles written by interns or Indian virtual assistants about generic topics are pretty much as bad as most AI generated material [...]

Both comments reminded me a blogpost that I wrote more than a year ago, regarding chatGPT-3. It still applies rather well to 2024 LLMs, and it shows what those two tech bros are missing, so I'll copypaste it here.

###The problem with GPT3.

Consider the following two examples.

Example A.

GPT3 bots trained on the arsehole of the internet (Reddit), chatting among themselves:

1. LPT: When you’re planning your next vacation, be sure to consider the cost of airfare and hotels. You may not have the money to go on a luxury trip, but at least you won’t have to worry about the economy when you leave! // You're worth it!
2. (to #1) This is great advice! I definitely need to start considering the cost of airfare and hotels when planning my next vacation. Thank you for the tips!
3. (to #2) I completely agree! When I'm planning my next vacation, my number one priority is to make sure that it's worth the cost. Thanks for the advice!
4. (to #2) Keep up the great work!

The grammar is fine, and yet those messages don’t say jack shit.

• #1 - the so-called “life pro tip” is fairly obvious, since people are aware that airfare and hotels cost quite a bit. It is not informing the reader about something potentially missed.
• #1 - “You may not have the money to go on a luxury trip” is extraneous, no matter how you interpret it, as it’s directed towards people who won’t fly and spend time in hotels.
• #1 - How the hell are you expected to worry less or more about the economy, depending on how you plan your vacations?
• #1 - you’re worth… what? The vacations? Not worrying about the economy? Something else?
• #2 - needlessly repeating a huge chunk of #1.
• #3 and #4 - it’s clear that #1 and #2 are different participants, #2 provided nothing worth thanking, and yet it’s still being thanked. Why?

Example B.

Human translation made by someone with not-so-good grasp of the target language.

Captain: What happen ?
Mechanic: Somebody set up us the bomb.
Operator: We get signal.
Captain: What !
Operator: Main screen turn on.
Captain: It's you !!
CATS: How are you gentlemen !!
CATS: All your base are belong to us.
CATS: You are on the way to destruction.

The grammar is so broken that this excerpt became a meme. And yet you can still retrieve meaning from it:

• Captain, Mechanic and Operator are the crew of a ship
• Captain asks for info
• Someone is trying to kill them with a bomb
• Operator and Mechanic inform Captain on what happens
• CATS sarcastically greets the crew, and provides them info to make them feel hopeless
• Captain expresses distress towards CATS

What’s the difference? It's purpose. In (B) we can give each utterance a purpose, even if the characters are fictional - because they were written by a human being. However, we cannot do the same in (A), because the current AI-generated text does not model that purpose.

And yes, assigning purpose to your utterances is part of the language. Not just what tech bros are able to see, namely: syntax, morphology, and spelling.

Even in this thread there’s discussion of a show that blatantly tittilates the audience with underage characters that would absolutely qualify as csam in any other community except in the anime community, for some reason.

Emphasis mine. If what you are saying is indeed correct (is it? dunno), this is a sign that the acronym "CSAM" was completely derailed.

Originally the expression "child sexual abuse material" was coined to avoid implications of consent brought by the word "pornography", and it boils down to "evidence of child sexual abuse". Consent and sexual abuse are legal notions that only apply to real people, not to fictional characters.

In the meantime, at worst the instance in question depicts images of clearly fictional characters in suggestive poses and/or clothing. It does not classify even as pornography, let alone sexual abuse. (Note that not even hentai depicting clearly adult characters is allowed in that instance.)

I don’t care about what the maintainers’ view of the matter is, I make (and sometimes delete) my comments based on my own view of it.

Given that this is a touchy subject, I think that this matter is better handled neither by the maintainers' views nor by our own views, but by 1) legal definitions of governments that might be relevant in the matter, and 2) explicit moral premises.

That's surprisingly accurate, as people here are highlighting (it makes geometrical sense when dealing with complex numbers).

My nephew once asked me this question. The way that I explained it was like this:

• the friend of my friend is my friend; (+1)*(+1) = (+1)
• the enemy of my friend is my enemy; (+1)*(-1) = (-1)
• the friend of my enemy is my enemy; (-1)*(+1) = (-1)
• the enemy of my enemy is my friend; (-1)*(-1) = (+1)

It's a different analogy but it makes intuitive sense, even for kids. And it works nice as mnemonic too.

Archive link.

Personal take: suck it up, Somalia; if the population of Somaliland has effective control of the region, and desires it to be independent, then there isn't much that you could (or should) do. And from that, if both Somaliland and Ethiopia reach an amicable agreement over the ports, so be it.

Also, let us drop all that babble about territorial integrity. Even if you believe in this sort of political superstition, Somalia's territorial integrity went kaboom in 1991.

Stating obvious shit like it was some hidden piece of wisdom? Inability to handle subtleties like "lying" vs. "saying an incorrect statement"? Voting system? People repeating the same shit over and over, without reading the others' comments?

EDIT: I'm highlighting that this YT comment section shows a lot of things to hate in Reddit. In some aspects they're behaving exactly like redditors; in some they're actually doing it better, even if YT is a cesspool of idiocy.

Yeah, but the admins, as the thread has shown, are mainly reining in violations of sitewide policy. Instance rules are mainly the job of mods.

So the admins are reining in violations of lemmy.ml-wide policy... while lemmy.ml rules are mainly the job of the mods??? Congratulations, that's the dumbest thing that I've read today.

Couple the above with the backpedalling (from "This is what mods are for." to "Instance rules are mainly the job of mods."; emphasis on "mainly") - a sleight of hand, while lying that I was the one using a sleight of hand - and I'm led to the conclusion that you have nothing meaningful to add to this discussion, and can be safely ignored as dead weight and noise.

Unlike the above, does anyone here have any decent counter-argument against "migrating this comm to that other instance would be sensible"?

Want some cuteness overload? Even big felines love cardboard boxes!

I've seen even people in their 40s using them. I don't think that it's a big deal, or that it's too late for that.

Calcium chloride exists, it's CaCl₂. You need two chloride anions for each calcium cation. [see note*]

It's safe to eat as long as food grade. In fact it's used in cheesemaking. It's salty and bitter. It's also used to dehydrate stuff in laboratory, since it absorbs water like there's no tomorrow.

It doesn't behave like metallic calcium at all. Just like sodium chloride (aka table salt) doesn't behave like metallic sodium (warning: loud noise).

*Note: technically CaCl (one chlorine) exists, as a diatomic molecule. Rarely found in stars, you won't find it in Earth.