James R Kirk

I have no issue with using AI to find otherwise undiscovered security bugs. But attempting to fixing them with AI I’m not in favor of.

I see “Elon Musk” invitating me to secret whatsapp groups where he is going to give me bitcoin

I get what you’re saying is a joke, but most people don’t know about Newpipe or whatever the current alternative app is, and soon most people won’t be able to sideload anyway when Google makes it’s changes to Android.

It’s not good that Google/Meta are exposing these people to scammed for the crime of simply for not knowing how to sideload.

If you open YouTube shorts in a new account or an account that doesn’t store history the ads are nearly exclusively AI slop scams. This is not just a Meta issue.

Good read that got me thinking. Donation supported journalism works well for NPR.

I can imagine an ecosystem in which enough people give their $50/month streaming subscriptions directly to artists and journalists.

Thankfully I don’t think economic demand for AI generated visuals is nearly as high as the human crafted variety

That’s really astute, I’ve never seen that comparison drawn so directly. It’s the same situation with the people who claim that AI “democratizes” art by allowing someone to have a “work” of art without putting in the work of creating which is what makes a work a thing to be desired in the first place.

This quote from Ford’s CEO:

“It’s going to be a vibrant industry, but it’s going to be smaller, way smaller than we thought,” Ford chief executive Jim Farley said at an event on Tuesday.

Combined with the following quote he recently said:

Speaking on the Everything Electric Show podcast, Farley praised the [Xiaomi] electric sedan. “I don’t like talking about the competition so much, but I drive a Xiaomi,” he said. “We flew one from Shanghai to Chicago, and I’ve been driving it for six months now, and I don’t want to give it up.”

Really feels like Kodak in the 90’s kinda-sorta investing in digital but not willing to fully transform a majority of business.

If these catch on (unlikely imo) it’s only a matter of time before I have an awkward interaction with someone when they come into my house wearing them…

I don’t understand, $600M? Is anyone using this browser?

That’s great to hear thanks

Can anyone with Bazzite experience tell me how it handles games with third party launchers like EA or Ubisoft? You can’t seem to be able to escape those these days and they are buggy even on Windows so I don’t have high hopes for Linux.

It worries me that there are scientists out there who are making studies based on the assumption that an LLM chat bot is a reasonable stand-in for a human in this context (in any context really but that’s another conversation). It’s just not what LLMs are, it’s not what they are designed to do. They’ve fallen for the marketing.

We address this question using a novel method - generative social simulation - that embeds Large Language Models within Agent-Based Models to create socially rich synthetic platforms. We create a minimal platform where agents can post, repost, and follow others. We find that the resulting following-networks reproduce three well-documented dysfunctions: (1) partisan echo chambers; (2) concentrated influence among a small elite; and (3) the amplification of polarized voices - creating a ‘social media prism’ that distorts political discourse.

1. lmao “generative AI chatbots trained on social media behave like social media users”
2. Shame on ArsTechnica they should be better than to publish a study like this.

That’s all LLM software is, it has no connection to reality, it’s bullshitting 100% of the time. The fact that it is correct mostly, or confident always does not imply that it understands anything it’s saying.

slop

From someone waking up from a coma without experience with Windows or MacOS, Linux truly is the most user friendly. It may not have been true five years ago but in my mind it is without question true now.

I hate to admit sometimes that the Chrome experience (especially on mobile) can be a lot smoother and quicker to load, but Firefox wins every time on extensibility. But to your point yes the hate directed Firefox’s way can be well, a bit much.

I believe Firefox is completely FOSS.

Looks like it is! I was under the apparently false impression that it was only partly.

Well, because FOSS apps are usually the best/most user friendly option even if they’re not always the most popular. If you woke up after a 30 year coma and had no prior commitments to using any particular software, there would be absolutely zero question that Linux is the best OS today.

An OS is a complicated thing, yet the FOSS option is the safest, most user friendly, and most versatile. I’m just a little surprised there isn’t a browser that checks those boxes too, since the browser is a widely used thing. But I’m guessing because Firefox exists the number of devs willing to give the time investment just isn’t as many.