spit_evil_olive_tips

at the risk of being "guy who pretty much only plays Factorio recommends you play Factorio..."

you can easily put 50+ hours into a single savefile, especially with the Space Age expansion

direct link to the paper, rather than this Gazeon clickbait: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adt3813

We study vocabulary changes in more than 15 million biomedical abstracts from 2010 to 2024 indexed by PubMed and show how the appearance of LLMs led to an abrupt increase in the frequency of certain style words. This excess word analysis suggests that at least 13.5% of 2024 abstracts were processed with LLMs. This lower bound differed across disciplines, countries, and journals, reaching 40% for some subcorpora.

99% of users on Lemmy instances are extremely fearful of AI and lack the courage to accept reality

hi. I see you registered your account here 2 days ago. welcome to Beehaw.

posting comments that boil down to "99% of you are stupid but luckily I'm here to educate you" is probably going to wear out your welcome pretty fast.

haha Streisand Effect go brrrrr

https://www.iceblock.app/

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/iceblock/id6741939020

(currently no Android version, unfortunately)

With NHS mental health waitlists at record highs, are chatbots a possible solution?

taking Betteridge's Law one step further - not only is the answer "no", the fucking article itself explains why the answer is no:

People around the world have shared their private thoughts and experiences with AI chatbots, even though they are widely acknowledged as inferior to seeking professional advice.

as with so many other things, "maybe AI can fix it?" is being used as a catch-all for every systemic problem in society:

In April 2024 alone, nearly 426,000 mental health referrals were made in England - a rise of 40% in five years. An estimated one million people are also waiting to access mental health services, and private therapy can be prohibitively expensive.

fucking fund the National Health Service properly, in order to take care of the people who need it.

but instead, they want to continue cutting its budget, and use "oh there's an AI chatbot that you can use that is totally just as good as talking to a human, trust us" as a way of sweeping the real-world harm caused by those budget cuts under the rug.

Nicholas has autism, anxiety, OCD, and says he has always experienced depression. He found face-to-face support dried up once he reached adulthood: "When you turn 18, it's as if support pretty much stops, so I haven't seen an actual human therapist in years."

He tried to take his own life last autumn, and since then he says he has been on a NHS waitlist.

tl;dw is that you should say "please" as basically prompt engineering, I guess?

the theory seems to be that the chatbot will try to match your tone, so if you ask it questions in a tone like it's an all-knowing benevolent information god, it'll respond in kind, and if you treat it politely its responses will tend more towards politeness?

I don't see how this solves any of the fundamental problems with asking a fancy random number generator for authoritative information, but sure, if you want to be polite to the GPUs, have at it.

like, several lawyers have been sanctioned for submitting LLM-generated legal briefs with hallucinated case citations. if you tack on "pretty please, don't make up any fake case citations or I could get disbarred" to a prompt...is that going to solve the problem?

short answer: no, not really

long answer, here's an analogy that might help:

you go to https://yourbank.com/ and log in with your username and password. you click the button to go to Online Bill Pay, and tell it to send ACME Plumbing $150 because they just fixed a leak under your sink.

when you press "Send", your browser does something like send a POST request to https://yourbank.com/send-bill-payment with a JSON blob like {"account_id": 1234567890, "recipient": "ACME Plumbing", "amount": 150.0} (this is heavily oversimplified, no actual online bank would work like this, but it's close enough for the analogy)

and all that happens over TLS. which means it's "secure". but security is not an absolute, things can only be secure with a particular threat model in mind. in the case of TLS, it means that if you were doing this at a coffee shop with an open wifi connection, no one else on the coffeeshop's wifi would be able to eavesdrop and learn your password.

(if your threat model is instead "someone at the coffeeshop looking over your shoulder while you type in your password", no amount of TLS will save you from that)

but with the type of vulnerability Jellyfin has, someone else can simply send their own POST request to https://yourbank.com/send-bill-payment with {"account_id": 1234567890, "recipient": "Bob's Shady Plumbing", "amount": 10000.0}. and your bank account will process that as you sending $10k to Bob's Shady Plumbing.

that request is also over TLS, but that doesn't matter, because that's security for a different level of the stack. the vulnerability is that you are logged in as account 1234567890, so you should be allowed to send those bill payment requests. random people who aren't logged in as you should not be able to send bill payments on behalf of account 1234567890.

SMART can be used for a couple different things - one is just reading the health values reported by the drive, another is for instructing the drive to run tests of itself and then reporting the results. if you haven't already, I'd recommend having it run the "long" self-test as that inspects the entire drive. it will often prompt the drive to report problems that it may not have noticed otherwise.

a related thing to keep an eye on, especially with an old netbook like that, is the power & data connectors to the drive. buildup of dust, or corrosion on the contacts, or something like that, could cause symptoms that look like a drive failure, even if the drive itself is perfectly healthy.

oh, this one's pretty easy, actually

a normal AI tells you it's safe to eat one rock per day

an AI agent waits for you to open your mouth, and then throws a rock at your face. but it's smart enough to only do that once a day.

Casey Newton reviewed OpenAI's "agent" back in January

he called it "promising but frustrating"...but this is the type of shit he considers "promising":

My most frustrating experience with Operator was my first one: trying to order groceries. “Help me buy groceries on Instacart,” I said, expecting it to ask me some basic questions. Where do I live? What store do I usually buy groceries from? What kinds of groceries do I want?

It didn’t ask me any of that. Instead, Operator opened Instacart in the browser tab and begin searching for milk in grocery stores located in Des Moines, Iowa.

At that point, I told Operator to buy groceries from my local grocery store in San Francisco. Operator then tried to enter my local grocery store’s address as my delivery address.

After a surreal exchange in which I tried to explain how to use a computer to a computer, Operator asked for help. “It seems the location is still set to Des Moines, and I wasn't able to access the store,” it told me. “Do you have any specific suggestions or preferences for setting the location to San Francisco to find the store?”

they're gonna revolutionize the world, it's gonna evolve into AGI Real Soon Now....but also if you live in San Francisco and tell it to buy you groceries it'll order them from Iowa.

click here to pre-order my upcoming book, published by Harvard Business Review, "Don't Be A Fucking Nazi and Other Secrets To Corporate Success"

their pricing page is here.

I'm paying 10 USD/month for their unlimited plan, there's also a 5 USD/month tier but I'm sure that I would exceed its 300 searches/month limit.

so it's not dirt-cheap, but not stupidly expensive either. I can afford it, and I'm happy to pay it because it's a business model that I would like to see succeed.

in 2024, Biden and then Harris tried their best to move rightward on immigration.

first with a "bipartisan" border security bill that was blocked by Senate Republicans on Trump's orders.

and then at the DNC:

Among the speakers in Chicago were New York Rep. Tom Suozzi, whose relatively hawkish views on the border helped him win a Congressional special election in a conservative Long Island district earlier this year. The sheriff of a Texas border county who has criticized former President Donald Trump's stance on the border was also on hand at the United Center.

this was the same DNC that had zero Palestinian-American speakers, because golly you know the schedule was just so packed. but there was plenty of time for two different speakers about how Democrats, not Republicans, are the people you should vote for if you care about the "border crisis". a Congressman from Long Island, because of course immigration is a hot-button issue on Long Fucking Island. and a sheriff from Texas, appearing in-uniform, to continue the long tradition of Democrats trying to "well, ackshually, we're the pro-police party".

Democrats campaigning as Diet Republicans does not fucking work

but the central tenet of the Democratic Party is never learning a lesson about anything, ever, and so they haven't learned that lesson.

that fucking animatronic wig is dead to me. if he's the Democratic nominee in 2028 (it seems pretty transparent that's the real motivation* behind starting his stupid little podcast), I'm not voting for him. I don't care if he's the VP pick behind someone I like better like AOC. crossing into anti-trans bullshit is an absolute dealbreaker for me.

* though this news is making me suspect that Newsom is realistic about not having a chance of winning the Democratic nomination, and instead he's making a feint towards it so that he is positioned to run as a "centrist" independent spoiler candidate in the event someone "too far left" gets the nomination. that should be a pretty decent fundraising grift regardless of whether he goes through with it or not.