Lvxferre [he/him]

You can also change it in the settings. Look for “search assist”; values are “never”, “on demand”, “sometimes”, and “often”.

But yeah, to be frank I use mostly DDG nowadays, I focused on Google due to the OP.

There’s an extension called Disable AI that gets rid of those intrusive Google Search AI “replies”. I strongly recommend people to use it, because… seriously, they are convincing but misleading trash.

The two phonemic transcriptions of “disregard” in the first picture are a prime example of that. I could go on a full rant about it, but to keep it short: compare them with the ones provided by Wiktionary, and play “spot the differences”. (Bonus points if you also play “spot the undeclared assumptions”.)

Giving free access to a tool you can’t rely on, over a system you must rely on. What could go wrong? /s

Plus come on, even my personal files get a monthly backup, and I’m damn sloppy*.

Ah, and like others said: Claude didn’t “confess” anything. A confession is an acknowledgement of something you’ve done but you’d rather avoid others knowing, good luck claiming a bot has a mental model of people like we do.

*currently using a single off-site backup, a USB stick. This will change in a few days, as my new hard disk pops up; the old one will be used for, among other things, backup of important files. Then I’ll get a bona fide 3-2-1.

RIP, apparently 😔

…wow. I wasn’t aware of that at all. But the forums confirm it, and Battosay wouldn’t joke about it. :-/

May he rest in peace.

Anyway. Now thinking, most of his takes were spot on, and proved true later on: Minecraft wasting huge amounts of dev time on pathfinding for pets and then testificates, Forge becoming a drama-generating machine, and, more on-topic, Molyneux.

Epic is evil while Ubisoft is just incompetent

Incompetence is a form of evil. Put them both in the same square.

Lemme quote a Minecraft forums post:

Now, I’m going to take an educated guess here and say that Peter Molyneux is probably the developer in question that suggested these things [that Notch should add pets to Minecraft]. It’s right up his ally [SIC - alley].

A couple of things to keep in mind with Molyneux: he has great ideas, but his ideas are often way overly ambitious. This is why his games are constantly very late and way over budget. While he’s brilliant, he also has a tendency to go way off on design tangents that keep his development teams spinning in circles.

This is from 2011. Fifteen years ago, at least professional game designers (like the OP from that quote, FlowerChild) were already aware Molyneux is an “ideas guy”. He pictures huuuuuge, world-changing games that are unfeasible. Couple this with anything related to RL money and guess what, you’ll get people losing money.

At its most absurd nadir, one is reminded of Juicero, a company that sold a $400 juicer that did the same work as squeezing its proprietary juice packs with one’s bare hands.

It does.

My comment doesn’t, but the OP does. Four downvotes in Beehaw is quite a lot, given the local users don’t downvote. Same thread is in the negatives in one of the cross-posts even if it’s on-topic.

And, like. I get why people would react negatively towards the product itself, but I don’t think it’s good tone to react like this towards the news being shared, you know?

People, please stop shooting the messenger. Please.

With that out of the way: I wish Mozilla didn’t waste so much money on chasing the latest trend of the season, and instead used it for its main products. Including Thunderbird. The one asking for donations.

Some years from now Thunderbolt will likely pop up in this list, of abandoned Mozilla products. Because it isn’t the result of Mozilla finding a niche to create an AI product to benefit users; it’s simply execs chasing the latest trend.

*Beehaw users are likely not seeing this, but this post has a bunch of downvotes.

That makes sense; it would be a mix of “if you can do it and I can’t, you must be cheating” and “your a bot than you’re arguement is invalid” ad hominem.

I think unnecessary combativeness might be also a factor. I’ve noticed on the internet people who want to fight against “something”, it doesn’t matter what; so they pick any low-hanging fruit they can find to fight you.

I’m actually using more those resources (em dashes, three points lists, “it’s worth noting that”, “it’s not X, it’s Y”, etc.) after AI popped up. They’re a damn good way to detect assumptive people, eager to conclude based on little to no info or reasoning; the same ones OP is complaining about. They don’t want a conversation at all, they want to whine, so if you give them a low-hanging fruit you can detect them early and block them as noise and dead weight.

That’s in my “casual” writing style, though. Professionally (as a translator) I mostly play by the tune, trying to preserve the style of the original. (Plus I barely translate things into English, it’s usually into Portuguese, very rarely Italian.)

That might not necessarily be the case – there is a possibility every example is completely organic – but it’s a sign of the times that we can’t just relax and assume the things we see and hear were made by people.

Guys, I found em dashes! The author is a bot! Bring me my pitchfork! /jk (those are en dashes, by the way.)

I think the text leaves the worst parts out: assumptions, decontextualisation, faulty reasoning, focusing on individual words instead of what they mean, and things like this. As in, issues with that part of comprehension that depends on logic, not on language proficiency.

All of those were already a problem before chatbots. But since chatbot output is really bad at those things, I think increased exposure to chatbots might make the problem worse.

And it’s such a great game. It exploits really well the expectations of visual novels and games in general, first pretending to play along them and then breaking those expectations. (I’m trying my hardest to not spoil it, seriously.)

But Google doesn’t care about it. Or about sensible rules. Or enforcing fairly the very rules it expects you to follow.

That threat did not materialize, and now some apologists are saying that it was just one of Trump’s deranged bargaining tactics, as if that excuses such categorical declarations of mass violence from a US president

Even if playing along this fucking farce of “just” a “bargaining tactic” (instead of accurately representing it as commitment to war crimes), and even if we brush off all moral standards (we should not), that’s still bloody stupid. He’s making sure the Iranian population gets as motivated as possible to resist, while the United-Statian population resists against any sort of war effort. He’s shooting his own foot split hoof.

Currently, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, xAI, Oracle and even Meta have large contracts with the US military.

That should surprise nobody. Let’s play “spot who you know”:

But this week should serve as a clarifying moment.

Aah, cut off the crap. If this is a clarifying moment for anyone, the person in question has been living under a rock since forever.

I see some angry person. The good type of angry — directing his anger at the right things.

To be clear: Bode is not criticising the fact that journalists quote what CEOs say. He’s criticising the fact they do it and call it a day, as if saying “trust the CEO”.

It goes without saying that CEOs are really loud when saying what they want the sucker (you) to believe. So if that’s all you want, you need no journalist. A journalist is only useful if you want to know the factual reality; but for that they need to contextualise and challenge the claims, not just parrot them.

I’d end with some noble call for the U.S. media industry to do better, but it’s abundantly clear they don’t want to.

If it’s any consolation it isn’t just the United-Statian media.

Nope. Even if the government (Brazil) controlling my homeland is one of those shitting “think on the children! [because we don’t]” laws.

I don’t know if this is related to my browser reporting my geolocation as NZ, and the default page language being Italian, it’s possible bad design is helping me out.

I don’t bother with Calibre or anything similar; I simply use the directory structure. Easier to show it with examples than explaining it.

You get the idea, right? No additional software needed, any automation tool to move/rename files can be used to help you out, and since metadata isn’t used for the organisation you can take your sweet time checking and fixing it. And sharing it across my network means simply sharing a directory with everything in it.

Key points to use this approach effectively:

1. Keep it simple. If you need to think on where an item should go, you’re probably over-engineering your sorting.
2. Keep it objective. For example, genre is usually a bad sorting criterion, as the same piece of media can belong to 2+ genres. Author, franchise, set (season, album, etc.) are typically better.
3. Keep it flexible. It’s fine and good if each subdivision has its own sorting criteria. Just be consistent with it.
4. Keep it accurate. Names are part of the sorting structure, and should be descriptive.
5. Keep it clean. Don’t add unorganised items to the file structure; if you must, keep a separated “to sort” directory elsewhere.
6. Keep it broad. You’re probably already used to this due to the Johnny decimal system, but broader categories are usually better. Just don’t create artificial divisions to arbitrarily nest divisions, though; remember #2.
7. Keep changing it. Ultimately the goal of a sorting system is to find your stuff; it is neither to be a control freak, nor to follow the advice of some random internet person like me. So if something is not working well for you, change it.

Ah, on automation:

• GPRename and Bulky are useful to… well, bulk rename files.
• EasyTag can do it for audio files, based on the metadata and/or info retrieved from the internet.
• Wikipedia “$series_name list of episodes” for descriptive names for anime or live action seasons. Often you can copypaste the whole text bloc into a text editor, and use some find-and-replace to get rid of everything except episode number + episode name.
• Calc (yup, the spreadsheet program!) is a godsend. Specially with the above, plus a terminal; it means you can create on the spot a bunch of commands like

mv 01.mkv "01 - The Sphere.mkv"
mv 02.mkv "02 - The Inhabited.mkv"
[...]

I remember ranting about it in the past, but, basically: the page regarding Brazil is fairly accurate, you’ll find 9001 types of plugs, and a mix of 127V and 220V (no underlying plug vs. voltage pattern). It reaches a point I’ve seen people daisy chaining adapters to get their stuff working, it’s bloody hell.

Some residences have both voltages. Including mine; it’s a few 220V sockets for highly demanding appliances, and the rest is 127V.

Brazil aims to phase out the other types; see footnote. // (1) beginning January 1st, 2007 new residential, commercial and industrial wall outlet installations must comply with this new standard, and // (2) beginning August 1st, 2007 imported electrical devices must comply with NBR 14136 regulations. It is the aim to gradually phase out NEMA flat blade and Schuko devices in Brazil.

Hello, I come from the future. 19 years past 2007. The mess is still there. Try harder dammit. Prime example on how completely dysfunctional the federal government is, I bet shit would be already solved if up to the States, at least in some of them.

This isn’t even a “lie”. It’s worse than that: it’s an empty statement misleading readers to see meaning where there’s none.

Commitment is intentions. Even between human beings, you don’t know someone else’s intentions, at most what they claim about them; so there’s no way to check if the “I’m committed to $thing” claim is true or false. But to make it even worse, a company is not a human being, it is simply an abstraction, unable to have “intentions”.

So, let’s call bread “bread” and wine “wine”: people working for Microslop noticed it’s being called “Microslop”, they know why, and they’re trying to minimise brand damage — trying to convince you that Microslop does not output slop, and that the Moon is made of green cheese. That’s it.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day. With enough broken clocks disagreeing with each other, the odds at least one is right are close to 100%. Only a fool would listen to any, though.