TehPers

@TehPers@beehaw.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta’s AI rules have let bots hold ‘sensual’ chats with kids, offer false medical info⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Zuckerberg brought a good VR headset to the world.

  Wait no, he bought the company and forced people to use Facebook accounts to access them. Nevermind, I got nothing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Study: Social media probably can’t be fixed⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It seems a big limitation that the users in the study were bots.

  Seems like an accurate representation of social media to me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK Asks People to Delete Emails In Order to Save Water During Drought⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes I am lol

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK Asks People to Delete Emails In Order to Save Water During Drought⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The only correct spelling is “electronic mail”, though “digital correspondence” is also acceptable these days.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LLMs’ “simulated reasoning” abilities are a “brittle mirage,” researchers find⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I disagree that all Humans can or do reason.

  Well if we’re talking about all humans…

  But more seriously, it doesn’t take much looking to find someone who doesn’t reason. Just look on the TV during the next major election and you’ll find a bunch.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LLMs’ “simulated reasoning” abilities are a “brittle mirage,” researchers find⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  They are obvious liars. Some people are just too invested to see it.

  These models only have reasoning capabilities using the most obscure definitions of “reasoning”. At best, all they’re doing are climbing to local maxima with their so-called “reasoning” on a graph as wavy as the ocean.

  I’ve mentioned this on other posts, but it’s really sad because LLMs have been wildly incredible for certain NLP operations. They are that though, not AGI or whatever snake oil Altman wants to sell this week.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act verification rules⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  If Wikipedia is required to do verification and doesn’t have the funds for it, they could just IP block the UK. Maybe it’d get people to give a shit too if Wikipedia noped out of the entire country as a result.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple’s lock on iPhone browser engines gets a December deadline⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Not only is Safari miserable to test on without a Mac, whenever I see an exception to something in caniuse, it’s almost always Safari.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It’s getting harder to skirt RTO policies without employers noticing⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Personally I noticed but don’t really care. I mostly consider it off topic to even bring it up, and I’m used to it enough at this point that reading it isn’t really that hard.

  I don’t get the hate. Seems really pointless. It’s not that bad to read. Plus, it reminds me of Iceland (though I only transited through it unfortunately).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It’s getting harder to skirt RTO policies without employers noticing⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  My manager lives nearly 1000 miles from me. I have coworkers anywhere from the other side of the continent to the other side of the world.

  The fuck you want me in the office for? “Collaborative development”? Lol.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple’s lock on iPhone browser engines gets a December deadline⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Well the alternative is what we have now: everyone is forced to use Safari.

  Imagine being upset that people have a choice now.

  Mobile apps are all already written without a care in the world about the user. I doubt Jimmy, who uses exclusively TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook and maybe plays a few ad-infested mobile games, is going to notice a difference, but now people can use Firefox and Chrome if they want instead of being locked to Safari in all its “glory”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I made an AI clone of my dead son - and let a journalist interview him⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Ya know, if you make an “AI clone” of a live person with their consent, you’re going to rustle a lot fewer jimmies.

  Is this just an extension of people trying to bring back the dead or something? Cause it comes across as pissing on someone’s grave instead, unless this specific thing was their wishes for some reason.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  As Anthropic argued, it now “faces hundreds of billions of dollars in potential damages liability at trial in four months”

  Well sure when you potentially violate almost every active copyright for multiple kinds of media, you end up potentially being liable for some wild damages. That’s the whole point.

  Whether or not the work was sufficiently transformative will be an interesting question of course, but they should have known up front that this legal battle was a risk that their business could need to face.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google search boss says AI isn’t killing search clicks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  These days it’s Kagi. Manually ranking websites (pin, raise, lower, block) is a feature I couldn’t live without now.

  They still use Google’s index to some extent from what I understand, but without all of Google’s shitty “features” like AI overviews and sponsored entries.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI claims new GPT-5 model boosts ChatGPT to ‘PhD level’⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Ph.Deez nutz.

  I have friends who actually have a Ph.D. It takes many years to get one and an attempt to actually better a field. People tend to trust your opinion onna subject when you have a doctorate in that field.

  I can’t even trust ChatGPT to answer a basic question without fucking up and apologizing to me, only to fuck up again.

  Maybe stop treating language models like AGI? They’re awesome at recognizing semantic similarities between words and phrases (embeddings) as well as generating arbitrary but reasonable looking output that matches an expected output (structured outputs). That’s cool enough. Stop pretending like it isn’t and falsely advertizing it as being able to cure cancer and world hunger, especially when you wouldn’t even be happy if it did.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google search boss says AI isn’t killing search clicks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  AI did not, in fact, affect the rate that I clicked on results in Google search, at least if we’re talking clicks per search.

  It made me stop using Google search instead.

  Well that and the shitty results it kept giving me at the top of the page when all I wanted was the Mozilla docs on a specific CSS attribute.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump Is Launching an AI Search Engine Powered by Perplexity⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  According to the announcement, “the mission of Trump Media is to end Big Tech’s assault on free speech by opening up the Internet and giving people their voices back.” Which is a funny thing to put in an announcement about Trump partnering with a company whose investors include Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and the former CEO of GitHub.

  Ah yes, the freeze peach absolutist who is also the president that has attacked free speech the most in my lifetime wants to stop “Big Tech’s assault” by… creating an AI chatbot.

  Genius. Never would have thought to do that myself. In fact, even if I did think to do it, I never would have done it, assuming my goals were the stated goals.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nintendo survey seeks feedback on controversial game-key cards, physical and digital purchases | VGC⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Is there any technical reason you couldn’t save a game with its license, in its entirety, to a SD card? Skip the cartridges, and if people want to resell, they can export their license + game files to a SD card and sell that instead.

  None of this seems to be an issue on PC. I can copy game files onto an external drive and load them on another PC. Even for games with DRM, it’s usually not an issue as long as any required software is installed and the game files are copied to the right location.

  For Nintendo’s DRM, export the license (unlink it from the account), then the other user can link the license to their account and use the files on the drive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would you rather stop playing a game than lower the difficulty? The First Berserker: Khazan devs reckon you would | Eurogamer⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d definitely lower the difficulty first.

  A game that comes to mind for me is Frostpunk. It has easy, medium, hard, and extreme. Naturally I selected normal at first.

  Normal difficulty Frostpunk is not for beginners. I learned that very quickly. That game was basically the dark souls of city builders. It was a super fun game though, and probably near the top of my list of best games I’ve played.

  They changed the difficulty names in FP2 to citizen, officer, steward, and captain. I believe the default is citizen there. I guess even they realized there is nothing easy about that game. FP2, while a drastically different game, was also hard.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Blocking Access to Harmful Content Will Not Protect Children Online, No Matter How Many Times UK Politicians Say So⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  One way that comes to mind is encouraging the use of either sketchy sites that don’t verify, or potentially sketchy sites to download VPNs (there are good VPNs but finding them might prove difficult for a non-techy child).

  The main question I’d have isn’t whether these laws harm children, but whether they do anything to “protect” children. It seems to me like the obvious answer would be no?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nintendo is increasing the price of Switch in the US this weekend | VGC⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Do people just seriously not give a fuck and buy this ancient thing because of the exclusive games?

  This is pretty much true of all consoles. People play games, not consoles, and they’ll use whatever hardware they need to.

  I mean, I get it, nintendo are royal pieces of shit for locking all their games down inside of a captive platform. But that’s a great reason not to buy this shit.

  Again, universally true of consoles, though unlike Xbox where games have become more and more crossplatform, or PS where some games are getting licensed for PC ports, Nintendo’s head is so far up its own ass that it won’t even let you record gameplay without worrying about a DMCA.

  Fuck Nintendo, but for the same reason as Oracle: because they spend more on lawyers than the people who actually do the work creating something. Also, they could use some modern hardware foe a change instead of always being multiple generations behind.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨So, Linus Torvalds is a jerk⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  we let really smart or really rich or really famous people get away with that shit anyways.

  This. I think people overlook his behavior because despite the fact he was an unrelenting asshole, he also did (and continues to do) a lot of good for the world. He supposedly has also made an attempt to address it via anger management classes, though I’m not up to date on how that went.

  Of course, why rich and famous people get away with it is another story, but their supporters ignore the terrible behavior for similar reasons.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Second Tea Breach Reveals Users’ DMs About Abortions and Cheating⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Am I missing something here? The article talks only about how user data was exposed, including the data on men being discussed in private messages. I don’t see any mention about any of what’s being discussed in these comments.

  I get that there’s probably some talking behind backs or whatever going on in the app, but both criticism and defense of it seems completely irrelevant to the article in question.

  If anything, the article goes to show just how wide of an impact the breach has. It not only is a violation of the users privacy (again), but also of personal information of non-users, including relationship history and sexual preferences of both the women on the app and the men they’re discussing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lawsuit Alleges Roblox Hosted Digital 'Diddy Freak-Off' Themed Games⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Imagine if it were Nintendo suing over IP infringement.

  Anyway, it’s Roblox and Discord. Both platforms have a history of stuff like this. It’s sad how prevalent it is, and I have to wonder how many people are out there setting up these environments just to target children.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Junior dev's code worked in tests, deleted data in prod⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  First dev, seems like an honest mistake and not on them. They weren’t properly informed of the schema, and seniors signed off before the script was run.

  Second dev - it happens, but this is why backups are crucially important, and always test the code before running it on prod, even if it’s a short script like this one.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple sues YouTuber for alleged iOS 26 trade-secret theft⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Allegedly, though that does seem to likely be the case.

  There’s a time when leaking to the press is an important option to have. Had this been all about Apple misbehaving in some manner, then nobody would take their side here. But breaking into someone’s laptop and stealing confidential info just to leak some stuff about their new UI is not the way to go. Fuck that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Travel reporter accuses Hyatt of $500 smoking fee scam⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not sure what’s confusing here. You pay exactly the price you see on the menu.

  (Plus ~10% tax based on which state and town/city you’re in. Plus ~15-20% tip. Plus sometimes a mantatory “gratuity” or whatever they’re calling it. Plus parking sometimes, unless you remember to validate it if the place supports that. Look it’s a lot of random things and even I can’t keep track of it anymore.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ride-hailing giants’ electric promises are stalling worldwide⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I used to call Uber the “Prius fleet”. These days it’s more of the Tesla fleet though.

  At least, in all the places I’ve used Uber anyway. I don’t use it very often though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kingston adds M.2 2230 form-factor to the NV3 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD lineup⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is awesome! More options at 2230 is great for Steam Deck users, and even some laptops (my Framework 16 for example) have 2230 slots where a 2280 would be too long.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I’m not ignoring your message – I’m overwhelmed by the tyranny of being reachable⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you don’t leave a voicemail, I assume it wasn’t important.

  I get asked sometimes when I don’t leave a voicemail why I didn’t. It’s because I don’t really care if you call back. I called because of something urgent, but not important. Just text me instead.