lvxferre

@lvxferre@mander.xyz

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Internet picture of a monkey⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago⁩:

  You know what, I got a brilliant idea:

  See, the chimp in my avatar is called Ai Ai. Was? I don’t know if she’s still alive; last news I could find about her are from 2005, when she stopped smoking. Anyway, wat if I had artificial intelligence to create a bunch of her pictures, and sold them as NFT? The “AI Ai Ai collection”, or Ai³ for short. I wouldn’t do this to scam a bunch of suckers, noooooo; I’d do it because you can get rich, if you “invest” into my collection: buy an Ai³ NFT now, for just 100 euros. Then resell it for a thousand euros, for mad profitz!!!

  […I’m obviously joking. C’mon, this summer is easily getting past 30°C, in a city where it used to snow once in a blue moon. I definitively don’t want to feed the global warming further with dumb crap like this.]

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Snitches get switches⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The nomenclature is really messy across countries and even sub-country entities. The Portuguese language Wikipedia even highlights the mess:

  Nomenclature diversity across countries. // Some surveys estimate protected areas in different countries and regions are called by at least a hundred names, and not uncommonly countries have their own categories of protected spaces, roughly similar to the protected space concept defined by the IUCN.

  From that I guess the restrictions associated with those spaces also change, and in some you aren’t supposed to remove local fauna and/or flora.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Breed back better, or whatever Biden said⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  What makes me lose my sleep:

  Trees are extremely iconic and we see a lot of similarities between them, but they’re mostly due to convergent evolution. Plants have been growing that stalk independently over and over and over. Crustaceans become crab-like, mammals become ant eaters, and plants become trees. *carcinisation intensifies*

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI-generated content in Wikipedia - a tale of caution⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m still reading the machine generated transcript of the video. But to keep it short:

  The author was messing with ISBNs (international standard book numbers), and noticed invalid ones fell into three categories.

  • Typos and similar.
  • Publishers assigning an invalid ISBN to the book, because they didn’t get how ISBNs work.
  • References "hallucinated"¹ by ChatGPT, that do not match any actual ISBN.

  He then uses this to highlight that Wikipedia is already infested by bullshit from large “language” models², and this creates a bunch of vicious cycles that go against the spirit of Wikipedia of reliability, factuality, etc.

  Then, if I got this right, he lays out four hypotheses (“theories”) on why people do this³:

  • People who ignore the limitations of those models
  • People seeking external help to contribute with Wikipedia
  • People using chatbots to circumvent frustrating parts of doing something
  • People with an agenda.

  ---

  Notes (all from my/Lvxferre’s part; none of those is said by the author himself)

  1. “Hallucination”: misleading label used to refer to output that has been generated the exact same way as the rest of the output, but when interpreted by humans it leads to bullshit.
  2. I have a rant about calling those models “language” models, but to keep it short: I think “large token models” would be more accurate.
  3. In my opinion, the author is going the wrong way here. Disregard intentions, focus on effect — don’t assume good faith, don’t assume any faith at all, remove dead weight users who are doing shit against the spirit of the project.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Public service announcement⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Now picture a gangster rapper dressed as Santa Klaus, with an eyepatch on one eye and a bottle of rum, saying “yo ho ho ho”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨boogs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I know some folks down north who eat pan-fried ant butts. The ants in question are typically flying adults of the genus Atta (leafcutters), so specially large.

  That hints to me that one of the main reasons people prefer sea bugs over land bugs is size and texture. Like, you can extract the meat from a crab leg just fine, but you can’t do it with most insects, you’ll be biting through the chitin, you know?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Japan’s internet looks weird — unless you live here⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Perhaps due to my heavy consumption of Japanese media, my views are biased. But frankly? I think Western design tendencies are the ones being weird here.

  Note quotes are out of order. Also, that by “West” I’m including the Latin America I’m from.

  “The West has an aversion to information density at times,” says Shoin Wolfe

  Indeed, in a country preoccupied with safety, information overload is a part of daily life.

  I think the difference is caused by advertisement: Western advertisement is so obnoxious, noisy, bossy, that it is bound to cause even more of a cognitive load than the Japanese counterparts. Western ads boil down to selfish arseholes screeching “are you too stupid to follow simple orders? I told you to consume it!” into your ears, while flashing loud lights. The following excerpt reinforces it:

  “For the most part Japanese advertising has been ‘soft-sell,’ relying on the use of celebrities, attractive graphics, music or catchy slogans to sell products.” This was contrasted with “hard-sell” advertising, which uses “analytical logic, product comparison, or ‘annoy and attract attention’ tactics.”

  And this might explain why people in the West avoid minor but still relevant info, while in Japan they seem to expect it:

  In 2020, Lawson learned the hard way that too much minimalism can backfire. When the convenience store chain redesigned its branded product packaging to embrace negative space, it faced swift and loud mockery on Twitter. Users complained the now uniformly beige products looked too similar and gave no indication of the contents.

  Moving on:

  “(In web design) I think that negative space is an aesthetic, Western idea,” says Wolfe. “In the West, with physical products and just design in general, they have this idea that more negative space equals luxury.”

  I have a better name for the so-called “negative space”: it’s “wasted space”. Space that failed to benefit the user.

  And while some waste is unavoidable, I think the current Western design tendencies boil down to “cripple your design until you’re offering the users the bare minimum, before they stop bothering with it”.

  “Because one symbol (of kanji) can compress what would be four to six letters in an alphabetic language, we grow up being accustomed to processing dense visual information very quickly,” says Akiko Sakamoto, a freelance UX designer and design strategist who works between Kyoto and Tokyo.

  Under ideal conditions, the difference in scripts shouldn’t be relevant here. Sure, kanji is more informationally dense per character, but as a consequence your average kanji has more strokes than your average Latin letter. Thus requiring larger sizes for comfortable reading. And I think both things cancel each other out, forcing both scripts to convey roughly the same amount of info per area.

  For the sake of example, contrast

  • ⟨F⟩ vs. ⟨E⟩
  • ⟨水⟩ vs. ⟨氷⟩ // mizu “water” vs. kōri “ice”

  People here in the Fediverse are probably seeing all four characters the same size, right? Note how the difference between 水/氷 feels way subtler than the one between E/F.

  …that is, under ideal conditions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No, I will not identify all the pictures with bicycles in them.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Sorry, I can’t hear what you said, because of all that *CLANK CLANK CLANK* noise you’re making. Clanker~

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon reality checks your fantasy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Just make sure the cats don’t track it everywhere.

  I might, uh, err… have a bit too many cats to check if they’re tracking it. Sorry.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon reality checks your fantasy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  TIL the Fediverse connects to the world of the dead, and Himmel shitposts here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon reality checks your fantasy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  “The more you hurt at the parting… the more it proves the depth of your love. And if you always fear sorrow… you’ll never be able to love at all.” — Belldandy, a literal goddess who’ll live longer than any knife-eared tree hugger.

  Also tell your whyfoo and her folks that I’ll keep cutting trees, goblinite does not drop charcoal and I need it for steel. If they keep whining I’m going to open the circus and unleash the clowns on them, not even Frieren and Fern would be able to get rid of all of them. I am not joking, I’m going to open the circus!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Threose or fourose?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The origin of the name is even sillier.

  In 1849, a pharmacist called Garot discovered a new sugar, that gives rhubarb stalks that red colour. They proposed the name “erythrose”, because “ἐρῠθραίνω” erythraínō means “to redden” in Greek, and you got to have that -ose for sugars. Fine name, right?

  Later on, it was discovered erythrose was two substances: one a mirrored version of the other. So they got named D-erythrose and L-erythrose.

  But then half a century later, in Ruff, a chemist called Otto Ruff discovered another compound. Same atoms as both D- and L-erythrose. Same chemical bonds: C goes to O that goes to H etc. But it was neither identical to the erythroses, nor mirrored versions of them.

  So… Ruff picked the prefix erythr-, jumbled the letters a bit, and then clipped the -ry-. Because the new compound was like a jumbled erythrose. He added the suffix -ose, and you got “threose”. And guess what, later on it was discovered threose was two compounds.

  For reference, here’s the chemical structure of all four molecules. The bonds looking like thick triangles have atoms closer to the viewer than the rest of the molecule, and the dashed bonds are for atoms further behind.

  Image

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google sues web scraper for sucking up search results ‘at an astonishing scale’⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Crimea has a mountain range up south, really close to the sea, so it has a bunch of really short rivers. Chile is the same.

  That said the river from the “Crimea river” meme is the Salğır/Салгир:

  Image

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mozilla’s new CEO is doubling down on an AI future for Firefox⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Info on how to disable AI anti-features from Firefox here and here.

  I’m getting real tired of this shit. It isn’t just Firefox, or large token models; every fucking little thing nowadays has anti-features, that go against why I want that thing, that I need to work around, that makes every simple task a bloody chore.

  ::: spoilers I’m going to rant a few examples here because they’re all bottled up. I open my bank phone application. Then I unlock it through biometry. Then I close 9001 useless pop-ups. Then I can actually check if my client paid me. Every bloody single time.

  I open my e-mail. Sometimes it asks for login, that’s fine. But if it does, it’ll try to force me to give it my phone number. There’s no “no, stop asking”, only a “MaYbE LaTeR LoL”. Keep in mind that email account is older than some adults here in the Fediverse.

  COVID times I had to buy a new microwaves oven. It lacks numbers buttons; instead it has a bunch of useless buttons for popped maize, brigadeiro, milk, pudding, soup. If I want to heat my cats’ frozen food for 35s, I can’t simply press “3”, then “5”, then “on”, like I did with the old one — I need to press +10s four times, then “on”, then stare the bloody thing until there are 5s left, then stop it prematurely.

  I go buy some slippers. Seller says I should register for their “discounts program” or crap like that. I tell her [translated] “no, thanks, I only want the slippers”. Seller asks me “Why?”, as if I had any legal or moral obligation to justify my decisions. I tell her “I do not want it. I only want to buy a pair of slippers.” She insists, vomiting some explanation on that bloody shite discounts program I give no flying fucks about, until I cut her short and say “I give up. I’m buying it elsewhere.” and leave the shop (and the slippers). I shit you not, I had an easier time buying nitric acid in the 00s than slippers now in the 20s. :::

  That bloody browser is the cherry of the cake for me. I already avoid Chromium and similar Google trash as much as possible, as I know Google vultures the shit out of your personal info; now every bloody time Firefox updates I need to check two computers, two phones, and a few household electronics for potential shit to disable. Do I need to sell my soul to Satan to make things simpler again? Oh wait, souls don’t exist so I’m out of luck.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google AI summaries are ruining the livelihoods of recipe writers: ‘It’s an extinction event’⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Those are great to add to beans or chickpeas.

  For example, feijoada relies on those and pig ears for thickness, while other ingredients (like sausages, jerk, bacon etc.) get added for the meat and flavour.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google AI summaries are ruining the livelihoods of recipe writers: ‘It’s an extinction event’⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Give up all hope (of seeing the recipe), you who enter (the site)!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google AI summaries are ruining the livelihoods of recipe writers: ‘It’s an extinction event’⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is like a network of small problems: the advertisement model being awful, ads paying almost nothing per view, overabundance of cooking sites, Google’s monopoly on search, search engine optimisation, Google forcing you to feed its AI to show your site in search results, AI models and their intrinsic shortcomings (such as not understanding what they output)…

  Cooking sites were the first victims because of how heavily they rely on SEO shit, and how people hate it. But others will eventually go the same way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Latin names suck⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Birds in the genus Turdus totally deserve the name. They’re like:

  • “Look! Cat food! Yummy!”
  • “Why are there cats here? FLY AWAY!”
  • “Why is the air solid? Perhaps if I hit it over and over I’ll fly past it!”

  Every single time this happened I managed to save the turd (they should be glad one of my cats is senile and the other overweight), but then the laundry room is full of turd turds and feathers and my cats spend hours looking for the missing bird.

  (inb4 yes, “thrush”. Fuck it, I’m still calling them “turds”. Turdus rufiventris, aka rust-bellied turds.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How I imagine mathematicians...⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Numbers are all made up stuff, and they’re all the same. Here, lemme prove it; let a=b, and…

  a² = ab             // multiplying both sides by "a"
  2a² = a²+ab         // adding a² to both sides
  2a²-2ab = a²-ab     // subtracting 2ab from both sides
  2(a²-ab) = 1(a²-ab) // isolating (a²-ab)
  2 = 1               // dividing both sides by (a²-ab)
  

  From there you can prove any number is any number. 36=36 or 36=8 or 36=π.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨There is software/a technology company/a game named after most of the elements in the periodic table⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Guys, please don’t call anything after Zirconium or Niobium. We need the name for the Russian hacker groups Snugly Bear and Hugging Bear.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Evidence That Humans Now Speak in a Chatbot-Influenced Dialect Is Getting Stronger⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Now I regret following it with only two points, instead of three. LLMs love listing threes.

  I typically used the em dash only when writing professionally, but because of this AI thing I’m doing it in general, just to see how it turns out. (So far it’s a good way to sniff out assumers.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What does this pic make U think of?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  a ‘product of its time’.

  Something like this, indeed. Or more like a product of the situation, plus a few laws - like network effect (the value a user derives from the OS depends on the number of users using it).

  Note that not even the devs are to blame for this; it makes sense someone releasing commercial software would focus on the 70% (Windows), sometimes on the 15% (Mac OS), but almost never on the 4% (Linux).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What does this pic make U think of?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It does, but this is a vicious cycle: small market share → devs don’t release Linux versions for their software → the software ecosystem is fragile → users who’d rather use Linux still need to use Windows → small market share. Anything countering any of those “links” weakens the vicious cycle, including Microsoft pissing off some Windows users; that’s why the penguin gets smug.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Let's stick with just the one observer from now on, then⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s like one of my cats. When she’s doing something silly, and I grab the phone to take her pic, all I get is a picture of her butt. Because to observe something you need to interact with it, and when I interact with her she collapses into the “I wants buttslaps!” state.

  And before I watch it, she’s in a superposition of states. Much like Schrödinger’s cat. However her states aren’t dead vs. alive; they’re “sleeping”, “licking her own buttocks”, and “ruining my Christmas decoration”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What does this pic make U think of?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Your typical Linux user (the penguin) gets really smug when learning about dumb shit Microsoft is doing with Windows. Because that dumb shit is making plenty Windows users consider ditching Windows for Linux.

  One of those things is to force-feed AI into the users. Exemplified by Microsoft seeking to transform Windows into an “agentic OS”. People who don’t know how those systems work don’t want it; and people who do, even less.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What does this pic make U think of?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “Windows is now an agentic OS”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Evidence That Humans Now Speak in a Chatbot-Influenced Dialect Is Getting Stronger⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In the specific case of clanker vocab leaking into the general population, that’s no big deal. Bots are “trained” towards a bland, unoffensive, neutral words and expressions; stuff like “indeed”, “push the boundaries of”, “delve”, “navigate the complexities of $topic”. Mostly overly verbose discourse markers.

  However when speaking in general grounds you’re of course correct, since the choice of words does change the meaning. For example, a “please” within a request might not change the core meaning of the request, but it conveys “I believe to be necessary to show you respect”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Evidence That Humans Now Speak in a Chatbot-Influenced Dialect Is Getting Stronger⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  And AI sucks at that. If you interpret its output as a human-made summary, it shows everything you shouldn’t do — such as conflating what’s written with its assumptions over what’s written, or missing the core of the text for the sake of random excerpts (that might imply the opposite of what the author wrote).

  But, more importantly: people are getting used to babble, that what others say has no meaning. They will not throw it into an AI to summarise it, and when they do it, they won’t understand the AI output.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Evidence That Humans Now Speak in a Chatbot-Influenced Dialect Is Getting Stronger⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t see a big deal given

  1. What matters the most is not the words within an utterance, but the discourse conveyed by that utterance. [Translation: how you say it matters less than what you say.]
  2. Word usage is prone to trends. Not just slang. Easy come, easy go.

  What I am concerned however is that those chatbots babble a bloody lot. And people might be willing to accept babble a bit more, due to exposure lowering their standards. And they kind of give up looking for meaning on what others say.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft has a problem: nobody wants to buy or use its shoddy AI products — as Google's AI growth begins to outpace Copilot products⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Point still stands; the same “customers” of Vanguard and Fidelity own a huge chunk of both Google and Microsoft.