jarfil
@jarfil@beehaw.org
Programmer and sysadmin (DevOps?), wannabe polymath in tech, science and the mind. Neurodivergent, disabled, burned out, and close to throwing in the towel, but still liking ponies 🦄 and sometimes willing to discuss stuff.
- Comment on Google’s New AI Puts Breasts on Minors—And J. D. Vance 2 days ago:
Sounds like a boon for trans people… and a sensationalized title:
When we attempted to “try on” some products explicitly labeled as swimsuits and lingerie, or to upload photos of young schoolchildren and certain high-profile figures (including Donald Trump and Kamala Harris), the tool would not allow us to.
Google’s own policy requires shoppers to upload images that meet the company’s safety guidelines. That means users cannot upload “adult-oriented content” or “sexually explicit content,” and should use images only of themselves or images that they “have permission to use.”
The reporter admits to having broken those policies, then cries foul when photos of 14+ year olds get a virtual breast augmentation.
- Comment on What Are People Still Doing on X? 2 days ago:
Some heads up: if you pay for the 🔵✔️ on 𝕏, a lot of people will instantly block you, and your post comments will get filled by other 🔵✔️ people trying to “market themselves”.
You may want to consider creating a second plain account, with proper tags and old fashioned brand building, to increase your reach. Block every 🔵✔️ on that one, to reduce the noise.
- Comment on What Are People Still Doing on X? 2 days ago:
Somewhat ironically, Musk’s changes have split 𝕏 in two:
- 🔵✔️ The mark of shame crowd: their comments get pushed to the front, they pay to one-up each other and see who can be the loudest Musk kissass.
- ⚪ The no-mark people: don’t try to get noticed, fly under the radar, keep finding each other through keywords, get pretty much ignored by the 🔵✔️ crowd… and are happy with that.
- 🟡✔️ Verified organizations: few, but unfortunately too many, government and business PR teams, trying to one-up everyone, attracting the 🔵✔️ scourge to their posts, which turns them into trash for ⚪ people. Still work for some announcements, but are useless for meaningful discussion.
Don’t get me wrong, the “average” public voice is gone, it’s been replaced by influencer wannabes.
What saves the situation for niche communities, is the BLOCK feature. Just block everyone with a 🔵✔️, follow people you like, and suddenly you find yourself in the Twitter of long ago.
In the Nazi bar analogy, it’s like if Musk put up a Nazi rune shaped stage in the middle of the bar, everyone with a 🔵✔️ armband is fighting each other to get to the mic on the stage… while it’s all enclosed in a soundproof cage, and random people sitting by the walls keep their conversations to themselves.
Lots of people have left 𝕏 for that reason, either because they want a fair chance to get their voice heard, or because even being aware of the stage fight disgusts them, and that’s fine. Some have stayed and keep ignoring the stage fight, while the stage fight ignores them, with the rare notification for… another 🔵✔️ to block. Pretty much nobody tries to infiltrate the ⚪ discussions, because they need a 🔵✔️ to get their voice heard above others, but if they get one, then they get blocked.
This also doesn’t mean there are no Nazis or other awful people among the ⚪ no-marks, but the loudmouths quickly get pulled into the 🔵✔️ cage fight.
- Comment on Leak confirms OpenAI's ChatGPT will integrate MCP 1 week ago:
I doubt it’s been fed text about “bergro”, “parava”, and “rortx”, this looks like basic reasoning to me:
- Comment on Leak confirms OpenAI's ChatGPT will integrate MCP 1 week ago:
“AI” has been a buzzword basically forever, it’s a moving target of “simulates some human behavior”. Every time it does that, we call it an “algorithm” and move the goalpost for “true AI”.
I don’t know if we’ll ever get AGI, or even want to, or be able to tell if we get a post-AGI. Right now, “AI” stands for something between LLMs, and Agents with an LLM core. Agents benefit from MCP, so that’s good for
AIAgents.We can offload some basic reasoning tasks to an LLM Agent, MCP connectors allow them to interact with other services, even other agents.
A lot of knowledge is locked in the deep web, and in corporate knowledge bases. The way to access those safely, will be through agents deciding which knowledge to reveal. MCP is aiming to become the new web protocol for "AI"s, no less no more.
- Comment on This Chatbot Promises to Help You Get Over That Ex Who Ghosted You [404 Media] 1 week ago:
I feel like a better solution is to get an AI SO. Shape them into whatever you like, don’t forget it’s still an AI, and get whatever comfort you need in the moment.
You can even have several at once.
- Comment on Leak confirms OpenAI's ChatGPT will integrate MCP 1 week ago:
The connectors are still optional.
Haphazard code is not a new thing. Some statistics claim that almost 50% of “vibe coded” websites have security flaws. It’s not much different from the old “12345” password, or the “qwerty” one (not naming names, but have known people using it on government infrastructure), or the “who’d want to hack us?” attitude.
MCP is the right step forward, nothing wrong with it on itself.
People disregarding basic security practices… will suffer, as always… and I don’t really see anything wrong with that either. Too bad for those forced to rely on them, but that’s a legislative and regulatory issue, vote accordingly.
- Comment on Yes, AI will eventually replace some workers. But that day is still a long way off 1 week ago:
One of the worst possible examples ever: Klarna is a payment processor, people don’t call their bank to get the same answer the system is already giving them, they call to negotiate something about their money. AIs are at a troubleshooting level, at best some very basic negotiation, nowhere near dealing with people actually concerned about their money.
Seems like Klarna fell hook, line, and sinker for the hype. Tough luck, need to know the limits.
- Comment on Lies, Damned Lies, and LLMs: AI is a Con 2 weeks ago:
Randomly obfuscated database: you don’t get exactly the same data, and most of the data is lost, but sometimes can get something similar to the data, if you manage to stumble upon the right prompt.
- Comment on Lies, Damned Lies, and LLMs: AI is a Con 2 weeks ago:
It’s going to be funnier: imagine throwing in tons of data at an LLM, most of the data will get abstracted and grouped, most will be extractable indirectly, some will be extractable verbatim… and any piece of it might be a hallucination, no guarantees! 😅.
Courts will have a field day with that. - Comment on Lies, Damned Lies, and LLMs: AI is a Con 2 weeks ago:
That’s why AI companies have been giving out generic chatbots for free, but charge for training domain-specific ones. People paying for using the generic ones, is just the tip of the iceberg.
The future is going to be local or on-prem LLMs, fine tuned on domain knowledge, most likely multiple ones per business/user. It is estimated that businesses are holding orders of magnitude more knowledge, than what has been available for AI training. Will also be interesting to see what kind of exfiltration becomes possible, when one of those internal LLMs gets leaked.
- Comment on Copyright Office head fired after reporting AI training isn’t always fair use 2 weeks ago:
Is Disney no longer a “pal”, or did it stop making money?
- Comment on Yes, AI will eventually replace some workers. But that day is still a long way off 2 weeks ago:
All of them. The moment they summarize results, it automatically filters out all the chaff. Doesn’t mean what’s left is necessarily true, just like publishing a paper doesn’t mean it wasn’t p-hacked, but all the boilerplate used for generating content and SEO, is gone.
Starting with Google’s AI Overview, all the way to chatbots in “research” mode, or AI agents, they return the original “bulletpoint” that stuff was generated from.
- Comment on Yes, AI will eventually replace some workers. But that day is still a long way off 2 weeks ago:
Can you elaborate? It does match my personal experience, and I’ve been on both ends of the trash flinging.
- Comment on Yes, AI will eventually replace some workers. But that day is still a long way off 2 weeks ago:
A lot of people have been working tedious and repetitive “filler” jobs.
- Computers replaced a lot of typists, drafters, copyists, calculators, filers, clerks, etc.
- LLMs are replacing receptionists, secretaries, call center workers, translators, slop “artists”, etc.
- AI Agents are in the process of replacing aides, intermediate administrative personnel, interns, assistants, analysts,
spammerssalespeople, basic customer support, HR personnel, etc.
In the near future, AI-controlled robots are going to start replacing low skilled labor, then intermediate skilled ones.
“AI” has the meaning of machines replacing what used to require humans to perform. It’s a moving goalpost: once one is achieved, we call it an “algorithm” and move to the next one, and again, and again.
Right now, LLMs are at the core of most AI, but AI has already moved past that, to “AI Agents”, which is a fancy way of saying “a loop of an LLM and some other tools”. There are already talks of moving past that too, the next goalpost.
- Comment on Yes, AI will eventually replace some workers. But that day is still a long way off 2 weeks ago:
Whose LLMs?
Content farms and SEO experts have been polluting search results for decades. Search LLMs have leveled the playing field: any trash a content farm LLM can spit out, a search LLM can filter out.
Basically, this:
- Comment on OpenAI scraps controversial plan to become for-profit after mounting pressure 3 weeks ago:
Ollama has the best GDPR compliance: my hardware, my data.
- Comment on Signal clone used by Trump official stops operations after report it was hacked 3 weeks ago:
Archiving communications is not optional (yet).
- Comment on Facebook Allegedly Detected When Teen Girls Deleted Selfies So It Could Serve Them Beauty Ads 3 weeks ago:
I’m still “using” Facebook, if by “using” we mean subscribing to some groups, sending birthday greetings to old friends, and rarely posting anything. It doesn’t feed me political content, any time it tries to push anything controversial, it gets blocked.
I do get political content on Threads though, but that’s my choice.
- Comment on Players Have Too Many Options to Spend $80 on a Video Game 3 weeks ago:
Fun fact: you can get a machine to do that, for about the price of 3 games. It will even last longer than the games.
- Comment on After Years of Struggle, Blizzard Has Found Itself in Uncharted Territory: Overwatch Players Are Having Fun Again 3 weeks ago:
Let me know when stuff is no longer locked behind a “Battle Pass”.
I got pretty much all the cosmetics in OW1 without paying for a single lootbox, and definitely refuse to pay for the privilege of FOMO.
- Comment on Energy labelling and ecodesign requirements will apply to smartphones and tablets from June 2025 4 weeks ago:
The ecodesign requirements will include:
* resistance to accidental drops or scratches and protection from dust and water
* sufficiently durable batteries which can withstand at least 800 charge and discharge cycles while retaining at least 80% of their initial capacity
* rules on disassembly and repair, including obligations for producers to make critical spare parts available within 5-10 working days, and for 7 years after the end of sales of the product model on the EU market
* availability of operating system upgrades for longer periods (at least 5 years from the date of the end of placement on the market of the last unit of a product model)
* non-discriminatory access for professional repairers to any software or firmware needed for the replacement
Finally! 🎉
Customer replaceable batteries would be nice too — those 800 cycles are not all that much — but I guess it’s a tradeoff for dust and water resistance increases with wireless charging and possibly no ports.
- Comment on Annoyed ChatGPT users complain about bot’s relentlessly positive tone 4 weeks ago:
- Comment on Tesla’s Remarkably Bad Quarter Is Even Worse Than It Looks 4 weeks ago:
The article sounds like it lifted the headline from some comment I’ve seen:
- Comment on Bluesky rolls out blue check verifications 5 weeks ago:
The comparison to 𝕏 doesn’t seem fair:
You can self-verify by setting your domain as your username. We highly encourage official organizations and individuals to do this
Additionally, through our Trusted Verifiers feature, select independent organizations can verify accounts directly.
- Comment on Bluesky rolls out blue check verifications 5 weeks ago:
It seems like both the data server (PDS) and the data aggregator (AppView) have been released:
What am I missing?
- Comment on Google won’t ditch third-party cookies in Chrome after all 5 weeks ago:
From Ladybird’s website:
No code from other browsers. We’re building a new engine, based on web standards.
Except… Chromium is the living standard for the web. They’ll have the same problem as Firefox, playing catch-up to whatever happens in Chromium.
Right now, the viable browsing experience is a combination of browsers:
- Chromium derived - latest compatibility
- Firefox with extensions - daily driver
- Tor Browser - actual chance of privacy
And a VPN and/or Pi-hole.
- Comment on Petition: Bring the Affinity Suite to Linux - #AffinityOnLinux 5 weeks ago:
one-time payment
Is Canva going to keep that? In the purchase announcement, they stated that their plan was to add the features of Affinity to Canva, which only has a subscription option.
rely on creative software by Adobe or other companies, for which there is no comparable alternative with Linux support
Corel has comparable features with a single purchase option. Too bad they removed the Linux version.
As for alternatives, Krita, Inkscape, or Blender, are not a 1:1 equivalent, but include features that Adobe is missing. When I used to do visual stuff, they were a good set of tools to complement an Adobe subscription.
How does Affinity compare to that?
- Comment on I Believe That It's Important For All of Us to Understand What 'Decentralization' Truly Means. Please, Let's Talk About That 5 weeks ago:
If we’re talking takedown-resistance, we may need to enter the dark web realm:
- Tor hidden sites are inherently hard to pinpoint
- ZeroNet was an interesting project, seems to be abandoned
- I2P is like Tor on steroids, can publish all sorts of services
- IPFS is a decentralized P2P storage system (best/worst known for NFTs)
FreeNetHyphanet is a 25+ years old distributed content system with limited support for services- FreeNet is… honestly, haven’t seen a working example, but it sounds interesting?
- Matrix… if they manage to get things under control
- Nostr is a censorship-resistant distributed messaging system
Hosting distribution and localization varies, but they all have features to make it hard to pinpoint host and/or client locations.
- Comment on I Believe That It's Important For All of Us to Understand What 'Decentralization' Truly Means. Please, Let's Talk About That 5 weeks ago:
There are many community networks out there, but they require more dedication and funding than simply paying an ISP, for a worse service. It’s a hard sell to the average doomscroller.
The EFF scaled down their efforts for OpenWireless.org after it became obvious that they’d have to support hundreds of different hardware models, and ultimately abandoned the project.
A couple decades ago, FON tried to build a mixed community-commercial network with their own standardized hardware, but even the commercial incentive was not enough to keep it afloat in the long run. Some of the hardware got repurposed for community projects, but most of the best placed hotspots ended up in the trash, replaced by municipal and ISP networks.
In many places, fiber is a no-go. Like, in my city there was a large move to get fiber to most houses over a decade ago, but after the first deployment of a handful of ISPs, the city stopped giving permits for additional deployments: lease from one of the existing ISPs, or you’re SOL.
