plenipotentprotogod

Even in the wide world of dubiously useful AI chatbots, Copilot really stands out for just how incompetent it is. The other day I was working on a PowerPoint presentation, and one of the slides included a photo with a kind of cluttered looking background. Now, I can probably count the number of things that AI is genuinely good at on one hand, and context aware image editing trends to be one of them, so I decided to click the Copilot button that Microsoft now has built directly into PowerPoint and see what happens. A chat window popped up and I concisely explained what I wanted it to do: "please remove the background from the photo on slide 5." It responded on that infuriating obseqious tone that they all have and assured me that it would be happy to help with my request just as soon as I uploaded my presentation.

What?

The chatbot running inside an instance of PowerPoint with my presentation open is asking me to "upload" my presentation? I explained this to it, and it came back with some BS about being unable to access the presentation because a "token expired" before requesting again that I upload my presentation. I tried a little longer to convince it otherwise, but it just kept very politely insisting that it was unable to do what I was asking for until I uploaded my presentation.

Eventually I gave up. The photo wasn't that bad anyway.

There's a recent video from Hank Green outlining the very compelling argument for abandoning coal power in strictly economic terms. It turns out that even if you ignore the big picture environmental impacts like global warming and acid rain, and you also ignore the localized impacts like air pollution and chemical waste, and you ignore the other negative externalities like long term health effects on the workers, then coal is still hard to justify because natural gas plants are simply more profitable.

Not to say that we should be ignoring any of those things, but just to make a point about how impossible it is to make a good faith argument for coal in today's world.

https://youtu.be/IfvBx4D0Cms

In case you're wondering how to get a list of all the apps installed on your phone, these instructions worked for me https://www.javathinking.com/blog/how-to-get-the-list-of-all-apps-on-android-device-using-terminal/

I just wrote a quick script to check my list against the google doc. The official Merriam Webster app and the official Letterboxd app both got flagged.

Every time I see a headline like this I'm reminded of the time I heard someone describe the modern state of AI research as equivalent to the practice of alchemy.

Long before anyone knew about atoms, molecules, atomic weights, or electron bonds, there were dudes who would just mix random chemicals together in an attempt to turn lead to gold, or create the elixir of life or whatever. Their methods were haphazard, their objectives impossible, and most probably poisoned themselves in the process, but those early stumbling steps eventually gave rise to the modern science of chemistry and all that came with it.

AI researchers are modern alchemists. They have no idea how anything really works and their experiments result in disaster as often as not. There's great potential but no clear path to it. We can only hope that we'll make it out of the alchemy phase before society succumbs to the digital equivalent of mercury poisoning because it's just so fun to play with.

Copy pasting my reply from the last time this came up:

Check how nearby colleges and universities dispose of used assets. The state school near me maintains a very nice website where they auction off everything from lab equipment to office furniture. It's also where all their PCs go when they hit ~5 years old and come up in the IT department's refresh cycle. The only problem in my case is that they tend to auction stuff in bulk. You can get a solid machine for $50 to $100, but only if you're willing to pay $500 to $1000 for a pallet of 10.

TBH I just use the Feeder app on my phone. Fully self-contained. No account, no server, no middleman of any kind. Just the app.

I've been meaning to set up something more elaborate, but this really does work fine, and I like to mention it in these threads for anyone who's interested in RSS but thinks it's a big lift to set up. It can be complicated, but it doesn't have to be. Download an app and start adding publications that interest you. That's all it takes to get started.

Time to quote Dan Olson again. This was originally written about NFTs, but just replace "crypto" with "AI" and it's still 100% relevant:

When you drill down into it, you realize that the core of the crypto ecosystem ... is a turf war between the wealthy and the ultra-wealthy. Techno fetishists who look at people like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, billionaires that have been minted via tech industry doors that have now been shut by market calcification, and are looking for a do-over, looking to synthesize a new market where they can be the one to ascend from a merely wealthy programmer to a hyper wealthy industrialist.

From the incomparable line goes up

No Man's Sky

Isn't this the one that crashed and burned on launch, but the devs owned their mistakes and put a ton of work into patching and upgrading? What a fuckin redemption arc for it to end up on this list unironically.

I've wondered before how large an order would be required to entice a white label manufacturer of robot vacuums into doing a production run of units with Valetudo preinstalled.

I would absolutely buy one if someone could work out a fair business arrangement with the developer and throw the project up on kickstarter.

The sample data shared in the article includes

"c": "ES", // Country code,

ES is usually used for Spain, so it looks like these tests were run from within the EU.

Man, I feel you on the affiliate link fluff. I actually ended up unsubscribing from the Popular Mechanics and Popular Science feeds because the signal to noise ratio was so bad.

The creator of Nunti provided a very good primer on the algorithm design here. Basically, you indicate to the app whether you like or dislike an article and then it does some keyword extraction in the background and tries to show you similar articles in the future. I suppose you might be able to dislike a bunch of the fluff and hope the filter picks up on it, but it isn't really designed to support the kind of rules that would completely purge a certain type of content from your feed.

Most of the feeds I subscribe to came to me in one of two ways:

1. I enjoyed reading an article posted somewhere else (Lemmy, etc.) so I sought out the feed of that publisher.
2. Sometimes news outlets enter into agreements to republish each others articles. When they do this, the re-publisher will usually include a little blurb at the end giving credit to the original publisher. If a feed I'm already subscribed to has an article re-published from elsewhere then I click through and check out the original source to see if I want to follow them as well.