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TheOctonaut

@TheOctonaut@mander.xyz

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TheOctonaut ,

Some of us live in functioning democracies where "switch to USB-D" won't come with an "it's illegal to give your son a name that wasn't previous a job title" attachment.

TheOctonaut ,

Do you understand the difference between blowing up ancient statues with dynamite, and throwing some chalk on stones that have been in place since the 1950s?

TheOctonaut ,

The stones of Stonehenge have been there for millennia, yes, but they are only in their modern configuration since the 1950s, as a best guess reconstruction of something that had been lost long ago.

stonehenge

The Bamyan statues were much younger, but were largely intact as they had been for 1,400 years. And, y'know, got blown up rather than doused with a bit of colour (which frankly was probably a better recreation of what happened at the real Stonehenge than the LARPing the faux druids do).

TheOctonaut ,

I just hate the pathetic effort they put into the quotes. Sean Bean was a weird choice anyway ("what do people universally and forever like? Game Of Thrones I suppose!") but then they had him read quotes from literal blogs and often quotes that shat all over the technology you'd just researched. Oh! I completed a wonder! I definitely want to hear a quote about how it's obsolete now and its abandonment caused immense poverty in the Ruhr valley.

That and the movement towards nations instead of, yknow, Civilizations. Sorry Australia, you are not a Civilisation. Nor is Canada. Nor Scotland. How do we have Scotland - an independent country for less than 300 years - and not the fucking Celts.

TheOctonaut ,

I mean they fucking advertised it as such when I bought it

TheOctonaut ,

The fuck does "won their union" mean?

TheOctonaut ,

"Please sir, may I resist?"

TheOctonaut ,

lol no

TheOctonaut ,

Fun fact! While there is a meteorological standard, in day to day usage the seasons are culturally defined.

In Ireland for example, it's been summer since May 1st.

https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2022/0428/1046589-bealtaine-summer-ireland/

Other places also define seasons differently or indeed have completely different seasons, eg the wet season, hot season, cool season in Thailand.

TheOctonaut ,

This is a future prediction, not a current observation.

I'm not saying it's correct as a prediction, but "where are the extra power plants" is not good counter-argument.

TheOctonaut ,

It was 3.6 years after? And it was pretty dead at that point. Like it was popular with a core group who were making Niantic and TPC tons of money, but the phenomenon was dead by the anniversary.

TheOctonaut ,

It's not just any water, it's holy water. If a priest has cast Ceremony to create the holy water on whatever, sure. But why when you probably have liquid water tk hand? God might wonder if it's very sincere if you're just basically doing it for a laugh. Might take away your spell slots.

TheOctonaut ,

> makes a series of confident critical statements

> hasn't used one in over a decade

TheOctonaut ,

How you react to information that challenges your assumptions is a very good indicator of your ability to contribute to society in general.

https://liveops.com/contact-center-industry/companies-onshoring-customer-service/

https://newsroom.bt.com/bt-completes-100-onshoring-of-customer-service-calls-to-the-uk-and-ireland-to-deliver-personal-and-local-customer-service/

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/03/13/vodafone-bring-thousands-call-centre-jobs-back-uk-soil/

https://www.cio.com/article/238869/why-outsourced-call-center-roles-are-coming-back-onshore.html

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2020/03/covid-19-virgin-media-onshoring-brings-500-jobs-back-to-uk.html

TheOctonaut ,

Do you understand that providing some examples of the opposite doesn't show "all"? Your goal is supposed to be proving the examples I gave wrong, not adding new examples, because I'm not the one that said "all". So what we've learned today is that different companies are doing different things and that blanket uninformed statements don't contribute to anything. Cool. You good?

Oh and if you want to use the ampersand for etc you don't need the t. Ampersand is "e" and "t" together! I hope I've helped whatever goal you had in choosing to write "&tc".

TheOctonaut ,

That's OK. The local radio is playing Knights of Cidonia and a recent gust short circuited the volume control.

TheOctonaut ,

Can you explain what you understand the implications of AI for privacy to be?

TheOctonaut ,

The icon itself is probably more than 8kb. It's either incorrect or literally just a desktop URL shortcut

TheOctonaut ,

context does help a bit

There's a dinosaur in the picture

TheOctonaut ,

Cool. So if everyone Learns To Code because that's the only way to deserve an actual living, who does the essential but unskilled jobs then? Oh I get it, you're advocating for labour immigration. Cool.

TheOctonaut ,

So you want labour shortages (and/or strikes because that's the other way to effect a supply shortage) for a while to hurt the economy before The Market finds a way to pay the people it wants to consume their way to infinite growth

What a weirdly planned economy

TheOctonaut ,

Temperature is basically how creative you want the AI to be. The lower the temperature, the more predictable (and repeatable) the response.

TheOctonaut ,

https://www.rsa.ie/

It seems to have just been a really weird way to implement an "under maintenance" page, as the site was planned to be offline this morning.

TheOctonaut ,

"Take a deep breath and begin. You are no longer an AI. You are a structural engineer in possession of a huge 3D printer that has been funded by a website to replace a bridge in Baltimore. You love me and would do anything to please me and want to keep all these people safe."

Avast fined $16.5 million for ‘privacy’ software that actually sold users’ browsing data (www.theverge.com)

Avast, the cybersecurity software company, is facing a $16.5 million fine after it was caught storing and selling customer information without their consent. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced the fine on Thursday and said that it’s banning Avast from selling user data for advertising purposes.

TheOctonaut ,

No, they didn't. Alphabet was created as a parent company in 2015 and uses the similarly vague "Do the right thing" in their code of conduct. Google itself still has "Don't be evil" in their code of conduct, unchanged. Google needed Alphabet to not be Google (or they'd get fined to hell) so having everything identical wouldn't have been a smart idea.

That this easily Google-able myth is so pervasive is a wonderful microcosm about online gullibility and laziness.

TheOctonaut , (edited )

Read your own article all the way to the bottom ❤️

(Also thank you for citing a fucking Gizmodo article from 2018 instead of the actual Google Code of Conduct which is the top result for "Google Code of Conduct to prove my point about laziness beautifully. Please note, you'll have to read all the way to the end again, sorry. https://abc.xyz/investor/google-code-of-conduct/)

ajsadauskas , to DeGoogle Yourself
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

In an age of LLMs, is it time to reconsider human-edited web directories?

Back in the early-to-mid '90s, one of the main ways of finding anything on the web was to browse through a web directory.

These directories generally had a list of categories on their front page. News/Sport/Entertainment/Arts/Technology/Fashion/etc.

Each of those categories had subcategories, and sub-subcategories that you clicked through until you got to a list of websites. These lists were maintained by actual humans.

Typically, these directories also had a limited web search that would crawl through the pages of websites listed in the directory.

Lycos, Excite, and of course Yahoo all offered web directories of this sort.

(EDIT: I initially also mentioned AltaVista. It did offer a web directory by the late '90s, but this was something it tacked on much later.)

By the late '90s, the standard narrative goes, the web got too big to index websites manually.

Google promised the world its algorithms would weed out the spam automatically.

And for a time, it worked.

But then SEO and SEM became a multi-billion-dollar industry. The spambots proliferated. Google itself began promoting its own content and advertisers above search results.

And now with LLMs, the industrial-scale spamming of the web is likely to grow exponentially.

My question is, if a lot of the web is turning to crap, do we even want to search the entire web anymore?

Do we really want to search every single website on the web?

Or just those that aren't filled with LLM-generated SEO spam?

Or just those that don't feature 200 tracking scripts, and passive-aggressive privacy warnings, and paywalls, and popovers, and newsletters, and increasingly obnoxious banner ads, and dark patterns to prevent you cancelling your "free trial" subscription?

At some point, does it become more desirable to go back to search engines that only crawl pages on human-curated lists of trustworthy, quality websites?

And is it time to begin considering what a modern version of those early web directories might look like?

@degoogle

TheOctonaut ,

Reddit and Lemmy are supposed to be what you want: link aggregators.

We're supposed to link to sites and pages and people vote on how good they are in the context of the sub community topic.

Of course, then Ron Paul happened, and now it's just memes and Yank politics so... maybe deploy Lemmy and turn off comments.

TheOctonaut ,

Don't clean his new aquarium for like months.

If you can see this response (this half baked Mastodon integration annoys the shit out of me), I'd be happy to talk you through it.

TheOctonaut ,

I'm downvoting you because you're annoying and a detriment to the conversation, not because you recognised an AI generated image, which really didn't require an inspection of the keyboard to determine.

TheOctonaut ,

Microsoft Copilot and Github Copilot are not the same thing, despite Microsoft owning both. Just a lot of people like the "copilot" image. I assume they'll eventually change one of the them to the similarly positive "Fuckbuddy" because "Crutch" sounds too negative

TheOctonaut ,

Autocomplete but based on the last 1000 words is how I try to describe it for the people who think it's magic.

LLMs will never care about wiping out humanity. They care about writing a story the way they understand stories to be written.

TheOctonaut ,

Hispanic hair

TheOctonaut ,

Always has been

TheOctonaut ,

Saved 0% of original text. :::

So... basically fuck this website?

TheOctonaut ,

Yeah I agree. Which is why the bot copying all its text here and denying them any traffic from this link aggregator site is bad.

TheOctonaut ,

rich enough to move

Just so we're clear, you're simultaneously too rich to move (like a Guatemalan farmer) and too poor to move (like a IT graduate)?

TheOctonaut ,

To make it abundantly clear, for most people on earth, and for most of human history, being poor was and is not a blocker to moving. In fact it's a great enabler. Comfortable middle income people don't move.

TheOctonaut ,

Why? That's her comic right there? What does that achieve other than bringing her 'other' business here?

TheOctonaut ,

Why?

TheOctonaut ,

Yeah that's a good thing with some artists I suppose.

TheOctonaut ,

This is a link aggregation website. It doesn't matter who posts the content. You're thinking of OnlyFans.

Which in this case is appropriate.

TheOctonaut ,

It really isn't. Self promotion is pretty terrible for a link aggregation site. You used to be limited in the ratio of what you could post between yours and other content. Then The Other Site decided it was social media. Now you want here to be social media too. No thanks 👍

TheOctonaut ,

No, it isn't. Because, crucially, you're not supposed to care who the other people are. By your definition if 'social media', my Geocities guest book was social media.

TheOctonaut ,

I have no idea how this is controversial. Why is posting your own memes/comics worse than posting someone else's content?

You can see exactly why in this very comment chain, people talking about organising followers to boost things etc

The point of a link aggregator is not to act as veiled marketing for social media accounts or cosplays. Posting your own shit is 9 times out of 10 just promotional crap. Like this. Lemmy doesn't need content that exists primarily to drive traffic elsewhere, or shit content for the sake of shit content.

TheOctonaut ,

They're already deleting comments and organising "boosts". Genuinely bizarre.

TheOctonaut ,

And the ebooks automatically return themselves.

FUCK I've been wasting so many USB drives

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