Makes senses: the California National Guard are now grizzled, battle-hardened warriors after bravely fighting in the trenches of the Great Los Angeles Insurrection, and therefore best suited to tackle the horrors of the Portland warzone.

They might even be asked to patrol farmers’ markets, where dangerous hippies might throw chia seeds at them! Oh the humanity!

Yeah for sure, but there’s always something off that screams fake.

I find it interesting that AI writes very high level, which is a trait that seems to be valued by upper management (VP, CEO level).

I think at some point someone will figure out that AI would sound more natural if it didn’t write so perfectly, and they’ll try to make AI sound hip and casual, and I’m almost certain AI will still fail to be convincingly casual.

I don’t worry about that. There are other markers of AI that are much more reliable:

1. Extreme verbosity.
2. Low S/N - i.e. lots of words to say not much at all.
3. Perfect grammar.
4. If you drill down into the subject, often completely incorrect - but you don’t know without having to read a whole bunch of tedious text.

And here’s how you recognize AI:

• High-schoolers turning a paper on a subject they know nothing about often fluff up their paper - at least when students still wrote their papers themselves - and hit 1. and 2., but rarely 3.

• Good writers always hit 3. They can be terse or verbose, and they may or may not hit 1., but never 2. or 4.

• Internet writers don’t write like journalists. Only journalists writing for a journal that happens to also publish on the internet write like journalists. Internet writers don’t quite hit 3, knowledgeable ones don’t hit 2., and almost none of them ever hit 1. Or said another way, when you read something about Linux networking that looks like an Atlantic op-ed, it’s AI.

Only AI hits 1., 2. and 3. AI almost always writes in a tone and form that doesn’t befit the venue.

As for 4., if you want an example of this, try to search “NFC unlock” on DDG or Bing (same AI-laden Microsoft trash search engine): you will find scores of perfectly-written articles that explain in painful details how you should buy NFC tags (they don’t say which), program them (they don’t say how), then present the tags to your device (they don’t say what devices) to program them to unlock upon presenting the tags.

If you know anything about NFC, you know this is all shades of wrong. But amazingly, each article on the subject is many pages long, perfectly written, and there are countless such articles.

That is one of the reasons. The other reason for me is, Wikipedia’s stated values are incompatible with staying in the US. So as long as they’re there, they don’t meet my expectations.

I’m not giving money to Wikipedia anymore until they move out of the United States personally.

(no consumer is going to pay for extended) begins to really push people to Windows 11

Consumers aren’t exactly ecstatic about throwing away perfectly serviceable computers just so Microsoft can push their spyware-cum-advertising platform down their throats either.

I’d say this is a great push towards Linux for anybody who knows anything about computers and isn’t a corporation with a dumbass MCSE jockey as an “IT” guy.

The worst thing Israel could have done to discredit Greta Thunberg and damage her brand would have been to give her a nice meal, a warm bed in a nice hotel, gently push her onboard the next 1st class flight back to Stockholm the next day and release a statement telling her to go play SJW somewhere else. Instead, they’re doing everything possible to confirm they’re truly bad people, like dumbasses.

The nation’s treasures are not Trump’s to give.

It’s been a little surreal watching everything as a self contained file

Yes the main .py is quite a pile of code 🙂

It’s one of those projects that grew organically and never got reorganized. I maintain a niche open-source project like that that has a few dozen kilobyte main Python file and I’m ashamed of it. But then it’s so niche I don’t really want to spend the time reorganizing it.

yt-dlp would benefit from that though…

And this is surprising how?

Apple is like all the other corporate monopolies operating in a fascist country: they’re in cahoots with the powers that be. It’s just that somehow Apple has managed to convince a lot of gullible people that they’re on their side.

As always, follow the money - because Apple’s friends are rich fucks and people in power that can give them more money, not you.

You guys ever wonder if maybe if the answer is to stop stealing s*?

There are two ways to be honest with normal companies:

1/ You pay them and they stop monetizing your data
2/ You don’t patronize their services and you choose a competitor instead

Unfortunately, with Google as with most other surveillance capitalism monopolies, it doesn’t work that way:

1/ If you don’t pay Google, they violate your privacy and abuse your data. If you pay them, they don’t stop: you just gave them extra money because you’re gullible.
2/ Youtube is a virtual monopoly. There is no valid competition to speak of. And unfortunately, a lot of the societal discourse now happens on Youtube. So it’s kind of unavoidable.

Therefore, Google being the abusive monopoly that it is, you have no way to deal with the essential service they provide honestly and pay your fair share - which I honestly would gladly do - without compromising your privacy. They put themselves in a position to be this abusive.

Therefore, I consider my duty towards paying honestly for Youtube waived. That’s why I’m happy to pay for a FUTO license for the work they do with the Grayjay client, but I’ll never give Google a cent: FUTO respects me while Google spits in my face.

apt generally downloads more things than apt-get on my Debian machine. apt-get never broke anything, but I tend to eye it suspiciously now.

Yeah alright. That’s one way of looking at it 🙂

I guess what I meant is that I don’t like upgrades that happen without me explicitly requesting each and every one of them, and me watching the upgrade process as it happens for errors.

No Linux system of mine upgrades itself without my explicit consent. That’s one of the many reasons why I don’t run Windows.

The poster would be more convincing if you hadn’t inverted apt-get update and apt-get upgrade…

The cynic in me immediately thinks it’s a honeypot to trap privacy-conscious individuals.

I’ll look it up. But I suspect it’ll be just another case of a company pinky-swearing to respect your privacy, like Apple.

I think it’s very much post-crime at this point.

One of the most stupendous traits of the Trump fascist regime is the deep-seated desire to be cruel.

Really? Last I tried it - not very long ago - it refused to do anything without an account.