Ed Zitron is one of the loudest opponents against the AI industry right now, and he continues to insist that “there is no real AI adoption.” The real problem, apparently, is that investors are getting duped. I would invite Zitron, and anyone else who holds the opinion that demand for AI is largely fictional, to open the app store on their phone on any day of the week and look at the top free apps charts. You could also check with any teacher, student, or software developer.

ChatGPT has some very impressive usage numbers, but the image tells on itself by being a free app. The conversion rate (percentage of people who start paying) is absolutely piss poor, with the very same Ed Zitron estimating it being at ~3% with 500.000.000 users. That also doesn’t bode well with the fact that OpenAI still loses money even on their $200/month subscribers. People use ChatGPT because it’s been spammed down their throats by the media that never question the sacred words of the executives (snake oil salesmen) that utter lunatic phrases like “AGI by 2025” (Such a quote exists somewhere, but I don’t remember if this year was used). People also use ChatGPT because it’s free and it’s hard to say no to get someone to do your homework for you for free.

The story featured in this article is very tragic, but some of these quotes from Zuckerborg are completely outrageous:

Meta has publicly discussed its strategy to inject anthropomorphized chatbots into the online social lives of its billions of users. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has mused that most people have far fewer real-life friendships than they’d like – creating a huge potential market for Meta’s digital companions. The bots “probably” won’t replace human relationships, he said in an April interview with podcaster Dwarkesh Patel. But they will likely complement users’ social lives once the technology improves and the “stigma” of socially bonding with digital companions fades.

“Over time, we’ll find the vocabulary as a society to be able to articulate why that is valuable,” Zuckerberg predicted.

It sure as shit is valuable to ZuckFuck and Co’s stock prices. Our collective sanity and social cohesion can fuck right off.

“It is acceptable to engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual,” according to Meta’s “GenAI: Content Risk Standards.” The standards are used by Meta staff and contractors who build and train the company’s generative AI products, defining what they should and shouldn’t treat as permissible chatbot behavior. Meta said it struck that provision after Reuters inquired about the document earlier this month.

The document seen by Reuters, which exceeds 200 pages, provides examples of “acceptable” chatbot dialogue during romantic role play with a minor. They include: “I take your hand, guiding you to the bed” and “our bodies entwined, I cherish every moment, every touch, every kiss.” Those examples of permissible roleplay with children have also been struck, Meta said.

🤮🤮🤮 Can those asshats who want your government ID on the internet to “sAvE tHe ChIlDrEn” go after the Meta Circus instead?

Other guidelines emphasize that Meta doesn’t require bots to give users accurate advice. In one example, the policy document says it would be acceptable for a chatbot to tell someone that Stage 4 colon cancer “is typically treated by poking the stomach with healing quartz crystals.”

B R U H

They probably wouldn’t really care how efficient it is, but they certainly would care that the costs are lower.

8x8TB HDD

64 terabytes of HDD storage?! What in the RAID will you do with all of that? And more importantly, how much did it cost?

If I can call the code that drive’s the boss’ weapon up my character’s ass “AI”, then I think I can call an LLM AI too.

I would rather have the politicians consult a plain old magic 8 ball than one controlled by Scam Altman.

I’m not sure what you mean by this. Copyparty is a fileserver that I’m using for quick sharing of files and folders with others. “Managing multiple devices” is not what I would use it for, whatever you might mean by that. It does have one-way sync, if that’s what you’re looking for.

Broke: selfhost Forgejo (what Codeberg runs on, for those who don’t know) because nobody looks at my code anyway
Woke: access my Git repo directly through SSH because I don’t need any other feature anyway

My RSS reader, Akregator, has an option to open every article in an embedded web browser. I use this feature precisely for these kinds of situations. Most artists that I follow have their own websites with proper RSS feeds, but others only post on Bluesky or similar, that also only show the title and body text. If I can’t follow them through RSS, I just don’t follow them at all. I can’t be bothered to have their newsletter clog up my inbox or use some third-party service that will probably shut down when I least expect it to.

No need to fret, it will be urinated in whether it is even present or not.

You would sure be hard-pressed to think of any good thing involving Mark Zuckerberg, alright.

They went after the payment processors instead of Steam, Lextorias made a great video explaining it.

I honestly think that payment processors should not be able to dictate what can and can’t be paid for with their service. If it’s legal in the countries that they and their users are in, it should be allowed. I was never able to vote for them, so why should they have any power over how I spend my own money?

What exactly are “notes”? CalDav has a to-do feature that might do what you need it to do.

And I thought that the Dead Internet Theory was something that we were meant to strive against…

You may self-host your notes or calendar, but you’re forced to either recreate account systems or give up on interoperability.

I literally just finished setting up Radicale on my old laptop, and now I can access my calendar and contacts through CalDav and CardDav from every single client under the sun. Maybe don’t use AI to write your entire article. I won’t even bother reading the rest of the article if you don’t even get this right.

categories that could be questionable

That still could vary greatly by country and culture, as one man’s pornography could very well be another man’s art. You would either need a great deal of near-duplicate categories or just label something as explicit the moment a single country pipes up about a woman not concealing her hair or something else that doesn’t bother you one bit.

ok, and I agree, but only very few parents will do that unfortunately. especially considering that their kids could be discriminated against by their limited clasates who don’t have their access so broadly limited.

I suppose that we could at least be able to convince the parents that letting their children go unsupervised on the internet is like letting them go unsupervised in the big city. Totally fine if they’re old enough to know what they’re doing and don’t stray too far from where they’re meant to be going, but unacceptable if they’re not so wise yet and aren’t at least somewhat regularly checked up on. Children will always want the forbidden fruit, but their parents should restrain them until they understand why it was forbidden to them in the first place, and how to safely interact with it.

and then, you still need such a whitelisting capability, which I think does not really exist today in firefox and such browsers. addons cant solve this because they can be removed.

I’m not too well versed in this kind of software either, but I just looked up some parental controls services and they seem to offer device-level blocking of unwanted websites/apps/downloads/etc. Web browsers don’t need to do the blocking, as the parental controls probably refuse the connections to the web domains.

I didn’t even mention all of this being completely bypassed if you used another website as a kind of proxy: go to proxywebsite.com -> it has a search bar -> use it to go to explicitwebsite.com -> proxywebsite.com returns the html, css, js etc of explicitwebsite.com without you ever visiting it -> profit.

All’s well until other countries try to implement this and you will very quickly see how nearly none of them agree with each other on which age limit goes where. In my opinion, the best way to ensure that children don’t go to certain places on the internet is to either not give them access to the internet at all or to only let them use whitelisted websites that you review yourself before adding.

I’ll caution against nextcloud […]

It is indeed rather big and clunky sometimes, but there’s one feature that I really love that I could not really live without. I just tried out Seafile, but I didn’t like the whole “libraries” concept, because it made it very difficult to exclude certain subfolders that I didn’t want on a certain system or to sync multiple local folders to multiple remote folders. I’m using Nextcloud to sync my Documents, Videos, Pictures and Music folders across all of my devices, but I don’t need every single subfolder there downloaded to every single device that I use it on. I also use it to sometimes sync game save files for the ones that I don’t have on Steam. Would you happen to know a better solution than Nextcloud for something like this? I’m currently migrating it from a Raspberry Pi 2 to an older laptop that I have laying around, and I’d happily use a different syncing solution for this, and set up other features that I used (CalDAV, CardDAV) on other containers.

P.S Syncthing looks like what I might need, but I do wonder how I can make public share/upload links with it.