AlienRobot

Google's AI is really intrusive. That's the only way to describe it.

I searched for "weather <my town>", I get an AI saying the current weather is 33C. It says monday will be 41C. Like I live in the desert. Google's actual weather widget, which appears BELOW the weather overview and gathers data from accurate sources, says 26C. How hard is it to block the "weather" keyword from triggering the AI overview when you already have a perfectly functional weather widget?

Also, because before we used to have a tool, there was even some sense of privacy in using that tool. Now with these LLM's pretending to be human, it feels like entering a store and instead of being allowed to browse things in peace a clerk starts pressing you about what you want in order to make themselves useful. At that moment the "privacy" of being able to just mind your own business, alone, vanishes. It's intrusive. And it becomes extremely clear how intrusive it is whenever you search for something by typing something to the SEARCH TOOL and the AI misinterprets it as YOU TALKING TO THEM AS A PERSON, e.g. if you type "how are you" and it says back "I am doing well, thank you for asking!" and things like that. Companies seem not to care about being as intrusive as possible in people's lives, it seems.

Maybe this is something cultural. iirc in America clerks are very proactive with interacting with customers, while in countries like Germany it's the opposite and they keep their distance.

The specific issue is that search has become so bad that they think an LLM that gets answers wrong half of the time is a valid alternative, or, in fact, the "future" of search. Then they shoved that "alternative" to users with no way to disable it.

I saw an ad with a guy saying he doesn't write e-mails because he can just speak to the machine, and then the AI does it for him.

Guess we'll live in an illiterate society soon...

Another modern problem with education is that every student has a smartphone now, which they bring to the class, then they get distracted by it.

i.e. most users think the OS is shell, not the kernel.

That's stupid. People didn't bash the em dash because it was an em dash. They bashed it because it made it obvious it was AI. If your product is so good why are your customers ashamed of using it?

>Not the typing itself, but also because I had to think of how to implement it.

I believe "writing the code" means literally just "writing the code" not thinking how to implement it.

>'Sure AI won't perform as well as our human tutors with all the support behind them, but it's also $30 a month.'

For how long, though.

>Mr Buckland also claimed the tutoring industry doesn't 'actually do anything unique' but instead provides comfort to students - something AI can replicate.

Jesus. That's really not a good thing.

It's not every day you see someone so incredibly dismissive of the product they're selling themselves.

Thanks, I didn't know that. I remember reading about verbs a long time ago, so I assumed the order was OPTIONS then HEAD or GET.

Right. But if the cache MUST be revalidated every time, it's the same thing as being disabled.

The point of a reverse proxy is to reduce load on the server rendering the page. If you GET, the page is rendered. So in order for etag/last-modified to be effective, the CMS must implement HEAD. If the CMS doesn't implement HEAD or implements it in a way that ends up doing all the work of GET anyway, you just end up with more load than just doing a GET every time.

The funny thing is that the way HTTP is designed the simplest PHP script can do this correctly, because the server must send the headers first, so a PHP script can NOT do the work to generate the HTML until it has sent the correct headers, as they won't be able to change the headers after they start sending the body. In theory, the process could just shut down the instant the first body byte starts being sent and save work in a HEAD request. The problem is that pretty much everything works in a more "clever" way: you have some sort of template engine that generates the whole HTML, a view method that makes the DB calls, etc., and only after all the work is done the HTTP headers are sent. Because this method allows the backend to add/change/remove headers at any point during the process, not just at the start.

Essentially the problem is that CF doesn't know what your server is running, and even an s-maxage=60 is going to look like a bug from the user's perspective if they go to /post?id=123, navigate to /edit-post?id=123, edit the post, go back to /post?id=123 and see the post unchanged.

They can't do that because a CMS under Cloudflare needs to be configured to bust the Cloudflare cache when content is edited or the user will see cached content after they edit a page.

Do you mean nuclear isn't profitable compared to coal, whose costs are externalized, or compared to other renewables?

Jesus. I don't think WP is nice to use, but people are saying WP is crap because someone else made pearcmd.php that allows you to run arbitrary commands, and then a third someone else included that in the default PHP docker image. In this case all PHP CMS's are a directory traversal bug away from this CVE.

I'm not sure I understand. That's the main pre-condition... to include an arbitrary PHP that is already in the server.

On a fresh WP install, a random user can't upload PHP files. Normally you don't even need to allow random users to register an account since avatars on comments come from gravatar anyway.

Unfortunately, just because you have choices that doesn't mean those choices are good.

I was forced to the file explorer on Windows, and the file explorer was good so I didn't mind. I was also forced to use MS Paint. And it was good for a long time, until they added layers. Now my primary use case of it (pasting an image and cropping it) doesn't work as well as it used to.

On Linux I don't even have that choice. There are choices, yes, but none of them do what I want anyway.

What truly drives me insane is that if you say "I just want what Windows does" people tell you that it's not Windows, it's "different(tm)." Then you ask why do Linux software sucks in comparison to Windows, and you get told "well, it's because Windows has $ to spend in R&D." So it's double-think. Developers are aware proprietary software spends tons of money they don't have in R&D, and yet they shy away from just copying the results because they don't want to be Windows.

I just want Windows, but with freedom. I don't want "different" if it's not going to be better.

The former. You use one DE, typeahead triggers full text search. You use another, no metadata like image width/height when selecting images. You use a third one, no folder thumbnails.

I have used Windows for decades. Not once have I thought "I should make my own file manager."

I thought that after a few months of using Linux.

But what if they update the webpage to something completely different from what you bookmarked? Wouldn't you like to have access to the most up-to-date version always? /s

I don't understand what you mean. The examples come from the article.

You need AI for this?

Go to Pinterest, search "poster", find some cool ideas, steal it and do it in Inkscape in 30 minutes.

Has the world gone crazy?

If they were the same thing nobody would complain about it, would they?

I find it so weird that people use AI to write things. Writing is one of the easiest things you can do. Just put one word after the other.

In the example of Rust:

    items.iter().enumerate().filter(|(_, i)| cond(i)).map(|(idx, i)| Pointer::idx(i, path, idx)).collect()

vs. Zig:

    while (i < cursors.len) {
        if (actual_index < arr.items.len) { cursors[i] = .{...}; i += 1; }
        else iteration.remove(i);
    }

I think you have to be a special kind of person to call Rust "more readable."

The thing about Rust is that if you can appreciate zero-cost abstractions on iterators then the language feels like the only right way to program. But many programmers either don't use this sort of programming at all, or don't care if it has a cost in languages like JS, Python, Java, etc.

Personally I like Zig a lot because it feels like you're doing low-level programming but without having to program C which is... well, https://xkcd.com/918/

What confuses me is that for a long while we told people to not write their passwords on a sticky note, to not write them in plain text somewhere.

Then we introduce all these "security" mechanisms that make it literally impossible to recover an account without backup codes.

Where do you store the backup codes? The average person, if they store it at all, will store it on a plain text file or in a sticky note.

Except that this creates a much more brittle system. Systems are safe when they are routinely tested/used. If you routinely have to enter your password, you are aware you need it. If you don't need your password, and you never have to enter your backup codes, you won't feel the importance of them until you actually need them.

It's the whole "I have backups" vs. "the backups actually work" problem except it's pushed onto the users who have zero technical knowledge.

That's because those AI's were trained on existing "CSS tricks."

If people stop writing new CSS tricks, they will never make it into any dataset, and it won't matter if the AI can search the internet or not, because they won't be posted on the internet either.

Essentially, mass scraping has a chilling effect.

That's a problem for whoever gets in charge of solving spam to solve. Not me.

I've never hoped for that. The opposite of the government owning the internet is cloudflare owning the internet.

>I'm Tired Boss >I'm 30 this year, and computers don't have the same level of whimsy and excitement as they once had. When I was young everything was new and interesting, it felt like there was so much experimentation and innovation. Today the various desktop environments seem to have largely converged, sharing the same flat design language and icon styles. Customisation seems to have completely fallen by the wayside in favour of a more curated experience controlled by the desktop environment.

It's funny. I share the same thoughts but it sent me from Windows to Linux.

And I'm very, very tired as well. I wouldn't recommend you to install Windows, because Windows is spyware. But I wouldn't recommend you to install Linux, because Linux is crap.

You know what I would recommend instead?

Not use computers.

If there is a way to avoid them your whole life... just do that. Otherwise you'll spend the rest of your life having to deal with... you know... all of this.

The solution is probably legal, not technological.

We need a legal solution to automated spam, AI or not. It does tangible damage to communication systems when 99/100 of your e-mails doesn't come from a human being.

This is for WASM, but you can also do it to use a Qt frontend via Python's PySide6 with a Rust backend, avoiding the need of Rust bindings for Qt.