Nadya

If they worked to any acceptable level of efficacy then they could be tolerated. They're only tolerated by people who think they work as well as they claim to work (security theater) but anyone who knows about the performance impacts and/or are tech-savvy enough to understand it is a rootkit and potential exploit (that would fully pwn your device) hates them.

Some cheats are getting rather sophisticated now. There's an ever-increasing number of Pi-devices where the cheating is done externally.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpvwjC1_Luo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=revk5r5vqxA

That's a good assumption because that's exactly one way it is done. :)

To my understanding wikis can take all their data, host it themselves, point the domain to their new hosting, and the move would be entirely invisible to end users if done properly and the quality of the hosting infrastructure wasn't considerably worse.

Observant users might notice the removal of any Weird Gloop branding but otherwise the only way people would know if the wiki itself announces the move or performance of the wiki becomes noticeably worse.

And Weird Gloop won't do what Fandom does and keep a zombie copy of your wiki online. So you won't be competing with Weird Gloop wiki traffic to reclaim your traffic. In fact, the obligations they agree to forbid it.

Reading the Minecraft.wiki Memorandum: https://meta.minecraft.wiki/w/Memorandum_of_Understanding_wi...

Upon termination by either party, Weird Gloop is obligated to:

- Cease operating any version of the Minecraft Wiki

- Transfer ownership of the minecraft.wiki domain to the community members

- Provide dumps of Minecraft Wiki databases and image repositories, and any of Weird Gloop's MediaWiki configuration that is specific to Minecraft Wiki

- Assist in transferring to the community members any domain-adjacent assets or accounts that cannot reasonably be acquired without Weird Gloop's cooperation

- This does not include any of Weird Gloop's core MediaWiki code, Cloudflare configuration, or accounts/relationships related to advertising or sponsorships

This sort of agreement means Weird Gloop is incentivized to not become so shit that wiki would want to leave (and take their ad revenue with them) because they've tried to make leaving Weird Gloop as easy as possible.

Try editing anything on a Fandom wiki and that's where the real differences in experience comes from.

Fandom makes it extremely difficult (nigh impossible) to do something as simple as access the page of an image asset.

Crazy seeing a weird gloop post in the morning on HN.

Cook is very passionate about wikis - as is the rest of the team - and the RS wiki has long been regarded as one of the best gaming wikis on the internet; no contest. If you run a wiki - talk to Weird Gloop. The blog isn't bullshit and they genuinely want to help.

I think it's awesome that they're helping more wikis move away from Fandom after the success of the Minecraft wiki moving.

They also are running a wiki for Andrew Gower's upcoming game as well.

I really hope I hear about other wikis making the move in the near future. Fandom deserves to die out.

The RS Wiki is the single website I've whitelisted in my ad blocker. And despite needing ads to cover costs - they made sure to ask the community first about adding them and what alternatives to funding might be possible. It was really a last resort and they are obsessive about making sure the ads are non-intrusive, single banner, not in primary real estate, and not harming the wiki experience. If any ads cause problems they completely pause running ads until the ad host resolves the issue. Although I'm usually signed in - so never see ads anyway as they only show for users who aren't signed in.

My litmus test is to simply lie. It weeds out the people hating AI simply because they know or think it is AI. If you link directly to an AI site they're already going to say they hate it or that it all "looks like AI slop". You won't get anywhere trying to meet them at a middle ground because they simply aren't interested in any kind of a middle ground.

> https://www.reddit.com/r/greentext/comments/zq91wm/anons_dis...

Which is exactly the opposite of what the artists claim to want. But god is it hilarious following the anti-AI artists on Twitter who end up having to apologize for liking an AI-generated artwork pretty much as a daily occurrence. I just grab my popcorn and enjoy the show.

Every passing day the technologies making all of this possible get a little bit better and every single day continues to be the worst it will ever be. They'll point to today's imperfections or flaws as evidence of something being AI-generated and those imperfections will be trained out with fine tuning or LoRA models until there is no longer any way to tell.

E: A lot of them also don't realize that besides text-to-image there is image-to-image for more control over composition as well as ControlNet for controlling poses. More LoRA models than you can imagine for controlling the style. Their imagination is limited to strictly text-to-image prompts with no human input afterwards.

AI is a tool not much different than Photoshop was back when "digital artists aren't real artists" was the argument. And in case anyone has forgotten: "You can't Ctrl+Z real art".

Ask any fractal artists the names they were called for "adjusting a few settings" in Apophysis.

E2:

We need more tests such as this. The vast majority of people can't identify AI nearly as well as they think they can identify AI - even people familiar with AI who "know what to look for".

https://www.tidio.com/blog/ai-test/

Artworks (3/4) | Photos (6/7) | Texts (3/4) | Memes (2/2)

Fun excerpt by the way:

> Respondents who felt confident about their answers had worse results than those who weren’t so sure

> Survey respondents who believed they answered most questions correctly had worse results than those with doubts. Over 78% of respondents who thought their score is very likely to be high got less than half of the answers right. In comparison, those who were most pessimistic did significantly better, with the majority of them scoring above the average.

I understand the vast majority of CCTV is private-sector. That doesn't matter when it is handed over to the government with little to no push back when the government asks for the footage.

When you'd only need CCTV to confirm with facial recognition that your suspect was in the area you wouldn't need CCTV coordination - that would be the entire point of deploying a WALDO network. It lowers the number of CCTV you'd need to coordinate with to track someone's movements.

https://www.politics.co.uk/reference/cctv/

Depending from how high it can reliably work from, collaborate with UK CCTV surveillance so that you can better track individuals with fewer cameras as long as you can collate them with cameras that confirm their position at various points in time.

Fly a handful of drones over the area of a fleeing suspect and be able to track their whereabouts and look for suspicious behaviors (eg. someone running and making constant turns in a city or doubling back often, cutting through alleys).

Hell fly a few drones of the city to monitor foot traffic of the population and determine possible points of interest for new developments. Where are people walking to? How do they tend to get there? Can we optimize traffic for them - or more realistically - around them?

Could be used for other forms of crowd analysis too such as how to best disperse a riot and separate a crowd.

Sorry I guess I'm about as pessimistic as you are about it. Use in S&R like throwup238 suggested seems like a good non-militaristic fit for it.

Oh and also this which was posted on HN not too long ago: https://dropofahat.zone/

It was disabled yesterday due to the high traffic - but I was able to connect today and after saying hello the chat immediately kicked me off after I asked a question. So unfortunately I've not been able to test it out for more than a few seconds of the "Hello, how can I help you today?"

One thing I've noticed for a lot of these AI video agents, and I've noticed it in Meta's teaser for their virtual agents as well as some other companies, is they seem to love to move their head constantly. It makes them all a bit uncanny and feel like a video game NPC that reacts with a head movement on every utterance. It's less apparent on short 5-10s video clips but the longer the clips the more the constant head movements give it away.

I'm assuming this is, of course, a well known and tough problem to solve and is being worked on. Since swinging too far in the other direction of stiff/little head movements would make it even more uncanny. I'd love to hear what has been done to try and tackle the problem or if at this point it is an accepted "tell" so that one knows when they're speaking with a virtual agent?

Sorry for the late response - but I can't. I don't really follow content creators at a level where I can recall names or even what they are working on. If you browse AI-dominated spaces you'll eventually find people who include AI as part of their workflows and have gotten quite proficient at prompting them to get the results they desire very consistently. Most AI stuff enters into my realm of knowledge via AI Twitter, /r/singularity, /r/stablediffusion, and Github's trending tab. I don't go particularly out of my way to find it otherwise.

/r/stablediffusion used to (less so now) have a lot of workflow posts where people would share how they prompt and adjust the knobs/dials of certain settings and models to make what they make. It's not so different from knowing which knobs/dials to adjust in Apophysis to create interesting fractals and renders. They know what the knobs/dials adjust for their AI tools and so are quite proficient at creating amazing things using them.

People who write "jailbreak" prompts are a kind of example. There is some effort put into preventing people from prompting the models and removing the safeguards - and yet there are always people capable of prompting the model into removing its safeguards. It can be surprisingly difficult to do yourself for recent models and the jailbreak prompts themselves are becoming more complex each time.

For art in particular - knowing a wide range of artist names, names of various styles, how certain mediums will look, as well as mix & matching with various weights for the tokens can get you very interesting results. A site like https://generrated.com/ can be good for that as it gives you a quick baseline of how including certain names will change the style of what you generate. If you're trying to hit a certain aesthetic style it can really help. But even that is a tiny drop in a tiny bucket of what is possible. Sometimes it is less about writing an overly detailed prompt but rather knowing the exact keywords to get the style you're aiming for. Being knowledgeable about art history and famous artists throughout the years will help tremendously over someone with little knowledge. If you can't tell a Picasso from a Monet painting you're going to find generating paintings in a specific style much harder than an art buff.

Yes. Your type can encode what the proper format for a string should be and if a string is passed that does not meet that format it will throw an error allowing you to make any necessary adjustments to handle the new date year_quarter format.

eg. `type DateString = ${number}/${number}/${number}`

A super naïve check for using "/" instead of "-" as the separator character for a date formatted as a string. If a date is provided with some other separator character it will throw an error. If my function takes a DateString the string must be formatted correctly to pass the type check. Obviously this isn't enough (YYYY/MM/DD is different than DD/MM/YYYY) but the intention was to show a way to enforce something via types rather than validating a string to check that your have a DateString you can simply enforce that you have one.

Not only do I work less in the office - the quality of the work I produce is lower. I'm more stressed out about things that I no longer have the time for because I'm wasting time commuting to work when I could be taking care of chores and errands or myself.

If I ever have to waste 5 more minutes over water cooler chat about what someone did the last weekend I'm putting in my 2 weeks notice. I don't go to work to socialize and as far as I can tell that is the real reason people want to RTO. They quite literally don't know how to socialize outside of work and bugging their coworkers so want everyone to RTO so they have people to chat with who have no choice but to pretend to be listening and be courteous with them.

It's hard to quantify how much time learning how to search saves because the difference can range between infinite (finding the result vs not finding it at all) to basically no difference (1st result vs 2nd result). I think many people agree it is worth learning how to "properly search" though. You spend much less time searching and you get the results you're looking for much more often. This applies outside of just Google search: learning how to find and lookup information is a useful skill in and of itself.

ChatGPT has helped me write some scripts for things that otherwise probably would have taken me at least 30+ minutes and it wrote them in <10 seconds and they worked flawlessly. I've also had times where I worked with it to develop something that ended up taking me 45 minutes to only ever get error-ridden code that I had to fix the obvious errors and rewrite parts of it to get it working. Sometimes during this process it actually has taught me a new approach to doing something. If I had started from scratch coding it by myself it probably would have taken me only 10~ minutes. But if I was better at prompting what if that 45 minutes was <10 minutes? It would go from from a time loss to a time save and be worth using. So improving my ability to prompt is worthwhile as long as doing so trends towards me spending less time prompting.

Which is thankfully pretty easy to track and test. On average, as I get better at prompting, do I need to spend more or less time prompting to get the results I am looking for? The answer to that is largely that I spend less time and get better results. The models constantly changing and improving over time can make this messy - is it the model getting better or is it my prompting? But I don't think models change significantly enough to rule out that I spend less time prompting than I have in the past.

Ever seen someone try and search something on Google and they are just AWFUL at it? They can never find what they're looking for and then you try and can pull it up in a single search? That's what it is like watching some people try to use LLM's. Learning how to prompt an LLM is as much a learned skill as much as learning how to phrase internet searches is a learned skill. And as much as people decried that "searching Google isn't a real skill" tech-savvy people knew better.

Same thing except now it's also many tech-savvy people joining in with the tech-unsavvy in saying that prompting isn't a real skill...but people who know better know that it is.

On average, people are awfully bad at describing exactly what it is they want. Ever speak with a client? And you have to go back and forward for a few hours to finally figure out what it is they wanted? In that scenario you're the LLM. Except the LLM won't keep asking probing questions and clarifications - it will simply give them what they originally asked for (which isn't what they want). Then they think the LLM is stupid and stop trying to ask it for things.

Utilizing an LLM to its full potential is a lot of iterative work and, at least for the time being, requires having some understanding of how it works underneath the hood (eg. would you get better results by starting a new session or asking it to forget previous, poorly worded instructions?).

If you prefer to own media instead of streaming it, are into photography, video editing, 3D modelling, any AI-related stuff (models add up) or are a digital hoarder/archivist you blow through storage rather quickly. I'm sure there are some other hobbies that routinely work with large file sizes.

Storage is cheap enough that rather than deleting 1000's of photos and never be able to reclaim or look at them again I'd rather buy another drive. I'd rather have a RAW of an 8 year old photo that I overlooked and decide I really like and want to edit/work with than a 87kb resized and compressed JPG of the same file. Same for a mostly-edited 240GB video file. What if I want or need to make some changes to it in the future? May as well hold onto it than have to re-edit the video or re-shoot the video if the original footage was also deleted.

Content creators have deleted their content often enough that if I enjoyed a video and think future me might enjoy rewatching the video - I download it rather than trust that I can still watch it in the future. Sites have been taken offline frequently enough that I download things. News sites keep restructuring and breaking all their old article links so I download the articles locally. JP artists are notorious for deleting their entire accounts and restarting under a new alias that I routinely archive entire Pixiv/Twitter accounts if I like their art as there is no guarantee it will still be there to enjoy the next day.

It all adds up and I'm approaching 2 million well-organized and (mostly) tagged media files in my Hydrus client [0]. I have many scripts to automate downloading and tagging content for these purposes. I very, very rarely delete things. My most frequent reason for deleting anything is "found in higher quality" which conceptually isn't really deleting.

Until storage costs become unreasonable I don't see my habits changing anytime soon. On the contrary - storage keeps getting cheaper and cheaper and new formats keep getting created to encode data more and more efficiently.

[0] https://hydrusnetwork.github.io/hydrus/index.html

When an AI makes a silly math mistake we say it is bad at math and laugh at how dumb it is. Some people extrapolate this to "they'll never get any better and will always be a dumb toy that gets things wrong". When I forget to carry a 1 when doing a math problem we call it "human error" even if I make that mistake an embarrassing number of times throughout my lifetime.

Do I think LLM's are alive/close to ASI? No. Will they get there? If it's even at all possible - almost certainly one day. Do I think people severely underestimate AI's ability to solve problems while significantly overestimating their own? Absolutely 10,000%.

If there is one thing I've learned from watching the AI discussion over the past 10-20 years its that people have overinflated egos and a crazy amount of hubris.

"Today is the worst that it will ever be." applies to an awful large number of things that people work on creating and improving.

I thought the same about APL until arcfide made a video about codfns a few years back. Was eye opening.

https://www.youtube.com/live/gcUWTa16Jc0?si=Rld3IoiN7ijKnlWb

Duolingo has removed a lot of user generated content that helped people learning. I've heard from many that it is overall worse than it used to be.

This seems to be a scaling issue for all of these online language/SRS learning systems. Every single one of them scales and then starts dialing back/deleting/hiding all of the user-generated content that helped the platform get to where it is today.

Almost a decade ago "smart.fm" was a thing and the best thing about it was all of the user-generated content (blogs) offering discussions and explanations for so many various languages. From grammatical concepts being explained to people asking questions and having users provide answers in public Q&A style format. Then smart.fm got rid of all of that and became "iknow.jp" and deleted everyone's blogs and hard work built to create the smart.fm community (many of whom then moved to Memrise).

Memrise was originally about using user-submitted mnemonics and it had a vast library of them being created. Nowadays, as far as I can tell, none of the mnemonics are around anymore and they're no longer the focus. The focus is on monetization and gamification of their Pro user stats (of which I have lifetime membership until the year 9999 due to my help/work during their Beta testing years).

Because mnemonics were the focus - words across all of their courses had to be combined so that the mnemonics between courses would carry over. Myself and a number of (unpaid) volunteers spent months combining all of the words for every popularly used language (I helped with the Japanese dictionary) across all existing courses at that time.

Hosting (and moderating) user-generated content is an issue at scale. At the start when you have mostly good faith actors and few trolls it works quite well. But after a certain scale moderation becomes a massive issue.

At least I got a cool staff-only T-shirts out of it. Ben is an awesome dude and when I donated to the Memrise bus tour godfundme I asked if I could have one of their staff shirts that I knew they had - and they actually sent me one instead of one of the bus tour shirts!

The better funded of these sites seem to last a bit longer/scale a bit larger but it seems the death of user-generated content is inevitable after a certain point.

If you try and prevent any usage of the phrase/snowclone it will only ever be an explicit reference to Trump's usage though. This is why I made the comparison to slurs against the LGBT communities earlier. If you only ever allow "gay" to be used as an insult instead of a self-identifying label that means it will only ever be used as an insult. This is why the reclamation of it as a self-identifying label was so huge in the 1990s/2000s and calling everything "gay" as an insult largely fell out of common vernacular. By refusing to allow it to be an insult it eventually ceased being one even if it took the better half of two decades. I'd rather see "make X Y again" used everywhere until it has nothing to do with Trump anymore and is just a cliché snowclone. Even if that means seeing it in my tech news ("Make Linux Fast Again" is/was another one). Even if it takes the better part of 10-20 years to make it cliché/generic enough to no longer remind people of Trump.

You are correct that I misidentified you - and I understand your point in the latter paragraph about it being more of an annoyance of politics overstepping into your unrelated Tech news rather than "Ugh, Trump". I'm glad I was able to get my point across clearly and as long as you understand where I am coming from we can absolutely disagree over my opinion on the matter. After all - it is just an opinion.

Thanks for keeping the discussion civil and take care o7

Do you know the original use of the "Don't mess with Texas" slogan? Do you think if people didn't repurpose the phrase it would have kept its original meaning? By leaving it alone you're ceding that the phrase belongs to Trump - who stole it from Ronald Reagan's "Let's Make America Great Again" 1980's campaign slogan.

I'm saying don't let him own it at all. It isn't his to own - it's a cliché English snowclone that he gave popularity to. It doesn't deserve to be a powerful slogan that makes people think of Trump. It deserves to be a generic, overused snowclone devoid of any significant meaning where the average person no longer remembers the original phrase or meaning.

By ceding it to Trump and wishing to discontinue usage of it you're choosing to give it power and continue a legacy that it doesn't deserve.

Disagreeing. It's like nobody paid any attention to the gay community in the late 90s/early 00's. Words are only given power over you when you cower from them and by doing so you help show that those words can have power over others too. You only harm yourself and others by doing so.

It triggers me whenever I see people ceding words like this - and this particularly annoyed me because it wasn't only ceding the phrase "makes America great again" but any phrase of the same grammatical construct!

Growing up trans I was called every name and slur in the book because people learned from others that those slurs might have power over me. The bullies had learned from other trans people that those words had power. That they could make me cry or feel weak or powerless if they held those words over my head. I never gave them that satisfaction though. My response was aways "Yeah, and?" which I had learned from the gay community. And I hate, rather strongly at that, anyone who helps those words retain power so that they can continue to be used to bully other trans children.

Never give words power over you. By doing so you give them power over others. If a word or phrase bothers you so strongly - reclaim it. Turn it into something you control - don't let it be wielded like a stick to hit you with. Why willingly turn it into a weapon that people can use against you?

That goes as much for slurs as it does for "make X Y again". It pisses me off is all.

Giving people the power to change your way of speech or way of thinking is how you let them have power and control over you. It gives them strength when they should be seen as weak. It empowers them.

If you detest what a certain phrase might stand for - work towards changing what it stands for. Don't give it away freely and without a fight. You do a disservice to yourself and everyone else.

Tigger should be joining Winnie the Pooh if my memory serves me correctly.

I support the content creators I care about directly (or as directly as possible through services like Patreon or ko-fi. Others I might consume the content of but it is by no means deemed important to me. Even a one off $5 payment is more than they'd ever make off of me via ad revenue even if I watch every video on their channel for years.

I host a lot of things out of pocket with the sole intention being to share them - not to profit off of them. I recognize that this is a privilege not everyone has but the internet was much better off when the incentive to create content was to share with other people even of it was at a personal loss. Now the incentive is what can go viral, get the most clicks, and be just clickbaity enough that people keep clicking but not clickbaity enough that people stop clicking. No thank you. If that is what the internet is I'd rather it die off so I don't really care if I'm contributing towards it dying or not.

Sounds like every pit bull owner up until their totally harmless lovely well trained wouldn't harm a fly pit bull snaps and attacks someone or another dog.

The leash in public areas is to be able to control your dog. If you want your dog off of the leash go to private property or a dog park where a gated leashless area exists for those willing to assume the risk.

I've seen military trained dogs with training worth tens of thousands of dollars disobey orders. I simply do not care how well trained people think their dogs are.

For political things sure. Now imagine you're explaining how something works on a technical level - like the physics of how induction heating works or the summary of a study where they've twisted your summary to claim the opposite of what the study and your summary actually claims. You go to correct their misinterpretation of your study and are told you are wrong and your edit reverted.

> I've corrected articles where things I've written have been cited and had the changes reverted. It was enough to just give up.

I've heard about this happening enough that I stopped treating WP with any credibility whatsoever even for what should be cut & dry fact (aka: non-controversial/political topics). I've heard of people who were being quoted updating the context to more accurately reflect what they were saying and having the changes reverted. As if the person who said the thing being quoted doesn't know what they meant. Often because it didn't meet some guideline or another but more often than not because one overzealous editor has decided that the page being edited is "their page".

I learn the truth more from perusing the edit history or talk pages than from ever reading the page itself. Also despite claims of neutrality it's amazing how often pro-communist articles are heavily maintained almost exclusively by diehard self-proclaimed Marxists making politically biased edits.

Exhibit A: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Holodomor

It can certainly swing both ways but I don't follow the logic that if I block ads that people follow me block ads. It varies largely from audience to audience. If my followers are mostly young, tech-savvy individuals then sure many of them are also likely blocking ads. If I'm a big Minecraft content creator and most of my audience is 9-13 year old though? It becomes much less likely.

I also share a video link with many, many, many more people than I ever could convince to buy a game. I might convince 2 or 3 friends to buy a game but I can incidently get 30,000 people to watch a video with a single tweet.

Think of it more like a loss leader. Costco sells hotdogs at a loss because it brings in more than what it costs them.

I'm sure Google/YouTube has crunched the data and came to the conclusion that it isn't worth it anymore but I also don't think data can even give a complete picture. Data can't predict how many people will leave vs subscribe when all is said and done. Results from limited rollouts are not guaranteed to follow in a full rollout.