It’s Neelix, obviously. Although technically I guess he outranks the captain.

Statcounter, huh. I’m guessing “unknown” means Windows 11 but they haven’t updated their software to recognise it yet.

https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/017/492/bUNXwFD.jpg

“Instead of constantly making futile attempts to control the weather, we should adapt to the ever-changing climate that has existed since time immemorial. After all, climate has always been a reality that impacts humanity from the outside, and we must align our actions accordingly.” — from Google’s translation of the AfD manifesto

Huh. I knew they were pretty openly fascist, but didn’t realize they were climate deniers too.

SearxNG is the only way I know of to get reasonably good results.

I block them if (f * t - p - e) / q * r passes a certain threshold, where f is the frequency of posting, t is how annoyed I am by the general theme or topic of those posts, p is the cuteness of their profile pic, e is the amount of effort they put into each post, q is the overall quality of the posts, and r is a random number generated by my subconscious.

Realizing how stupid you were when you were young.

Yeah? We can only hope that maybe some day the nation will progress to the point where it’s possible to reach the historic first election of a president who isn’t running a cryptocurrency scam.

Reading this is not going to be good for my faith in humanity, is it. Let’s see…

1. make them think everyone else is doing it
2. bribe them
3. get their cult leader to tell them to do it
4. persuade them that it’s good for “the economy”

With these techniques in mind, you may be able to persuade people to take bold actions such as sharing a video, initiating a conversation, or signing up for a newsletter.

I prefer a more deontological approach. Don’t do bad things, even if they threaten you.

I find that they too often exaggerate the wisdom of following the orders of the bad guy. Like, if they say “drop your weapon or I shoot the hostage” okay sure, maybe consider dropping your weapon, depending on circumstances. If it’s “give me the MacGuffin I need to release the neurotoxin and kill fifty million people or I shoot the hostage” maybe don’t do that.

The offensively stupid part is where they pretend it’s not a hypothetical thing that might some day exist after a series of unprecedented breakthroughs that there’s no sign of yet, but something that might be here any day now if it’s not already upon us.

Are you an LLM? Or just a troll? That’s another problem with “AI” — it’s hard to tell, these days.

This should be a poll. Why do you hate “AI”?

• The sheer volume of hype it gets is horrifying and everyone needs to stop talking about it
• It’s a trillion dollars of wasted investment capital that is going to wreck the financial markets
• Its main use is generating bullshit and we already have enough of that
• All the talk about the dangers of AI superintelligence is insulting to real intelligence
• Slop is no substitute for thought and it’s drowning out real culture
• All the fucking bots are making life hard for web server admins for no good reason
• The amount of energy it wastes is unconscionable
• Almost every use of it seems to be a misuse of it
• It’s too expensive to be worthwhile
• It’d have to get a lot more expensive if the people selling it were ever going to stop losing money
• The more people rely on it the worse it makes everything
• Nobody has the slightest idea how they could ever make it trustworthy
• Its output is often wrong in subtle ways that are hard to detect
• People have a tendency to imagine intelligence where it isn’t there, causing psychological harm
• Nobody can afford dram any more
• That you found something it seems useful for is outweighed by all of the above

The hacker news discussion is surprisingly not bad. Very few Google stans coming in to shill for their corporate masters, and they’re getting soundly ignored and downvoted.

Oh, sorry, did not mean to put that in c/technology.

In the old days we had large numbers of people believing that being online meant using AOL, Compuserve, or whatever walled-garden type of “portal” they were lured into using. But we could mostly rely on tech-aware people like computer programmers to know better. Not any more. Today it’s a more diverse group that knows better, but a less cohesive and politically influential one, and it makes up a much smaller fraction of net users.

The Crying of Lot 49 — it’s pretty short.

I dreamed that I owed someone an apology for something I had said to them in a dream.

I will suppose that some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me.

I shall think of your post, my keyboard, the sky, the air, the earth, all colours, shapes, sounds and all external things as merely the delusions of dreams. Dreams devised to ensnare my judgment. I shall consider myself as not having hands, or eyes, or ascii, or bandwidth, or ganja, but as falsely believing that I have all these things.

I shall stubbornly and firmly persist in this meditation; and, even if it is not in my power to know any truth, I shall at least do what is in my power: I will resolutely guard against assenting to any falsehoods, so that the deceiver, however powerful and cunning he may be, will be unable to impose on me in the slightest degree.

(… remembering that most search engines suck now and so people who don’t recognize it might have trouble finding out what that’s from: it’s Descartes.)