I heard a talk a few days ago, and the fella said that if you want a non-smart monitor, you’ll need to pay somewhat more for what he called an ‘industrial monitor’. He said the ‘smart TV’ is cheaper because of all the data it’ll collect, and they can sell that data to make the price-to-the-user lower. (Don’t know for myself, my old Samsung monitor’s only smarts were to send data out to one URL, and I was able to change that URL to a site that doesn’t exist.)

For 30 years I watched the fossils downplaying, lying about, covering-up the facts about free solar energy (‘oh that’ll never work’), wind ('oh that’ll never work) and other green tech. Now they see the writing on the wall, and they’re buying because that’s the way the wind blows … because They’re rapacious motherfuckers, and never have enough money. They started in the US cutting down all the ancient forests, they’ll forever rape whatever looks like dollars.

I’d never ask a friggin machine to do coding for me, that’s MY blast.

That said, I’ve had good luck asking GPT specific questions about multiple obscure features of Javascript, and of various browsers. It’ll often feed me a sample script using a feature it explains … a lot more helpful than many of the wordy websites like MDN … saving me shit-tons of time that I’d spend bouncing around a half-dozen ‘help’ pages.

Damned good question, and I played stump-the-search-engine for 15 minutes and it’s like they’re AVOIDING that question

But fossil fuel companies don’t want energy storage, right?

Stockholders and aalesmen make them put that towards the end… to make investors feel dizzy I think

It is the case that posts people make on HN can quickly be moved from the front page to the 2nd or 3rd. This may be algorithmic or a moderator decision. A valid point is that there’s no way of knowing why this happens, apart from careful reading of the site’s guidelines. Some users will be bad-jacketed. Some posts can be flagged or simply go ‘dead’, also not transparent.

LOL I would NOT be surprised !!

What if some civilization in the past already had something like this, and there are ‘plates’ or pieces of rock out there (under sand dunes? written in the sides of those vases from ancient Egypt?)

Could they make portable readers that can at least spot old pottery chunks that are probably FULL of videos?

Manipulating the atoms in a crystal to store info is extremely high-precision, as is verifying the accuracy of the write). So is reading positions down to a few nanometers, But consumers wouldn’t need a $6000 reader to get, say, 10GB dumped to a hard drive … you’d carry your crystal and 16GB drive down to the corner store and user their reader to dump sector 37BJ to the drive. No need to trust them with your platter … but are you exposing all 360TB to potential damage from the machine?

Encrypted text is pretty much worthless to LLM. The hard part is getting decrypters to potential readers. RSS could get the text to readers; it could even get decrypters to readers as well … if someone was working on this problem.

Shhhh… just a little secret between us … but most of today’s shit-ton of house music is VERY VERY, uh, discoish

Sounds like a ripping good way to keep corporate data (and government secrets) from the public radar.

That way we won’t find out whose hands public taxdollars (or public-owned structures rented to corporations) wind up in.

To quote ChatGPT:

“Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT cannot accurately cite sources because they do not have access to the internet and often generate fabricated references. This limitation is common across many LLMs, making them unreliable for tasks that require precise source citation.”

It also mentions Claude. Without a cite, of course.

Reliable information must be provided by a source with a reputation for accuracy … trustworthy. Else it’s little more than a rumor. Of course, to reveal a source is to reveal having read that source … which might leave the provider open to a copyright lawsuit.

Finding inconsistencies is not so hard. Pointing them out might be a -little- useful. But resolving them based on trustworthy sources can be a -lot- harder. Most science papers require privileged access. Many news stories may have been grounded in old, mistaken histories … if not on outright guesses, distortions or even lies. (The older the history, the worse.)

And, since LLMs are usually incapable of citing sources for their own (often batshit) claims any – where will ‘the right answers’ come from? I’ve seen LLMs, when questioned again, apologize that their previous answers were wrong.

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I have to admit I’ve only ever used it to translate a paragraph or two at a time… where I was just looking for the gist of a text.

Not too surprising, considering that for centuries many people well-versed in two languages have made a very good living as translators … and often having to get delicate nuances across (for poets as well as statesmen). It’s as much art as science.

overwriting articles written by humans with machine generated translations. I really don’t understand that! But then, there are truckloads of worthwhile texts from throughout history that will never see translations otherwise … so that’s a worthy cause. Over time it may be improved, IF the algos are given feedback that allows them to learn from mistakes.

deepl.com (text translation) has been useful to me

The Mint team also puts out a very stable version called LMDE which is based on Deb rather than Ubuntu.

Interesting when authority-figures start foaming at the mouth about the word ‘woke’. A dog-whistle to those who need the sleep-walking to keep behaving predictably … and to the work of those who’ve spent decades and billions to program that behavior. This cha-cha has been going on since at least the beginning of the Holy Roman Empire.