Yes, but many things can be mapped to “language”, let’s say a grammar describing state machines, so it can be used to generate control actions.

Transformer models etc. are not only useful for conversational AI and translations.

I’d be fine with the approach as part of research advancing the field, but unfortunately, that’s not what we’re seeing.

Congratulations, this is how you get exploited by corporations.

Who says you can’t check their outputs? It’s much faster to e. g. read a generated text than to write everything yourself. Same applies to translations, they’ve been excellent for quite a while now.

Business communication can be handled effortlessly by AI. Of course you read the result before you send it out, but that takes an order of a magnitude less time than formulating and typing all those meaningless sentences.

And honestly, that’s a perfect use case for AI. I wouldn’t compose a love letter to my family using AI, but a pamphlet, feature description, sales pitch, any bullshit presentation deck? You bet AI excels at those.

Same applies to content summaries that help augment search indices. Finding a large number of content candidates (e. g. videos) and have AI summarize the contents of said videos to narrow down the search is helpful and works today.

I’m not looking for AGI. I’m looking for tools to make my life easier, but in an ethical manner that doesn’t advance the destruction of the planet at an exponential rate, just for some tech bro to jerk it and buy another yacht.

Those numbers are baseless exaggerations. There are plenty of tasks which they solve perfectly, today. It’s just that a bunch of dicks operate them, and the cost of operating them are way too high.

Also:

• environmental impact of AI
• unethical acquisition of training data
• dichotomy of how conservative politics treat AI company and private copyright law
• “undress AI” and deepfakes

It’s not that they’re not useful, that’s just nonsense.

Ah shit. I swear to god, this just happened to me. I came to the comments, confused why a trailer for Outer Wilds 2 would be age-restricted.

Ugh.

But then again, you cleared up my confusion, so I guess there’s that.

If you have ADHD, it’s literally impossible to work without the background distraction.

Fwip!

Many places in the world mandate expiration dates on food items, no matter what the item in question actually is.

Water in a glass bottle? Expires in 24 months.

When asked what location fans wanted as a fighting stage, one very popular answer was Waffle House. Context: if you crash at WH after a long night out, you’re guaranteed to witness some drunken fighting.

Man, I’d love a Waffle House stage.

It absolutely does, on Android at least. On iOS, given Apple’s restrictions, the whole situation is a bit more complicated:

https://ericmigi.com/blog/apple-restricts-pebble-from-being-awesome-with-iphones

They don’t feel stiff at all and they’re incredibly soft to walk / stand in for hours. On top, they’re water proof, so they clean easily. You can get models without the holes.

And, of course: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pools_of_Darkness

It’s not like Bluetooth started demanding location permissions, the conceptual model of the permission was revised: having access Bluetooth means an app could determine your location via a form of lateration.

In earlier versions of smartphone operating systems, this was not transparent to users lacking the technical background, so Bluetooth also requiring location access is actually an attempt at making users aware of that. I’m not an iOS developer, so I can’t comment on iPhones, but on Android versions prior to 11, having access to Bluetooth meant an app would be able to determine your location.

Today, you can require the permission ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION, which expresses that your app might use Bluetooth to obtain location information on Android. Also, if you’re just scanning for nearby devices to connect your app to, but don’t want users to be confused why your smart fridge app needs to know your precise location, you can declare a permission flag (neverForLocation) and Android will strip beacon information from the scan results, better asserting your intentions.

So, overall: no, there is nothing nefarious going on, it was always possible to determine your location via Bluetooth, and the update to the permission model was an honest improvement that actually benefits you as user.

Now, there are still plenty of shady apps around, and apps that are poorly written - don’t use those.

Someone found the DMT stash

What’s a good way to financially support artists directly, without involving shady corporations, and without resorting to piracy?

No idea where you’d like to use live captions, but n maybe this helps:

https://github.com/abb128/LiveCaptions

Hey, much appreciated!

Is anyone speaking Chinese able to tell me what the guy in the first scene of the video is crying out? The one where the rocket falls horizontally. I mean, I have a general idea what is being said there conceptually, but I’d love to get an actual, accurate translation.

Handwriting hurts my wrists. My handwriting became super sloppy after what, like 40 years in front of a screen. Can’t index or search my notes. I had one of those pens that record everything using a camera on special, dotted paper, but no OCR can process my writing, and you need special paper.

But yeah, the idea seems interesting. I like dedicated devices these days. It have to carefully think about what I’ll be doing, pick an activity and then venture out to do the thing, packing the dedicated device that is suited for the task. I’m more focused that way, more productive.

However, that device here is not what I am looking for. Tiny keyboard, non ergonomic, colors too flashy.

It’s not just the difficult stuff, but often the mundane, e. g. stability, user friendliness, polish, scalability etc. that takes something from working in a constrained environment to an actual product - it’s a chore to work on and a lot less “sexy”, with never enough resources allocated to it: We have done all the difficult stuff already, how much more work can this be?

Turns out, a fucking lot.