In case you haven’t seen it, Tom7 created a delightful exploration of using an LLM to manipulate word counts.

Google removed “Don’t be evil”

Still parading that lie around? It’s easily verified as false. Their code of conduct ends with:

And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!

Landing gear were down, so it was likely coming in for a landing when the incident occurred. Based on the height and positioning, maybe an attempted go-around that ended in abandoning the craft entirely.

Rakuten is up front about it. They force their affiliate links, then pay you part of their cut.

Honey forces their affiliate links in exchange for maybe finding you a discount code.

POS is an English acronym. It stands for Point of Sale. The proper term would usually be POS Terminal, but it’s often shortened to POS.

The dev stated that it mostly exists for more performance-limited applications like mobile.

Expanse does too, though it isn’t common in that world.

Similarly, VLC names their releases after Discworld characters. It’s a fun way to make major versions feel like more than just a number increment.

They have two avenues to make money:

1. Sell commercial services such as customer support bots. They get customers thanks to the massive buzz their free services generated.
2. Milking investors, the real way to make money.

Generative AI doesn’t get any training in use. The explosion in public AI offerings falls into three categories:

1. Saves the company labor by replacing support staff
2. Used to entice users by offering features competitors lack (or as catch-up after competitors have added it for this reason)
3. Because AI is the current hot thing that gets investors excited

To make a good model you need two things:

1. Clean data that is tagged in a way that allows you to grade model performance
2. Lots of it

User data might meet need 2, but it fails at need 1. Running random data through neural networks to make it more exploitable (more accurate interest extraction, etc) makes sense, but training on that data doesn’t.

This is clearly demonstrated by Google’s search AI, which learned lots of useful info from Reddit but also learned absurd lies with the same weight. Not just overtuned-for-confidence lies, straight up glue-the-cheese-on lies.

The lack of pressure leads to absurd file sizes for silly things.

A few weeks ago, I needed a vector company logo, so I asked our graphics team for one. The file they sent me was 6MB. While working with it, I noticed it was actually quite clean, so I exported it as an SVG and it came out to 2KB. 1/3000th the size for the exact same graphic.

I opened their file up in a text editor and found font configs for specific printer models (in a graphic with only filled curves), conditional logic, multiple thumbnails, and other junk.

Banks like to think that branch employees (bank tellers) are sales people. Most of them give ‘goals’ to each employee requiring them to open a certain number of new accounts, land a certain number of loans, etc each week/month. It isn’t ethical since the only people you can really sell on those services are the ones who should least get them. Anyone who actually wants/needs the services will come to you.

Wells Fargo differed from the rest of the industry by setting completely impossible goals, not just unethical ones. This led to them developing a culture where signing people up for services they didn’t agree to became commonplace.

That’s exactly what it is. Firefox’s advanced tracking protection blocks connections to social media sites from other sites so that social media can’t see your behavior on the rest of the Internet.

Twitter started moving some things to a different domain and FF saw it as a third-party, blocking connections from it to the old Twitter domains.

Yet another reason the rebrand is dumb.

This is what I’ve found too. Tutorials help to learn tools and some basic techniques, but actual learning requires doing. That’s easy if you have something you want to do, but incredibly difficult if you don’t.

The regulatory agency is pretty large, but it’s headed by a 5-member commission.

Boeing doesn’t make engines.

Also, this is a nine-year-old plane. It has had at least one total tear down by Southwest.

I’m starting to suspect Oregon is cursed. All of these recent incidents, including the shroom incident, have been in Oregon.

This is not a new plane. A panel being improperly attached is a maintenance issue.

The headline is a bit misleading. The appeals court ruled that they didn’t have a warrant to search the boxes, which is an important distinction since they did have a warrant to search the business that housed them. They got a warrant to search the building, then used that to seize the property of clients and open investigations against them.

Also, the headline is completely wrong. The source claimed that a Spirit warranty team opted to go for a physically-impossible action and Boeing didn’t stop them.