Paid and freeware but either way non-free, unfortunately.

🍉

I wouldn’t be willing to disable my vpn for the nyt so thanks for confirming that it wouldn’t have made a difference. It appears that they now block everyone who doesn’t let javascript freely do whatever it wants to fingerprint you or whatever. I’ll not miss them too much.

“Judge not convinced by flimsy excuse” doesn’t really strike me as worthy of the Onion.

I’m shocked! — shocked to find that LLMs aren’t superhuman intelligences that will soon enslave us all. Other things they’re not good at:

• Summarizing news articles. Instead of an actual summary they’ll shorten the text by just leaving things out, without any understanding of which parts are important.
• Answering questions about anything controversial. Based on subtle hints in the wording of your question they’ll reflect your own biases back at you.
• Answering questions about well-known facts. Seemingly at random when your question isn’t phrased exactly the right way they’ll start hallucinating and make up plausible bullshit in place of actual answers.
• Writing a letter. They’ll use the wrong tone, use language that is bland and generic to a degree that makes it almost offensive, and if you care about quality the whole thing will need so much re-writing that it’s quicker to do it yourself from the start.
• Telling jokes. They don’t really get humour. Their jokes tend to have things that superficially look as if they should be punchlines but aren’t funny at all.
• Writing computer code. Correcting their mistakes is even more laborious in computer languages. Most of the time they’re almost as bad at it as they are at playing chess.

Still they are amazingly clever in some ways and pretty good for coming up with random ideas when you’ve got writer’s block or something.

The time when it would’ve seemed to everyone an unacceptable intrusion to make routine demands that travellers show their ID anywhere other than at international borders is still within living memory.

I’m mean sure they’ll still kill a few people along the way, but they’re not going to contribute as much to the downfall of all civilization as they might if they weren’t constantly revealing their utter mindlessness. Even as it is smart people can be fooled, at least temporarily, into thinking that LLMs understand things and are reliable partners in life.

This slightly diminishes my fears about the dangers of AI. If they’re obviously wrong a lot of the time, in the long run they’ll do less damage than they could by being subtly wrong and slightly biased most of the time.

Addicted to coffee? Try just a pinch of meth instead, you’ll feel better than ever in no time.

I was a user for a while. Never did figure out if they were just a small team of well-meaning people who didn’t know how to run a business properly, or a front for something. Good prices though, and reliable service for the time I was there. Their web page seems to indicate they got acquired by Malwarebytes, I’m not sure if that makes them less trustworthy, or more.

Makes sense to me. AI bullshit generators may be worse than useless for most of the things people try to do with them, but they might just be the perfect tool for rationalizing the systematic looting of formerly productive companies by private equity.

doggedly backed the invasion of Ukraine, calling it a Holy War

Yeah I don’t really give a shit about their concept of the male gender. Apparently it involves fathering many children, so that Russia doesn’t run out of soldiers for the hundred years of glorious holy war it will take to defeat NATO and save the world. If you really want to reach the ultimate heights of manliness, try wearing eye shadow, practicing embroidery, and watching Hello Kitty while remaining confidently masculine.

This shift allows us to shape the next era of the internet – with tools like vertical tabs

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I don’t know if there are others that did a better job but the only source the USA Today article had was the Daily Mail, other than a quote they got from DHS which simply denies there’s any truth to it.

Okay it’s not The Onion, but it is the Daily Mail.

Sucks if you’re in France. For the rest of us it should be interesting to see which of these VPN providers choose to comply by geo-blocking France, which choose to cut any ties they have with France and otherwise ignore the order, and which to abandon their mission and become agents of censorship on behalf of France.

Imagine spending four years plotting and scheming about how you’ll do everything better next time, and this is what you come up with.

… I then come across a post on “fuck_AI”

For a moment you had me going there, but no, it really does say OP beside your username.

Although the removed comments are not showing up in the moderation log, I see that your tireless devotion to the topic over the past 24 hours has provided us with at least one screencap of what seems to be one of the deleted comments. It was pretty low-quality, mildly insulting, and not worth thinking about for more than the 5 seconds its author did. Anyway good luck with your crusade.

Do you happen to have any evidence at all that they “delete any comments that complain about AI”? Because it seems unlikely, given that the only thing you came up with to support that statement is a comment expressing opinions about AI with which you presumably disagree.