There are no reliable automated LLM output detectors. Anyone who says otherwise is either trying to sell you snake oil (or is unwittingly helping someone to sell snake oil to someone else, I guess).

I was about to link to that, and specifically the stuff that now seems to have been moved to Signs of AI writing.

I thought that was a very interesting read, because it’s so much better than the usual AI ragebait that led to people getting pilloried over the fact that they actually know how to use em dashes. You can’t detect LLM use just by the fact that someone uses em dashes. It’s a complicated stylistic issue that usually boils down to “well, you know what ChatGPT output looks like when you see it”.

It’s moments like these that make me think about the state of the world and my part in it. I may just be a random loser on the Internet, but I do know a lot more shit that some of the biggest multi-quad-spillion-dollar CEOs, apparently.

For example, it’s an old fact that tech CEOs know jack shit about measuring productivity, even when they’re obsessed with it. Yeah. One more example.

[insert that meme of a cat peeking behind a snow bank going “wtf they’re doing over there” or something]

Last time I was blown away by graphics was when I started up my brand new Xbox 360 and played Bioshock and was like “whoooa, reflections, water effects, whoooa”. Everything since has been a mild gradual improvement.

In fact, I expect this stuff to be mild improvements you can barely notice unless you’re specifically looking for it. Don’t make it big and don’t stir drama, Nvidia.

And just about the last thing you want to tell people is “you know what, we’re doing a giant leap here, you’ll better buy new hardware now.” …In this fucking economy.

I’d be willing to get YouTube Premium just to get rid of ads, but they’re bundling it with YouTube Music and I’m not trusting Google with my music purchases any more, thank you.

They discontinued Google Play Music (fortunately only after a long long period of time allowing you to download MP3s with their bloody terrible client app, so no loss there) and told me that you can just import the purchases to YouTube Music. Which I couldn’t actually access.

Also I don’t want a music streaming service, I just want to buy the albums. It’s pretty sad that it seems the only remaining feasible local option for electronic music purchases is iTunes! Bloody iTunes!

Yup. The turtle in the comic is sad, not because of the eviction notice (which is clearly bogus, and annoying to deal with, but the buddy probably takes consolation in that they’ll outlive the clueless landlord) but because the note is in an awkward place they can’t reach. Turtles are unfortunately not very nimble.

Did you know that alphas have low penetrating power?

…Why are you looking at that Andrew Tate picture again? I’m talking about nuclear radiation.

/stolen joke

It’s a “beginner-friendly” distro so people might subconsciously think you should “graduate” to use something “better”.

Which is ridiculous, of course. No reason to switch if it works for you!

If the speedrun strategy is “introduce a stupid law, wait for everyone to go ‘holy shit none of this can be realistically implemented in this timeframe’, wait for OS vendors to just ban the use of the OSes in the country, watch the local industry as a whole to rally and petition the government to stop the madness before there’s a new dark age, repeal the clearly stupid law”, all before the California law comes to effect - I’ve got to say it’s a bold strategy and we’ll see how it plays out.

Edit: Also, not going to upvote a Lunduke video - I’m glad he crams every bit of substantial information in the thumbnails so I can just not listen to him at all

Crackheads? Looks like it was designed by methheads.

My first reaction was, damn, is that from that episode of Top Gear where they made the stupidest RVs imaginable? What janky nonsense is this, I wondered before reading the comments.

Don’t worry, this is very old news.

OpenOffice.org was basically stuck in a bureaucratic hell of their own and couldn’t really do major decisions without the leaders’ approval. I think Sun Microsystems/Oracle was involved.

Some high up developers got basically kicked out by the governing folk, so they decided to start the Document Foundation to make LibreOffice, and vast majority of the developers followed. They were just happy to be actually able to do something.

OpenOffice got donated to Apache Project and there’s been very minimal maintenance on it ever since.

Firefox. I’m not happy with how Mozilla Corp is operating, but I’m not switching to a Firefox fork unless there’s actual developer exodus (akin to what happened to OpenOffice/LibreOffice). Ultimately, at this stage, those forks depend on upstream Firefox developers for 99% of the work.

My Xbox gamertag/Steam id is “Rose in Shadows” and also using “Rosa Umbrarum” and variations.

The inspiration came from The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. The last line of the novel is “Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus” (“The rose of the past endures only in name; we hold the bare names”) Which is why I usually put “Yesterday’s Rose” in the name fields.

I don’t know much of Latin at all. Also, the z in the username was for edginess, to make it a Notorious Hacker Alias or someshit.

That’s a bit weird. They didn’t get this worked up about being called “Micro$oft” or something. This is probably hitting the nerve in a completely different way!

Episode 230: Google
“…over there, you can see a YouTubeAI datacenter on fire. It’s not supposed to be like that.” - Roz, probably

Long ago, I had SoundBlaster Live! soundcard which was perfectly capable of mixing audio on hardware under ALSA, which in my mind meant that all of the userland sound daemon nonsense could go straight to hell for all I cared. Earlier, EsounD never worked right and no app supported it directly and the wrapper utility was a hassle when it even worked. Then came PulseAudio. I could get buuutttery smooth audio on direct ALSA or laggy barely working audio on Pulse. Absolute hog.

Sure, nowadays the situation is better. But back in the day, for me, the answer to “why isn’t the sound working?” was usually “you tried to use anything but direct ALSA”.

My feeling on Xbox since Xbox One days has been pretty much “this is an awesome platform, you’re sitting on a gold mine Microsoft, what the fuck are you doing?”

The last bit of brilliance they did utilise properly was GamePass, and of course they cocked that up by getting greedy.

Last few years have been extremely rough. The only lucky thing about this is that instead of full Xbox exclusivity Microsoft was pushing Xbox/Windows cross functionality. …Yeah, I’ve been pivoting to PC, but Steam/GOG instead.

I was about to ask “I’m mildly concerned, are American Evangelicals okay?” but then I remembered there has never been a time when they have been okay, so I don’t know why am I even asking.

Oh good, the Bitcoin argument.

“Sure, Bitcoin wastes a lot of energy, but you know what else wastes energy? The Visa payment network.”

Yeah, but Visa handles six quadrispillion transactions per megawatthour, Bitcoin handles two drug purchases. Not the same results, is it?

So yeah, training humans takes a lot of energy. But in the end, you get a coherent, capable and well functioning individual. Spend the same energy on training LLMs and you get a system that’ll happily tell you to glue the cheese on pizza or something.

A significant chunk of American pop culture of the past decades is based on the premise that The Government is Hiding Something.

Trump’s going to throw a big wrench in that by releasing fucking everything. Except a few things. A few great secrets.

I swear American pop culture in the coming century or so is just going to be The Government is Hiding The Epstein Files, over and over and over.