TheGrandNagus

joined 2 years ago
[–] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 11 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

I will never understand why people think FOSS is or should be apolitical.

FOSS has always been political. It's literally never existed in any other way.

[–] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 26 points 18 hours ago (4 children)

Same. I have to tinker with it a lot to make it less frustrating to use. I like how customisable it is but man I don't really want to customise everything anymore.

I want a UX that is great out of the box in terms of theming, functionality, and ease of use. I want sane defaults.

[–] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 14 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (4 children)

Having artificially generated news anchors seems so bizarre to me.

It's one person that in a country like china will be seen by tens or hundreds of millions of people. Is it really worth it to axe that job and put some uncanny valley CGI figure in their place? The per viewer cost saving must be fractions of a penny, and it risks putting off a not insignificant amount of people.

Now, if initiatives like this can be used for things like generating a figure that can do sign language in the corner of a screen that would be an amazing development, but this? I just don't see it.

I even get it for broadcasting to a very small audience, such as languages with almost no speakers. E.g. having an always-available Welsh language presenter. But this? Nah.

[–] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 127 points 1 day ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (32 children)

LLMs are an interesting tool to fuck around with, but I see things that are hilariously wrong often enough to know that they should not be used for anything serious. Shit, they probably shouldn't be used for most things that are not serious either.

It's a shame that by applying the same "AI" naming to a whole host of different technologies, LLMs being limited in usability - yet hyped to the moon - is hurting other more impressive advancements.

For example, speech synthesis is improving so much right now, which has been great for my sister who relies on screen reader software.

Being able to recognise speech in loud environments, or removing background noice from recordings is improving loads too.

My friend is involved in making a mod for a Fallout 4, and there was an outreach for people recording voice lines - she says that there are some recordings of dubious quality that would've been unusable before that can now be used without issue thanks to AI denoising algorithms. That is genuinely useful!

As is things like pattern/image analysis which appears very promising in medical analysis.

All of these get branded as "AI". A layperson might not realise that they are completely different branches of technology, and then therefore reject useful applications of "AI" tech, because they've learned not to trust anything branded as AI, due to being let down by LLMs.

[–] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 132 points 2 days ago (4 children)

I miss the internet being a wild west.

It certainly had its downsides, but it felt a lot better than the nonsense that's been happening over the past decade+.

[–] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 16 points 4 days ago

This is such a depressing read. So fucked up. How can people be this evil?

I'm glad this has become illegal, but I'm sad it even had to be in the first place.

[–] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 22 points 4 days ago (4 children)

One way to interpret this is "ha, people consider AI worthless!"

However another way to interpret this is the same way users view everything on the web, from social media to journalism and media streaming: this should be free and they should use my data and advertise to me instead, consequences/enshittification be damned.

[–] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 16 points 4 days ago (4 children)

Break the law and pay 0.014% of your market cap, or 0.31% of their 2024 profit.

[–] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 46 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Tech firms will suggest any invasive nonsense that will make them money.

Those present included representatives of Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Palantir, which works closely with the US military

A completely unsurprising list of companies lol

[–] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Ok so you think that the old 4" screen phones should actually have been sub 2". That seems excessively small to me.

[–] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Arguably. Or it's just what the dev team was used to. Or a bunch of other explanations.

I just don't find "a historic Germanic group of settlers that immigrated to medieval Britain are purposely neglecting unicode support as a means to suppress people that aren't part of their group."

Going through their post history, they seem obsessed with the "Anglo Saxons".

Just a bizarre conspiracy theory from a one day old account that's also advocating for genociding everyone in the middle east lol

[–] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 31 points 1 week ago (10 children)

To be fair, the term "AI" has always been used in an extremely vague way.

NPCs in video games, chess computers, or other such tech are not sentient and do not have general intelligence, yet we've been referring to those as "AI" for decades without anybody taking an issue with it.

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