It's only local to China in the sense that they choose what {packages/CCP poison} go in there.

For all values of u, Linux is local to u in the sense that u chooses what packages go in there.

I had to add minimum paragraph and sentence counts to the prompts it uses to keep it from trying to write a few terse sentences each time.

I noticed this in Claude (from DDG). It invariably tries to shorten sentences or make them more compact and concise. Sometimes that can be good, but most times long-winded sentences are what are needed.

and there is no way I can find to make it stop popping up giant intrusive ads for their other services every single time I open it.

Just like Firefox. There is no easy way to turn off being harassed by an intrusive pop-up telling me about a new update.

There used to be. It was a simple checkbox. But somewhere along the way someone had to justify their existence and removed that simple checkbox in favor of harassment.

Ha ha, Linux already has..

# top -o gpu
top: unrecognized field name 'gpu'

.. d'oh! Never mind.

And is asking an AI to proofread something that much different than MS Word flagging spelling and grammar errors?

Great question, and I think there isn't any significant difference.

But LLMs use a type of math that apparently has the evil bit set. Meanwhile, up here in VirtueVille, the computer code we write to create things, uses different math that doesn't have the evil bit set. Conclusion: we can look down on those AI companies and their stupid users. ;-)

Now, I wouldn't expect an AI service to be better at copyediting than an average human, but I haven't kept up so I'm ignorant of their performance. (All my "AI" experience is that I used Claude twice to, it turned out, fix some typos in some RoR config initializers.) But whether an AI service is as good at copyediting as a human or not, it's that user's choice and, as long as they sign off on the work and really take responsibility for it (declare the words to be their opinion), then I've got no problem with them doing that, whether it uses LLMs or Markov chains or human slaves or Searle's Chinese Room.

The words will be judged by their quality, not provenance.

That said...

Here's a similar story where I'd probably come to the opposite conclusion(!), despite the clown in it pretty much doing what I preach above, though he was using the AI service to do a lot more than copyedit. Behold this 3M expert witness cross-examination (134 page PDF) in the Watson Grinding case. It's slow going at first, but eventually you'll be laughing and cringing like in a good episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Fuck. I don't know.

Would like to add one tidbit because I've had this same conversation at work. The professor stated they used AI to help edit only after hundred of hours of writing. In other words, they did the heavy lifting and only used AI at the end to help refine what they had already done.

Is this any different than a human editor? If I write a book, do what I can to edit it down, then go to an editor who makes suggests, removes or reorders parts, and so on, is that any different than having AI do the same thing? In both cases you wrote the words. In both cases you went somewhere else to help edit.

If people claim that using AI to edit a work is "cheating" because it's no longer your work, then the same should apply to a human editor.

"Can we get it in cornflower blue?"

Don't mock it. Cornflower blue can be valuable.

Facial recognition is really neat technology, and we are all slightly better off thanks to its development. It's also imperfect, and nearly-guaranteed to be a net negative if you fully trust it, without human verification.

If you want to come out ahead by using cool technology, you're going to have to think about how to use it. There just isn't any shortcut around thinking.

If you have something which is only 99.9% reliable, that can be useful but it's going to be wrong sometimes. How are you preventing that wrongness from breaking your system? Insulting (much less turning-away) regular, recurring, paying customers is usually considered a really bad move, generally resulting in lower profits.

Free money falls out of the sky. Should we take it? Today we'll be interviewing Republicans, and learning that the answer is No because asceticism is a fundamental ideal that we should all strive toward. Burn a sacrifice instead!

Musk's data center near Memphis, KY has been illegally using pollution-producing methane-gas generators since day one even though he said they would be temporary. He does not have a permit for these generators and conveniently, the site is located near a poorer section of Memphis.

Needless to say, the EPA has not done anything about this even with its own decision of illegality.

No need to switch to generators when you can use them from day one and not have to worry about doing anything under the current regime.

Instead of rare books, let us rare video games or computers. Let's say someone bought a rare version of a Ninentendo system (an early edition) and said, "You know what, I'm going to see what happens if I apply a larger and larger force to it. Let's see how long it stays intact."

Mind you, they did a 3-D scan of the system so you can digitally see it, but the physical copy no longer exists.

How many of you would raise a stink at destroying it?

If not Nintendo, pick something you like and go back to its earlier days where something is rare and someone wants to destroy it, just because.

One of the things people complain about the digital age is loss of information. Sure, these books "exist" in a digital form today, but what about in 50 years?

This is why physical books are still superior to digital. We can still read books/scrolls/clay tablets from centuries ago. It is doubtful the same will be said for digital books.

As you increase the size of the bulk licenses' box, the amount of expensive cardboard increases as a square, but the number of licenses that fit inside the box increases as a cube. This results in a reduction of the amortized cardboard cost per license.

If a cost reduction isn't happening, then I would suggest people look into the shape of their bulk licenses. It may be that a same-sized box holds fewer licenses than it did ten years ago, due to the addition of "AI features" being tacked onto everything, resulting in irregular, difficult-to-efficiently-pack licenses.

Seriously, root is needed for software installation and updates (and not always even that) and that should be IT. Done. finito.

Yeah, individuals may have root access (but in corporate situations, even THAT has some limits to it - e.g., I can't see the that the 'spyware' I know is on my work machine actually exists. I know it does (because, for example, it is blocking me from screen-sharing to my AppleTV even off the firewall)).

But on a shared machine like old-school Unix minicomputers, that stuff is off-limits except to admins. This actually proves why that was the case - individual users can't be trusted with 'root'. And now we know that extends to non-sentient 'users'.

So this may prove that the bots are going to abuse their powers and therefore shouldn't be given any...but it also proves that the admins of these boxes that the bots are running on have about as much concern for real security as they ever did...which is to say, next to none until the exploitation is already out there.

This is a task that only required standard 'user' access - get the original software, get the dev tools needed for the new language, and have the tools for running the original to check parity), and that's it. They needed nothing more. They didn't need root, they didn't need email, they didn't need the ability to write commits to the others' repos. They needed the tools to do the job, nothing more.

Just like real users.

But this is a good thing. Meta patenting this means there's only one company we need to worry about pulling this shit.

Read his comment again. His objection has nothing to do with what's being patented; it's just a super-generic anti-recording complaint. This patent does not prohibit anyone else from pissing him off by recording things.

It doesn't help that the Facebook angle (that these are Meta's glasses rather than merely "smart glasses") injects all sorts of weirdness into the imagined application.

Facial recognition to identify people: has applications, such as the obvious "crap, I always forget names. Who is this guy, again?"

Highlight reels: WTF?! You call that an application? Extremely niche at best.

There's useful technology being discussed here, but apparently Meta doesn't want that to be the focus.