After more than a year of paying for it, I canceled Linked In Premium last September in disgust. The opportunities it was bringing me were 95% scams 5% real.

But since then I've pivoted from job searching to building a small consulting business http://informationr.us/. My question is for anybody else selling IT consulting as a job- are the opportunities given by offering services on LinkedIn, paying for the monthly subscription? Is a Business Page Paid account on LinkedIn a positive return on investment?

Yes, the job market is just that bad. But I'm trying to learn GenAI.

One way I'm doing this is using https://galaxy.ai/?ref=theodore. Obviously, this is an affiliate link. $15/month for a shit ton of token credits on a large variety of cloud based LLM. I still think the real solution is going to be local LLM, but I've yet to figure out how to properly install Hugging Face. This is a good 2nd best if all you want to do is play around with figuring out AIs.

A new white paper from Stanford University suggests that AI has now learned a trick from social media platforms: Lying to people to increase audience participation and engagement (and thus spend more tokens, earning more money for the cloud hosting of AI).

It gets even worse when the audience participation is ALSO an LLM looking for more engagement- creating a negative feedback loop that gets further and further away from anything humans would recognize as reality.

14 years ago I picked mailchimp because it could read RSS feeds from my Knights of Columbus blog and send out daily digests.

We had a small form in an iframe allowing people to sign up to get the digests.

This year, something broke in the "detect a human" code for that small form, and I am getting hundreds of thousands of signups of the form "valid email address" "gibberish first name" "gibberish last name" and I can't figure out why.

I can think of zero ways to make money with this behavior as adsense is turned off for the kofc15485.org blog.

Anybody else seeing similar attacks?

https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/whats-going-on-in-cardinal-prevosts

Pope Leo XIV has a unique chance to stand with victims, and flip the script by flying to Peru soon to testify against Fr. Eleuterio Vasquez Gonzales

Doing so will let him purge the sodomites. Doing so will send a message to all, that Cardinals will no longer be given the red hat to escape justice.

Or he can squander this chance like Pope Francis did, duck his own responsibility in the case, and never return to Peru again.

Social Media Audiences Experiment
$1.00 USD
As many of you know, I have not had steady work for a while. Needless to say, with my wife's rotator cuff surgery, open heart surgery, and upcoming cataract surgery; finding post intel employment has been hard.

I am wondering if I can leverage social media to any significant amount. Thus an experiment is in order. Do not click on the below link unless you can afford a $1 donation.

This is an attempt to see if I can begin to monetize my social media audiences. IF you choose to, donate a dollar to me so that I can verify one contact. Doing so will help me pay down my credit card, which is why I'm using paypal for this experiment to begin with.

https://www.paypal.com/ncp/payment/U6R3Q3NAJWCUE

From the smartest people I know.

It also has to be on a forum my wife won't read.

I'm going through one hell of a change in life. December 16 she had open heart surgery, and her caregiving combined with less than 90 days in my new job means I lost my contract due to not devoting 40 hours a week to it.

I want to do something cheap and good for her for Valentines.

Everybody who knows better than google what foods have Vitamin K and which don't, let me know some good no sodium, no vitamin k snacks to put in a snackle box for her. Google seems full of conflicting information on this topic.

For getting the United States out of the World Health Organization before this insane hallucination hits

What an insane last 4 months.

October I found a contract and was finally working again after my March layoff from Intel.

November brought President Trump's election, which surprisingly stayed peaceful, despite my prediction of widespread violence in response to Orange Man Bad coming back into office.

December my wife had open heart surgery, causing me to take Oregon Paid Leave Act time, because I had not been employed the 90 days for FMLA coverage.

Which last Friday, led to me losing said contract, because 20 hours a week availability on "Intermittent" was not enough time to complete the work necessary for the contract.

And today, I just blew all my moderator points on the announcement of Trump's inauguration, without succumbing to the temptation to post.

For whomever is programing telemarketing AIs, you need to have them accept a variety of ways that people pick up the phone, and they need to be MUCH more reasonable in their responses. "Hello are you there" is never going to get a yes from me, it's going to get "Hello, you have reached name". Hanging up on that answer is stupid.

It appears that Elon Musk's interpretation of section 230 is quickly becoming the standard. Among the social media I us, X and Meta are now onboard (or at least promised to switch to a slashdot-like community moderation system- I have moderation points right now, but I like this better than what has been implemented on X).

I wonder if NextDoor will follow suit? Their community guidelines are far more oppressive than the others ever were, and near as I can tell, is a violation of Section 230 that crosses the line regularly with the 20% tail of the political normal distribution hump on both the left and the right.

Capitalists fight in the courts. Communists fight in the streets.

As these two extremes have taken over, I expect Wednesday will either bring unending court battles or rioting.

270toWin shows Kamala squeeking in at 270 electoral votes. 538 shows Trump not much better at 278 electoral votes. They can't both be right.

Hey capitalists, use capitalism. Musk showed us the way. Buy KIND. Buy META. Buy BizX and DHI. Then at the next opportunity, join together to propose no cancelation moderation, based on the idea that every person you cancel, is lost ad revenue and thus hurts the company's bottom line. Let's have a vote in no confidence in the board of directors.

My last troll with somebody who seems to be a libertarian with Trump Derangement Syndrome timed out with a question:

"Are you a bot? Your answers look like a bot"

Answer- to a newbie I'm not surprised I look like a bot. I'm autistic and I focus on subcategories of any given conversation that most human beings wouldn't. Also, I'm a veteran of the late 1980s Fidonet Flame Wars (when you could easily wait a weak or more for QWK packets to be passed across the continent) and the 1990s Usenet/Listserv flame wars (in that I was attacked by one of the first bots, Sedar Argic, a bot programmed by a Young Turk to try to convince everybody that the Aramaic Genocide really happened in reverse, killing Turks rather than Aramaic Christians).

From that, I developed the following four rules for online debates that make me extremely pedantic and frustrating to debate:

1. Ignore all personal insults. Personal insults are irrelevant to the conversation. Corollary to 1: Few people do this and thus personal insults are very useful to throwing your debating partner off topic, as long as you stay on topic yourself.
2. Take it Meta. Most subjects are far deeper than neurotypical non compos mentis realize. It can be as little as "I became pro-life because I noticed autistics like me are being targeted for genetic deletion"- I recently had a pro-choice feminist tell me she never forgot that, even after a couple of decades. So dig deeper, eventually you're going to find a point of agreement.
3. The conversation is not for the person you're debating. Your real audience is the 8-10 people reading the thread that will never comment. They deserve to hear both sides at their best, so be at your best. Don't sink to the level of the person you're debating with.
4. Have set principles and never change them unless absolutely disproven. Be a reverse skeptic on this, and be skeptical as possible. Force the other guy into trying to prove a negative.

I suspect as time goes on and AI gets better at these 4 rules, AI will win more debates.

On the plus side for First Deadly Sin month, I'm no longer with Intel, which means the only rainbow flags I'm subject to are from either for profit business advertising or online.

On the negative side I'm no longer with Intel. And am burning through my severance pay fast.

Anybody know of any good SQL/PowerBI jobs out there?

Oh, and just in case I never find a job again, I've started this company in the Portland area (for various meanings of the word started- not earning enough profit yet to make it my main gig): https://www.informationr.us/