Clearly that wasn't spam, because his name is nospam007.

Forced? You think reviewers of writing contests are captives, imprisoned by mad scientists and forced to read story after story, like some sort of literary equivalent of the backstory to MST3K?

It is no more "theft" than you are.

I'll never get over how many people I watch online complain about how they'll never use AI because "it's theft", and then post photoshops they made with pictures they don't own, when that's not what the AI is doing.

I'll never get over how many artists I've seen complain about how AI is theft, and then paint something with "inspiration images" sitting in front of them while they paint, with their painting effectively being a blended composite of their inspiration images - when that's not what the AI is doing.

I'll never get over how many writers I've seen write the exact same derivative stuff that they also read, down to the same phrasings at times, just packaged in a new plot with new characters, and yeah, same story.

Even a person who isn't *directly* copying things that they're literally looking at is still the sum of their experiences. And it's rather hard to say that the breadth of human experience is broader than an LLM (whose "breadth of experiences" is "the whole world's outputs"), outside of the things that relate directly to having a body in a way which a blind / deaf / quadraplegic / whatnot person wouldn't grasp well.

And on that latter note, most people underestimate how well e.g. the congenitally blind actually grasp colours and the like. They're far better at reasoning about colours - similar to the sighted - than they are at knowing what colours things are. One study I read for example asked about polar bear fur. A good fraction of the congenitally blind subjects answered that they didn't know what colour it was. When asked to guess, about half of them answered that it was white so that it could blend into the snow, while the other half wrongly guessed black, but did so on the assumption that they'd want to soak up light to help stay warm. And actually in reality, both are true - to an outside observer, the exterior scattering of visible light without pigment makes them look white, but it's also designed to trap non-visible light up against black skin to absorb it for warmth. A sighted person, just seeing "white fur" and not knowing the latter property, might not have thought to even consider that.

To a LLM, our bodily experiences are akin to a blind person asked about colour: only knowing for sure things that they've learned about them directly, but still quite adept at reasoning about them.

You understand that this was not a sales contest, right?

What should be telling is that people started criticizing the metaphors only after concerns were raised that it was AI.

I do this experiment all the time (as it amuses me endlessly): when some people are hating on AI, I post some masterpiece panting or award-winning photo, suggest it's AI, and then watch them all explain why it's terrible, obviously-flawed, soulless crap. Sometimes I also do the reverse and post an AI image by comparison, say I prefer the "AI image" (actually real) to the "real image" (actually AI), and watch them go on about how the "real" (actually AI) image is so much better and shows so much more human creativity and emotion that AI could never have.

One person did this recently (posted a real Monet, said it was AI) and hundreds of such replies. The funniest part however was that someone took all their replies about the real Monet and fed them (along with the real Monet) into an AI model and had it improve the real Monet to match their criticisms ;)

That's fake news, actually. A very widespread misunderstanding, but incorrect regardless.

What Google actually did was move "Don't be Evil" from the introduction of the code of conduct to the summary at the end.

It's a widespread but inaccurate belief that Google kills everything. If you look closer, there's a distinct pattern to what they kill and what they keep, and it's mostly based on adoption. If a Google service -- free or paid -- has 100M+ monthly active users, it won't be killed. That number is a guideline, not a hard requirement. If it appears that a service is on track to attain that sort of "Google-scale" user base, and it has some monetization mechanism (usually a place to put ads), then it will survive.

Paid services are a little different. Google is much more reluctant to kill any service that people are paying money for. That's not to say they won't do it, but they're less likely to, and if they do they'll bend over backwards trying to make it right. Stadia is a good example. Stadia didn't get enough adoption to be worth Google's time/effort, so they killed it... but they refunded every penny of what the users had spent on hardware, monthly subscription fees, game purchase fees, etc. I still have (and use) the rather nice Stadia controllers I got for free. I'd rather have kept the service, but I definitely don't feel like I was ripped off.

There's no free option for new signups. Lots of us who set this up still have the legacy free G-Suite accounts. I'm not sure what triggers the "you might be using this for a business" check. My family is still using mine and Google isn't telling me we're a business.

The biggest problem with it, frankly, is that Workspace accounts have lots of restrictions that regular gmail accounts don't have. There's lots and lots of stuff that just doesn't work, and the list is growing year by year. This isn't specific to the legacy accounts, though, it's all Workspace accounts, because Workspace is intended for business use. I've had to migrate various things to a personal gmail account, even though I'd really rather keep it all on my primary account (which is a legacy G-Suite/free Workspace account).

The "upgrade path" thegarbz mentioned is mostly that you can convert your legacy G-Suite account to a regular Gmail account, porting all of your data, Google Play Store purchases, etc., over to it. That won't have a custom domain, but if you want to keep your custom email address you can use one of many services (probably not free, but quite cheap) to forward.

I am in favor of Microsoft releasing Linux distributions, donating code for Linux distributions and for the Linux kernel, supporting Linux on their cloud infrastructure, et cetera. I am not in favor of anything which involves Redhat even peripherally as long as they (IBM, really) continue to mount an attack on the GPL by continuously violating the clause about additional restrictions not being allowed, hiding behind the corrupt US court system, and exploiting the fact that approximately no one can afford to sue IBM.

To return to my point, I remain unsurprised.

The issue is that I use Microsoft software every work day, and it is shit all day every time.

cron daemons still exist. Some of them are fairly fancy. I am running the default one for debian (as in, I installed "cron") and even that conveniently creates cron.{daily,hourly,monthly,weekly,yearly} where I can just dump scripts instead of editing crontab, if one will suit anyway. And then there's also at.

That's /etc/boot.d

Windows 8 was the single biggest change in all of Microsoft UI history, and even then they didn't actually change any of the most important parts. All windowing operations are still based on IBM CUA and... work like dogshit.

Every single Windows version has the same problem, some things just won't multitask. If you try to drag an Edge window while the browser is opening a tab, you can't. That's because the application is responsible for that. On Unix systems this isn't a thing because the Window Manager is responsible.

What's especially frustrating about this is that Windows actually has some cool UI features like detecting when you're connecting to some displays you've connected to before, and arranging them logically the way you had them arranged before. But then the process fails as Windows forgets which windows were maximized, or the application doesn't restore to the same size window it had before because of some weird interaction. So Windows has this awesome feature... which doesn't actually work. I still have to rearrange my windows every time because they do actually do it, but they do it incorrectly.

But with that said Windows has never, ever, EVER changed the basic way Window management has functioned since Windows 3.0. It is still basically the same, the only significant difference is where minimized windows go.

I did a google search, then I wanted to do another related search, google figured out accurately what I wanted on the second one based on the first, and offered as a suggestion exactly the search I had in mind. Could they do this without AI? Maybe, they were doing it before, but rarely did it actually give the suggestion I wanted. I might not have thought anything of it but there were interface appearance changes at the same time.

Problem is, lawmakers are too often on the teat. A proper response to this would be to not only force them to restore literally all of these domains but also allow people to use them for commercial use after this, just to remind Google that they don't run the world.

The problem here isn't scams and grift. It's that by growing the number of bets by orders of magnitude, you grow the number of insiders with insider info by orders of magnitude. Which creates perverse incentives across your entire economy for people to profit off of their status, while simultaneously making it much harder to do so.

Say there's a bet on whether Russia will take the village of Mala Tokmachka by a certain date. Well, now every Russian commander on that front has an incentive to have family members / friends bet against it and then delay / undercut their ability to wage incentives, while every soldier also has the incentive to do so and then do everything they can to spoil the offensive.

Or say the US is planning a major offensive in Iran, and various insiders are betting *on* an imminent attack. Well, Iran can feed Polymarket data into their intel assessments as one factor to help determine when the US will invade in order to maximize their readiness. OR, Iranian intel services could track down US officials / military officers who are making these bets based on insider info and blackmail them in order to get them to cooperate.

Every single aspect of society that gets bet on gets subtly undercut by the existence of these bets. It's one thing to have bets be placed on sports, an action that by definition is entertainment, something that doesn't actually matter. But it's an entirely different thing to have bets on virtually everything in our world. It's already been a problem with stock trading, but sites like Polymarket make it so, so much worse.