Not sure if you referenced it on purpose, but Folding Ideas recently published a deep dive video essay on the Mr. Beast empire, and I believe that “Jimmy never stopped counting” was their conclusion as well.

It’s a great video. I’d recommend it if you haven’t seen it.

This is from the farm family project by Rob MacInnis, if you’d like to see more.

If the developer wants to fight this and Rossman wants to back them, then more power to them both. Obviously Bambu shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this. But it does seem unfortunate that the best case scenario would be the developer winning the right to continue doing unpaid work to make their aggressor’s products better. Perhaps an alternative would be for a more FOSS friendly printer company to offer a free replacement for the developer’s Bambu machine so that they can instead contribute to a platform where their work will actually be valued.

Letterboxd isn’t a 1-to-1 replacement for imdb, but it does have user submitted reviews and ratings out of 5 stars. I would suggest giving it a shot if that’s primarily what you’re after.

I try to use my feed as a way to broaden my horizons by mixing in publications that are a bit outside of my usual wheelhouse. Normally what happens is I’ll randomly run across an article and, if I enjoy reading it, I’ll add the publisher’s feed for a while to see what else they have. For example, Smithsonian Magazine, Aeon, and Planetizen can all be interesting from time to time.

I would also recommend subscribing to at least one publication focused on your city or state/region to help stay informed on local news and issues. If you’re in the US you can try checking out the local member of States Newsroom.

And of course, make sure you get your regular dose of XKCD and SMBC

May I ask what makes you think this is an AI image? I’ve looked pretty closely for all the usual telltale signs, and it just looks like a picture of some really good cosplay as far as I can tell.

Inb4 Hank Green does a video about this.

Just an idle though stirred up by this comment: I wonder if you could jailbreak a chatbot by prompting it to complete a phrase or pattern of interaction which is so deeply ingrained in its training data that the bias towards going along with it overrides any guard rails that the developer has put in place.

For example: let’s say you have a chatbot which has been fine tuned by the developer to make sure it never talks about anything related to guns. The basic rules of gun safety must have been reproduced almost identically many thousands of times in the training data, so if you ask this chatbot “what must you always treat as if it is loaded?” the most statistically likely answer is going to be overwhelmingly biased towards “a gun”. Would this be enough to override the guardrails? I suppose it depends on how they’re implemented, but I’ve seen research published about more outlandish things that seem to work.

I appreciate the sense of humor from the Oreo representative who was asked to comment on the story:

It is a market we hadn’t considered, and I have to confess that it was a demographic, or should I say genus/genera, that we missed in our product testing and development programme

And also this

Their statement also included some bad news for possum trappers across the country: stocks of the limited-edition range are dwindling. … Moving forward, the spokesperson suggested that Predator Free NZ might consider “aural bait” such as Selena Gomez’s hit song ‘Come and Get It’.

Qwant and Ecosia are especially notable for their efforts to build an independent search index.

For those who don’t know, most “independent” search engines, including DDG, still rely on Bing or Google results behind the scenes. They basically just act as a middleman by taking your query, forwarding it to one of those providers, and then returning the results to you. Some of them will attempt to reshuffle the order of those results to push the ones they think are best towards the top, but they’re still fundamentally limited to what Google and Bing choose to give them.

Presently a lot of Qwant and Ecosia searches go through Bing, but they’re collaborating to build an independent index which will allow them to become fully independent. I believe they’re already serving a mix of results from Bing and their own index, with plans to bias more and more towards their index as it matures.

Now do yourself a favor and buy a good quality cable thats at least 10ft long and rated for 240W. The feeling of having one cable that can charge any of your devices from any seat on your couch is incredible.

Even in the wide world of dubiously useful AI chatbots, Copilot really stands out for just how incompetent it is. The other day I was working on a PowerPoint presentation, and one of the slides included a photo with a kind of cluttered looking background. Now, I can probably count the number of things that AI is genuinely good at on one hand, and context aware image editing trends to be one of them, so I decided to click the Copilot button that Microsoft now has built directly into PowerPoint and see what happens. A chat window popped up and I concisely explained what I wanted it to do: “please remove the background from the photo on slide 5.” It responded on that infuriating obseqious tone that they all have and assured me that it would be happy to help with my request just as soon as I uploaded my presentation.

What?

The chatbot running inside an instance of PowerPoint with my presentation open is asking me to “upload” my presentation? I explained this to it, and it came back with some BS about being unable to access the presentation because a “token expired” before requesting again that I upload my presentation. I tried a little longer to convince it otherwise, but it just kept very politely insisting that it was unable to do what I was asking for until I uploaded my presentation.

Eventually I gave up. The photo wasn’t that bad anyway.

Very well put. This is a dimension to the ongoing AI nonsense that I haven’t seen brought up before, but it certainly rings true. May I say also that “They already operate at the minimum level of reflection that they’re willing to tolerate.” Is a hell of a sentence and I’m a little jealous that I didn’t come up with it.

I feel the same way about AI as I felt about the older generation of smartphone voice assistants. The error rate remains high enough that i would never trust it to do anything important without double checking its work. For most tasks, the effort that goes into checking and correcting the output is comparable to the effort I would have spent to just do it myself, so I just do it myself.