Japan has been living in the year 2000 since the 80s.

Why jump through all these hoops, and lessen the security of your browser in the process, just to do something that is being fully stripped out soon anyway?

Just install Firefox. It’s not like you can’t import your bookmarks and such.

Honestly the above comment infuriated me.

They would not be defending this person if they were a man.

Having lower expectations of women isn’t progressive, it isn’t feminist. It’s infantising. It’s misogyny of lower expectations. “Oh you can’t expect women to understand the difference between right and wrong.”

A woman who is happy to support Elon is every bit as bad as a man that is happy to support Elon. Supporting a nazi is supporting a nazi.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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+.

Why compare it to nuclear rather than what’s currently being used in that area? Coal and gas.

Nuclear is good for providing a stable base load, but having the entire grid be nuclear would be very expensive. And if everyone were to do the same, the market cost of fissile fuel materials would skyrocket.

Lots of solar and wind in the energy mix is a no-brainer.

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.

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.

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

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

So a “phone” without any ability to connect to mobile networks or to WiFi?

Americans seem get really weird with the whole ancestry thing. There appears to be a desire to look into your family history and find something “exotic”, which basically seems to mean non-English - I imagine because that’s perceived as the ‘default’ ancestry, so-to-speak.

Honestly, who the fuck cares? What difference does it make? Nationalities aren’t Skyrim races. You don’t get special abilities. It makes no difference whether your ancestors were British/Irish/Spanish/French/whatever.

E: This is obviously not intended as a hateful statement, people. You have to understand that the rest of the world doesn’t care about this, so we’re confused when we look to the US and see them take it so seriously. We’re especially puzzled when Americans say “I’m Irish” because their great great great uncle bought a pint of Guiness in the 1870s. It’s an alien concept to the rest of the planet.