The companies that market machine learning tools to investors and the masses have not been set up by people who believe art has value. Everything is content, and content exists to be aggregated alongside advertisements or displayed for a fee.

I genuinely hate that actual artists can’t use a lot of pretty neat novel digital levers to make stuff. Because it’s synonymous with garbage. The ability to leap across the uncanny valley has lost all novelty and is downright banal now.

But the answer to your question is the same as every desperate attempt at getting a “good” use case for slop generators. It’s for cranking out low effort trash.

As a dedicated fan of walking simulators I can already see the amount of shovelware we need to dig through to find the good stuff multiplying by orders of magnitude.

It’s been a year since I played INFRA and I’ve thought about it without fail at least once a week and it damn well isn’t because they haphazardly made boring environments.

I love/hate that this is a common experience. Someone did this to me too, although this was sort of a work friend taking the piss.

I have straight up backhandedly implied people senior to me who get paid 5x more than I do are throwing any possible expertise they might have out of the window. To their face. My stance on these slop extruders is well known among my colleagues.

I’ve even told people who used them in front of me, in a gentle but unflinching way, that their willingness to use them uncritically is a red flag for me and that comparing my genuine work to general machine output is something I can’t simply decide not to take as an insult. Including people who are supposed to review my work. As a professional I have to do something that exceeds the first page of Google in specificity. I do the long yards. Why is that suddenly a problem? If our work was this simple why are we getting paid to do it?

Some of these people trust me enough that they’re getting queasy about the whole AI thing after initially giving in. Yeah it’s decent at summarizing mass emails from corporate. Summarizing mass emails from corporate is not our fucking job. At least two people were paid subscribers to OpenAI’s product and no longer pay for chatbots. Proselytizing against the death of critical thinking is not a lost cause.

I have to get the fuck out of corporate.

I have a lot of 90s - aughts edutainment stuff that might be of interest to some people in my life. This might be a half decent way to preserve my old PC library for this stuff. I feel like virtual machines are pretty hit and miss and non-technical people don’t seem to enjoy messing around with them

"My method is I read an article about something, you know, and I get convinced that, oh, I gotta have this stuff,” he said. “And then I get it and then six months later I’m still taking it. I don’t remember what the article said. So, I end up with a big crate of vitamins that I’m taking, and I don’t even know why.”

I feel like this is a lot of people’s experience, we all know someone like this. I know that’s not the kind of thing the Lemmy demographic would look very kindly at, but this is a type of person. Some of them are batshit and others just had a lot of bad luck with the field of medicine.

I really feel like if this guy had a kinder worldview and wasn’t genuinely fucking bonkers he would be a much-needed voice that could speak reason to people who have lost their trust in medical science. Instead he’s this. So he isn’t that.

That quote could have come from someone who has come to a good realization about their understanding of health. Okay, you got sold a crate of vitamins big boy. Are you fixed yet?

But I really feel like the only ones who talk nicely to those people are industrial suppliers of snake oil and that just makes the world worse. Especially now that they’re at the wheel.

Demoscene, baby. People made things, shared them anonymously, and almost turned their nose at building a reputation or a brand.

The internet I fell in love with years ago is nothing like the pathetic shadow of it we live with today.

Macroblank has a fun compilation of remixed demo music, many of the original tracks are mostly known for being used in keygens. It’s called Keygen, obviously.

There was an idea tooted over on Mastodon

It’ll just be called Microsoft Copilot.

None of you are in an abusive relationship with the cruel mistress that is Windows and her accursed family and it shows.

Personally I’m excited for when they rerelease regedit as Windows Copilot, MFS as (Co)Pilot, and Purble Place as Copilot Kids Demo.

I’m in Lebanon. Your comment is reminding me how unusually flat the ground is where most of you live lol.

Most of us live on mountains with very messy elevation changes. Water towers are extremely uncommon. Generally, water is poorly filtered by the public water companies, then pumped uphill by dirty old pumps through dirty old pipes. Lebanon generates something like a third of its electricity demand, so… pumping is not constant.

Also single family homes are much rarer, most of us live in buildings that are 3-6 floors high. Water happens on the building level.

The water usually fills into a sort of well, a بير (pronounced like “beer”), not all buildings have that. Where I live, that’s the main bulk storage for water split among all the neighbors in the building. The water then gets pumped up to a large central holding tank on the roof (إمّاية ≈ “mother” tank), from which it then trickles it down to the individual apartments’ tanks (خزّانات = tanks) on the roof. Top floors need a pressure pump if they’re too close to the roof. Keep in mind that pumps need electricity, which we don’t always have. Floater valves everywhere. In my own building, my family and I have set up a rudimentary rainwater collection system. It’s not much, it’s not exceptionally clean, but it wasn’t ever either of those things. You can call a cistern man to fill your بير (“beer”).

We’ve had a main pop on our street before. It was a pathetic dribble of water seeping through cracks in the asphalt.

Re: wells, we used to be able to drink from the old town wells, but years of neglect and improper sewage handling means that you really really should not drink from them. I remember drinking from them as a kid, although my parents disapproved. Situation is worse now, I don’t drink well water anymore. The bad part is that well water was only drinkable in pretty rural towns, the worse part is that climate change has wrecked our groundwater supply and the wells I drank from as a kid have run dry. There’s less gentle rains and melting snow, and more summery Decembers with catastrophic, sudden storms. There are rivers I’ve swam in that are now stagnant little green spots. Cisterns are getting more expensive and more essential, and they’re struggling to fill them.

When my parents were kids they claim they could drink tap water. 15 years of brutal civil war and twice as much crony neoliberal “reconstruction” years later and nobody has dreamed up a contrived enough profit incentive to reliably deliver water and electricity. There are tribes warring in Sub-Saharan Africa with better basic utilities than we do because we live in an utterly dysfunctional feudal society. We’re technically in a continuous drought, but we have no mechanism to declare a drought season with drought measures.

That can’t be thaaaaaaaaat uncommon, riiiiiiiiight?

Here’s a funny story: when I was a kid, we got a dishwasher, and one of the first things you do is use the water hardness test strips and configure something in the machine. We rapidly learned that each cisternful of water was completely different and the only way around it was to underfill the salt tank and inshallah. Worked fine and still does.

Now you know why we pay 2-3 water bills per month. Come back tomorrow for the two power bills (power company and power mafia) and two Internet bills (it’s complicated). Surely I can bang out a few more manic 5 am comments this Christmas season.

These threads are always a sad look past the curtain. Is drinkable tap water really that common around the world? I thought that was a rich people thing when I saw it in cartoons as a kid.

Knowing vaguely how municipal plumbing works I find the idea that so many pipes and fittings could be clean enough to drink from to be utopian fan fiction. We have storage for water since there’s really only pressure a few hours per week, at its best. I have the contact info of over ten water cistern drivers in case it’s out for too long - and it very often is.

Our tap water’s good enough to shower and wash dishes and clothes in, but not nearly enough to drink. It even doesn’t taste like the smell of diesel 300 days out of the year. Yeah we have filters, no sand is crusting up my washing machine’s valves anytime soon, but it won’t keep the bacteria out.

Drinking from plastic containers of various sizes between 300ml and 24L is the only fucking option for most people on the planet right now. It’s cheap in these places too, obviously.