Ugh, if only. Amazon has done everything in their power to bury and strip that number from the internet. Once upon a time that worked great.

Storytime! Earlier this year, I had an Amazon package stolen. We had reason to be suspicious, so we immediately contacted the landlord and within six hours we had video footage of a woman biking up to the building, taking our packages, and hurriedly leaving.

So of course, I go to Amazon and try to report my package as stolen… which traps me for a whole hour in a loop with Amazon’s “chat support” AI, repeatedly insisting that I wait 48 hours “in case my package shows up”. I cannot explain to this thing clearly enough that, no, it’s not showing up, I literally have video evidence of it being stolen that I’m willing to send you. It literally cuts off the conversation once it gives its final “solution” and I have to restart the convo over and over.

Takes me hours to wrench a damn phone number out of the thing, and a human being actually understands me and sends me a refund within 5 minutes.

Asahi Linux is a project to get Linux running on M-series macs, which has taken a bunch of difficult reverse engineering, since Apple doesn’t really provide public documentation on how they work.

Running Linux means they can run steam games like a Linux machine. This is a pretty impressive landmark in terms of their OpenGL rendering support.

I don’t necessarily disagree that we may figure out AGI, and even that LLM research may help us get there, but frankly, I don’t think an LLM will actually be any part of an AGI system.

Because fundamentally it doesn’t understand the words it’s writing. The more I play with and learn about it, the more it feels like a glorified autocomplete/autocorrect. I suspect issues like hallucination and “Waluigis” or “jailbreaks” are fundamental issues for a language model trying to complete a story, compared to an actual intelligence with a purpose.

Same honestly. And if I ever ask a question that someone might think is a duplicate, I link to that question and say something like “I found X, but the answers here don’t reflect Y”.

Ah, well that niceness was much shorter lived than expected. Oh well, my VPN will continue to block the ads anyway.

I’d be very surprised if anything functional actually comes out of this. Far more likely they get scammed out of the money by garbage like the current “AI writing detection” methods, with terrible success rates that cause more societal problems than they solve.

Mine is still that (on Mac, at least) the only way to update Apple apps is by updating the whole system. Work requests we don’t update our macs, and now I still can’t edit texts from my computer.

Oh, what an interesting idea! I like this, on Monday I’ll test out switching to this as my main search engine for work and try to report back how it goes!

Surprisingly legible, but feels like I can only read it with momentum, flitting past it and letting my subconscious tell me where the word breaks are. The moment I get confused and look more closely, it becomes almost impossible to read.

A lot of assuming that this project was dead serious in here… he’s a college student, presumably working on a senior project or something. Hooking up a glasses display, to his phone with a mic and the ChatGPT API isn’t a massive endeavour, either, and this is funny as all hell if you assume he’s mocking the industry and being tongue-in-cheek. RizzGPT? Charisma As A Service?

Point being, don’t despair for this guy, he’s hilarious!

Surprisingly, a lot of the creepy media is fairly accurate, though extreme. Demons aren’t prominent, we know they are angels who rebelled with Lucifer, and were cast out, so that would be their appearance, but in reference to possession, we basically have those that Jesus encountered and a few his apostles drove out in his name later on.

And what we see are people behaving almost like animals, screaming, shouting, with an inhuman strength to break chains or whatever locals have tried to contain them with, and inflicting a lot of self harm. There’s a woman who would throw herself into fires, a man who had 100 demons in him (where “I am legion” comes from") who would throw himself onto rocks and off cliffs and cut himself, etc.

The more manufactured elements are the head twisting, anything to do with pentagrams, and honestly a lot of the hostility to others. People usually steered clear, but demon possessed individuals generally did more self harm than harming others, with cases where Jesus would meet them within cities, and they weren’t surrounded by dead people or a panicking mob or anything. They also don’t “haunt” or hunt people like they do in movies, but are usually extremely obvious.

Anyway, that’s my experience purely from biblical account, off the top of my head, I’m sure others can add more detail or examples.

This is very intriguing… I actually work in CBC (nowhere near content or with the social media people who’d make these kinds of decisions), but as a developer I get 20% time to dabble with anything I think might be useful. I haven’t used it in a while, but a CBC ActivityPub instance may be just the right project, especially if it can auto-publish our content from the same feeds that power our site.