ML/LLMs applied sensibly is definitely not snake oil.

Peddling ML/LLMs as AI and saying it will be the biggest paradigm shift ever seen is definitely snake oil and a lot of people just looking to capitalise on the latest fad, just like blockchain, “Big Data” or the metaverse.

Tech companies were struggling to raise funds in the bearish market that followed the pandemic tech boom. They were desperately looking for something big and shiny to use to persuade investors into loosening their wallets, and they’ve struck gold with “AI” because it sounds so cool and it can “basically do anything”, including replacing loads of staff with bots. Investors are being very easily bamboozled by this. Of course FOMO plays a big role here too.

I think “AI” is close to its peak of inflated expectations on the Gartner hype cycle curve below and it will take a while for people to wake up to the realisation that the “Bright AI-fuelled Future” they had been sold is nothing more than a thin wrapper around a ChatGPT API with a pretty bow on top.

I’m not disputing that certain super foods are just marketing but I would also say that almost no food is healthy when consumed in excess.

“Regular consumption of coconut oil may raise cholesterol levels and is high in saturated fats”. How regular are we talking about? Every day? Every week? What amount of oil? A few ml or 3L? And what kind of cholesterol are we talking about here? The good one or the bad one?

Coconut oil may well be a nutritious, healthy oil when eaten sensibly, just like eating nuts is very good for you but you don’t want to eat too much at once because they are very high in calories.

Voyager. I tried a few others but Voyager has a very slick UI and all the features I want.

Btrfs. It was the default filesystem already when I used Fedora on both my personal and work laptops. Not a single problem. It is true I don’t really make much use of most of its advanced features like snapshotting, CoW, etc., but I also didn’t notice any difference whatsoever in stability compared to ext4 so I’m pretty happy with it as my new default.

Sure, but only as far as science doesn’t contradict their religious beliefs. For example, there are many Creationist Christians who reject Evolution, Natural Selection and the Big Bang.

Not sure about that. It takes a pretty big leap to go from believing in 0 gods to 1. I think the line dividing atheists from theists is a pretty huge rift because they hold opposing views on very fundamental matters like the concept of God itself, how the world came to be, our purpose in life, what happens after we die… I don’t think it’s something you can quite reduce down to a matter of numbers.

Kitty. Don’t really care about the dev. I don’t use software or not just because the devs are assholes, as long as they’re not cannibals or pedos ofc. Even less so if it’s FOSS.

The guy who started Bluesky was the same Twitter co-founder who push for Twitter to sell out. Thanks but no thanks. I’ll stick with Mastodon. It’s getting real comfy in there now.

I rely on Google Search far less now than I used to for this reason. People had already gotten Google SEO down to a science and were poisoning search results very effectively. This AI-generated bullshit is taking it to a whole new level.

I’ve decided to use alternative search engines like DDG, SearXNG, etc. hoping their indexing criteria will be different enough current SEO techniques won’t affect them as much… For now.

XD

Kitty. Fast (GPU-accelerated), Wayland-compatible, and has a built-in image viewer, among other things.

Very intrigued by OpenSUSE as an alternative to Fedora. How do you think the two stack up against each other? Is it a noticeable leap switching between them?

Still, the use of cookies as key elements used to persist client session identifiers in the browser is too widespread and relied upon by prevalent web powerhouses like PHP for Google to do away with them.

Moreover, as much as there may be more modern, sleek alternatives like browser session and application storage, you can’t realistically expect the entire web industry to completely migrate away from cookies just like that.

Glad to see stability and QoS being prioritised over throughput this time around. I feel like once WiFi broke through the 300 Mbps barrier with the 5GHz band, strictly focusing on further improvements in throughput would just yield diminishing returns for most people.

However, latency and signal strength have been notoriously annoying long-term problems that I’m happy to see finally being acknowledged.

I welcome this change. It makes it clear to the user in realistic terms how they want to engage with the site.

• Pay up with your money
• Pay up with your data
• Don’t use Facebook

I despise Meta and all their products but they are entitled to charge people for them. Shit ain’t free to run, you know.

I’d much sooner they showed this banner and force people to make a decision than what they’ve been doing up until now, which is to “assume” everyone’s fine with their personal data being harvested and exploited without their knowledge or consent.

It is so ironic that SEO has become the very problem it was invented to fix: all these jokers gaming the system have all but plunged us all back into prehistoric internet times, before search engines appeared and people had to remember which specific sites to go to find information online.

For videogames specifically, I usually turn to these sources for reliable advice:

• Eurogamer and other reputable media outlets I’ve been following for years, so I know their journalists well and their tastes
• Metacritic and GameFAQs
• Watch streamers play the game I’m interested in for a while and make up my own mind as to whether I like what I see or not

This is the right answer.

I am truly sorry to hear this. As a longtime Vim user, I cannot thank Bram enough for his massive contribution to software development and for his kindness. His legacy will live on, not only in Vim, but in all the communities he selflessly supported for so many years.

Thanks ChatGPT!