Damn, that’s sad. Thank you for the info.

Worst hypothesis they just need to mess around a bit. For example I don’t think that queerasfu.ck would be registered.

They could get a .ck domain instead and move to queer.as.fu.ck, no?

It’s hard for Google to claim that they’re focusing resources (e.g. dev time), given the list of features being removed. As one of the HN comments said, quite a few of them “seem to fall under the umbrella of “features that actually make the assistant an assistant”/connecting the assistant to other apps”. In other words, integration - that’s core functionality for an assistant and they likely know it.

Yup. Google consistently gets rid of features or services that it deems unprofitable. And that’s fine, really - as long as you don’t pretend that you’re doing it for the users.

To be fair in modern phones there are some features that if removed would make the user experience better.

I hear ya - for example, the SIM toolkit being able to send you pop-ups (phone providers use that to spam the users).

We’re removing some underutilized features in Google Assistant to focus on delivering the best possible user experience.

Is this the non sequitur used nowadays to explain removal of features? “We’re removing it to give you a better experience”??? That’s bloody hilarious.

Be honest at least dammit. If you don’t want to maintain a feature, because it’s against your best interests, say so. Users are not stupid, and should not be implied to be stupid with this idiotic “it’s for you lol” discourse.

(I don’t even use Botnet Assistant.)

4chan was always called the asshole of the internet, but it’s more like the mouth of an extremely drunk internet ready to vomit on you.

I agree too much with the text to comment anything meaningful about it. So let’s see the comments…

One aspect of the spread of LLMs is that we have lost a useful heuristic. Poor spelling and grammar used to be a signal used to quickly filter out worthless posts. […]

Although I agree with the title, I also don’t think the internet is that significantly different from before GPTs 4, 3, or 2. Articles written by interns or Indian virtual assistants about generic topics are pretty much as bad as most AI generated material […]

Both comments reminded me a blogpost that I wrote more than a year ago, regarding chatGPT-3. It still applies rather well to 2024 LLMs, and it shows what those two tech bros are missing, so I’ll copypaste it here.

###The problem with GPT3.

Consider the following two examples.

Example A.

GPT3 bots trained on the arsehole of the internet (Reddit), chatting among themselves:

1. LPT: When you’re planning your next vacation, be sure to consider the cost of airfare and hotels. You may not have the money to go on a luxury trip, but at least you won’t have to worry about the economy when you leave! // You’re worth it!
2. (to #1) This is great advice! I definitely need to start considering the cost of airfare and hotels when planning my next vacation. Thank you for the tips!
3. (to #2) I completely agree! When I’m planning my next vacation, my number one priority is to make sure that it’s worth the cost. Thanks for the advice!
4. (to #2) Keep up the great work!

The grammar is fine, and yet those messages don’t say jack shit.

• #1 - the so-called “life pro tip” is fairly obvious, since people are aware that airfare and hotels cost quite a bit. It is not informing the reader about something potentially missed.
• #1 - “You may not have the money to go on a luxury trip” is extraneous, no matter how you interpret it, as it’s directed towards people who won’t fly and spend time in hotels.
• #1 - How the hell are you expected to worry less or more about the economy, depending on how you plan your vacations?
• #1 - you’re worth… what? The vacations? Not worrying about the economy? Something else?
• #2 - needlessly repeating a huge chunk of #1.
• #3 and #4 - it’s clear that #1 and #2 are different participants, #2 provided nothing worth thanking, and yet it’s still being thanked. Why?

Example B.

Human translation made by someone with not-so-good grasp of the target language.

Captain: What happen ?
Mechanic: Somebody set up us the bomb.
Operator: We get signal.
Captain: What !
Operator: Main screen turn on.
Captain: It's you !!
CATS: How are you gentlemen !!
CATS: All your base are belong to us.
CATS: You are on the way to destruction.

The grammar is so broken that this excerpt became a meme. And yet you can still retrieve meaning from it:

• Captain, Mechanic and Operator are the crew of a ship
• Captain asks for info
• Someone is trying to kill them with a bomb
• Operator and Mechanic inform Captain on what happens
• CATS sarcastically greets the crew, and provides them info to make them feel hopeless
• Captain expresses distress towards CATS

What’s the difference? It’s purpose. In (B) we can give each utterance a purpose, even if the characters are fictional - because they were written by a human being. However, we cannot do the same in (A), because the current AI-generated text does not model that purpose.

And yes, assigning purpose to your utterances is part of the language. Not just what tech bros are able to see, namely: syntax, morphology, and spelling.

Archive link.

Personal take: suck it up, Somalia; if the population of Somaliland has effective control of the region, and desires it to be independent, then there isn’t much that you could (or should) do. And from that, if both Somaliland and Ethiopia reach an amicable agreement over the ports, so be it.

Also, let us drop all that babble about territorial integrity. Even if you believe in this sort of political superstition, Somalia’s territorial integrity went kaboom in 1991.

Another important detail is that Digg v4 pissed off most of the userbase, so the impact was pretty much immediate. Reddit APIcalypse pissed off only power users instead; the impact will only come off later (sadly likely past IPO).

It isn’t “Hangul” that is saving the language, but the fact that it’s getting an orthography. That orthography could be theoretically in any writing system - not just Latin or Arabic (both already exist for Cia-Cia, contrariwise to what the video claims), but even a native one or Cyrillic or even, dunno, the Cherokee syllabary.

Abidin looks informed on the matter; the same cannot be said about whoever produced this video. I’ll highlight a few issues.

[0:33] - pretty much all languages are “syllable-based”. They organise sounds into syllables. The video is likely trying to convey that it’s a CV (consonant, vowel, repeat) language, unlike, say, Russian or English (that cram quite a lot of consonants in a single syllable).

[0:36] The video is trying to use “transliterated” as a posh synonym for “spelled”; both are not the same thing. Transliteration is to convert text from a script from another; for example, “Quis credis esse, Bellum?” (Latin, using the Latin script) → “Кўис кредис ессе, Беллум?” (Latin, using the Cyrillic script instead) is transliteration.

And you can spell pretty much any language in any writing system. The association between grapheme and sounds (or phonemes) is arbitrary.

You might say “but the Latin alphabet doesn’t have a letter for /ɓ/!” - well, it doesn’t have a letter for /ʃ/ either. Italian handled it by spelling it ⟨sci⟩, English as ⟨sh⟩, Polish as ⟨sz⟩, Portuguese kind of repurposed ⟨x⟩. And the current Latin spelling for Cia-Cia - that you can check here - handled /ɓ/ just fine, using a similar approach as the Hangul one.

Let’s go simpler: what if your instance was allowed to copy the fed/defed lists from other instances, and use them (alongside simple Boolean logic plus if/then statements) to automatically decide who you’re going to federate/defederate with? That would enable caracoles and fedifams for admins who so desire, but also enable other organically grown relations.

For example. Let’s say that you just joined the federation. And there are three instances that you somewhat trust:

• Alice - it defederates only really problematic instances.
• Bob and Charlie - both are a bit prone to defederate other instances on a whim, but when both defed the same instance it’s usually problematic.

Then you could set up your defederation rules like this:

• if Alice defed it, then defed it too.
• else, if (Bob defed it) and (Charlie defed it), then defed it too.
• else, federate with it.

Of course, that would require distinguishing between manual and automatic fed/defed. You’d be able to use the manual fed/defed from other instances to create your automatic rules, to avoid deadlocks like “Alice is blocking it because Bob is blocking it, and Bob is blocking it because Alice is doing it”.

If you want, you could use GMail filters to delete those emails automatically. Here’s how:

1. click the engine button (settings), then “see all settings”, then “filters and blocked addresses”.
2. click “create a new filter”. Add “top of Google search” to the field “has the words”, leave other fields blank.
3. click “create filter”, then check the “delete it” box, then “create filter” again.
4. repeat steps 2-3 for other shit that SEO spam is likely to mention.

Important: never use as a filter anything that legitimate users might reasonably say. Only things that you’re fairly certain to come from a spammer.

EDIT: I repeated two steps without noticing it. My bad.

He’s almost Karate Kid!

The article mentions what the author sees as two trends behind retrocomputing (reusing the old and escaping the modern world), but I’d argue that the second one should be further split, since there are two modernities that people are running away from:

• unnecessary complexity. Since the old stuff performs the same role as the new one, minus unnecessary delays or elements introducing cognitive load, might as well use the old stuff.
• lack of control. I’m not talking about an AI takeover or shit like this. Simpler stuff: big tech has become considerably better, over time, in bossing you around so you do its bidding, even against your best interests.

For further info, the link mentions this article. If I got it correctly:

Higher pressure compresses the orbitals of the sodium atoms, making them more cluttered together. As a result, the outer electrons - that “should” be in the 3s orbital, surrounding the nucleus like a bubble - are repelled to more energetic orbitals, like 3p and 3d. Those orbitals have “lobes” reaching far from the nucleus, so further away from the other electrons.

But since the sodium atoms are not isolated, and all those sodium atoms are doing this at the same time, the 3p and 3d orbitals from multiple atoms overlap. Orbitals overlapping form a chemical bond. And, since it’s damn hard to remove electrons from those bonds to send them elsewhere, electrical conductivity goes down. Sodium becomes first a semiconductor, then an isolating material.

So it’s a lot like your usual macromolecules (like, silicon dioxide or diamond), except that those bonds are shared by multiple atoms, not just two. And I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that all three are transparent, given that those electrons “stuck” in specific molecular orbitals suck major balls at absorbing photons and releasing them back.

Personal predictions:

• high-pressure sodium should be bloody hard, and not malleable at all. Kind of funny given that normal pressure sodium is really soft.
• other s-block metals will behave similarly under high pressure. If exceptions exist, they’ll be the largest ones (in this order: radium, francium, barium, caesium).
• aluminium and gallium might behave similarly, but you’ll need a lot more pressure to pull it out. (Note: this is completely unrelated to a certain oxygen/nitrogen/aluminium ceramic that was developed recently.)
• d-block metals like iron are probably unaffected.

I have this extension; it works great, and it has support for other engines (I use mostly DuckDuckGo), and if you really need the results from one of the blocked sites you just click a link and it shows them again. Give the link a check for the list of supported search engines.

I’ve done similar experiments with my two cats. Both behaved mostly like dogs - the mirror doesn’t smell like a cat nor makes noise like a cat, so why bother with it? I was rather surprised with Siegfrieda ignoring it because she tends to watch whatever I put on the computer screen, be it some “cat game” video or even anime.

That lower emphasis on vision became specially obvious when I showed them videos with kittens meowing. They didn’t bother with the screen, but with the speakers.

Now I get it. And yes, now I agree with you; it would give them a bit more merit to claim that the data being used in the input was obtained illegally. (Unless Meta has right of use to ThePile.)

The link does not mention GPT (OpenAI, Microsoft) or LaMDA/Bard (Google, Alphabet), but if Meta is doing it odds are that the others are doing it too.

Sadly this would be up to the copyright holders of this data. It does not apply to NYT content that you can freely access online, for NYT it got to be about the output, not the input.

I don’t think that the content was illegally obtained, unless there’s some law out there that prevents you from using a crawler to automatically retrieve text. And probably there’s no law against using data intended for human consumption to feed AI.

As such, I might be wrong but I think that the only issue is that this data is being used to output derivative works, and acc. to NYT in some instances “can generate output that recites Times content verbatim, closely summarizes it, and mimics its expressive style.”