I think OpenAI’s recent sycophant issue has cause a new spike in these stories. One thing I noticed was these observations from these models running on my PC saying it’s rare for a person to think and do things that I do.

The problem is that this is a model running on my GPU. It has never talked to another person. I hate insincere compliments let alone overt flattery, so I was annoyed, but it did make me think that this kind of talk would be crack for a conspiracy nut or mentally unwell people. It’s a whole risk area I hadn’t been aware of.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/openai-says-its-identified-why-chatgpt-became-a-groveling-sycophant/ar-AA1E4LaV

The new M365 Outlook is just webmail. Every upgrade is actually a reduction in functionality as they align to the web version. The good news is this eliminates the need for Windows.

It’s trolls, trolls are what Facebook stands on. But what do the trolls stand on? It’s trolls on trolls on trolls all the way down.

There is nothing trustworthy on Facebook. Shut it down.

My father is a prepper in his 70s and my brother has become a flat earther. Down with Facebook and YouTube, the two halves of the most evil and vile existence on this planet. 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

Thought this was an Onion article!

Hey plebs! I demand you work 50% more to develop AGI so that I can replace you with robots and fire all of you and make myself a double plus plutocrat! Also, I want to buy an island, small city, Bunker, Spaceship, And/Or something.

I’d be more forgiving, but what MS Copilot sucks at the worst is working with Office files: PowerPoint: completely useless

Excel: useful for some tasks if I reformat all my sheets into tables, so mostly useless

Word: can’t even answer why the formatting of the file from my coworker is a mess (which is every coworker), let alone try to fix it. But it will gladly take a succinct piece of information and make it into an insufferable 50 pages of fluff. It summarizes documents well and helps with reviews.

OneNote: creating content it’s ok, but useless at retrieving info.

Outlook: It tries to help, mostly confirms that my language is may be perceived as cold and offensive. Which is good, because that was my intention.

It is surprisingly helpful with PDFs and extracting data and cleaning up formatting.

Unsurprising, it does great with CSV and other open data formats. Maybe there is a lesson here?

Indeed. My Alienware doubles as a space heater in my north facing office.

Awesome! Send them to Canada, we can build data centres and sell the cloud services back to Americans powered by the electricity that we expect to be tarriffed, and cooled by the water we won’t sell.

Energy conservation has been part of that messaging. Running appliances and low peak times etc. All of that is out the window for AI.

Energy conservation is the dumbest thing we have ever talked about. For prosperity and well being, electricity should be cheap and plentiful. It’s pollution and greenhouse gases that need to be curtailed. Another mixed up policy mess of messaging, and it is being unravelled by AI.

Clean electricity should be so cheap that every other option isnt feasible. Instead, it’s talk conservation, reducing wealth and quality of life.

Duolingo is a game for points and badges. it’s not actually useful for learning anything.

Here’s a thought: Before installing packages you don’t understand, go to the Firefox site and follow their instructions which work fine on Ubuntu and doesn’t install snap.

I’m not a fan of snap either, but with all software, people need to RTFM. Not do the dumb thing and then cry on the Internet seeking hive mind rage when the dumb thing happens.

Powering off a pile of switches is turning it off. Powering off a sentient being is killing it. Not to mention a million other issues it raises.

Growing up years ago, I found a book on my parents bookshelf. I wish I’d kept track of it, but it had a cartoon of 2 Martians standing on Mars watching the Earth explode and one commented to the other along the lines that intelligent life forms must have lived there to accomplish such a feat. I was probably 8 or 9 at the time, but it’s stuck with me.

It only took a Facebook recommendation engine with some cell phones to excite people into murdering each other in the ongoing Rohingya genocide. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html

We don’t need AI, and at this point it uses so much electricity that it is probably the first thing that would get shut down in a shit hits the fan moment.

Roger Penrose wrote a whole book on the topic in 1989. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/179744.The_Emperor_s_New_Mind

His points are well thought out and argued, but my essential takeaway is that a series of switches is not ever going to create a sentient being. The idea is absurd to me, but for the people that disagree? They have no proof, just a religious furver, a fanaticism. Simply stated, they want to believe.

All this AI of today is the AI of the 1980s, just with more transistors than we could fathom back then, but the ideas are the same. After the massive surge from our technology finally catching up with 40-60 year old concepts and algorithms, most everything has been just adding much more data, generalizing models, and other tweaks.

What is a problem is the complete lack of scalability and massive energy consumption. Are we supposed to be drying our clothes at a specific our of the night, and join smart grids to reduce peak air conditioning, to scorn bitcoin because it uses too much electricity, but for an AI that generates images of people with 6 fingers and other mangled appendages, that bullshit anything it doesn’t know, for that we need to build nuclear power plants everywhere. It’s sickening really.

So no AGI anytime soon, but I am sure Altman has defined it as anything that can make his net worth 1 billion or more, no matter what he has to say or do.

Yeah, this is the gist of the problem. When a PC is connected to airplane WiFi, but it is limited, Steam decides it is online, but some sort of validation fails and then no games will play until I get back to a full internet connection and reboot. I don’t even try anymore, hence my comment about GOG, and yes, I know some games on GOG have DRM, but most don’t and they don’t hide the fact. The Steam DRM bootlicking combined with GOG hatred because they were forced to sell a few games with DRM is so bizarre. Are Steam fan boys a thing? What a weird hill to fight for.

DRM is the heart of most technology pain for paying customers since it’s inception. For pirates, the experience is much better since the DRM is removed.

I’m really happy with my experience with GOG, but they put a lot of effort into their Windows app and i ws pretty blunt with my feedback, it is pretty useless to me and I find it unhelpful. Heroic game launcher on Linux great and cost GOG $0.00. My thought is that they have been focusing on the wrong things, fundamentally I love their strong DRM stance and when I am travelling internationally,the games I bought off GOG work, unlike Steam😡😡😡😡. So if they have come to this realization, then nothing about these changes are disturbing as a customer, but sad to hear their employees taking the hit. 😢

YouTube ruined Christmas. I can’t stand my relatives anymore, they watch every conspiracy clip and now they are a thousand miles down the rabbit hole and I can’t handle them for more than a few days a year. I hate evil Google or alphabet, or whatever they call themselves.

“With regard to the algorithms used to hash data – particularly SHA-224 and SHA-256 – Buchanan expressed surprise that neither will be approved for use beyond 2030.”

Sounds like corruption to me. Hey gov’t pal, let’s make crazy requirements for security due to a quantum boogyman so I can sell you consultants and all new equipment with insane processing capabilities for a shit ton of money. Look for the greasy palms.

Decades of research and we are at 100 qbits and estimates are bouncing around that estimate it will take millions. Once we build them, job #1 will be reading government email?

Maybe, but it’s a lot easier just to use backdoors, software bugs, spies, and good ol’ bribes.

Yet companies are still pushing 2FA over the PSTN. IMO, it’s worse than no 2FA since some companies have processes that essentially trust the outcome as a full validation. I can’t think of a less secure channel.

The year is about right. I didn’t lose my DOS partition, but I was already familiar with partitioning. Someone gave me a Slackware CD set. Had a lot of difficulty getting a higher res than 640x480 with my VLB video card.
Started a BBS at the time, switched to OS/2 Warp, which worked awesome until Windows apps moved to the new Win95 requirements. Started using RHEL for a while, but eventually Debian, then Ubuntu, and now PopOS.

It’s been a long journey, but now Windows 11 is the weird OS that needs hours of troubleshooting and tweaking and adjustments. It’s just not worth the effort, so I keep an Windows 10 VM around with Office for the odd occasion when I need it.

I did, but I hate Windows 11 so much, I bought a PS5 Pro o avoid it. Windows 10 🙌💎🙌