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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • If I was raising kids, I absolutely would not want to do it in the suburbs. It’s isolating and limiting. I was always so jealous of the kids I knew that lived in the city. They could do things. I was stuck indoors , or walking for like 90 minutes to get anywhere.


  • jjjalljs@ttrpg.networktoMemes@sopuli.xyzBruh, chill
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    14 hours ago

    I do not miss driving. Public transit forever.

    But when I did drive, after my reckless youth, I’d usually just chill in the right lane. I don’t care. Fly by at 120mph. I’ll be here going with the flow of traffic, or about the speed limit if I’m alone.

    I do remember one time in the suburbs when I was visiting my parents, I was driving to the grocery store. It’s a short drive (because it’s the suburbs, you can’t safely walk to the supermarket), no highways. About 10 minutes to get there from driveway to parking lot. Some guy behind me started absolutely losing his shit, screaming, and passed me dangerously by driving onto the shoulder. He pulled into the same parking lot. I parked well away from him because I didn’t want to deal with crazy.

    I’m not good at math, but if the entire trip was about 10 minutes, I feel like the time difference between me going about the speed limit and me speeding is, at most, what, 2 minutes? 5 minutes? The guy probably took more than 5 minutes off his life being so angry.


  • There are credible allegations that the AI companies are not merely scraping publicly available resources, but are also consuming content in violation of the terms of use / copyright law. Like, a site has a robots.txt file that says “no scrapers” and they scrape it anyway. People would be mad about traditional search doing that as well.

    Secondly, if a search service scrapes your site and then directs relevant users to it, that’s probably fine. Most websites want users to visit. A lot of AI stuff sucks up the content, and then the creators of that content get nothing. No users are sent there. The scraper hitting the site takes resources, and gives nothing back.

    Google has also gotten some flak for putting stuff on their own site instead of sending users to the source. Like you do a search and get a snippet on the google page, and you never click through to example.com/cool-stuff. Well, now the owner of example.com/cool-stuff doesn’t get the click. If they run ads, they get no credit. If they have metrics, they probably don’t see any visitors. If they have like forums, people are less likely to engage.

    If the “AI Search” includes links back to the source, that’s not perfect either. One, it’s kind of excessive to use an LLM to parse text when the origin site is already there and readable. If I search for “population of london”, you can just send me to a census website or even wikipedia. You don’t need to use a whole ass LLM. Two, as I touched on in the previous paragraph, users are less likely to click through if google is putting the core of the information right there (even if it’s not always accurate). It’s still lessening traffic to the origin site, and traffic is often the lifeblood of websites.

    Lastly, a lot of AI stuff is simply inaccurate or misleading. We’ve all laughed at the “use glue on your pizza” stuff or the “there are two Rs in ‘strawberry’” fuckups. If traditional search was really bad, like you type in “cat food” and you got a webpage that was all jewelry and “buy gold” scams, you’d be annoyed, too. That’s more like how search was before old google came about. There were a lot more low effort “SEO” hacks like putting a bunch of keywords in tiny print to fool the search indexer. Now google is the shitty old guard, but they have too much money and power to be easily replaced.

    That’s just off the top of my head. Scraping for AI isn’t the same as scraping to make a searchable index.












  • I just tried “Language Drops” and it was… interesting. It didn’t place me at the right level, so I got a very beginner lesson when I’m closer to intermediate (but definitely not fluent). I’m not sure I liked matching the pictures- the picture for “thank you” could mean different things depending on how you interpret the person’s face and body language- and then I hit the end of the free content for the day. It didn’t get to different tenses or even whole sentences- just basic vocabulary and no verbs. Maybe it ramps up quickly?


  • This doesn’t seem like a good idea.

    One, releasing should be easy. At my last job, you clicked “new release” or whatever on GitHub. It then listed all the commits for you. If you “need” an Ai to summarize the commits, you fucked up earlier. Write better commit messages. Review the changes. Use your brain (something the AI can’t do) to make sure you actually want all of this to go out. Click the button. GitHub runs checks and you’re done.

    Most of the time it took a couple minutes at most to do this process.


  • I hate space yielded to cars that would be better used some other way.

    All those cars parked on the side of the road? Could be a bike lane. Could be outdoor seating for the restaurant. Could be benches. Fuck those cars.

    Big ass parking lot? Could be something green. Could be another building. Fuck those cars.

    i don’t think we should promote private car ownership. If someone needs point to point transit occasionally, we can solve that some other way. I know people that have a car because they go on trips a couple times a year. Wasteful.

    If people want a car of their own, they should pay all the externalized costs.