Onihikage

You’re entirely correct, but in theory they can give it a pretty good go, it just requires a lot more computation, developer time, and non-LLM data structures than these companies are willing to spend money on. For any single query, they’d have to get dozens if not hundreds of separate responses from additional LLM instances spun up on the side, many of which would be customized for specific subjects, as well as specialty engines such as Wolfram Alpha for anything directly requiring math.

LLMs in such a system would be used only as modules in a handcrafted algorithm, modules which do exactly what they’re good at in a way that is useful. To give an example, if you pass a specific context to an LLM with the right format of instructions, and then ask it a yes-or-no question, even very small and lightweight models often give the same answer a human would. Like this, human-readable text can be converted into binary switches for an algorithmic state machine with thousands of branches of pre-written logic.

Not only would this probably use an even more insane amount of electricity than the current approach of “build a huge LLM and let it handle everything directly”, it would take much longer to generate responses to novel queries.

Webtoon is still shitty in other ways. When they adapt a property, they want it their way, regardless of the author’s original vision. I’ve seen several stories that originated on Royal Road get Webtoon adaptations, and the adaptations always seem to change or leave out important parts of the story, making characters look stupid or just completely replacing entire sets of characters, forcing the story to diverge substantially when inevitably something they got rid of turns out to have been critically important to where the author was taking things. They turn great stories into middling slop every single time.

He did at the beginning, but he helped them get what they wanted in the end, and I think that counts for something.

“We’re thankful that the Biden administration played the long game on sick days and stuck with us for months after Congress imposed our updated national agreement,” Russo said. “Without making a big show of it, Joe Biden and members of his administration in the Transportation and Labor departments have been working continuously to get guaranteed paid sick days for all railroad workers.

“We know that many of our members weren’t happy with our original agreement,” Russo said, “but through it all, we had faith that our friends in the White House and Congress would keep up the pressure on our railroad employers to get us the sick day benefits we deserve. Until we negotiated these new individual agreements with these carriers, an IBEW member who called out sick was not compensated.”

Counterpoint: Scumbag companies ninja-editing their timestamped warranty page such that the only way you know they edited it after you bought the product is because it was archived previously.

Archives are ideal for identifying sneaky behavior like that. You never know when an admin might have the ability to delete or edit something without anyone noticing.

Technically, any model trained on LAION-5B before December 2023 was trained on CSAM.

But yeah, I expect any porn model trained on a sufficient diversity of adult actors could be used to make convincing CP even without having it in the training data. AI image generation is basically the digital equivalent of a chainsaw - a tool for a particular messy job that can really hurt people if used incorrectly. You wouldn’t let a typical kid run around unattended with one, that’s for sure.

MPV is a video player.

It’s a little more tinkering than Windows, but definitely less than it’s ever been, and getting better all the time. I’ve found it to be basically exchanging one set of weird OS quirks for another. And hey, if you have any issues, the folks in the Universal Blue Discord are super friendly and helpful!

The biggest thing missing for me is good VR support at the OS level. Even with all the optimizations in Bazzite making regular games perform about equivalent to Windows, latency in VR is awful, and motion smoothing just plain isn’t supported in Linux yet, on any hardware. Those two pain points make the experience much worse than on Windows, I’d be motion sick in minutes if I tried to actually play something. Thankfully, normal gaming works just fine, and I don’t play VR as often as flat games, so I can just boot into Windows when I want to do that.

The second thing is the poor state of music players. I’m used to the very extensive feature set in MusicBee, and not a single native player hits all the boxes that MusicBee does. It can be run in Bottles, but not very well, and as a newbie, it took me a lot of extra tinkering to get things working even sort of right - file permissions, dotnet stuff, font libraries, etc. I still haven’t quite gotten file permissions working right, and font rendering is pretty bad (and custom font selection is broken entirely), but maybe I’ll figure some of that out eventually so I can stop booting into Windows whenever I want to make changes to my library.

Bazzite, from Universal Blue, based on Fedora Atomic Desktops. Immutable-style distro which means critical OS files and folders are read-only and all system apps (the ones preinstalled) are updated together as a full image rather than piecemeal. Anything not preinstalled can be installed in a distrobox or as a flatpak/appimage/aur, or as a last resort, layered with rpm-ostree. Extremely user-friendly, everything a gamer needs is either installed and preconfigured out of the box or available as a flatpak. Bazzite’s the first time I had a good enough experience on Linux that I made it my daily driver; now Windows is the secondary OS I only go to when I really need that one thing that only works there.

I’d get premium if they weren’t so insistent on bundling in bullshit I don’t want or care about to justify the high price. I put up with enough of that from cable TV. I’ll pay when there’s an ad-free tier that doesn’t do anything else and is a reasonable price for “the service that’s free with ads, but without ads”. If there was a per-device premium tier that I could throw on my Roku, and all my family members could have premium when they stream from there, I’d pay for that. I’d pay for family tier if it didn’t have the dumb single-household rule which screws over truckers and those who travel for a living.

Google has options they could take to convince consumers to pay to not see ads, but there’s no creativity left there, no effort to court the market or adapt the service and prices to what potential customers need and are willing to pay. And it’s because they believe they are the market, and want to keep it that way.

It’s not gone, they didn’t even take down all of the Nintendo games, they took down specific games (reddit link), albeit a lot of them, but there’s still lots of stuff left.

Is Live Captions not an option?

The first result on Kagi search is this list which shows the movie years in parentheses so you can easily skip through just the ones from the 1980s. The other search results are more about the gag itself - first use of it by Charlie Chaplin, etc.

his “solution” is some kind it proprietary video player that just plays Youtube videos.

It’s not proprietary, it’s source-available, and it plays a lot more than YouTube videos - in addition to YT, I use it to watch Nebula, Twitch, Odysee, and even Peertube on rare occasions. There are other plugins (that I don’t use) for BiliBili, Rumble, Patreon, Kick, and Soundcloud, and the way its plugin system works, there’s potential for many other paid subscription-based streaming services to be viewable through Grayjay. That is its real strength. If a creator uploads to a bunch of platforms, users can follow them on the platform they prefer, and get all their updates from one feed in one app, with added functionality that the official apps or sites simply might not have.

This is FUTO’s way of trying to make web video platforms more competitive, by creating an app that can interface with content from all of them and has all the popular features even if the sites themselves don’t. Grayjay has playlists, likes, dislikes, background playback, picture-in-picture, local history, the ability to block certain creators from the home feed, and the ability to hide individual videos from your feed. Furthermore, creators get a lot of ways they can monetize their content in Grayjay, like putting their merch store under the description of their videos, donation buttons, links to their Patreon or other subscription services, or general promotions, that would appear under all of their videos. Like… there are a lot of features here that really improve the experience with otherwise lackluster competitors. This tilts the market a tiny bit away from the established dominant players, and every new Grayjay user tilts it a little bit more.

Finally, it’s worth emphasizing that this is not Louis Rossmann’s personal pet project. His promotion of Grayjay, while it does align with his personal values, is paid work for a literal tech billionaire, Eron Wolf, who created and runs the FUTO organization. Neither of them need you to “take Louis Rossmann seriously.” They only want you to consider if the apps the company makes suit your needs and values.

I was in your shoes for ages, but HeliBoard has predictions and other languages out of the box. Voice transcription works if you have FUTO Voice Input. Gesture typing uses a swypelibs binary extracted from Gapps; you just have to download it manually since the app never requests network access (instructions are on the Github page). I started using it today and some of its features actually seem to work better for me than Gboard, like the swipe gestures on delete or space, and it has at least a few more features I’m pretty sure Gboard doesn’t. Give it a look at least.

Net Neutrality is about not policing content online. That’s kind of its whole thing:

These net neutrality policies ensured you can go where you want and do what you want online without your broadband provider making choices for you. They made clear your broadband provider should not have the right to block websites, slow services, or censor online content. These policies were court tested and approved. They were wildly popular. In fact, studies show that 80 percent of the public support the FCC’s net neutrality policies and opposed their repeal.

The closest we get to online censorship is obscenity laws, which one might think applies to porn, but obscenity is actually defined much more narrowly than just “content designed to arouse”. Obscenity is basically stuff that even Hugh Hefner would find offensive, stuff the average adult would find deeply repulsive and abhorrent (not just a little bit, the exact language is “patently offensive”). Adult content in general (obscenity & indecency) is banned from broadcast media during daytime hours to keep kids from seeing it; subscription-based services are exempt from such rules, which presumably means that the adults who pay for the subscription are supposed to be the ones preventing kids from using it to view adult material, if such is possible. I expect this is why anything which does manage to qualify as obscene is typically very hard to get to unless you really want to see it, so nobody who might report it ever actually finds it.

It’s worth mentioning that obscenity laws apply whether Net Neutrality is a thing or not, so having it will be a net reduction in the avenues through which content may be censored or policed. Now if only they’d ban ISPs from selling your data to brokers…

VPN subscriptions about to explode.

Naturally, they’ll try to ban VPNs next.

Grayjay still works? YT-DLP still works? I sleep.

It can, there’s an Open Subtitles plugin that can automatically download subtitles in specified languages that match (or don’t) the file hashes of your media. Being an open database of subtitles, though, YMMV. You configure it on a per-library basis.

Blog commenter Frank Wilhoit made a now somewhat famous assertion that the human default for nearly all of history has been conservatism, which he defined as follows:

There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

He then defined anti-conservatism as opposition to this way of thinking, so that would be to ensure the neutrality of the law and the equality of all peoples, races, and nationalities, which certainly sounds left-wing in our current culture. It would demand that a legal system which protects the powerful (in-groups) while punishing the marginalized (out-groups), or systematically burdens some groups more than others, be corrected or abolished.