A handful of Democrats joined Republicans to defeat an effort to force President Trump to go to Congress for approval to continue using force against Iran, while two G.O.P. lawmakers backed it.
Every time I have to use my work laptop (with Windows) for anything, it feels like a giant step back. Lately it's even worse; it feels like that step is right into some dog shit.
This might legitimately be the year of the Linux desktop, not because Linux suddenly got better, but because Windows finally got unacceptably bad.
One possibility is that with Israel focused on Iran and Gaza, other countries take it as an opportunity to attack Israel. The U.S. escalates in defense of Israel, other countries escalate and start including U.S. bases as targets (becoming defacto allies of Iran in the process), and it all spirals from there.
Live in the past, is mine. I will listen to things over and over because some songs or even podcast episodes, rewind me back to times where I felt comfortable in. I do sometimes poke my head out to see where things are currently in the present, but nothing around really makes me gravitate to anything current-day. But, then I ...
Tall guy, here. There are specific exercises you can do to strengthen and stabilize your back, and that might help. I've actually got fewer back troubles than I did when I was young and stupid, because I'm taking care of it.
My favorite example: Copilot to read your emails for you and send responses automatically. Get two people with Copilot sending each other emails with neither person actually involved. Efficient!
Federal immigration authorities arrested a Columbia University student early Thursday, triggering protests on campus along with allegations that agents had entered the university-owned residence under false pretenses. ...
The federal judge identified 210 orders issued in 143 cases in Minnesota in which he said Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials had not complied with court orders. ...
This is what failing to enforce their orders has wrought for the judicial branch. ICE will continue ignoring them until judges start ordering their bailiffs to take these scumbags straight to jail from the courtroom.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta last night filed a request for a preliminary injunction in California’s existing case against Amazon for price fixing. Attorney General Bonta’s 2022 lawsuit alleged that the company stifled competition and caused increased prices across California through its anticompetitive policies in ...
Then why are newer versions of the major models performing so poorly? For instance, GPT 5.2 is definitely not an improvement over 4.5. What's the root cause?
It goes beyond the problems introduced by the model router, though. I have to work with GPT 5.2 for my job (along with Claude, Gemini, and a few others), and we have enterprise API access to it. So when I select GPT 5.2 as the model to use, it's spending tokens to actually use it.
And it's pretty bad. It's noticeably worse than the 4.x series. I find myself having to fix its mistakes far more often.
I've struggled to reason out an explanation, and model collapse really seems like a contender, especially if you follow information theory and why training these things is so hard.
As it happens, there's a new talk about exactly this from George D. Montañez. You might find it interesting: https://youtu.be/ShusuVq32hc
Ahead of local elections that serve as a bellwether for next year’s presidential campaign, the National Rally says it is the victim of an increasingly radical left wing. ...
I don't see how this could even be in question. The sequence of events in the video is absolutely plain as day. Nazis picked a fight and got their heads kicked in for it, case fucking closed.
He's never gonna be their Charlie Kirk, as if that would even be something to aspire to.
I won't link directly to the video, because it does show an extremely violent brawl (and a man's final conscious moments; to be clear, I'm not celebrating his death and never would). But the Wikipedia article on it links to news sites and analysis, and several of those have the video.
And it's not even working. Not one of the AI companies is profitable. So they're putting the hope for profits some time in the future over sanity and safety.
They're also not providing a large language model, so they actually did have a path to profitability. It's keeping LLMs updated and running that costs so much money that companies trying to do so are losing billions, and Midjourney doesn't have that problem.
It's just that their path to profitability was built on plagiarism on an astonishing scale. You're spot on, they should have been utterly destroyed right at the start.
It’s not just about the trade war. Nearly half of America’s neighbors to the north now think the U.S. is a bigger threat to world peace than Russia. ...
The weirdest thing about all this is that by sheer accident, the QAnon freaks actually managed to find a tiny sliver of truth: There really is a cabal of powerful child abusers. It's just that they got every single other detail, including who the child abusers are, insanely wrong.
Dutch lawyers increasingly have to convince clients that they can’t rely on AI-generated legal advice because chatbots are often inaccurate, the Financieele Dagblad (FD) found when speaking to several lawfirms. A recent survey by Deloitte showed that 60 percent of lawfirms see clients trying to perform simple legal tasks with ...
I'm watching that happen in my industry (software development). There's this massive pressure campaign by damn near everyone's employers in software dev to use LLM tools.
It's causing developers to churn out terrible, fragile, unmaintainable code at a breakneck pace, while they're actively forgetting how to code for themselves.
I have a work-supplied laptop with Windows on it. I use it maybe once or twice a month, just for the things requiring a VPN. The rest of the time it sits there gathering dust while I get real work done on my Linux laptop.
The specs on the work laptop say it should be a performance beast, but my Linux machine (with half the RAM) runs circles around it.
A while back, I was thinking about upgrading my living room entertainment PC. It's got a decent video card in it, but some of the other hardware is getting long in the tooth.
Now, my plan is to focus on software tweaks to squeeze the absolute best performance I can out of it, and keep the hardware as-is until it starts physically breaking down. And when that happens, I'll find refurbished hardware to upgrade it with, rather than spending the exorbitant fees to buy anything new.
What mystifies me about all this is that it's obvious what the end goal is: No more PCs, and everyone just rents dumb terminals connected to AI data centers that run everything and have all the compute power. The problem is that literally no one but AI companies want that. Not consumers, and not other companies that sell software and services to consumers.
When cars replaced carriages, it was because people actually wanted them. Cars had real-world benefits over horses. But this shit? No one wants it. Gamers want game performance you simply can't get with streamed games. People who work with computers for a living don't want their ability to do anything to vanish if their ISP has an outage.
We can't vote with anything but our wallets here, so this is a thing we can do to at least reduce their income. And considering they're losing close to $100 million every day already, I can't help but suspect nickel and diming them a bit still hurts.
I wonder how OpenAI's investors feel about that expense, considering they're losing somewhere around $80 million every single day.
At the beginning of the year, they projected a $14 billion loss for 2026. They'll almost certainly exceed that by quite a lot, and may have lost $12 billion in the previous fiscal quarter.
They aren't bleeding money. They're a veritable cash volcano, blasting it into near-Earth orbit.
It's very much in the uncanny valley. Hard to point my finger at exactly what's wrong, but no one looks quite real. I keep expecting their too-rubbery skin to start doing weird shit.
Chatbots provided incorrect, conflicting medical advice, researchers found: “Despite all the hype, AI just isn't ready to take on the role of the physician.” ...
Neil Gaiman. I fucking loved Sandman and damn near everything else he wrote. Finding out he's a total scumbag has basically ruined a lot of very dear memories.
The country’s first female PM is the object of a personality cult revolving around everything from her outfits and snacks to her favourite pink pen ...
Some of the emails in the file dump had attachments.
The way attachments work in emails is that they're converted to encoded text.
That encoded text was included - badly - in the file dump.
So it's theoretically possible to convert them back to the original files, but it will take work to get the text back. Every character has to be exactly correct.
Source: I'm a software developer and I'm currently trying to recover one of these attachments.
I'm not having trouble with it as such, it's just a slow and painstaking process. The source is crappy enough that an enormous number of characters need to be checked manually, and it's ridiculously time-consuming.
Yes, it's base64. And what's behind it could be anything that can be attached to an email.
In this case, it's a PDF. If the base64 text can be extracted accurately, then the PDF that was attached to the email can be recreated.
The challenge is basically twofold:
There's a lot of text, and it needs to be extracted perfectly. Even one character being wrong corrupts it and makes it impossible to decode.
As the article points out, there are lots of visual problems with the encoded text, including the shitty font it's displayed with, which makes automating the extraction damn near impossible. OCR is very good these days, but this is kind of a perfect example of text that it has trouble with.
As for my approach, I'm basically just slowly and painstakingly running several OCR tools on small bits at a time, merging the resulting outputs, and doing my best to correct mistakes manually.
In Trump’s first term, grassroots Democrats focused their ire on the Republican president. But now, after President Joe Biden’s reluctance to step aside in 2024 at age 81 helped pave the way for Trump’s return to the White House, many see their party’s own veterans as part of the problem.
Dude. I mean this in all sincerity: Eat my entire ass. Conflating voting with support for genocide might not be the stupidest thing I've ever encountered, but it's gotta be in the top twenty.
Welcome! Isn't it a breath of fresh air to use an OS that isn't trying to turn your computer into an advertising and upselling platform? It has its issues, but it's a huge relief to escape the constant inundation from Microsoft.
House Turns Back Bid to Restrict Trump’s War Powers in Iran ( www.nytimes.com )
A handful of Democrats joined Republicans to defeat an effort to force President Trump to go to Congress for approval to continue using force against Iran, while two G.O.P. lawmakers backed it.
Windows 12 Reportedly Set for Release This Year as a Fully Modular, Subscription-Based, AI-Focused OS ( tech4gamers.com )
It's not april fools yet
Anti-War MAGA Unites to Turn on Trump Together ( www.thedailybeast.com )
archive https://archive.ph/yRffm
3 US service members killed, 5 wounded, CENTCOM says ( abcnews.com )
3 US service members killed, 5 wounded, CENTCOM says ...
Iran latest: US and Israel carry out joint attack on Iran as Tehran launches retaliatory strikes ( www.bbc.com )
And so, WW3 begins.
What old person thing do you do now that you wouldn't have guessed you'd do when you were younger?
Live in the past, is mine. I will listen to things over and over because some songs or even podcast episodes, rewind me back to times where I felt comfortable in. I do sometimes poke my head out to see where things are currently in the present, but nothing around really makes me gravitate to anything current-day. But, then I ...
‘Unbelievably dangerous’: experts sound alarm after ChatGPT Health fails to recognise medical emergencies ( www.theguardian.com )
cross-posted from: ...
Columbia student detained by ICE is abruptly released after Mamdani meets with Trump ( www.npr.org )
Federal immigration authorities arrested a Columbia University student early Thursday, triggering protests on campus along with allegations that agents had entered the university-owned residence under false pretenses. ...
Judge Vows to End Trump Administration’s Noncompliance ‘One Way or Another’ ( www.nytimes.com )
The federal judge identified 210 orders issued in 143 cases in Minnesota in which he said Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials had not complied with court orders. ...
Disgraced Andrew insists royal staff call him 'sir' and fetch beer ( youtu.be )
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Amazon BUSTED for Widespread Scheme to Inflate Prices Across the Economy— Amazon, its vendors, and competing retailers are price fixing, hiking up prices for consumer products, making Amazon richer ( oag.ca.gov )
California Attorney General Rob Bonta last night filed a request for a preliminary injunction in California’s existing case against Amazon for price fixing. Attorney General Bonta’s 2022 lawsuit alleged that the company stifled competition and caused increased prices across California through its anticompetitive policies in ...
Car Wash Test on 53 leading AI models: "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?" ( opper.ai )
Screenshot of this question was making the rounds last week. But this article covers testing against all the well-known models out there. ...
French far right looks for Charlie Kirk moment after activist’s killing ( www.politico.eu )
Ahead of local elections that serve as a bellwether for next year’s presidential campaign, the National Rally says it is the victim of an increasingly radical left wing. ...
Talents leave AI companies: "They are putting profits over sanity and safety" ( www.computerworld.com )
Look how much Canadians hate the United States now ( www.politico.com )
It’s not just about the trade war. Nearly half of America’s neighbors to the north now think the U.S. is a bigger threat to world peace than Russia. ...
Open-source game engine Godot is drowning in 'AI slop' code contributions: 'I don't know how long we can keep it up' ( www.pcgamer.com )
Questions swirl over Ohio billionaire Les Wexner’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein ( www.theguardian.com )
Lawyers increasingly have to convince clients that AI chatbots give bad advice ( nltimes.nl )
Dutch lawyers increasingly have to convince clients that they can’t rely on AI-generated legal advice because chatbots are often inaccurate, the Financieele Dagblad (FD) found when speaking to several lawfirms. A recent survey by Deloitte showed that 60 percent of lawfirms see clients trying to perform simple legal tasks with ...
Rufus blames Microsoft for allegedly blocking latest Windows 11 ISO downloads ( www.neowin.net )
Western Digital runs out of HDD capacity: CEO says massive AI deals secured, price surges ahead ( www.tweaktown.com )
Trump Admin to Spend $40B to Turn Warehouses Into Massive Immigration Jails ( truthout.org )
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Attorney on 9-year-old client in Dilley detention site: 'She wishes she was no longer alive' ( www.sacurrent.com )
Palantir and leaders from OpenAI pledge to invest $100 million to boost US midterm candidates friendly to AI ( edition.cnn.com )
cross-posted from: ...
Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun ( europeanbusinessmagazine.com )
Trump threatens to block opening of new bridge between Detroit and Windsor ( www.cbc.ca )
Irish man with valid US work permit held in ICE detention for five months ( www.theguardian.com )
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/915874 ...
Ghoulish Jurassic Park Super Bowl ad. ( www.youtube.com )
Chatbots Make Terrible Doctors, New Study Finds ( www.404media.co )
Chatbots provided incorrect, conflicting medical advice, researchers found: “Despite all the hype, AI just isn't ready to take on the role of the physician.” ...
The AI boom is so huge it’s causing shortages everywhere else The $700 billion AI spending spree has few precedents. Good luck finding an electrician or a reasonably priced smartphone. ( archive.is )
Who were some of your childhood heroes that turned out to be horrible people?
‘Sana-mania’ grips Japan as ultra-conservative Takaichi expected to secure election landslide ( www.theguardian.com )
The country’s first female PM is the object of a personality cult revolving around everything from her outfits and snacks to her favourite pink pen ...
Recreating uncensored Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments ( neosmart.net )
Out with the old? Young Democrats are trying to convince voters to send a new generation to Congress ( apnews.com )
In Trump’s first term, grassroots Democrats focused their ire on the Republican president. But now, after President Joe Biden’s reluctance to step aside in 2024 at age 81 helped pave the way for Trump’s return to the White House, many see their party’s own veterans as part of the problem.
'I'll believe it when I see it': Windows 11 users are cynical about Microsoft's promises to fix the OS and stop pushing AI ( www.techradar.com )