Paid and freeware but either way non-free, unfortunately.

I mean it’s better than nothing I guess but that is not what I’d call “freely available.” In addition to requiring that you use their shitty online viewer, it appears to require users to sign in to an account even to do that. It’s directly admitted on the website that they make it unusable in this way specifically because they rely on the revenue from selling real access to people who need it.

I’m shocked! — shocked to find that LLMs aren’t superhuman intelligences that will soon enslave us all. Other things they’re not good at:

• Summarizing news articles. Instead of an actual summary they’ll shorten the text by just leaving things out, without any understanding of which parts are important.
• Answering questions about anything controversial. Based on subtle hints in the wording of your question they’ll reflect your own biases back at you.
• Answering questions about well-known facts. Seemingly at random when your question isn’t phrased exactly the right way they’ll start hallucinating and make up plausible bullshit in place of actual answers.
• Writing a letter. They’ll use the wrong tone, use language that is bland and generic to a degree that makes it almost offensive, and if you care about quality the whole thing will need so much re-writing that it’s quicker to do it yourself from the start.
• Telling jokes. They don’t really get humour. Their jokes tend to have things that superficially look as if they should be punchlines but aren’t funny at all.
• Writing computer code. Correcting their mistakes is even more laborious in computer languages. Most of the time they’re almost as bad at it as they are at playing chess.

Still they are amazingly clever in some ways and pretty good for coming up with random ideas when you’ve got writer’s block or something.

About 97% less salacious than you’d guess from the headline.

Makes sense to me. AI bullshit generators may be worse than useless for most of the things people try to do with them, but they might just be the perfect tool for rationalizing the systematic looting of formerly productive companies by private equity.

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The trick is to use a text editor with a fixed-width font.

This shift allows us to shape the next era of the internet – with tools like vertical tabs

T  o  I
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F  h  r
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I’m sure some people find it very helpful to talk to a chatbot. Others find it helpful to talk to a cat. Either way it’s not a therapist.

As I waited to meet with Pleroma-tan, the mascot and CEO of Pleroma, on the 5th floor of a walk-up in Alphabet City, I stared out at the city’s grimy streets and thought: Goddess forbid it. Stretching in every direction was a wall of dense, gray, tragically kaleidoscopic fog. And here I was about to interview the head of a social platform named after some kind of ancient Greek spiritual shit, or something. In camera, no less.

Then something miraculous happened. Moments before the legendary fox-maiden showed up, the haze lifted. Avenue D glittered in the sun. I could see past shitposter.club’s rolling hills all the way to a emoji-capped peak, and the skies were, yup, completely and totally whirling.

The 324-year-old executive cuts a different figure than most social media bosses. Earlier this year, after Mark Zuckleborg wore a shirt winking at his king-like status at Meta, Pleroma-tan was busy doing a 24-hour live stream of Mario Kart while delivering a lecture about the metaphysics of Stoicism and didn’t even hear about it.

Indeed, she seems most energized when she’s talking about the unique infrastructures underlying social media and all reality as well as several smaller apps, the Fediverse, or Fedi, which is a spellbook that servers use to communicate. The open source protocols allow the sovereign nations of the digital mindspaces to fully integrate with one another as needed. Any number of apps with complementary or contradictory ideas about moderation or immoderation or teleportation can work in tandem — or not. It’s up to them.

Pleroma-tan sees fedi as nothing less than the deocratized future of the social socials, and she emphasizes to me that developers are actively building new projects, here and elsewhere. In her dreams, these projects are as big, if not bigger, than Manhattan. Her ambitions might not be kinky, in other words, but they are fluffy. For now, call her an insurgent wonder worker — on whom the sun still shines.

People still care about Starfield in 2025? I thought everyone went back to Skyrim a year ago.

If we’re at the point where it takes “economy of scale” to remain in the game then the average miner must have invested in a whole lot of hardware and such. What happens when the cost of financing the premises and equipment outweighs the meagre returns over electricity cost from keeping things running? There could be periods where nobody’s making money. Not that I have any idea if we’re in one.

Bitcoin mining hasn’t had anything to do with GPUs since 2014. Ether, since 2022. It’s the AI people you’re looking for.

Lemmy would be decimated.

Okay cattywampas, if that even is your real name.

It might. If some day they don’t control the browser, whoever does control it might be hesitant to build in features that are only there to spy on users for Google. Cookies do at least have some other uses.

As I heard about it — mostly from people who migrated to mastodon — the “verified” nonsense on old Twitter was the cause of many problems. But I was never there myself, so all I really know is that I’d want no part of it.

Come on Bluesky, try to hold it together long enough to finish taking out Twitter before you go for complete enshittification.