You must not be that interested in staying in contact with your family if you’re only willing to use one, specific way to do it and simply refuse to use any other method.

How about texting? Does texting work?

This guy obnoxiouses.

Wait, no, that’s not right.

Uh, instructions unclear, dick stuck in Reddit? How’s that?

Consider that we’re evaluating Firefish vs. Lemmy vs. Kbin

There’s a third one I didn’t know about?

That’s gonna be the one to take off. Put your chips on Firefish. It’s always the one I’m not using.

There are alternatives to Lemmy. Kbin, I’d argue, is superior in most respects. (Kbin is still obviously young and rough around the edges at times, though.)

I try to use both equally, because I’m always on the hook for picking the “doomed” standard in any 50/50 contest. It’s easier to read stuff from other instances in kbin, and that gives it the appearance of more frequent and more current activity; lemmy, even on “All/Active” or “All/Hot”, frequently drops 30 threads from one dude at the top of my feed, or I have three pages of threads with no comments and 6 upvotes. So even though I hate how kbin handles viewing pictures thumbnails (click on the post, wait for everything to load, click on the thumbnail, wait for it to load, chuckle, then x out of the picture to read the comments), I end up spending more time there.

It couldn’t happen to a more deserving group of smug, self-satisfied shitheads.

Year 2030 is a global target for renovations in every aspects of societies and countries.

By what method? Is that when the secret computer chip in the vaccine will turn on and kill us? Thereby removing all the people who have shown they’ll do anything the government tells them to do, leaving behind all the staunch and distrustful individualists who are harder to control? Or is this some other global renovation?

Especially since hydrogen as a fuel is a dead-end, so far as I can tell. In addition to the net energy loss that come from separating hydrogen from whatever else it’s attached to in the precursor material (please tell me they’re not using water for this…), who is going to want to drive a 2025 Toyota Hindenburg?

300 miles is just barely under the safe distance between most major towns \cities in parts of the us that means you barely or don’t get to your location on one charge

I’ve never owned a car in my life that gets more than 300 miles on a single tank of gas.

The quickest way I’ve found to separate the articles that are going to be meaningless waste-of-time fluff pieces from ones that might be informative is to find the verb in the headline.

Is it something like “claims”, “calls for”, “praises”, “criticizes”, or “expects”? Fluff. If something deserving of a more concrete, direct verb had happened, the headline would have said so. Verbs like “slams” or “attacks” or “demands” are even worse; they’re aggressive and enthusiastic about their content but still can’t make the claim something actually happened or changed.

If the verb is preceded by “could”, “might”, “maybe”, or similar, especially with regard to tech news, it’s also probably an empty slow-news-day article, but those words aren’t necessarily as hollow as the ones mentioned above. Sometimes they’ll contain interesting information about the current state of things, even if they’re just going to lead you on a merry speculation romp about the optimistic/horrifying future.

I think one of the big problems is that we, as humans, are very easily fooled by something that can look or sound “alive”. ChatGPT gets a lot of hype, but it’s primarily coming from a form of textual pareidolia.

It’s hard to convince people that ChatGPT has absolutely no idea what it’s saying. It’s putting words together in a human-enough way that we assume it has to be thinking and it has to know things, but it can’t do either. It’s not even intended to try to do either. That’s not what it’s for. It takes the rules of speech and a massive amount of data on which word is most likely to follow which other word, and runs with it. It’s a super-advanced version of a cell phone keyboard’s automatic word suggestions. Even just asking it to correct the punctuation on a complex sentence is too much to ask (in my experiment on this matter, it gave me incorrect answers 4 times, until I explicitly told it how it was supposed to treat coordinating conjunctions).

And for most uses, that’s good enough. Tell it to include a few extra rules, depending on what you’re trying to create, and watch it spin out a yarn. But I’ve had several conversations with ChatGPT, and I’ve found it incredibly easy to “break”, in the sense of making it produce things that sound somewhat less human and significantly less rational. What concerns me about ChatGPT isn’t necessarily that it’s going to take my job, but that people believe it’s a rational, thinking, calculating thing. It may be that some part of us is biologically hard-wired to; it’s probably that same part that keeps seeing Jesus on burnt toast.