Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.

Really hoping he hasn’t brought the jinx with him.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2024

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  • That immediately makes the Internet basically free for the rich and only partially accessible for the poor. Maybe you’re OK with that, but business models like that are partly what’s wrong with the world. In fact the Internet already has this problem. This would almost certainly move the boundary between who’s relatively rich and who’s relatively poor in the wrong direction.

    Also, hosting providers would immediately crank up the prices so that they get as much of that sweet page-visit money as possible ensuring the site owner doesn’t.

    The prices would find a level eventually, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near as low as half a cent. We’d be lucky if it was a dollar.

    There’s also the question of what constitutes “a page”. What if only part of the screen refreshes? What if you refresh an existing page because it didn’t load properly, or just because? Is that a new payment?

    Data caps and charges would be the “better” way to handle all this, but let anyone tell you who’s on a plan that has those, that they’re awful and the money never goes where it needs to. Good luck getting legislation changed so that some of that money goes to the sites that the data ultimately comes from.



  • Y’know if I was the exec of a bloodsucking electricity company, I’d be explicitly putting something in my terms and conditions that commercial AI data-centre use of my company’s supply is to be charged double or triple, and that undeclared use will be subject to heavy legal repercussions and surcharges.

    There has to already be precedent for specific commercial uses of resources being treated differently from others. And if not, commercial versus non-commercial use may be a close enough precedent.

    Likewise, if I’m the oil company or builder of power plants, generators and the like, I’d be putting a similar clause in.

    This would then be one of those situations where desires align, however different the goals.





  • How about cultivating a world that is less depressing before jamming wires into people’s skulls to “fix” a problem that might not originate there?

    Oh no, that won’t do, the people who have low tolerance for depressing reality have to be turned into drones for the corporate machine just like everyone else. If we can turn off the emotions that derive from a sense of self-preservation, they’ll be more willing workers for the constant grind.

    In before employers require that their applicants must have one of these implants. People without will not be hired.

    By the 24th century we won’t be Star Trek’s Federation, we’ll be an unholy hybrid of the Ferengi and the Borg.



  • Updating databases to support anything other than that which would run on a 1970s mainframe costs the sort of money that eats into C-level’s yacht funds, so it won’t happen. These are the people who when faced with the “pick two from done right, done quick and done cheap” will never pick the first one.

    Or in other words, if your name contains something outside the English alphabet’s A-Z, you’re out of luck. They’ll give you an approximation you don’t want and you’ll like it. Lower case? What’s that? You’re Irish and your surname has an apostrophe? F**k you, that’s in the bin, you’re OBRIEN now.

    I was about to suggest SHXWMATHKWAYAMASAM as something that would be bound to work, but it’s 18 characters, and, being two more than a power of two, that all but guarantees that someone will truncate it at 16. Sigh.










  • Ah, but the clueless code monkeys, script kiddies and C-levels who are responsible for writing the AI companies’ processing code only know how to scrape from someone else’s website. They can’t even ask their (respective) company’s AI for help because it hasn’t been trained yet. (Not that Wikipedia’s content will necessarily help).

    They’re not even capable of taking the ZIP file and hosting the contents on localhost to allow the scraper code they got working to operate on something it understands.

    So hammer Wikipedia they must, because it’s the limit of their competence.


  • Hard to say. I feel like it’s about as likely he would have found LLMs to be an overcomplicated false prophet or false god.

    This was a man whose operating system turned a PC into something not unlike an advanced Commodore 64, after all. He liked the simplicity and lack of layers the older computers provided. LLMs are literally layers upon layers of obfuscation and pseudo-neural wiring. That’s not simple or beautiful.

    It might all boil down to whether the inherent randomness of an LLM could be (made to be) sufficiently influenced by a higher power or not. He often treated random number outcomes as the influence of God, and it’s hard to say how seriously he took that on any given day.