That's totally fair, and I'll keep it in mind.
I hope my habit makes your life a little easier by normalizing they/them (or just avoiding gendered terms) as an un-interesting default.
I hope for a world where they/them becomes accepted as "I'm not trusted enough by this person to be told their pronouns yet, and that's okay."
I think asking people to identify their gender, early in a (non-intimate) relationship, is a particularly unhealthy cultural habit. I hope I'm helping push back on that, a bit.
In the meantime, I'm trying to learn speech habits that don't force you to gender yourself, or to be noticed in not doing so. I hope to help make these kinds of situations easier for you.
You shouldn't have to decide at a random moment whether to share your gender identity with me. I'm committed to keep trying to learn communication patterns that make it natural for you not to have to.
Yeah. Which I'm sure is what they're officially selling. That's fair. Long term, walking robots are likely only going to succeed thanks to learning algorithms.
I find it suspicious that this company is touting their AI enhancement while admitting their product can't be trusted to navigate an apartment alone.
Personally, I would select homes with simple layouts, before conceding to constant monitoring, if I could. But I couldn't do that if my mix of math and AI was outright bad, and it couldn't handle it...
To me, this smells like over-promising and hoping new AI algorithms outpace their promises.
And having a remote operator just looks like a lot like a classic mechanical turk scam.
AI is propping up the blockchain bubble that already popped.
Both have been primarily interesting solutions looking for problems to solve without any hard work, rather than having any worthwhile investment strategy, in most cases.
There's people doing hard work with block chain and AI to solve real problems. But there aren't "the vast majority of venture funds" number of people doing that.
I am constantly amazed at how long it takes folks to realize their money is being pissed away.
An alternative less generous assumption is that they're mostly just laundering crime money, and so don't mind the high rates of loss.
Beat me to i...
When unsure of what the Captcha is trying to learn from me, I find "Kill all humans." is a pretty good guess what the Captcha is really after.
"I don't understand it (pauses to pour various inedible compounds into another vat). There's no way to explain why Americans don't want to eat our delicious healthy snacks anymore. (Pauses to check with legal whether using the word "healthy" will hold up in court. Legal says it won't, but Sales says to use it anyway.)"
This is not an actual quote, but it's wild that they don't understand the road that got them here. It's just way too much trouble to read and research the package labels for basic safety, anymore. If there's four or more ingredients, I probably just won't buy it.
I fucking love snacks, but they took the fun out of it.
While Neo Gamma uses AI to walk and balance, the robot is not fully capable of autonomous movements today. To make in-home tests possible, Børnich says 1X is “bootstrapping the process” by relying on teleoperators — humans in remote locations that can view Neo Gamma’s cameras and sensors in real time, and take control of its limbs.
So yhis is a non-functional product.
Being able to walk autonomously is normally done with a lot of difficult math, which it sounds like they don't have the talent on staff to code.
Be sure to get your venture capital dollars in soon, because that's all this is here for.
Also, it's comforting to know that creepy robot face will initially be remote controlled by a rotating series of low paid total strangers. And by initially, we mean always (as in the case of Amazon checkout.)
Heh. Good point.
I also use "they/them" until someone shares their pronouns.
Officially, I do this to avoid misgendering people.
Really, I do it because some snowflakes are too fragile to share their pronouns, and I enjoy annoying them until they do.
My preferred pronouns are actually "none of your business/fuck off", but I settle for "they/them" for professionalism reasons. (Until I retire. Then my pronouns change officially everywhere.)
Permanently Deleted
Oh, gee. A Microsoft product that worked perfectly locally is about to require a subscription. Who could have possibly guessed that would happen, yet again? (This is sarcasm.)
I really like OneNote, but I decided to learn something else when I realized which way the wind was blowing.
Bosch has a lot of goodwill. Interesting how they decide to spend it. Also Consumer Reports needs to start considering Internet connectivity, because the risks from Internet connected dishwashers are real and scary.
I've longed to work the fields with my hands and simple tools because the fields don't fucking spit out meaningless gibberish when I'm just trying to get them to process a simple text field, and my hands don't have documentation apparently written by a distracted seven year old.
And while the living off the land will certainly kill me due to my own incompetence, nature will have the decency to just eat my corpse and not gloat over my failure repeatedly in a hung CI/CD process for the rest of eternity.
Holy wall of text, Batman.
Usually the asshole.
Yeah. And, in fairness, as a non-pirate, I read along here for tips and tricks to get a non-shit streaming experience out of my home hosted hardware.
If I could still pay for a non-shit streaming experience, I would just do that.
We're all getting clones. You get a clone. And you get a clone. Every 23andMe customer gets a free* clone!
*Clones are provided at no cost, but are not free of their lifetime indentureship.
I installed a DVD player under the TV
I got tired of having to search and sign up for wherever my favorite movie is streaming this month, so I'm going back to DVDs for the foreseeable future, until the streaming overlords get their shit together. So... maybe forever. But at least for now.
It's nice. I put a disc in, and press play, and it plays.
I hadn't quite realize how much messing around the streaming services had added to my movie nights.
(Recover password, verify my email, sign up with a credit card, authorize the TV, remove the old iPad because of a device limit, sign in at least one extra time for no certain reason, sometimes discover I chose the wrong service and start over.)
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is going all-in on AI. Earlier this week, he announced that the company’s developer division (which makes developer tools and compilers) has been folded into a new unit …
My commentary: An AI that can be trusted with sensitive information remains a tantalizing but unattainable "holy grail".
And a quote I love from the article:
"As long as machine learning and generative AI is being deployed in production systems, we predict a heartwarmingly lucrative job market in AI security."
Pluralistic: Enshittification isn’t caused by venture capital (20 Jan 2025)
Cory Doctorow details the path to the enshitifications of Facebook and Twitter.
"This is what changed: the collapse of market, government, and labor constraints, and IP law's criminalization of disenshittifying, interoperable add-ons. This is why Zuck, an eternal creep, is now letting his creep flag fly so proudly today. Not because he's a worse person, but because he understands that he can hurt his users and workers to benefit his shareholders without facing any consequences. Zuckerberg 2025 isn't the most evil Zuck, he's the most unconstrained Zuck."
Cory Doctorow proposes that Canada break ranks with international IP law enforcement
Cory recommends a response for Canada to the USA's promised tariffs: break ranks on oppressive IP laws and build a local right-to-repair economy.
Edit: Corrected link. Sorry about that!
DropOut Sport
Since Game Changer is the best thing that ever happened to game shows, I wonder if there's any chance we can get coverage of a recreational league sports team?
I don't even care what sport, and I don't care if it's not live.
Televised Pistol Shrimps games or some such would be a delightful addition.
JSAUX have released another Docking Station, this time it's White and it does look rather nice. A good match for the recent Steam Deck OLED: Limited Edition White launch.
This came across my GamingOnLinux feed, and I figured y'all might share my interest.
I'm excited for this dock release because my simple JSAUX HDMI dongle has always been a more reliable SteamDeck dock, for me, than my official SteamDeck dock.
I understand recent patches to the SteamDeck official dock may have solved many of the issues I was having.
But it's still cool to see a brand I already trust adding a targeted SteamDeck product.
I don't see whether it accounts for my habit of keeping my SteamDeck in a protective case, though.
Once you’ve trained your large language model on the entire written output of humanity, where do you go? Here’s Ilya Sutskever, ex-OpenAI, admitting to Reuters that they’ve plateaued: [Reuters] The…
I'm usually the one saying "AI is already as good as it's gonna get, for a long while."
This article, in contrast, is quotes from folks making the next AI generation - saying the same.
Ultimate Spider-Man
Uh...I guess this is a public service announcement.
"Ultimate Spider-Man" is really good.
This subverts my expectations, while offering new insights into established characters.
Pluralistic: Antiusurpation and the road to disenshittification (07 Nov 2024)
"We need policies that keep middlemen weak."
stood out to me.
Many of my influences have railed against middle men, and I think that's unfair. I've worked with plenty of middle men that made everyone then better off.
I've also had the unique displeasure that at least half of all links shared with me in recent years have been to a site called "Instagram", where I am unable to access the content without an account (which I refuse to make because Zuckerberg is a creepy stalker.)
I find it deeply weird that such a locked ecosystem now controls so much attention.
I find Cory Doctorow's thoughts on the problem and potential solutions to be both hopeful and cathartic.
Soundtrack: EL-P - Flyentology At the core of Microsoft, a three-trillion-dollar hardware and software company, lies a kind of social poison — an ill-defined, cult-like pseudo-scientific concept called 'The Growth Mindset" that drives company decision-making in everything from how products are sold...
Kind of an inflammatory title, but I like to let it match for accessibility.
I've been enjoying Ed Zitron's articles lately, because they call out CEOs who aren't doing their jobs.
I'm sharing this partly because I'm honestly surprised to see criticism of Satya Nadella's leadership. I think Satya has been good for Microsoft, overall, compared to previous leaders. And I was as convinced as anyone else when the "growth mindset" first hit the news cycle. It sounds fine, after all.
TL;DR:
Pluralistic: Conspiratorialism as a material phenomenon (29 Oct 2024)
You might recognize me from such comments as "All AI hucksters are scammers.", and "AI is just an excuse to enshitify while laying off real engineers.", and "I actually use current generation LLMs for a bunch of things and it can be pretty great."
In this article science fiction author and futurist Cory Doctorow is on my favorite AI soap box, and raises some interesting points.
A Pipeworks Crash Course
Pipeworks is a mod for Minetest allowing the crafting and usage of pipes and tubes - mt-mods/pipeworks
Since I couldn't find it, here's a bare minimum guide to starting using the Pipeworks mod.
This recipe builds a trivial item sorter.
Mods you need:
Resources you need (if building this in survival):
To build the parts - look up the part recipes in I3 Inventory, or the MineTest wiki.
The Build:
In this order, place, on flat ground, in a straight line:
Now place the last two chests on the ground on either side of the 'sorting pneumatic tube segment'.
Now place a 'blinky plant' beside the 'stackwise filter injector', to get it running. Yes, it must b
PSA - MineTest on SteamDeck
In this article, I will explain how to set up Minetest on the deck, and review the controls, performance, and experience.
MineTest on a SteamDeck is so fun, y'all.
(Edit: MineTest is a free and open source game engine that started as a clone of Minecraft, and has grown to be that, and much more.)
I would have tried it sooner, if someone had mentioned it to me, so I'm mentioning it to you.
Edit: Disclaimer, I'm not the author of this blog. It's the walkthrough I followed to start playing.
Newbie Lessons
Here's things I learned, so far, as a new player of Minetest. I'm new at this, so I'll gladly update this post with any corrections.