is anyone else fucking sick and tired of discord? it's one thing if it's gaming-related^[i guess. not really, fuck discord.], but when i'm at a repo for some non-gaming project and they say "ask for help in our discord server", i feel like i'm in a fever dream and i'm going to wake up and discover that the simulation i was in was managed by chatgpt
an unintended side effect of this is people who can't or don't want to verify their age going to less reputable sources. so even though it can be done in a "privacy-respecting fashion" (see, for example, soatok's post on this^[https://soatok.blog/2025/07/31/age-verification-doesnt-need-to-be-a-privacy-footgun/] ), it's still a bad idea.
additionally, in my opinion no one who wants to enact such a thing is doing it in good faith. it is a pretense towards an ulterior goal^[e.g. "steam porn games" → "this person's existence is inherently sexual" → "ban lgbtq content"]
weird fuck's post reads to me as the mistake of thinking web/js is uniquely capable of dynamic code loading
what is stopping a desktop or mobile client from running new/different code? the only solution im aware of (we're in halting problem territory here, probably, though grapheneos has "prevent DCL from storage/memory" toggles so idk) is to inspect the code to make sure it does what they say and then cryptographically sign it
you can save even more time by not doing the work at all
the output is more consistent than what an LLM shits out, too
Edit: serious note, even though you probably aren't worth anyone's time: you may be conflating the technology's actual use cases (as an accountability sink and to spread misinformation) with the intentions of its creators. and the real reason higher-ups are pushing this is because they're pliant dipshits that would eat dogfood if the bowl was labelled "FOMO". also they hate paying employees
the question was rhetorical, but also thank you for the links! <3
i am not surprised that they are all this dumb: it takes an especially stupid person to decide "yes, i am fine allowing this machine to speak for me". even more so when it's made clear that the machine is a stochastic parrot trained via exploitation of the global south and massive amounts of plagiarism and that it also cooks the planet
i bought some bullshit from amazon and left a somewhat pretty mean review because debugging it was super frustrating
the seller reached out and offered a refund, so i told them basically "no, it's ok, just address the concerns in my review. let me update my review to be less mean-spirited --- i was pretty frustrated setting it up but it mostly works fine"
then they sent a message that had the "llm vibe", and the rest of the conversation went
Seller: You're right — we occasionally use LLM assistance for responses, but every message is reviewed to ensure accuracy and relevance to your concerns. We sincerely apologize if our previous replies dissatisfied you; this was our oversight.
Me: I am not simply dissatisfied. I will no longer communicate with your company and will update my review to note that you sent me synthetic text without my consent. Please do not reply to this message.
Seller: All our replies are genuine human-to-human communication with you, without using any synthetic text. It's possible our communication style gave you a different impression. We aim to better communicate with you and absolutely did not intend any offense. With every customer, we maintain a conscientious and responsible attitude in our communications.
Me: "we occasionally use LLM assistance for responses" \
"without using any synthetic text" \
pick one
is it cynical that i find the idea of a "latent space" a bit goofy? may just be because i think data science is kind of a joke and much machine learning is "we threw shit at our model but don't know what a category error is"
like it's just dimensionality reduction with new vocab?
wish i had thought of this before clearing out my inbox 😞