Pxtl

Pxtl, 2 days ago

Absolutely.

Bing Chat Assistant is better than Google, Bing search, or DDG today. If I search for “how do I do X in software Y” on a normal search, I get zillions of dead-link-filled MS pages, some interesting tangentially-related stackoverflow posts, and a bunch of old blogspam.

If I ask the robot, I often get “no, there’s no supported way to do that officially” which is the clear clean answer I can’t find elsewhere. Or sometimes it misunderstands the question and gives me a tangentially-related result, which is bad but is the same thing I get from Google via StackOverflow, except Bing is much more responsive to me saying “no, I didn’t mean that way, I meant this” in which case I often get either the right answer or the “no” answer, which is still good and accurate! The problem is as you iterate, the conversation accumulates cruft and becomes more erratic and hallucinatory.

But right now, with the level of SEO that has ruined all major search engines (ironically partially caused by AI), Bing Chat is the best search on the market now imho. <homer>The cause of and solution to all of life’s problems </homer>

So yeah, in terms of “things where AI has lived up to its potential”? It is winning the search war today. Everything else is something on the horizon in various distances (art, music, text generation, true general AI) but better search for information is here right now.

Pxtl, 2 days ago

Bing Chat provides its sources.

Pxtl, 2 days ago

I mean yeah. I’m not disagreeing with any of that (except the fact that AI caused it - search engines got destroyed by SEO before AI textgen started crapflooding).

But it is what it is. The SEO spammers won. They defeated Google and Microsoft and DDG’s respective search algorithms. Traditional search got killed. The internet got worse instead of better.

In light of this miserable new reality, AI-based content synthesizers (particularly ones that can coherently point to the references for their synthesis) are the current solution to SEO spam. Maybe this is another temporary plateau that the SEO spammers will murder. And yes, it’s tragic that this energy-pig of AI is the best solution to something that used to be doable with a simple trie.

But still: there is a real problem today for which an AI-based tech provides the current best solution. In this one specific case, the AI lives up to the hype. It swallows the hellscape of noise of the internet and gives you the signal.

Pxtl, 2 days ago

Glass backs are the dumbest idea in the history of stupid.

The only way things like that could be defensible if they were easy to replace (bring back Moto-Z style magnetic backs!), but since phones are all held together with glue now, that’s not a thing.

Pxtl, 2 days ago

I wish they could come up with a more honest term for it than “vegan leather”. Call it “upholstery vinyl” or something. Frustrating how there’s no good standard quality grades for that stuff too. Like, the seats in my Prius don’t wear the way my belt and my boots do, and they’re all made of pleather vinyl.

Pxtl, 2 days ago

Okay but I still have to fold my own laundry.

Pxtl, 2 days ago

And I don’t make my own paints either when doing art. I still agree with the basic original point:

It is disappointing that we’re currently automating creativity far faster than manual labour. I’m angry that my art is getting automated away faster than my folding of laundry.

Pxtl, 12 days ago

Except there isn’t much of a Google stealing their thunder. Bing isn’t better. DDG isn’t better.

Pxtl, 29 days ago

G Hub has gotten better in the past year, imho. It is now merely bad and no longer completely goddamned defective.

Pxtl, 29 days ago

In general their mice are weirdly perverse in the way they fail. I’ve never seen one fail in any way besides the buttons, usually failing into double-clicking. Like it feels like they would last super-long if they just used better components for the buttons. The mousewheel has never failed on me, the radio has never failed on me, the main sensor has never failed on me, nor the laser… just the clicky buttons.

Pxtl, 1 month ago

I have a simple opinion on paywall bypassers:

If it’s possible to bypass the paywall, that means there’s already a class of unauthenticated clients you’re allowing to see it. I have no interest in complying with whatever infrastructure you use to implement this discrimination.

Implementing a true hard paywall is trivial software. The only reason bypassing is possible is because they’re trying to have their cake and eat it too by allowing (eg) search engines to see it unauthenticated.

Pxtl, 1 month ago

This feels like a workaround for a core problem: Media (particularly games) are no longer transferable goods.

What’s needed is a proper legal standard WRT resale-ability and server support. Clear requirements on what a piece of software must be able to do without its private and impossible-to-acquire cloud server, and clear requirements on allowing transfers of ownership of non-recurring-subscription-based digital goods.

Pxtl, 1 month ago

The PM should make more than the people who run crown corporations. 80 of Canadians are wrong.

Pxtl, 1 month ago

You know those “X is now older than Y was when X came out”?

Like, in this case: “Pearl Jam Ten is now older than The White Album was when Pearl Jam Ten came out”

That happened in 2014.

Pxtl, 1 month ago

I have a gwatch 4 and the hardware is fine. The flaw is Google’s half-assed android fork WearOS, and then the layer of Samsung software that somehow makes it worse.

You could have infinite memory and processor in there and it wouldn’t solve the jank.

Pxtl, 2 months ago

I dunno, these extreme tall phones are a pain to type on. Keyboard usability seems to be defined by the squareness of the phone.

Pxtl, 2 months ago

Thanks, municipalities, by trying to persevere the character of your neighbourhoods, you’ve managed to destroy the character of Canada.

People are upset about immigrants because of housing. Housing is a problem because cities made it de jure illegal.

Pxtl, 2 months ago

So, do you have to have an account to drive a Tesla?