Furries: "UGH we're such horrible people we ruin everything there was a fire at FWA and obviously furries set it and that means we're just as bad as Rainfurrest and no one will ever want us again!"
1 - the fire was a grease fire that burned through the kitchen wall of the Sear hotel restaurant.
2 - that everyone references "the one bad convention" that happened nearly TEN YEARS AGO when there is a furry convention happening pretty much EVERY WEEKEND somewhere in the world means we have a pretty damn good track record.
For anyone out there: nudge me if you're gonna be at FWA and want to hang out with an old person and drink beer. I talk tech stuff (IT/DevOps war stories), nerd stuff, dumb hobby stuff (Arduino, 3D printing, puzzles), and fox stuff.
Seriously. Get a cheap Brother laser. They eat any toner you feed them and will fire up and print flawlessly with even a few microns of toner left even after they sit for a full year with no activity at all.
Banning TikTok shows the myopic vision of our lawmakers. The US needs comprehensive data privacy legislation that applies to all social networks and protects our data—and we needed it 15–20 years ago.
@connie@paul And they dominate the good ones. Furries are the canary in the mine -- if you look around in a tech space and don't see furries there being open, it's a red flag.
@Azure@paul It isn't. It can be, but it doesn't have to be. Furries are just very open about it. Humans are -- most of them -- sexual creatures. Because of the nature of furries having an alternate version of themselves they can experiment with in terms of expressing themselves without fear of social repercussions they tend to be very open about those facets of their lives.
When I go to furry cons I love to speak to hotel management about what hosting furries is like, how the staff is treated, etc. Every one I've spoken to loves furries because they tend to be the most kind to the staff and bring in a ton of money. The most common answer for what group is the most raucous? Conventions that are held for the medical community, apparently.
It bothers me so much that most used fonts have no easily visible differences between "I" and "l" -- there's quite a difference between "Weird Al" and "Weird AI" as only one gets permission for and pays to reuse the work from a talented artist.
@windbliss I once worked for a place that set service account passwords in a DB and their website for getting them used a sans serif font. The bonus was that they disabled text copy and people complained they couldn't get passwords correct that sometimes contained combinations of "I" and "l". And of course the team that owned the application refused to make any changes, telling people to just deal with it and make guesses.
The stuff falling from the sky this morning is not snow, not sleet, and not rain. It is somehow gloopy and between states, like a gas station slushie. It still has to be shoveled and it's somehow so much worse than snow.
I was listening to an NPR show about how experts are deeply concerned about a loneliness epidemic and how people used to spend over 6 hours per week with friends, but it’s down to like an hour and a half per week now. Well, I only see friends maybe once every month and a half, on average.
@tilton This is hitting me hard right now, too -- everyone suddenly scattered and moved about everywhere, myself included, and now... there's just so much distance both physically and...not. I used to be so much more connected, so much more involved with other people and...it's just quiet, now. People changed but I think people's habits also changed a lot in recent years. It's getting scary and I'm growing increasingly worried about what this means and how I should deal with it. I don't really even hear from people online all that much any longer. Remember when we'd all log in and you'd check in with everyone in chat rooms to see how they were doing? That kind of medium...it's not as much a thing anymore.
It is my opinion that LLMs are fundamentally a dead-end technology. They are a parlor trick that provide amusement, but cannot actually reliably accomplish what we ask of them, and are therefore even WORSE than useless; they're actively misleading, in a dangerous way. A gold rush for venture capital grifters, but not much else.
@tilton I'm convinced they're a funding push while other technologies are driven. I really don't expect them to be of any real use and given that I've seen more and more articles with interviews of creators saying "well, we might not be able to actually overcome the hallucination problem..." leads me to believe they're going to keep this going as long as possible before these things finally collapse.
I keep seeing "our programing days are numbered!" and...wow I wish because if I could have something write decent code for me I would totally use it but that ain't the case yet. Shit is still terrible.
@tilton I'm also starting to realize that so much of this is PR bullshit. IBM announcing layoffs some months back and saying it was because of their AI taking over those jobs is...I'm not buying it. Same with OpenAI's "we were suddenly concerned it had become sentient" thing.
...and then there was this much hyped bullshit I'll never forget that the media ran crazy with and had their initial reports hinting that this experiment was shut down because the bots were purposefully speaking in code so they would not be understood. Gag.
@tilton And I honestly can't help but wonder if Google's putting an employee on leave because he felt that one of the chatbots had become sentient is also somewhere along these lines.
@tilton So much of this, I believe, is also that the media doesn't understand this stuff and tech companies don't really care to explain it well outside of them making their coming tech seem like it is going to change the world in order to get the attention of investors.
...not to mention tech company leads also eating this kind of shit and believing it. Someone misinterpreting a published philosophy thought experiment paper still haunts us to this day and now we have people like Elon Musk not only repeating the "We LiVe In A sImUlaTiOn" bullshit but he now weaves this misunderstanding into his ideas for his businesses and the future.