Ran into google's new LLM search answering system today; first time I've seen it so far, which I guess is impressive?
I did some poking and it seems like specific keyword searches - especially esoteric or technical ones - tend to not get LLM-generated answers, while "can you..." "how do you..." "does a..." "what is the..." questions do.
Which I guess makes sense; the goal appears to be to distill the hundreds of questionable link farm "answer" sites into a single (questionable?) answer 😅
Verdict: Gemini (or whatever Google is calling it) is probably fine for general trivia type questions where it would take longer to find the appropriate Wikipedia page; I would still never trust LLMs in general for, like, legal or medical advice.
It appears to mostly just be a slightly fancier version of what you would get if you asked your Android phone or Google Home speaker a question, which again, is fine? Not my thing, but you do you.
@tess the funny thing is is that we only need an LLM engine to sort through the millions of trash copies of the same old forum posts and buried recipe sites because Google has completely broken the web by allowing feeding SEO back onto its own search.
@tess This makes sense to me - I have heard for example "post it in the chat" jokingly used in situations where there is no chat. Not just in Twitch streaming but also things like Zoom, many people are used to having a parallel text chat now for many interactions.
This post brought to you by every fantasy role-player who ever thought that doing an accent would give their character more gravitas but instead ended up making them sound like an extra from a high school Shakespeare production.
Dying because you got run through/eaten/blended: five stars, funny, would get eaten again
Dying because you got clipped by a random hitbox that didn't even look like a deliberate attack: zero stars, frustrating, I cannot believe the absolute jank this game sucks
Somebody is DDoSing Final Fantasy XIV servers today, which means I can't log on and get the 16 million gil deposit on my failed housing swap back.
This was supposed to be a five-minute in-and-out, probably won't be able to get back in until after maintenance.
I'm sure they will figure out how to block the offending bots, but it annoys the shit out of me that the people doing this probably don't even care about the game and are likely only doing this to show off their capabilities.
Managed to get in and, actually, it was 19 mil; happy to have that cash back.
I'm hoping they open a new housing zone in Dawntrail; I like my current house but I'd love to swap up to a medium or large.
Also: housing in Sharlayan or Radz-at-Han would kick ass. So would Crystarium or Bestaways Burrow, but I understand that for spoiler reasons they can't actually do that.
Ngl I expected Fallout to be... funnier? Weirder? More irreverent? The veneer of the original aesthetic is there but an hour in it's just grimdark post-apoc with a splash of (very inconsistent) retro-futurism for flavor.
Am I crazy for expecting it to be goofier? I don't remember the games very much but from what I do remember there was at least a mixture of irreverent silliness in with the deadly serious stuff.
I think consistently referring to counter-protestors as "zionists" is probably misleading; I suspect that while there may be many genuine zionists doing violence to pro-Palestine protestors, there are also probably a bunch of fascists mixed in there who are very much not "zionists" in the traditional sense (other than perhaps that Israel's continued existence provides a potential avenue to ethnically cleanse the US of Jews).
Using that broad brush actually plays into the fascists' agenda.
It is true that many Jewish zionists dishonestly equate anti-zionism with anti-Semitism.
However, this only works because Nazis, the KKK, and other anti-Semites have been using "zionist" as a dog whistle for "Jew" for literally longer than I have been alive (I am in my 40s).
This is why anti-zionist Jews are tetchy about non-Jews calling all violent counter-protestors (many of whom are anti-Semite fascists themselves) "zionists".
Like, if you know for sure that the folks attacking the protestors are Jewish supporters of Israel (which many probably are), then it's fine to call them "Zionist Jews".
And if they are Evangelicals who support Israel but only so all of the Jews can be killed in the Apocalypse, you can call them "Christian Zionists".
If they're nazis, say that.
But as an older, anti-zionist Jew, I still hear "zionists" coming from non-Jews as a thinly-veiled slur.
Tesla: no new car models, slumping sales, cybertruck flop, trouble dealing with governments over self-driving - but massive capital in their charging network which is now the de-facto standard
What you would expect: new or refreshed cars, more aggressive lobbying, big investment in charging network as a profit center
What we're getting: no new cars, massive layoffs in charging network and government relations while pivoting the company to self-driving taxi service...?
The thing with all of these Silicon Valley "transportation" companies is that they genuinely believe the only road to profitability is being "Uber, but without drivers" (this includes, of course, Uber itself).
Tesla could drop its auto manufacture and just make money off being a charging network. It could choose to be a car company and make good, high-quality cars. But they won't do either; they're going to engage in thrash and mission creep until they go bankrupt.
No no Kuni 1: you are a small child from an idyllic town who - after suffering a tragedy - is whisked away to a beautiful, Narnia-like fantasy land where you use the power of friendship to solve people's emotional problems and liberate them from a fantasy villain.
No no Kuni 2: more or less the same premise, but you are the President of the United States and your superpower is "gun".
I got to the first stealth mission in NnK2 and immediately refunded the game, so perhaps my summary isn't 100% accurate. Maybe the President of the United States eventually discovers that friendship is more powerful than gun? I will never know. But kudos to Level-5 for taking a game and setting that couldn't help but be charming and adorable and somehow making it neither of those things.