You must not be that interested in staying in contact with your family if you’re only willing to use one, specific way to do it and simply refuse to use any other method.

How about texting? Does texting work?

This guy obnoxiouses.

Wait, no, that’s not right.

Uh, instructions unclear, dick stuck in Reddit? How’s that?

Consider that we’re evaluating Firefish vs. Lemmy vs. Kbin

There’s a third one I didn’t know about?

That’s gonna be the one to take off. Put your chips on Firefish. It’s always the one I’m not using.

There are alternatives to Lemmy. Kbin, I’d argue, is superior in most respects. (Kbin is still obviously young and rough around the edges at times, though.)

I try to use both equally, because I’m always on the hook for picking the “doomed” standard in any 50/50 contest. It’s easier to read stuff from other instances in kbin, and that gives it the appearance of more frequent and more current activity; lemmy, even on “All/Active” or “All/Hot”, frequently drops 30 threads from one dude at the top of my feed, or I have three pages of threads with no comments and 6 upvotes. So even though I hate how kbin handles viewing pictures thumbnails (click on the post, wait for everything to load, click on the thumbnail, wait for it to load, chuckle, then x out of the picture to read the comments), I end up spending more time there.

It couldn’t happen to a more deserving group of smug, self-satisfied shitheads.

I frequently have to look up whether a term is a misspelling/mistranslation or an actual technical term (or a term in British English, or a British spelling for a technical word). For me, quotes do nothing. It will frequently refuse to look up the term I’m specifically hunting for, just the term it thinks I should be hunting for. Sometimes that means it’s a mistranslation… but not always.

Next time it comes up for me, I’ll keep a note of it and get back to you.

I have an even bigger problem trying to exclude terms from a search. The example I always use is try to look up “Dolphins -football”, and use any version of “-” you’d like (NOT, etc). The first results will always be the latest scores for the Miami Dolphins.

Year 2030 is a global target for renovations in every aspects of societies and countries.

By what method? Is that when the secret computer chip in the vaccine will turn on and kill us? Thereby removing all the people who have shown they’ll do anything the government tells them to do, leaving behind all the staunch and distrustful individualists who are harder to control? Or is this some other global renovation?

Especially since hydrogen as a fuel is a dead-end, so far as I can tell. In addition to the net energy loss that come from separating hydrogen from whatever else it’s attached to in the precursor material (please tell me they’re not using water for this…), who is going to want to drive a 2025 Toyota Hindenburg?

I can’t grasp the whole concept of Discord servers even though I was moderating one. They’re bad as a knowledge base, they’re bad as a discussion platform, so why do people keep creating them?

I mean, as a chat room, it’s fantastic. It’s a massively upgraded IRC (except in terms of the ease of discovering new servers), with QOL features I didn’t even know how badly I wanted back in the old Yahoo! Chat days (such as the ability to spin up a temporary thread to take an in-depth conversation out of the main channel without going to DMs). It’s for discussions that happen right now and are not meant to be conserved forever because, generally speaking, they’re not expected to be that important. I love discord for that, because I miss chat rooms.

But it’s absolutely garbage for being a repository of static knowledge. Releasing patch notes only in discord is ridiculous.

I wish people would stop trying to use Discord as an information repository/hub. It’s a chat program. It’s designed for people to engage in transient, real-time back-and-forth communication, not to store discussions or information for long-term use. I get so cranky at people who insist that Discord can be used like a web forum when it so obviously sucks nuts at it.

A forum has content that can stay up indefinitely, where the message history on narrowly defined subjects is packaged into a convenient container and is visible as far back in time as one cares to go. It’s easily searchable, and old discussions for which a user has new questions can be brought back up to the top of the list, in full. Trying to recreate that kind of functionality on Discord is not only stupid, but also generally futile. It’s the exact opposite of what Discord is intended to be.

I think one of the big problems is that we, as humans, are very easily fooled by something that can look or sound “alive”. ChatGPT gets a lot of hype, but it’s primarily coming from a form of textual pareidolia.

It’s hard to convince people that ChatGPT has absolutely no idea what it’s saying. It’s putting words together in a human-enough way that we assume it has to be thinking and it has to know things, but it can’t do either. It’s not even intended to try to do either. That’s not what it’s for. It takes the rules of speech and a massive amount of data on which word is most likely to follow which other word, and runs with it. It’s a super-advanced version of a cell phone keyboard’s automatic word suggestions. Even just asking it to correct the punctuation on a complex sentence is too much to ask (in my experiment on this matter, it gave me incorrect answers 4 times, until I explicitly told it how it was supposed to treat coordinating conjunctions).

And for most uses, that’s good enough. Tell it to include a few extra rules, depending on what you’re trying to create, and watch it spin out a yarn. But I’ve had several conversations with ChatGPT, and I’ve found it incredibly easy to “break”, in the sense of making it produce things that sound somewhat less human and significantly less rational. What concerns me about ChatGPT isn’t necessarily that it’s going to take my job, but that people believe it’s a rational, thinking, calculating thing. It may be that some part of us is biologically hard-wired to; it’s probably that same part that keeps seeing Jesus on burnt toast.