My biggest pain point with Duck is that the minus operator doesn’t seem to do anything. Have to use Startpage (!s) when in need of excluding a word.

The most immature billionaire. Scary.

It certainly is somewhere around the peak of the hype cycle.

It appears that users in this case include agents such as software. A bit confusing for the general public.

For instance, a malicious app obtained from an app store could use the Downfall attack to steal sensitive information like passwords, encryption keys, and private data such as banking details, personal emails, and messages.

—Official website

It can theoretically even be exploited via a browser:

[Q] What about web browsers?

[A] In theory, remotely exploiting this vulnerability from the web browser is possible. In practice, demonstrating successful attacks via web browsers requires additional research and engineering efforts.

—FAQ at the official website

A “sassy personality” just puts the assistant into the uncanny valley for me. I prefer it to just do its job and not try to fool me into anthropomorphizing it.

But the name was pretty cool, though, as noted by another commenter, not the easiest to pronounce.

For a second or two I thought that you didn’t even get any actual ink. I had seen a post about multi-function printers refusing to scan if you’re out of ink, and I thought perhaps you could buy a card with an unlock code for such situations (hence “instant ink”). That’s not too unbelievable these days though, is it?

Yeah, right.

Perhaps politicians should concentrate on making it so there’s less depressing stuff in the world for anyone to see and hear, and not creating more of it with things like this rubbish bill. 🤷‍♀️

I would like to hear the rest of the story, please.

despite the fact that I’ve watched half of them already and ignored the other half for months now

What’s up with that anyway? You don’t have to have a fancy algorithm to not show me the things I’ve watched already!

Also congrats on finding new hobbies. Sometimes we forget that there’s life outside of screens. Or perhaps not many have the energy for anything beyond staring at the black mirror.

I guess that’s also what you’re saying.

Yep. And it’s gonna get so much worse once LLMs are mainstream. Perhaps they have been for some time. After all, the Dead Internet theory precedes the onslaught of ChatGPT.

I’ve been passively wondering how long it will be until I have to start adding before:2023 to get remotely useful web search results on any topic. Don’t know what to try yet if I need to look up something from after that.

Yes, that’s very sad. And what would we get in return for losing the Web to the bots? Nothing but automatic expensive BS at scale.

Oh yeah, definitely. I just meant that as an ironic silver lining, the damage would probably be worse if there wasn’t already some level of dishonesty and deception in society, because then we’d be too pure to have any defences against LLMs.

Sorry for the misunderstanding. You’re right. Distrust is essential to critical thinking also. Maybe once everyone learns to assume that you absolutely shouldn’t trust anything on the internet (and especially not anything produced by ChatGPT), it will be easier to combat the spread of fake news and nefarious propaganda. But I doubt it. Even smart people seem to fall into this trap, lured by the plausibility of the output, as was shown by Mozilla recently.

Hm. It’s also exactly the kind of disingenuousness that that humans have spent a couple million years evolving to try to detect, though.

I agree, but by now there’s probably no reason to make people write those kind of things. It’s likely that no human oversight is needed at all. Astroturfing can now be nearly completely automated.

I wonder if the LLMs are going to win this. Maybe more likely: When everyone realizes that the entire Internet is being flooded with even more bullshit, we’ll just stop trusting it, and the LLMs will more or less have put themselves out of a job.

One good thing about perfect bullshit generators is that they might help us abolish bullshit things like cover letters and marketing copy. But that’s a very small gain considering the massive loss of trust in the web and making it a glitchy, spammy, scammy experience.

It would be funny if the propensity for humans to lie to each other meant that we were basically already inoculated from this terrifying new category of machines that we’ve designed to lie to us too.

On the contrary, I believe our inherent ability to trust each other is one of the main pillars of civilization, and undisclosed use of LLMs heavily undermines it.

That is exactly the type of content LLMs were designed to excel at generating.

small player

Tee hee!

British Cycling is sponsored by oil company Shell.

— Reuters

British Cycling is the Host partner of the championship, according to the official website of the championship (linked to at the UCI website, “Organizer website” section), and its partner is Shell UK (announcement).

Someone pointed it out in the comments before, but it’s neatly summarized now 😝

Isn’t the software supposed to correct for such false input in most cases?

I always thought Uber was supposed to be like carpooling.

That’s ~4.74 kilometers, by the way.

The status quo is the problem, so it would have to be some basic logic defying magic.

YouTube should be a part of the public infrastructure.

While I understand the intention here is to reassure people that not all is lost and there’s still time for action, a take like this is going to be paraphrased into “climate change is overblown and isn’t something to worry about” by Big Oil and other major polluters.