Did they remove channel blocking recently? Something very undesirable appeared on my recommendations this week, and when I went to the channel to block it it the button wasn’t there, and worse still me going to the channel auto played more of its shit. So now YouTube think I want more.

It’s hardly tinfoil hat time - I defy you to name a single poster anywhere on Lemmy who reads more like a repost bot or engagement farmer than that particular user.

Yup. Also the post captions always read a bit too engagmentey, if that makes sense? Like either the account is a bot, or it’s one that being run cynically by a farm who’s following a set of guidelines to maximize reach over anything like sincere interest or value or humanity.

I’d recently blocked “LadyButterfly she/her” because I was getting fed up of her constant low effort ragebait, so I was surprised to see this post appear on my feed - it turns out she’s posting from multiple instances, presumably to get around either blocks or bans.

I’m reminded of Jon Ronson’s observation in “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed”, that the religious right are surprisingly tolerant of sexual misconduct scandals in a way that progressives aren’t.

The current MAGA position seems to be that they weren’t children, they were just very very very young adults…

The kind of people they’re pissing off with this, are the same people most likely to switch to bittorrent.

One quirk of github copilot is that because it lets you choose which model to send a question to, you can gaslight Opus into apologising for something that gpt-4o told you.

I recently had an interaction where it made a really weird comment about a function that didn’t make sense, and when I asked it to explain what it meant, it said “let me have another look at the code to see what I meant”, and made up something even more nonsensical.

It’s clear why it happened as well; when I asked it to explain itself, it had no access to its state of mind when it made the original statement; it has no memory of its own beyond the text the middleware feeds it each time. It was essentially being asked to explain what someone who wrote what it wrote, might have been thinking.

My 3rd generation iPad became functionally useless after only 6-7 years even though the hardware was pristine. Almost half of the apps on it, including some major ones like YouTube, started refusing to run because they had a mandatory Update, and the App Store wouldn’t provide updates for the newest iOS version that the 3rd gen could support.

Meanwhile my Windows laptop that I bought at the same time is still in service after 12 years. Windows going out of support just means you don’t get the security updates; Apple going out of support means they’ll brick your machine.

Fuck Apple to infinity.

They spend over £50,000,000/year on care, research, and conservation.

A significant portion of what we know about the ancient world is a direct result of their research sharing and activities; for example when the Rosetta Stone was in French hands they kept it to themselves, when it was in Egypt they did nothing with it, but when it came to Britain it was shared with research departments across Europe as well as in Britain, resulting in our ability today to read hieroglyphics and demotic script.

Think about that for a second: if the Rosetta Stone had been left in Egypt, there’s every possibility that Egyptians today would still have no idea about most of their own history or how to read their own ancient texts. You might dismiss this as paternalistic or white-savioury, but it’s true nonetheless.

Even as recently as last year we had researchers finding things like https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/babylonian-map-world-0021631 that simply wouldn’t have happened without the British Museum’s work. So, I’m inclined to cut them some slack.

Some of those are astonishing.

Safety Index: 71st, lower than Belarus, Lebanon, and Egypt.

Healthcare: 39th, worse than Argentina, Sri Lanka and Mexico

People give the British Museum a lot of shit, but it’s free all year round for everyone.

Those films are weird in that I enjoy them while I’m sitting there, but the moment it finishes I couldn’t name or describe a single one of the characters in it or any details of the plot.

It’s because they messed up a fundamental principle of character design - we can tell real human faces apart because our brains are highly tuned to it, but with cartoons and CGI faces you need to really exaggerate differences to get them to stick in the mind. The Avatar team tried to go for some notion of realism instead, and tripped over their own feet with a lineup who are virtually indistinguishable from each other.

It’s an issue with cost, but that also extends to the perception of the degree itself. Even a few decades ago I always found American culture to be generally more disdainful towards degrees and degree holders than most of Europe or Asia.

One of the worst things you can be in America is “elitist”; it’s a loaded word that describes a fundamentally Un-American attitude. And you can see why - there’s plenty of idiots with rich parents and a degree, and a lot of intelligent people with poor parents and no degree. So elitism and intellectual snobbery also imply classism and racism.

In countries with free/cheap tertiary education, it’s less controversial to say that people who are qualified to do a thing are likely to be better at that thing, and that getting qualifications is inherently a good thing.

In some ways it’s just as well to occasionally get a reminder that loyalty to a brand is a fundamentally bullshit concept in the first place.

Epic Boss Tim Sweeney can go fuck himself

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

If you can’t get your LLM to not deny the holocaust, then your LLM is not ready to get platformed on a major internet site.

I do too, but all the ones I used to visit have gone offline, and whenever I try looking for one on some relevant topic the most recent post is from 2017.