This is the kind of AI/machine learning I can get behind, especially given it may sort of help even out some of its energy use in the process. More of this application of the tech could be great if the results hold up.

Sort of odd to see this again (from Vox as well, I think?). It seems to add more detail, but the bottom line remains the same: it’s largely because fewer people are trying to immigrate into the U.S. since the Trump admin entered office.

Trump might struggle to ramp up deportations along the border, as Obama did, simply because significantly fewer people are coming. In March, border apprehensions fell to 7,181, a 95 percent decrease from March 2024.

This all sucks, and another part that sucks about it is that as usual, in the absence of as many of the Republicans’/conservatives’ favorite scapegoats, they begin turning inward and grabbing anyone and everyone that remotely resembles those scapegoats to abuse and deport to appeal to their base. Without more pushback, and as those deportation numbers continue to dwindle, you can expect that they’ll begin more widely rounding up their detractors (or at least attempting to).

Odd url…Here’s the original: https://futurism.com/chatgpt-polluted-ruined-ai-development

Nice detail to use when searching the internet btw:

“But if you’re collecting data before 2022 you’re fairly confident that it has minimal, if any, contamination from generative AI,” he added. “Everything before the date is ‘safe, fine, clean,’ everything after that is ‘dirty.’”

Try running searches set pre-2022, at least for older info, to reduce the possibilities of AI generated noise.

Anyway, kinda funny to see these generators may be producing enough noise to make producing more noise somewhat harder. Hopefully this doesn’t also impact more productive AI development, such as what’s used in scientific research and the like, as that would genuinely suck.

Edit:
Revised from generators “have produced” to “may be producing” to better reflect the lack of concrete info regarding generative AI data pollution as someone else pointed out. As they note:

“Now, it’s not clear to what extent model collapse will be a problem, but if it is a problem, and we’ve contaminated this data environment, cleaning is going to be prohibitively expensive, probably impossible,” he told The Register.

This timing is pretty amusing.

The other day I shared this video (Failure of Battlebit Remastered), which itself was uploaded by its creator only a week ago.

It’s great to see the devs coming back to it. Tbh I don’t think it’s my sort of game personally, but I typically prefer to see projects revisited and restored well instead of abandoned.

In a better world, this (or one of its forks) would have taken off instead of Mastodon. It makes a way better case for itself by its distinct features compared to Mastodon, which is too easy to ignore (by everyday people) as Nerd-Twitter.

There’s an extra treat buried in this article…

The diarist John Evelyn, whose 1661 treatise Fumifugium focused on London’s growing pollution problem, had no doubt that Parr’s death was caused by “the Aer, which plainly wither’d him”

Fumifugium is such a great title!

Honestly this article gets better as you go…We could use a modern medical series like the old “Anatomy of Quackery” to debunk the insidious nonsense still being spread today!

Cryptocurrency orgs have done one job extremely well here, and that’s blatantly demonstrate that the best way to try to fast track legislation is Big Money.

It’s like how all the cryptocurrency screwups demonstrate why there are financial regulations to begin with, now they’re inadvertently helping demonstrate extremely clearly why we need to get money out of politics.

There’s something a little like this in the form of https://portal.alien.top/

However, as I understand it that currently only works with that specific site/instance (alien.top). Not aware of any others that may do so.

Desktop friendly link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drugstore_beetle

That aside, you’re not kidding:

It belongs to the family Ptinidae, which also includes the deathwatch beetle, furniture beetle and cigarette beetle.

Talk about a wild family.

Some apps (e.g. Voyager/Thunder) and web frontends (Tesseract? not sure which tbh) enable keyword filtering.

In the case of the apps, it’s found in settings under filters & blocks or filters, respectively. Unfortunately I can’t recall which web frontends enable it for sure, but I do remember there seemed to be fewer of them that did last I checked.

Personally I dislike anything with -verse involved because big companies have run it into the ground and then some.

The boring, dry ways of describing them work best in my opinion.

Federated forums is the driest, most technical and to the point but not very telling.

Swap out forum for link aggregator and you have similar, arguably even more technical (certainly more of a mouthful).

Connected/linked forums might be more approachable, more readily conveying how these are separate forums but networked together.

Cross-forums may work as well to the same end, but not sure how immediately understandable cross may be in this context and outside of gaming spaces.

Whatever the case I kind of think this has things backwards. What’s more important than describing and talking about the backend tech is pointing people to any of the sites built with them that have anything of interest to them to bother with. I can’t think of anything online I’ve ever gone to or used because someone told me it was using Apache, Nginx, phpBB, or like an Open Source Web Server or using such and such CDN.

The reason why is simple: next to nobody talks like that. The only people that might are deep in web dev.

Keep an eye on !webrevival@lemm.ee, search via Marginalia Search, and check out the ooh directory among other things.

Also look out for webrings (or similar) on some of the sites you may find, as they can help you find other likeminded net people.

Some people are trying to bring back some of the old navigation methods, but with some improvements, to keep the open net around.

Going off the headline alone makes me think of when the idea of putting cosmetic patches on things felt cool. Personally I still think it’s cool, maybe others do too, I dunno.

Anyway, repairing things is cool whether it’s electronic or cloth!

The thumbnail had me thinking this was some strange creature waving until I opened it and saw the good friends goofing about.

Penn’s theory is that at some point during its race, No. 9,550 decided to rest on a cargo ship and hitched a ride across the Atlantic.

Sometimes you just casually fall asleep on a ship and find yourself going across an ocean.

RIP, take my wheels away, I wiped out on the wheelie!

It weally was, I can’t believe I whiffed that wheelie

Aah, so I think Play Store is up to date but F-Droid isn’t, check again here: https://f-droid.org/packages/app.vger.voyager/

Unless this updates between me commenting & you checking (or browser cache is messing with me), it still shows v2.29.1 for F-Droid.

Checked the other day and it hasn’t gone up via F-Droid repo yet. I just downloaded the updated version from Github since it was bugging me.