The world tends to find that having an extraordinarily wealthy parent makes its own luck.

Exactly. Unfortunately “move fast and break things” has some disadvantages when it comes to driving in traffic.

At first I read that as an old printer from a school, and thought that was a very weird thing to want, but then I realised you meant a printer that was old school, and it all suddenly made sense to me!

I’m happy to let mods carve out a bunch of niche communities with their own preferences. The fediverse is a big place. If you don’t like instances that are protective of LGBT+ folks you’re cutting it down a bit, but genuinely, you seem to be deliberately picking topics that troll the specific community you’re posting on, then you complained that they took it down. Post where your post will be welcome, stop complaining when you post where you already know it’s not. Reddit and twitter are pretty right wing and troll friendly. Maybe you’ll be happier there.

Paint roller

Actually made me laugh, thank you.

True. But the word Monad has done more harm to the accessibility, popularity and reputation of pure functional programming than pretty much anything else.

Yeah, I could have said circle rather than curve of constant normal intersection points, but that word is very commonly understood, so it’s not that same as unnecessarily calling something a Monad. Maybe it’s the equivalent of calling it a 2-manifold instead of a wheel.

Perhaps just ditch the generalisation, then, and just call them Result or Maybe. After all, circle is a short word, but we just call them wheels.

Don’t call it a monad, call it a structured data type or something, that’s what it is! Calling it a monad is like saying that you’re using a curve of constant normal intersection point. Why not just say it’s a wheel?

Yes, it’s mathematically true that you’re having a smooth ride precisely because the normals have a constant intersection point, but it’s also true to say that it’s a wheel and it goes round and isn’t bumpy and doesn’t scrape, and people can get a handle on that.

So yeah, use a Result or Option or Maybe structured data type because it keeps explicit track of whether there’s a value or not, and yeah, you can change or combine them and preserve the tracking, but there’s no point calling it a monad unless you’re trying to make people believe that avoiding the $1bn mistake of allowing/using null requires category theory. It doesn’t, it’s just a structured data type. It’s simpler than an array! Stop calling it a monad.

Well, universal, anyway.

I don’t think I have an iron in this fire, but I do think that filtering some crap out of a gullible person’s Internet feed is way kinder and way healthier than cutting them out of your life completely.

I’m afraid that Minister for Gender Equality is far, far more likely to be attacked as woke by the right than Minister for Women.

Well, sounds like you’re well on your way to hand-rolling your own product comparison tool that’s Powered By AI TM. You could make a popular price comparison site that initially filters out all that cruft and just gives you simple, clear, easy to read information about products.

Version 2 could have handy links to the cheapest websites.

Once it gets super popular you could offer retailers the chance to ensure their products and prices are correct. Perhaps a nice easy AI powered upload where you dump the info on whatever format you like, check it’s understood and go live.

You could later offer retailers the chance to host a store front with you, or maybe allow initially just one or two, very tasteful, clearly marked-as-advertisment links for strictly AI-sanctioned relevant upselling, you know, offer the warranty with the product, or the printer with the fancier ink alongside the ones that exactly matched the criteria.

Once your engagement with retailers is strong, and they know they’ll be missing out on a lot of custom, you can start maximising your income from them.

Or, wait did this whole cycle repeat itself many times over with many websites and many corporations?

Enshitification is real, and it’s already AI powered. We don’t know exactly why what’s in front of us when we’re online is the thing that is most likely to get us to keep scrolling and clicking and purchasing and maximising profits, but it’s reasonable to assume that on a lot of successful websites, some sort of AI system chose it for exactly those purposes.

It’s nice that you feel AI will get us away from the power of the multinational corporations, but I think it’s vastly more likely that the AI we use will fall under their control and they will be twenty steps ahead of us. They were the ones who popularised it in the first place!

(Personally, I tend to use some reviewing sites that I trust and in particular for phones, a spec agreggator so I can filter out the five year old products that amazon is offering me.)

You know that a LLM is a statistical word prediction thing, no? That LLMs “hallucinate”. That this is an inevitable consequence of how they work. They’re designed to take in a context and then sound human, or sound formal, or sound like an excellent programmer, or sound like a lawyer, but there’s no particular reason why the content that they present to you would be accurate. It’s just that their training data contains an awful lot of accurate data which has a surprisingly large amount of commonality of meaning.

You say that the current crop of LLMs are good at Wikipedia style questions, but that’s because their authors have trained them with some of the most reliable and easy to verify information on the Web. A lot of that is Wikipedia style stuff. That’s it’s core knowledge, what it grew up reading, the yardstick by which it was judged. And yet it still goes off on inaccurate tangents because there’s nothing inherently accurate about statistically predicting the next word based on your training and the context and content of the prompt.

Yes, LLMs sound like they understand your prompt and are very knowledgeable, but the output is fundamentally not a fact-based thing, it’s a synthesized thing, engineered to sound like its training data.

I don’t know why you want to use an AI to purchase goods and learn about products. That’s what the current www is really really strong at. Lots of people are spending an awful lot of money to make that information really easy to discover, and popular search engines definitely prioritise that information.

Also, if an AI is to give you price and product information it’s going to have to be reading live web pages, which will of course be full of ads. SEO will become AIO/LLMO. There is no end to the time and money advertisers are prepared to pour into getting products in front of users. The irony is that you seem to want to view products and you have this weird perspective where you’re keen to avoid ads for products so that you can view marketing information about products without the ads.

It’s already fairly hard to tell without knowing some good websites or reading through to conclusions and using some common sense whether a review website is honest or biased. I don’t know why you think an AI with access to the Internet will filter out fake reviews and content crafted to lead you to specific products over others.

Also, downloading and configuring your own AI is unlikely to be the way the “AI revolution” comes. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple and other mega corporations will be funding the “AI revolution” and will not sit idly by allowing their kingdoms to crumble.

The number of people who will be saved from the corporations that run the online world by open source grass roots AI will be smaller than the number of people who are saved by Linux from proprietory products and SAAS.

Yeah, everyone will get used to using an AI to interact with the web, but it will be freely supplied by a corporation, and I PROMISE you the enshitification of AI has been long planned before we even reach step one of making it awesome for the masses.

I use the liftoff app, which automatically asks if I want to switch instance when I try to upvote something elsewhere. If it’s not on my home instance, I go back and subscribe, problem fixed.

I was fired for “fraternisation in the workplace”. Teenage me was caught snogging the boss’s daughter, no less, in the stock area by said boss. Cue “get your hands off my daughter” (he didn’t know we were dating) and a meeting later that day being told much more calmly I was being let go for fraternisation. I said it was unfair because he kissed his wife in front of us the previous week, and he said “not that way,” and he had a point, but it was still obviously unfair.

Anyway, we started deliberately dating in secret instead of her just not really telling him, and when she rang me she always called me Samantha, which I then used to find exciting (Freud eat your heart out).

I’m convinced that she found it exciting to be disobeying her dad, and would complain to me about her dad saying something like “he’s just trying to take advantage of you” and we would reassure each other that I wasn’t but she would be much keener those days, it felt like.

When you’re a teenager and you find a magic button that gets you nice things, you don’t hold back on pressing the button, so if she got a bit unenthusiastic about meeting up, I’d just ring her at home knowing full well that her dad would shout at me if he answered and her mum would quietly also refuse to put me through but tell her to stop me from ringing because it might upset her dad. She’d argue with her parents and get revenge by seeing me and behaving in a manner she new her parents to find improper.

It was really fun while it lasted, but in the end I felt like I shouldn’t have to provoke her dad to get with her and stopped doing it. We drifted apart, I don’t know whether her heart wasn’t in it when she wasn’t cross with her dad or I just started worrying about that too much, but I’m pretty sure her dad had been my unintentional wing man all those months. I really think it’s properly messed up.

She later dated a guy who I think really was trying to take advantage of her. Also messed up.

Anyway, I got a job at the big chain version of his store and of course she and her friends started shopping there, which resulted in more arguments with her dad.

I guess the moral of the story is make sure you’re on good terms with your teenage daughter or she might just go against everything you said just to spite you.

In real life? My mate’s wifi is called “Error 503 Service Unavailable”.

I’m not who you were speaking to, but back when I used to read it occasionally, the stack overflow blog repeatedly mentioned that the vast majority of its traffic comes from Google. If the vast majority of your traffic comes from Google and then your traffic quantity changes dramatically, it’s reasonable to look to the source of your traffic.

But I think they can still see that you visited 9gag, just not which pages in 9gag (possibly after the first request) because https hides the details after you connect to their server.

That’s really really really annoying, as someone who has a good, strong brain-based password algorithm and hates it when websites forbid my strong password forcing me to make an exception.