with a LLM I can be open without any baggage involved, I can be more raw and honest than I would or could be with any human because the information never leaves my computer.

😐

One of my family members participated in one such project, she wrote scenarios for a number of video lectures for schoolkids. It was bad, it was really fucking bad, and I could write an essay explaining why it was so, there’s a wide variety of reasons ranging across the technical, legal, administrative, etc. Just one example: you’re making a lecture about art? Yeah, go contact the copyright holders if they would be merciful enough to allow us to use the artwork in the video.

And your idea that the default approach should be that kids have no interaction with their teachers is honestly horrifying.

They already did something similar back in the day. I remember watching a music video some ~10 years ago where they placed an ad like five seconds before the end of the song, right at the musical climax, ruining the mood with surgical precision. I was absolutely infuriated and went off to Google wondering if there’s a way to block ads. And the rest is history.

Any good free alternatives?

You won’t like the idea but…

That’s honestly enraging!? Such data can be greatly valuable for learners, and the native speakers’ community, and linguistics.

Tbh I find that they were always surprisingly lenient on piracy. There are multiple subreddits about piracy websites, some of which had their Telegram channels blocked multiple times in the last year or two, while having no issues on reddit, and even some subreddits where people directly link to pirated content.

No. Qanon stuff mostly happened on 8chan, and even then there’s no secret “historical” data to access. It was one or multiple obsessed and/or manipulative people spreading insane ideas anonymously, and idiots falling for it. There’s no secret inside some system out there, it’s essentially just organic stupidity. Some believe the guy who owned 8chan was “Q”, it’s not an unreasonable idea, but it changes nothing.

In an ideal society, IP laws would definitely not exist. The idea by itself is inarguably desirable.

But, more practically, IP laws should be abolished or reformed to accommodate the needs of the average creator and the average consumer. The two people who proposed this change are not average creators in the slightest, they’re looking to benefit primarily their own class, the consequences for the other 99.99% are irrelevant.

A reform of this type should start at the very least with small and realistic steps. Can we e.g. reduce the absurd duration of copyright protection (author’s life + 70 years)? Reducing it by just 20-30 years would be an incredible boon to human culture, and it would have zero serious negative consequences.

But they only talk about it in the most vague terms, no details or anything, and Dorsey doesn’t seem to have actually described any of those other ways of compensation. They’re just greedy megalomaniacs throwing ideas around.

The issue that the article raises is legitimate, but actually looking through their archives is baffling, they’re really just hellbent on shitting on WP. One of their most read articles says Wikipedia should attract more female editors by reducing the anonymity on the site and making it more like a social media platform. What the hell? https://wikipediocracy.com/why-women-have-no-time-for-wikipedia/

The iPhones must flow.

The way it does math is mostly as people have already assumed - approximating instead of doing it “manually”. It’s 2025 and at this point absolutely nobody should be surprised that AI “confidently describe[s] the standard grade-school method, concealing its actual, bizarre reasoning process”.

As for poetry,

Here, the model settled on the word “rabbit” as the word to rhyme with while it was processing “grab it.” Then, it appeared to construct the next line with that ending already decided, eventually spitting out the line “His hunger was like a starving rabbit.”

this is exactly how many poets write rhymed poetry too, it’s not even remotely bizarre.

Still, it is interesting and good to see some concrete advancement in the study of AI reasoning. Hopefully it will contribute towards reducing the mystification of the whole thing.

I don’t think piracy is legal anywhere.

The device knows what time it is at all times. It knows this because it knows what time it isn’t.

While I was looking for an alternative to Goodreads, which was widely known to be horrible long before the recent push against these big corpos, I tried BookWyrm (my first contact with the fediverse). I like their approach and wish them success, but what put me off is exactly what you say, the data they use is messy and lacks a lot of info. E.g. one of the things that makes (or at least made) GR satisfying is the visual aspect, you get these cool charts with the book covers, but Open Library doesn’t have covers on so many books. So should I go to Google Images and add covers for 80% of my “library” of like 500 books? Lots of work.

For comparison, TMDb, which is the source of data for Letterboxd, seems to have about as high-quality if not better data than IMDb that it is an alternative to (idk if it’s FOSS though?).

I’ve manually added many dozens books to Goodreads, so I’m not against assisting a site I use and enjoy. (Ofc at this point I regret improving that garbage site.) But the lack of data on BookWyrm was just too much even for me.

So in the end I just switched to the simplest solution: LibreOffice Calc. But we do need an alternative to GR. I came across BookBrainz a few years ago, it was still early in development. Today it might be better, I should give it a shot and maybe add some data there…

I’m not sure if #ebooks mirrors Libgen. I wouldn’t be surprised if they copy from each other.

It is unclear to me what’s the method to upload to #ebooks. I’ve uploaded some obscure books to Libgen in the past, so I checked whether they’re available on #ebooks, and they’re not. So… they don’t mirror each other. I checked both UnderNet and IRCHighway, and the latter even directed me to these websites in case I’m looking for textbooks. It doesn’t seem like an adequate replacement for LG, at least for my purposes.

I have allergies against ads, countdowns, etc. The interweb is polluted with that stuff and so are most piracy sites.

As I’ve said, this is not a big issue with the sites listed on the uptime tracker I linked. Libgen.is and Z-library have neither (the latter has daily download limits per IP), AA has a countdown (not always), and libgen.li has ads (which I had no idea about until I saw other people mentioning it, thanks to uBlock).

Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t #ebooks basically just mirror Libgen?

Among the major book downloading websites, only libgen.li has ads, and only Anna’s Archive has a countdown.

It’s been offline for like a month, maybe more, I haven’t kept track. I don’t know any details, maybe there’s info on their forums, but overall the owners are quite secretive.

deleted by creator

Kruschev

Actually Khrushchev. For some reason, х gets converted to kh. The rest is slightly stupid but at least understandable why it is so - щ was historically ш+ч, thus sh+ch (this pronunciation is still normal in Ukrainian, but not in Russian anymore), and the ‘e’ is just based on the usual spelling.

How did you even do that, assuming you didn’t prevent your usage of computers and smartphones altogether? Just sheer willpower?