Since I have a creeping suspicion this instance is blocked by many instances on the fediverse I am going to move to another one in a couple of days.

@mozilla - word of advice: make your LLM-slop in #firefox configurable so nobody has to fiddle around in their about:config section to switch it OFF. OFF! not "hide" - OFF!

nobody asked for this!

Guess my new occupation will be to search and deactivate all the shoe-horned AI/LLM features out of the programs I use that nobody ever asked for. I hate tech sometimes :(

One of the reasons I'm so skeptical of AI getting shoved into everything is that it is not forward-looking, it's just reinforcing all of the bad systems and processes we already have. It's not just that I miss a past, pre-AI world (though I do), it's that when I think of a genuinely better future, it mostly involves ripping out the systems that AI is trying its hardest to perpetuate.

AI is not the future, it's the present, repeated endlessly.

Oh, there's a new Debian out. Let me take a nice long sip from my drink and check to see how out-of-date the version of XScreenSaver they chose is...

Dumb jokes are sometimes the best jokes 🙃

:neofox_flop:

Mitten in Süddeutschland gibt es ein kleines gallisches Dorf, in dem sich die Bewohner entschieden haben , die Immobilienbodenspekulanten aus diesem Dorf auszusperren. Resultat: bezahlbare Wohnungen
Wie: nur der #Boden, der der Stadt gehört, darf Baurecht bekommen und #bauland mit #baurecht, der nicht bebaut wird , muss zurück zur Stadt ( #Ulm).
https://www.ardaudiothek.de/episode/urn:ard:episode:34a64c0fe960cc71/
Ab Min 12/16
#Wohnen
#Mieten
#Stadtplanung
#mietshausersyndikat
#Commons
#bodenpolitik
#Kooperation statt #Konkurrenz

Let's imagine you're colorblind. The kind of colorblindness that only allows you to see grayscale - no colors at all - but everything else is fine.

You're stressed and need fidget toy - so a friend hands you a ball, roughly filling your hand. It's hard, but somewhat squishy, and has a weird fabric-like, furry texture. You now want to know what color that ball is. But, well, you're colorblind, and your friend already disappeared and isn't reachable - probably riding a Deutsche Bahn train or something.

So you take a picture and post it to a "what color is this?" subreddit. Seems reasonable. You get 200 responses - 198 of them say "it's yellow", two of them say "it's pink". A few people helpfully say it's a "tennis ball". That's helpful, because even the Wikipedia article states that only yellow and white tennis balls are officially approved colors. Sweet.

A few days later, a random person approaches you and says "wow, cool ball - what color is it?" and you say "yellow!". Alright, end of the chat. A LLM would do exactly the same - given the "yellow" responses far outnumbered the "pink" responses, your ball is probably yellow. Ball==yellow is something both you and the LLM "learned". A few weeks after that, another friend asks you "ALice has a ball, too! Do you know which color her ball is?" - and now it gets interesting.

The LLM would immediately say "yellow". Of course it would. It makes sense. Yellow is the most likely response to that question.

But you're not an LLM - you're a human, and your brain is cool. Instead of saying "yellow", you respond "huh I don't actually know that? My ball is yellow, maybe she has a similar ball. But it could also be that she has a completely different ball that might a different color! Also, lol, I'm colorblind, so I can't really answer that anyway - you should ask Alice." And now, your brain is already doing better than any LLM. Your logical thinking engine already realized that you don't actually know something, and you're honest enough to just say that. Your job isn't to be a ball color guesser, you're just a person.

Wait, it's gets more fun! A few weeks after that, you hang out with me. You hand me your ball, and say "hey look at my cool yellow ball!". Oddly enough, my reaction is "huh? this ball isn't yellow, it's a pink tennis ball..." and now things get funky. If you were an LLM, you would either insist that no, your ball is absolutely yellow - or you'd come up with some kind of "oh, sorry for the misunderstanding - it's pink, you're correct", almost implying that my definition of color is different - and the next time someone asks you about the color of your ball, you'd still say "Yellow!!" again. Because of course, there's still only three people claiming it's pink, and still 198 people saying it's yellow.

But you're not an LLM. You're human, and your sexy human brain immediately goes into a "uhhh we have a conflict of information! how exciting! let's figure things out!" You now have to conflicting hypotheses, and you're thinking about ways to experiment on your ball to learn more. And you have an idea! You know your additive color mixing theory, so you realize that your phone camera can take pictures and you can look at the RGB values. If it's yellow, you'd expect to see lots of red and green but no blue - but if it's pink, you'd see lots of red and blue, but no green! You can test that!

So you take a photo, and... rgb(255, 0, 255). Turns out your ball is actually pink! It's still a tennis ball, but a fun one not meant for official tournaments, so it's pink! Wow! You immediately learned something new - and from now on, if someone asks you about the color of your ball, you'll say "pink!" and you'll have a heck of a story to tell alongside. Also, after some self-reflection, you realize that the subreddit your posted your image to wasn't a real "what color is this?" subreddit - it was one of those "false answers only" shitposting subreddits. Whoops.

This process of having assumptions, but being able to question them, to come up with tests for it, and to immediately change your opinion on something when you have good evidence for it is what makes humans awesome. You don't rely on the majority of people screaming "pink!" at you. You don't need to rely on manual weights that give some sources more weight than other sources - you can independently process information and deduct things. Give your brain a pat on the.. uh.. cranium.

LLMs can be a useful tool, maybe. But don't anthropomorphize them. They don't know anything, they don't think, they don't learn, they don't deduct. They generate real-looking text based on what is most likely based on the information it has been trained on. If your prompt is about something that's common and the majority of online-text is right, you'll most likely get a right answer out of the LLM. But if you're asking something that not a lot of real people had interactions on, the LLM will still generate text for you - but it might be complete nonsense. You're just getting whatever text is "statistically most likely".

If you're a coder stuck on something, identify a colleague or friend who is more knowledgeable in that specific area. They'll happily help you out and provide all sorts of fun added context that'll allow you to learn. If you're a nerd on the internet who enjoys ranting on social media, just do it yourself instead of having an LLM generate it, because that'll allow you to insert some bad jokes and a bit of your own personality to it instead of just getting a "default-feeling" text. If you're a manager in charge of something and you need to come up with new directions to push your company towards, go take a walk outside and listen to some cool music and let your ideas roam free - don't ask an LLM to generate the statistically-most-likely direction for your project, because that's by definition the opposite of creative and innovative.

Use your brains.

It’s release day for Debian 13 “trixie”! Across the world, the release, publicity, images, and FTP teams are making their final preparations for the new stable release. #debian #debian13 #trixie #ReleasingDebianTrixie

@pzmyers

Die Mitte-Kandidatin Brosius-Gersdorf wurde Ziel einer inszenierten Fake-Kampagne und zog sich jetzt zurück. Es entspricht 1:1 einem autoritären Masterplan, der unsere Demokratie zerstören will. https://www.volksverpetzer.de/aktuelles/masterplan-brosius-gersdorf-cancel/?utm_source=mstdn

Der Rückzug von Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf ist ein Sieg der rechten Hetzer – der nur durch die Unterstützung von CDU und CSU möglich war.
https://taz.de/!6102139

#MeatCanyon 's stuff is the most bizarre thing I've seen since Salad Fingers or Llamas with hats.

From sunburn to swimming pools, the sun triggers chemical reactions all around us. The latest edition of #PeriodicGraphics in C&EN shines a light on some of the molecular transformations driven by the sun's rays: https://cen.acs.org/physical-chemistry/Periodic-Graphics-Chemistry-sunshine/103/web/2025/07

I seem to have a lucky streak in #Warframe. Got all parts for Nova Prime and for my jellyfish queen Ivara Prime, too 🥳

Beim #Sommerinterview mit dem neuen Grünen Chef fällt wieder auf: Demokraten werden brutalstmöglich gegrillt während man Faschos Softball-Fragen stellt. Trotzdem vermisse ich Habeck, weil der es geschafft hat, Dinge auf den Punkt zu bringen.

Le sigh - wieso sind es eigentlich IMMER die alten, weissen Männer, die das Thema "Genderwahnsinn" ansprechen müssen? Und das dann auch noch völlig random - es wirkt zwanghaft.

I last polled about this at the beginning of June. Here is a revised version. Please boost for reach.

If you are a trans woman and have a US passport marked “F”, and have reentered the US since June 1, what was your experience (multiple choice)