The response I have seen now is “but national debt”

…Has anyone looked at the budget?

Well, trying to be more positive, if you want to drop $100k on an off-road vehicle, how about a prerunner? I just saw these two awesome videos, one techical and the other less so:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRVrsNE_7FE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nR1-J676ao

Try it here instead, set the temperature to like 0.1 or 0.2, and be sure to set 2.5 Pro:

https://aistudio.google.com/

It is indeed still awful for many things. It’s a text prediction tool, not a magic box, even though everyone advertises it kinda like the later.

Gemini 2.5? Low temperature, like 0.2?

The one they use in search is awful, and not the same thing. Also, it’s not all knowing, you gotta treat it like it has no internet access (because generally it doesn’t).

It can be grounded in facts. It’s great at RAG. But even alone, Gemini 2.5 is kinda shockingly smart.

…But the bigger point is how Google presents it. It shouldn’t be the top result of every search just thrown into your face, it should be a opt-in, transparent, conditional feature with clear warnings, and only if it can source a set of whitelisted, reliable websites.

The irony is Gemini is really good (like significantly better than ChatGPT), and cheap for them (no GPUs needed), yet somehow they made it utterly unbearable in search.

Scary how that’s plausible, drowned out in the noise, and totally accepted as normal (or even cheered) by the public.

Narrowly.

Are you guys not horrified of what’s happening south? If you interpret this as a win and go on, your country is going to be mega conservative in like a decade.

No, this is an existential crisis, and you need to shut off the propaganda machines before it’s too late.

The heck is this title?

YouTube says goodbye to decade-old video player UI, but users hate the new design

Meanwhile, the article itself just cites a few tiny aesthetic changes and like four random Reddit comments. Doesn’t seem like they even tried it themself… That’s justifications for 460 upvotes?

I think that’s the thing. People who would care (especially those more medium with the administration) mostly have no idea this is going on, people who like this are seeing it because their algorithms are feeding that tweet to them (albeit without any of the nasty context).

It’s bad enough that this is happening today…

But people in high offices getting cheered on for it, by millions of people? For violating the intelligence’s community’s personal lives, and years of guarantees?

Thing about the the Lavender Scare is I don’t think most of the population was aware of that, but a huge fraction is cheering this on.

Eh… could be worse.

How’s the view on Brexit in the UK these days?

It’s collapsing under propaganda and a cult of personality.

The USA’s old ethos as a “champion of liberty,” rebel against tyrrany, equalizer (yes, I know) was at least admirable, and the indiviuality and greed were somewhat functional. The weight we’ve collapsed under is the populations collective susceptibility to runaway propaganda machines, which we have completely ignored both for the illusion of “freedom of speech” (even though online spaces are nothing like open forums) and blatant bribery.

If Canda and Europe knew what’s good for them, they’d ban all American social media yesterday.

The Chinese government’s preferred perception is “philosophical and stable,” and all this just plays into that.

The US’s… Well, I don’t even know anymore.

My thinking is that it’s a way to avoid adding to existing credit card debt, and accumulate more net “interest free debt” so to speak, as it’s a separate pool from a credit card.

Yes, I know. But if one is going to have the debt one way or the other, I kinda see the logic.

It’s a plausible trap. Depending on the architecture, the image decoder (that “sees”) is bolted onto main model as a more discrete part, and the image generator could be a totally different model. So internally, if it’s not ingesting the “response” image, it has no clue they’re the same.

Of course, we have no idea, because OpenAI is super closed :/

The loans… are a popular alternative to credit cards because they often don’t charge interest.

I never considered this. That makes them seem more reasonable TBH, though of course they screw you over more if you pay late or pile them up.

You’re welcome. Check out the ISW report too!

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-23-2023

Ha!

Have you seen the bloatware they ship with Windows? It somehow manages to be so much worse than base windows… it’s honestly much better if they don’t touch the OS at all, barring the absolute bare minimum of making sure input works.

I’m being cynical: I know some OEMs do make kernel contributions and such. Still, the “generic” support distros/chip makers provide for free is better, given their track record.