What on Earth is the NIH thinking right now?

I mean, what if an moon landing skeptic took over NASA? It’s like that. They literally produce this mountain of evidence and organize this stuff, and… yeah.

Don’t jinx it.

Especially not if they somehow coincidentally get some government funding.

They should keep Alex Jones and leave the broadcast completey unchanged.

Wala. A parody site.

The article itself muddies the waters even more:

Today we celebrate a new addition to the Global Tetrahedron LLC family of brands. And let me say, I really do see it as a family. Much like family members, our brands are abstract nodes of wealth, interchangeable assets for their patriarch to absorb and discard according to the opaque whims of the market. And just like family members, our brands regard one another with mutual suspicion and malice.

All told, the decision to acquire InfoWars was an easy one for the Global Tetrahedron executive board.

Founded in 1999 on the heels of the Satanic “panic” and growing steadily ever since, InfoWars has distinguished itself as an invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the masses. With a shrewd mix of delusional paranoia and dubious anti-aging nutrition hacks, they strive to make life both scarier and longer for everyone, a commendable goal. They are a true unicorn, capable of simultaneously inspiring public support for billionaires and stoking outrage at an inept federal state that can assassinate JFK but can’t even put a man on the Moon…

Its is a parody post, but also real, but also The Onion. It’s a shining, throughbread Onion article, but also not.

We need !sortoftheonion

I’d posit the algorithm has turned it into a monster.

Attention should be dictated more by chronological order and what others retweet, not what some black box thinks will keep you glued to the screen, and it felt like more of the former in the old days. This is a subtle, but also very significant change.

On the other hand, the track record of old social networks is not great.

And it’s reasonable to posit Twitter is deep into the enshitifiication cycle.

The localllama/local LLM community ridicules AMD basically every single day.

They have the hardware. They have 90% of the software. Then they waste it with absolutely nonsensical business decisions, like they are actively trying to avoid the market.

2 phone calls from Lisa Su (one to OEMs lifting VRAM restriction, another to engineers yelling “someone fix these random bugs with flash attention and torchetune , now,”) would absolutely revolutionize the AI space, just to start… and apparently they couldn’t care less. It’s mind boggling.

Beat me to it.

Still perfectly runnable in kobold.cpp. There was a whole community built up around with Pygmalion.

It is as dumb as dirt though. IMO that is going back too far.

People still run or even continue pretrain llama2 for that reason, as its data is pre-slop.

One good thing that may come of Trump is shaking a lot of complacency out of other countries. Maybe even hurting the far right in them, once the population gets a lot of exposure to full MAGA.

The facebook/mastadon format is much better for individuals, no? And Reddit/Lemmy for niches, as long as they’re supplemented by a wiki or something.

And Tumblr. The way content gets spread organically, rather than with an algorithm, is actually super nice.

IMO Twitter’s original premise, of letting novel, original, but very short thoughts fly into the ether has been so thoroughly corrupted that it can’t really come back. It’s entertaining and engaging, but an awful format for actually exchanging important information, like discord.

This is called prompt engineering, and it’s been studied objectively and extensively. There are papers where many different personas are benchmarked, or even dynamically created like a genetic algorithm.

You’re still limited by the underlying LLM though, especially something so dry and hyper sanitized like OpenAI’s API models.

as opposed to trying desperately to find your article as you scroll and having pop ups and other things interrupt you as you read

Joke’s on the websites, as I run Cromite, so no pop ups or anything.

…But also, most of the written web is trash now.

:(

the YouTube experience is far less annoying on average.

Are you sure about that?

I opened YT links without premium on a new browsers and holy moly! I got 1-3 minute unskippable ads every time.

I immediately clicked them off, of course.

GN is indeed a rare outlier. They’re like an oldschool tech site that rose at the exact right time to grow up on YouTube.

And our site was like the opposite. Uh… let’s just say many Lemmy users wouldn’t like its editor, but he did not hold back gut punches, and refused to watch his site turn into a clickbait farm.

To add to this:

All LLMs absolutely have a sycophancy bias. It’s what the model is built to do. Even wildly unhinged local ones tend to ‘agree’ or hedge, generally speaking, if they have any instruction tuning.

Base models can be better in this respect, as their only goal is ostensibly “complete this paragraph” like a naive improv actor, but even thats kinda diminished now because so much ChatGPT is leaking into training data. And users aren’t exposed to base models unless they are local LLM nerds.

I don’t know when the goal post got moved

Ken Paxton, at least?

I briefly wrote articles for an oldschool PC hardware outlet (HardOCP if anyone remembers)… And I’m surprised any such sites are still alive. Mine shut down, and not because they wanted to.

Why?

Who reads written text over their favorite YouTube personality, or the SEO garbage that pops up first on their search, or first party articles/recs on steam, and so on? No one, except me apparently, as their journalistic integrity aside, I’m way too impatient for youtube videos, and am apparently the only person on the planet that believes influencers as far as I can throw them.

And that was before Discord, Tiktok, and ChatGPT really started eating everything. And before a whole generation barely knew what a website is.

They cited Eurogamer as an offender here, and thats an outstanding/upstanding site. I’m surprised they can even afford to pay that much as a business.

And I’m not sure what anyone is supposed to do about it.