Timothy B. Lee writing for Ars Technica:
Today’s LLMs are far more capable:
OpenAI’s GPT-4o can handle 128,000 tokens (about 200 pages of text). Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet can accept 200,000 tokens (about 300 pages of text). Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro allows 2 million tokens (about 2,000 pages of text). Still, it’s going to take a lot more progress if we want AI systems with human-level cognitive abilities.
Great, article from Edward Zitron over at his newsletter Where’s Your Ed At?. The whole things is great, but here’s a few quotes that stood out to me:
Why wouldn’t you think that the content on one of the most notable media outlets in the entire world is trustworthy? Why wouldn’t you trust that CNN, a respected media outlet, had vetted its advertisers and made sure their content wasn’t actively tricking its users? I think it’s fair to say that CNN has likely led to thousands of people being duped by questionable affiliate marketing companies, and likely profited from doing so.
Michael ☕️ @mcpinson@mas.to President-elect Musk doesn't like this cartoon. #USPol #PresidentMusk #Elon #JDVance
7:46 PM • December 19, 2024 (UTC)
Where will Elon Musk end up ranking among America’s shadow presidents? Our panel of historians weighs in.
— New York Times Pitchbot (@nytpitchbot.bsky.social) 2024-12-19T13:04:01.136Z
David Pierce writing for The Verge:
The app can see three kinds of feeds: anything from ActivityPub, which means things like Mastodon and Threads and Pixelfed; anything from AT Protocol, which means Bluesky; and any RSS feed.
This sounds a lot like the new Reeder.
I hope we see more apps like this and sites are forced to provide feeds that these apps can read from and maybe even interact with through things such as “likes” or “reposts”.
Wait, do we think Trump is trying to recreate Depression era policies because he keeps hearing it was “Great”?
— Kevin M. Kruse (@kevinmkruse.bsky.social) 2024-12-13T23:50:29.050Z
ebbtide @sandlapper37@mstdn.social 7:41 PM • December 13, 2024 (UTC)
From Reddit.
Googling Stuff: Then v Now.
— Chaz Hutton (@chazhutton.bsky.social) 2024-12-11T17:15:44.238Z
KevinOnEarth @Quantillion@mstdn.io @FantasticalEconomics Dunno who #JessPhoenix is but it's succinct.
4:26 AM • December 7, 2024 (UTC)
niconiconi @niconiconi@mk.absturztau.be Q: How far are we from fusion power?
A: 1 AU.
2:34 PM • December 6, 2024 (UTC)
Kyle Orland writing for Ars Technica:
Longtime Valve watchers likely remember Steam Machines, the company’s aborted, pre-Steam Deck attempt at crafting a line of third-party gaming PC hardware based around an early verison of its Linux-based SteamOS. Now, there are strong signs that Valve is on the verge of launching a similar third-party hardware branding effort under the “Powered by SteamOS” label.
Isaac Callan and Colin D’Mello reporting for Global News:
Auditor General Shelley Spence found as part of her annual report that, in the fiscal year ending at the end of March, the province spent a total of $104.6 million on advertising.
That is the most any Ontario government has ever spent on advertising in a single year, the auditor general said, and triple what was spent the year before.
I use #Hugo for my blog, and I have a number of embedded tweets using the built-in tweet shortcode. If this shortcode is unable to fetch the tweet when the site is building, the build fails. As such, I’ve been seeing a lot of build failures because of deleted tweets and deleted twitter accounts lately.
Man, I really need to go back and watch Idiocracy so I can see how all this is gonna go.
I loaded my Twitter archive into my blog. Haven’t decided if I’m going to delete all my tweets from Twitter, or delete my Twitter account entirely, or maybe just leave everything. Dunno.
The Onion, as usual, nails it.
Ryan Christoffel writing for 9to5Mac:
Live Activities are having a moment. Yesterday Apple rolled out a popular Live Activity for tracking election results via Apple News. Now, a new Safari Live Activity has been discovered in the latest iOS 18.2 beta for tracking a file’s download progress.
Kevin Purdy writing for Ars Technica:
Pixelmator Pro has been advancing its capabilities recently with regular updates, including a number of AI and ML tools for adjusting photos and creating masks, vector tools, and support for more RAW photo formats and other design tool files.
This is an interesting acquisition. Will Apple roll Pixelmator into Photos, or start some sort of new pro line of image/photo editing software?
Laffy @GottaLaff@mastodon.social #VOTE
1:51 PM • November 1, 2024 (UTC)
This story over at Peta Pixel compares Apple’s vs Adobe’s photo cleanup tools.
Outside of some flashy animations, Clean Up works pretty much identically to Adobe Generative Remove in practice, except for the fact it will offer suggestions sometimes on objects in photos it detects and thinks you might want to remove. Otherwise, it uses the same painting method that Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop users have come to know. Since Adobe just updated Photoshop and its Firefly AI model, we figured now was a great time to see how these two widely available removal tools fare against each other. So, we tasked both with removing the same elements of six different photos to see which performed best.
May Keable 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ @Keab42@kind.social I think that fact that we're using AI to write emails because we find it hard and AI to summarise emails because we can't be bothered to read them suggests that we should take a look at how we communicate rather than boiling the oceans to have LLMs hallucinate at each other on our behalf.
3:12 PM • October 27, 2024 (UTC)
Picked our pumpkins today 🎃
𝐿𝒶𝓃𝒶 "not Christmas Cake" @Lana@beige.party EVERY STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION PLOT, SORTED BY WHICH CHARACTER IS THE FOCUS: Jean-Luc Picard believes he can solve something diplomatically, immediately resorts to violence anyway
William Riker believes he can solve something without violating the Prime Directive, immediately violates the Prime Directive
Deanna Troi believes her Betazoid heritage won't embarrass her at work, is immediately embarrassed at work by her Betazoid heritage
