This was happening before AI, with less sophisticated tools, often called “Persona Management” that allowed one person to control numerous bots with pre-written scripts that could be called up depending on what was called for. The only difference the AI has made is the speed and scale at which the same can be done and be more convincingly not all culled from the same script.

https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/bots-flooded-the-fcc-with-comments-about-net-neutrality-1513307159

Here’s an article about a flood of bot comments to an FCC open comment regarding Net Neutrality in 2017, five years before OpenAI would release ChatGPT. So it’s definitely been going on before the AI tools as they now exist were available. It’s a quantitative difference, not a qualitative difference, in other words it’s the same thing just larger scale due to the speed of AI.

company called CiviClick, which bills itself as “the first and best AI-powered grassroots advocacy platform.”

I have been saying this since 2016, when we were dealing with both Cambridge Analytica and Correct the Record flooding the internet with paid political speech masquerading as real people with real opinions who weren’t being paid to spout nonsense.

Paid political speech online whether by a human or a bot, should legally be required to state that they are being paid to promote their statements. There should be hefty penalties, large fines for single instances (one person, one message) up to prison time for an organized group (something akin to RICO). The fines/prison time should be even more severe when AI generated messages are fraudulently being promoted as real humans, simply due to the industrial speed and scale AI generation allows.

Paid political advertising on television and radio has for a long time been required to state that it is paid. This should have been priority number one from the Democrats when Biden got into office and they held slim majorities in both houses,

Sure, there’s nothing we can do about foreign bot farms, but that’s not what this article is about. This is about a US company based in our nations capital whose goal is to spread disinformation abusively to impact public comment. This is a private company absolutely flooding an agency with an open public comment period for an agency proposition and killing the proposition through messages that are not from real people at all but from AI.

The fact that getting this under control at the very least within our own borders is not a priority for any politicians is a fucking travesty and makes our entire democratic apparatus an outright farce.

Pour one out for the OG

These definitely could be pretty solid headless Linux serverboxes for microservices.

Couldn’t find any Taylor Dunn vehicles near me, but I may just be about to dump some money on a used Fire truck.

I love how hilariously ineffectual the windshield wiper seems. I want one.

EDIT: Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like they make the Taylor Truck anymore.

https://www.taylor-dunn.com/

You can get a similar style out of their “Build a Bigfoot” which has some cab options.

https://www.taylor-dunn.com/build-your-bigfoot/

The “econo cab” looks very similar to this but with no doors and no wiper. Sadly, the “deluxe cab” has an actually effective wiper and no longer sports a rink-a-dink wiper.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9MfOvk9D_k

I am sucked into this world of things I didn’t know existed.

I think I was born an old man, because my old man habits have been there since my youth.

Attitudes like this is why people reverse engineer systems and build emulators.

To an extent I understand why Miyazaki and Sony felt they shouldn’t let outsiders mess with it lest it was an underbaked and bad remake, but at the same time, it’s locking the game to a historical artifact, and one that many people (including myself) had hoped to one day play on PC without using an emulator.

Even if they cannot hoard that much themselves, anything they hoard will contribute to the death of the PC space and I don’t think Sony is just going to let their consumer electronics division, which has been a huge part of their brand for decades, go quietly into that good night. They might not have as much money to spend on it, but they’re not going to just stop making PS5s and other consumer electronics devices. That also means that if there’s PC hardware shortages for the foreseeable future, that they’re waiting for those shortages to strangle the PC gaming industry and revert a lot of those PC gaming converts back to console.

My guess is they’re watching the PC parts supply issues due to AI and have decided they will use their institutional weight to also hoard parts to push consoles back to the forefront since it’s harder to pirate on consoles and easier to resell the same game on new console generations.

Sony is and has been a big institutional player and I would not be at all surprised to see them moving on hoarding parts themselves: for AI, for consumer electronics, for game consoles. They’ve been practically waiting for a way to kill the PC industry and take the profits from it.

If only

They’re the best

*lonely top noises

I kinda dug it myself, but to each their own

When that pie and coffee just goes right through you

Aged like milk.

I vote for the “die trying” bit.

Part of a properly functioning LLM is absolutely it understanding implicit instructions. That’s a huge aspect of data annotation work in helping LLMs become better tools, is grading them on either understanding or lack of understanding of implicit instructions. I would say more than half of the work I have done in that arena has focused on training them to more clearly understand implicit instructions.

So sure, if you explain it like the LLM is a five year old human, you’ll get a better response, but the whole point is if we’re dumping so much money, resources, destroying the environment, and consumer electronics market for these tools, you shouldn’t have to explain it like it’s five.

Seriously what is the point of trashing the planet for this shit if you have to talk to it like it’s the most oblivious person alive and practically hold it’s hand for it to understand implicit concepts?

I mean, I’ve been saying this since LLMs were released.

We finally built a computer that is as unreliable and irrational as humans… which shouldn’t be considered a good thing.

I’m under no illusion that LLMs are “thinking” in the same way that humans do, but god damn if they aren’t almost exactly as erratic and irrational as the hairless apes whose thoughts they’re trained on.

Linux in general is the wise choice, no matter the distribution.