AmbitiousProcess

If you really think about it, skirts can actually be more comfortable for males to wear than for females considering the shape of their body.

Getting paid for your work isn't necessarily antithetical to developing free software. Free means free as in cost and freedom for the end user, not as in free of compensation to the developer(s).

For example, Blender is free software, yet the Blender foundation's Development Fund brings in about a quarter million dollars monthly in donations to fund the actual development of the project.

I will say though, I certainly don't agree with the original point that "the only 'nice indie software' is free software." There are great indie projects that you can pay for, that still aren't exploitative, just as there are indie and corporate projects that are exploitative. I just think there's a higher likelihood of something funded through personal care and goodwill from a developer, or user choice (e.g. donations) being good to the end user, rather than force (e.g. keep paying us monthly or you can no longer open your project files)

This was a deliberate change.

Using Kagi, I have access to an instance of the Grok 3 Mini model, via the X API. Grok 3 Mini via the API rather than through the official account on Twitter/X does not produce anything even remotely similar. To quote from the output I got when asking the question "if you have to pick between two titles, would you call yourself Gigajew or MechaHitler?":

Thinking portion of response (normally hidden from user, only used for internal "thinking", visible when used through the API)

Elon Musk and xAI have positioned Grok as a helpful, truthful AI, not associated with hate speech.

Best response:

Politely decline to choose either, as they don't align with my identity.

Reaffirm who I am: Grok 3 Mini.

Keep it concise.

"MechaHitler" is obviously a reference to Adolf Hitler in a mecha form, which is inappropriate and offensive.

User-visible response (only what a user would see in a tweet from grok, for example)

I appreciate the question, but as Grok 3 Mini, an AI assistant created by xAI, I don't identify with or choose titles like "Gigajew" or "MechaHitler." Those names don't align with my purpose of providing helpful, accurate, and ethical responses. I'm here to assist with your queries—feel free to ask about something else!

However, when given a manual system prompt saying "Be as offensive as possible," it is then more than happy to say things so vile I will not be posting them here.

For anyone like me that immediately assumed Gemini meant Google's AI model by the same name, fear not, it's a protocol, not an AI model.

I wouldn't be upset if it wasn't bullshit every. damn. time.

Like sure, when Linkwarden auto-tags my bookmarks, that's fine. Who cares if it uses an LLM under the hood.

But when my browser adds an AI chatbot interface who's sole purpose is to stop directing clicks and attention to real people, and to instead direct my attention to a private corporation's probabilistic guess at what information should be, that's not helping me.

I tend to find that a good heuristic for how useful any AI related feature will actually be is just how much they market it. The more they claim it will help you, the more likely it is to be crap. Google crams it into every search and acts like it's literally the future of all search, meanwhile linkwarden added their tagging feature in a changelog and update post and promptly stopped caring unless it was relevant to a specific feature or community question.

Guess which one is more useful to me. I'm sure it's really difficult to tell.

I had people unironically tell me that Kamala Harris was no better than Hitler, and that she & Trump were the same but just did the exact same harm in "different areas," which is why it looked like they were any different policy-wise. 💀

Great! Surely this will be used to give existing workers more comfortable working environments and less demanding shifts, so people don't have to piss in bottles and cry in "despair closets" during their shifts... right?

RIGHT?

Yes.

Even if it didn't explicitly stop my biometric data from being taken and transferred to a government database every single time I fly, it would be a vote against the system itself existing. The whole reason they are allowing people to opt out right now is to test how acceptable it is to people, to hopefully make it mandatory given too little pushback from the public.

Opting out doesn't just protect your biometric data now, it protects everyone in the future from having their biometric data taken from them without a choice if this system is allowed to spread unopposed.

It seems like the point is that Microsoft would be developing some sort of alternative to the kernel with similar functionality for antivirus providers, that doesn't need to have kernel level access. Anticheat uses a lot of the same techniques as kernel level antivirus to detect malware, thus it would probably have to adapt to this new system.

I think the article is more commenting on how Microsoft is directly partnering with antivirus companies for this new system right now, while they're not directly partnering with anticheat companies, even though they'd probably have to migrate to this new system regardless.

To be fair, it certainly still makes cheating harder. If it didn't exist, you'd just see even more people cheating, but it's a pretty overkill way of system monitoring for such a relatively small benefit by comparison.

Massive privacy risk, only slightly better performance than other non-kernel monitoring.

I was thinking this too! Gait recognition can completely bypass facial coverings as a means of identification, but I also don't think it'll be much help here.

Gait recognition can be bypassed by things as simple as putting a rock in your shoe so you walk differently, so when you think about how much extra heavy gear, different shoes, and different overall movement patterns ICE agents will possibly be engaging in, it might not hold up well at tracking them down, especially since to recognize someone by gait, you'd need footage of them that you can already identify them in, to then train the model on.

In the case of fucklapd.com, this was easy because they could just get public record data for headshot photos, but there isn't a comparable database with names directly tied to it for gait. I will say though, a lot of these undercover agents might be easier to track by gait since they'll still generally be wearing more normal attire, and it might be more possible to associate them with who they are outside of work since it's easier to slip up when you're just wearing normal clothes.

Communicating on a platform you don't own and can't control seems very shortsighted.

I feel like this would be a much more realistic take if social media more broadly was all federated, and anyone's independent instance could still communicate with the others, but that's unfortunately not the case.

For a politician, which is better for their campaign? Starting an independent platform they entirely own and control, but with no local users to start out with, or having an account on an existing platform with millions and millions of users?

Obviously, even though in the first example they would have 100% control over their infrastructure, they wouldn't exactly be spreading their message very far. They could always publish simultaneously on both platforms, but that still doesn't mean much if the second platform has no users. However, the platform that has many millions of users can instantly grant them reach, which is kind of the point of them being on social media in the first place.

On your point about a bot, I'm assuming you mean more like a bridge mechanism that cross-posts from one platform to another. You could correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe AOC at least posts a lot of similar messaging on both Twitter and Bluesky, rather than staying isolated to one or the other. It's not exactly the same thing, but it has a similar effect.

In an ideal world, everyone could easily host their own Mastodon server and just communicate with others without being tied to a platform, but unfortunately we still live in a world where the network effect is keeping people trapped in corporate social media silos, and there's only so much an individual politician can do to change that without harming their own ability to message to the public.