There are no reliable automated LLM output detectors. Anyone who says otherwise is either trying to sell you snake oil (or is unwittingly helping someone to sell snake oil to someone else, I guess).

I was about to link to that, and specifically the stuff that now seems to have been moved to Signs of AI writing.

I thought that was a very interesting read, because it’s so much better than the usual AI ragebait that led to people getting pilloried over the fact that they actually know how to use em dashes. You can’t detect LLM use just by the fact that someone uses em dashes. It’s a complicated stylistic issue that usually boils down to “well, you know what ChatGPT output looks like when you see it”.

It’s moments like these that make me think about the state of the world and my part in it. I may just be a random loser on the Internet, but I do know a lot more shit that some of the biggest multi-quad-spillion-dollar CEOs, apparently.

For example, it’s an old fact that tech CEOs know jack shit about measuring productivity, even when they’re obsessed with it. Yeah. One more example.

Another fun reptile fact!

Tortoises are mostly herbivorous. However, many species of tortoises will not stop munching on leaves where snails are sitting. They are happy to eat snails for the protein. And also to demonstrate the snails that turtles are significantly faster!

(Also I wish I had one particular video at hand, of Galapagos tortoises eating pumpkins)

I’d be willing to get YouTube Premium just to get rid of ads, but they’re bundling it with YouTube Music and I’m not trusting Google with my music purchases any more, thank you.

They discontinued Google Play Music (fortunately only after a long long period of time allowing you to download MP3s with their bloody terrible client app, so no loss there) and told me that you can just import the purchases to YouTube Music. Which I couldn’t actually access.

Also I don’t want a music streaming service, I just want to buy the albums. It’s pretty sad that it seems the only remaining feasible local option for electronic music purchases is iTunes! Bloody iTunes!

If the speedrun strategy is “introduce a stupid law, wait for everyone to go ‘holy shit none of this can be realistically implemented in this timeframe’, wait for OS vendors to just ban the use of the OSes in the country, watch the local industry as a whole to rally and petition the government to stop the madness before there’s a new dark age, repeal the clearly stupid law”, all before the California law comes to effect - I’ve got to say it’s a bold strategy and we’ll see how it plays out.

Edit: Also, not going to upvote a Lunduke video - I’m glad he crams every bit of substantial information in the thumbnails so I can just not listen to him at all

Spent some time imaging a bunch of floppies from my late father last summer, and I noticed that on every single 3.5" floppy box, the keys were the same. The locks had same bitting.

…also just noticed that the single 5.25" floppy box (of Commodore 64 floppies) I have at hand that even has a lock is currently unlocked. And the key is at my parents’ place. …have to check if the key is the same as the rest when I visit the next time.

Episode 230: Google
“…over there, you can see a YouTubeAI datacenter on fire. It’s not supposed to be like that.” - Roz, probably

I just went grocery shopping and oh wow looks like onions are nice and cheap and domestic.

Early this week I was cutting onions (figuratively), I feel better now that I’m cutting onions (literally). Made some tacos. Things are good.

I hope the locals were like “I didn’t know which car to boo for, so I booed to all of them”

Ancient shellmaster! Awww.

Eeeeehhh, I don’t even have the Epic Launcher installed. I keep claiming the freebies out of the habit, but I can’t remember what games I have there. Last time I checked you can’t even see your library via the website.

Fun thing: Kind of the same thing happening to me with Xbox Game Pass. Try out games, buy it on Steam later on sale

Back in the day, I got the weird idea that it’d be handy to grab information from the XMMS music player as it was running. So I made an extension that basically dumped the information about the player state as text to a named pipe. A few people wrote scripts for their IRC clients and whatnot to tell others what they were listening.

(Back then, none of the GUI music players really had any kind of RPC capability. Nowadays, you can probably do this stuff easily with D-Bus or whatever.)

One time, late at night, I was just listening to music in bed with headphones, controlling XMMS via infrared remote controller (LIRC). A random cool track came up. I had no idea what it was actually called. I went “wouldn’t it be cool if I could hit a remote button and it’d say what song is currently playing?” …so I got up, got back to the computer, and wrote a script that reads the pipe, takes the artist and song title, and feeds it to Festival TTS, then added that to LIRC configuration.