Mastodawn

Jono_p82 Mar 12, 2023

@nixCraft when something simple doesn't work and a few hours go by and I'm building dependencies from source..

Jono_p82 Jan 28, 2023

Caroline Orr Bueno Jan 28, 2023

And here is possibly the most offensive 60-seconds of television I’ve ever seen, in which Tucker Carlson’s guest said Tyre Nichols’ brutal killing by the police is what happens when you have “young black men being supervised by a single black woman” (Memphis PD has a black woman police chief). He blamed a lack of “male authority” and said this is what happens in cities “run by single black mothers.”

Jono_p82 Jan 28, 2023

Nate Looker Jan 28, 2023

Finally remembered to download my route on Flyover Country before going into airplane mode. Great app for offline #geology, check it out! Originally developed by an undergrad at U #Minnesota

Jono_p82 Jan 27, 2023

Ethan J. A. Schoonover Jan 26, 2023

My wife decided to learn #Python and, with absolute deadpan seriousness, refers to curly brackets exclusively as "squirrelly brackets".

Not only do I not correct her, I have now adopted this term as canonical.

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Jono_p82 Jan 25, 2023

@HourlyOtters and half a fish

Jono_p82 Jan 25, 2023

Hourly Otters (old)Jan 25, 2023

Otter!

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Jono_p82 Jan 23, 2023

@mapsmania the small town I live in has a document on their website detailing the etymology of a lot of our streets that was compiled back in the early 1900s. It's great because it gives further context into the local reasons for common street names like Washington or Maple. For anyone interested in that sort of thing it's probably worth checking with local historic societies.

Jono_p82 Jan 22, 2023

Esther Schindler Jan 22, 2023

If you ever connected to the Internet before the 2000s, you probably remember that it made a peculiar sound. But despite becoming so familiar, it remained a mystery for most of us. What do these sounds mean? https://www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-dialup-pictured.html

The sound of the dialup, pictured

If you ever connected to the Internet before the 2000s, you probably remember how it sounded. But what do these sounds mean?

absorptions

Jono_p82 Jan 22, 2023

schrockg Jan 9, 2023

This is aimed at surveyors and GIS folks in the U.S.... more about those two different feet units... https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/when-do-i-have-foot-unit-change-gavin-schrock

When Do I Have to Do the Foot Unit Change?

The short answer (for nearly all instances) is “Not yet, not until the new datum is implemented…” But also…. “It depends…” This is a very U.

Jono_p82 Jan 22, 2023

Kee Hinckley Jan 22, 2023

What Google should *really* do about ChatGPT.

First, let’s be clear. ChatGPT knows absolutely nothing about anything. It’s summing up everything it’s read into a sort of democratized conclusion of what it thinks people would say when asked a question. Even ignoring the fact that it will happily munge two unrelated items and make up something new, a lot of the stuff it reads on the internet (I hope this isn’t a surprise to anyone) isn’t actually *true*. And facts can’t be determined by majority vote. That’s not how reality works.

But that doesn’t mean the technology wouldn’t be useful to a search engine.

1. Determine when one site is simply copying another site with tweaks. (Google has gotten worse and worse at this...and as a result search results are polluted with garbage sites.)
2. Determine all the places a particular topic is being discussed.
3. Given an answer on a site, actually report on whether other sites agree or disagree, and what sites those are. (This is both generally useful, *and* provides transparency. It also enables you to cluster and discard bad actors.)

Note that in none of those cases did I recommend that it generate anything for the user to read. It might be doing that internally to see if two things are similar, but the output to the user should be a list of actual human generated resources. I wouldn’t even trust it for summarizing. It’s too easy to ingest a paragraph describing what people incorrectly say, and not realize those are counterfactuals. (Google’s quick answers do this far too often.) ML *sucks* at understanding context.

And of course that leads to the most useful thing the tech can do for Google. Determine when a site is using GPT-type algorithms to generate content. That’s going to be an ongoing battle right up there with spam, but it’s absolutely necessary to combat misinformation.

#chatgpt #gpt3 #google #search #ml #ai