Piero Bosio Social Web Site Personale

*posting quietly as the clock hits midnight* its my birthday

The motto of the modern tech industry is "You can just do things to people"

@brainsoup They're not super prominent they're like a Canadian Mother Jones or Atlantic or something

@ireneista @mntmn @cwebber well it's a general purpose UI *now* but only in a very monkeys paw way

@tedmielczarek Everything I buy is this color so everything always coordinates lol

@mayintoronto Thanks!

Redyed my hair

@dlakelan No we call it the Walrus

Welcome to Canada. Okay so what you need to understand is that if you see a link to "the Walrus" that's a real news article but if you see a link to "the Beaver" that's a fake news article

@mntmn @cwebber And I'd say "maybe the solution is to build a *good* natural language interface to the computer, so people use that instead" but I don't think a culture that believes LLMs are a computer interface (or are an "artificial intelligence"), could build or adopt such a system. If you put it side by side with the LLM the LLM will "win" because it is fail-open. A "good" interface would tell you when it can't do something, and then the user quits using it. An LLM can make something up.

@mntmn @cwebber I think the single interesting thing LLMs have revealed is that there is a substantial market segment who has an active desire for natural language interfaces to the computer and who will flip from "do not engage to the computer" to "engage with the computer" if a natural language interface became available.

I do not personally want a natural language interface to the computer. I also do not believe the thing LLM vendors have built is a natural language interface to the computer

@Plumbert Yeah.

The governor of Texas around the time this was introduced, at about the time that it was new enough it seemed like it was having good results but before the bad effects became visible, later became President and took the TAAS philosophy national by passing a bill that heavily incentivized standardized testing.

Meanwhile, I was one of the first students to take the TAAS and then slipped out of the Texas public schools system before it became a factory for producing TAAS scores

@megmac :O

@Plumbert You're joking but you don't know how right you are. You have no reason to know what the TAAS test is or how it destroyed America

@jrose Firefox also claims that pescatarian is misspelled. Perhaps I would be able to spell better if I had a trustworthy spellchecker

@kzurawel My wife and I each feel the other says "sorry" in a weird way but neither of us can convince the other one that she's saying it the way the other hears it

The Canadians are being very gracious and are not kicking me out of the country despite my continued insistence on spelling it "color"

Words the Firefox spellchecker has claimed to me are not words tonight:

"pescetarian" (or "pescatarian", neither is recognized)

"kigurumi"

Is there a good alternative to the Firefox spellcheck dictionary that I couldn't beat at Scrabble

Mozilla has an addons page that suggests a "English (US) Dictionary Extended" but it's posted as if created by a third party (named… "bugmanavery"?) and it has zero ratings. Has anyone tried this? Is it actually better?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/language-tools/

@glyph i have heard claims of windows just fuckin breaking grub if you install it second. don't know if that holds up to reality.

@mhoye okay. that was literally my initial impulse so i'm glad to have it validated.