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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • CBS’ parent company, Paramount, is in merger talks with Skydance. Mergers must be approved by the federal government. (I thought it was the FTC, but I see the FCC mentioned in articles about this … don’t want to dig into the weeds here. The feds must approve.)

    This used to be done by a theoretically impartial board which would make decisions based on benefit to the public. Now there isn’t even a pretense of caring about the public good. If Trump is happy with the tribute he receives, the merger will go through. If he’s upset, it won’t.

    Yeah, CBS already folded and paid a huge fine as a “settlement” to a lawsuit they could almost certainly have won in court, but when you’re trying to appease a mob boss you just have to keep paying.

    It’s true that putting the end date for Colbert a year out isn’t as extreme an appeasement than just pulling him off the air, but there are many factors involved. The mob boss has declared that he is pleased with the outcome, so mission accomplished.


  • I’m thinking about getting the new FairPhone 6 when it comes out and running /e/ OS, but I’m so reliant on Google Maps and Gmail (my email account, not necessarily the app … but I do rely on the app).

    I’m afraid that I’ll either install Google apps and end up with a phone just as compromised as a stock Android install, or if I don’t it will be too much of a pain in the ass to use.










  • As far as I can tell from the article, the definition of “smarter” was left to the respondents, and “answers as if it knows many things that I don’t know” is certainly a reasonable definition – even if you understand that, technically speaking, an LLM doesn’t know anything.

    As an example, I used ChatGPT just now to help me compose this post, and the answer it gave me seemed pretty “smart”:

    what’s a good word to describe the people in a poll who answer the questions? I didn’t want to use “subjects” because that could get confused with the topics covered in the poll.

    “Respondents” is a good choice. It clearly refers to the people answering the questions without ambiguity.

    The poll is interesting for the other stats it provides, but all the snark about these people being dumber than LLMs is just silly.



  • That’s an overly negative take. Yes, there are serious challenges to the production of lab-grown meat; Wikipedia provides a good summary. This isn’t a business that’s ready to take off soon. But humans who are actually smart and do know what they’re doing are working to solve these things.

    The challenges are serious, and anyone telling you “world is simple and future is bright” about the future of this industry, yeah, that’s bullshit. I’ve never heard anyone say that, and I don’t know where you heard that from. It might never be a viable industry. But it’s not just a gimmick to keep fleecing VC investors.