FaceDeer

There’s been a spate of Discord-based hacking attempts lately, two of my friends have had to do this. They can’t get their old accounts back, Discord is basically just ignoring them. Starting new accounts is easy.

The hard part is that they also lost their gmail accounts, that’s a lot more important for most people to be able to recover. I recommend everyone with a gmail account do the “create an emergency recovery code” thing, print it out and store it somewhere safely off anything digital.

I’ve pondered my own lack of interest and I think it comes down to the Artemis program’s design being such a shitshow. Sure, if you throw enough brute force budget and a long enough time you can get astronauts back to the Moon. But they’re doing it in such a poor manner that I doubt anything will come of it long-term. It’s going to be another unsustainable flags-and-foot-prints stunt.

Some of the recent changes hint at NASA maybe finally getting their act together, but I’ll believe it when I see it - NASA doesn’t actually call the shots here. It’s a political program.

Heh. Sorry, got busy with stuff when I got home. null

It was an episode of an improvisational soap opera I’ve been attending. Went rather well, they sang a song and at the end of the episode a bunch of characters got “freaky Fridayed” into each others’ bodies so the actors got to make fun of how each other portrays the characters they played.

A sensible chuckle, and then back to work isolating the United States and calling out the ongoing criminal behaviour of the rest of its government.

Trump’s a symptom, the problem isn’t going to magically go away. Though admittedly he’s a very useful cult leader and his death will be helpful in fracturing their support.

I’m in line for one right now, I’ll let you know how it went when it’s done.

From OP’s post:

Stringent business associate agreements ensure data privacy and HIPAA compliance.

Sure, they could break HIPAA. They could do that with any records, not just transcripts or summaries of sessions. If this is a showstopper for you then no medical practitioners will meet your standards, you’re basically advocating crawling away into a hole to die alone whenever you get sick.

That article is from May 2025, almost a full year ago. In AI terms that’s the stone age.

One of the major problems of getting information about AI inside an anti-AI bubble is that nobody here is actually using it, so they don’t know what its actual quality and capabilities are like now. As I said, I actually set up a system like this for myself on my own personal computer and I keep it updated as new models come out, so I’ve seen what the state of the art (or near-state-of-the-art at any rate) is actually like.

Nothing is perfect, of course. But perfection is not the standard this system is to be compared against. The alternative is the doctor’s handwritten notes and personal memories. Those are almost certainly not as good.

As I said, this is something I do all the time myself. Even with just my piddling little graphics card it works fine, the technology is quite good these days. I’m sure a professional setup being used by a doctor would be a much higher standard than that.

I get the impression no level of quality and no kind of human involvement with the results will likely satisfy you, though. Which means your negative view of AI is not particularly useful here.

You’re asking a forum that’s in a strongly anti-AI bubble, so the answer you’re going to get is both obvious and useless. You might as well be asking a bunch of Vegans whether you should have steak for dinner. You admit yourself to having a strong knee-jerk reaction.

However, it looks to me like their use of AI is a perfectly reasonable one. It’s just making transcripts and summaries of sessions. I do that all the time with personal logs and meetings, I’ve got a couple of local models that run entirely on my computer. So I don’t see the big deal here.

If you feel you really need this medical help then maybe don’t rely on the advice of a bunch of people you know are going to instantly react negatively to AI regardless of any other details.

Do you enjoy posting? That’s all that really matters in the end. Karma is pointless.

Controversy can actually be good, as long as you’re not saying stuff simply to provoke it for its own sake. If I wanted to only speak to something that agreed with everything I said I could just go tell an AI to act that way and waste my time there. Should communities be insular bubbles where everyone believes the exact same things?

In Russia there’s long been a sort of “social contract” between the oligarch elites and the general population. As long as the general population “stayed out of politics” and let the oligarchs stay rich and powerful, the oligarchs wouldn’t interfere with their lives. The classic bread-and-circuses thing.

I guess the US could have a similar dynamic developing.

It very much depends on where you’re located, what sort of climate the place has, even what sort of neighbors you have.

I have a relatively small front yard and am located in a temperate region with reasonably good rainfall. So I planted a bunch of perennial flowers and clover in the existing grass of my lawn, laid down some decorative stone pathways weaving through it, and some shrubs around the edges. Bought a sign that reads “Meadow Habitat Restoration - Please Do Not Mow or Spray” to make it clear that I wasn’t just neglecting my front yard but was deliberately turning it into a patch of pseudo-wilderness. Now I can basically leave my front yard completely untouched all summer (occasionally pulling a few thistles because I personally hate them) and it looks lovely and has plenty of bees and whatnot visiting it. There’s no such thing as “weeds”, just wildflowers.

My back yard is much larger and I wanted to keep the lawn because it’s a nice space for activities. But I got a pushmower, and the lawn doesn’t grow fast because I’ve allowed trees to grow all around the edges and that makes it quite shady. The trees make for a nice privacy screen once the leaves come in, it’s like my back yard is a forest clearing. I scattered clover seed among the grass there too, you can mow clover just like grass so I figure whatever survives best gets the territory.

Personally, I’m not fond of gravel because it’s an unnecessary dead zone. There’s already plenty of bare concrete everywhere, we don’t need more of that. But if you’re in a dry environment that doesn’t support greenery without watering or fertilizer then some hardscrabble landscaping could look quite nice. Maybe plant a few sagebrushes or even cacti (cacti can put out some very nice flowers) with some interesting piles of larger rocks to add visual interest.

Maybe take a wander around your neighborhood to see if other folks have set up interesting alternatives to lawns and get some ideas off of them, they’ll have done the testing to see if it works.

Except that suddenly he’s realizing that soft power did matter, as he casts about looking for anyone to help him out of this mess he’s got himself into in Iran.

Yet another area where the big companies are voluntarily leaving money on the table for the open model users to rake in. I approve.

A classic case of making a ridiculously restrictive change, then “walking it back” to a merely semi-ridiculous change and having everyone sigh in relief.

Fill it with white powder and the reaction will cause more damage than a bomb would have caused.

I mean, do those headcount numbers count contractors?

I linked the source for my information, feel free to dig into it for more detail.

Beyond that, unless you have an actual source for the culture shift beyond ‘you think so’

I literally said I didn’t know whether there had been a culture shift. Reread the last line of my comment. All I’m doing here is pointing out that your own view on the subject is likely very outdated at this point. There’s been enormous employee turnover, including right to the top CEO position, and other major companies have merged into Microsoft in the interim.

I’m willing to bet it is now even worse.

Based on?

I’m not doubting your previous experience. I’m just pointing out that it was a long time ago and a lot has happened since then, so I’d like to hear some more recent evidence.

The Red Ring of Death was around 2009 or so, Windows 8 rolled out in 2012. That was 14 years ago now.

Headcount numbers:

• 2012: ~94,000 employees.
• 2026: ~228,000 employees.

The median tenure of employment at Microsoft is 5.3 years, so most of those 94,000 employees will be long gone by now.

Also, Satya Nadella took over in 2014 and made major changes to the corporate culture from the earlier Balmer era. Stack ranking was abolished, there were major corporate acquisitions that brought external corporate cultures inside (eg LinkedIn, GitHub, ZeniMax/Bethesda, Activision Blizzard, Nokia).

I have no idea what Microsoft’s current internal culture is like but I think your impression is likely quite outdated by this point.

For someone who likes digging around in my Reddit history you’d think you’d be able to find something that was actually relevant to the topic at hand. That was a comment about the uses of agentic coding tools for making custom applications, not about building bots.

The only thing keeping the bot population low here is that there just aren’t enough people here to be worth it yet. If the Fediverse grows they’ll come in greater numbers.