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McBainiel commented on Tell HN: An update on your Google Maps Timeline    · Posted by u/ChrisArchitect
sega_sai · 9 months ago
Thankfully I had the backup, but it is certainly not something that I'd expected from google. Maybe now time to backup all emails and photos...
McBainiel · 9 months ago
You can set automated backups on takeout.google.com for everything in your Google account but I'm not sure if it includes the maps stuff since they did e2ee
McBainiel commented on The Bluesky Bubble: This is a relapse, not a fix   theatlantic.com/technolog... · Posted by u/davidbarker
McBainiel · a year ago
Has a clone of a social media site ever replaced an original? The closest I can think of is Tiktok being kinda similar to Vine but that feels like a stretch.

I don't think Bluesky will succeed unless it offers something different to the basic Twitter experience. It's hard to picture enough people giving up Twitter (or using both) for it to reach the critical mass required to sustain it.

McBainiel commented on Apple Researchers Show Critical Flaw in AI   latimes.com/business/stor... · Posted by u/markgavalda
McBainiel · a year ago
I wonder if AI being really useful when it comes to programming caused some to miscalculate its usefulness in general.
McBainiel commented on New record-breaking Prime Number, 41M Digits Long   scientificamerican.com/ar... · Posted by u/timbilt
McBainiel · a year ago
Good for Durant, I guess, but spending that much on it kind of removes some of the charm of the project in my eyes.
McBainiel commented on Code that helped end Apartheid   wired.com/story/plaintext... · Posted by u/impish9208
McBainiel · a year ago
The tech side of this is really cool but I'd also like to read more about the non-tech stuff. I wonder if the sympathetic Dutch flight attendant is still alive or the guys who actually carried the Trojan horse books to Mandela.

What an amazing story!

McBainiel commented on Google Chrome's uBlock Origin phaseout has begun   theverge.com/2024/10/15/2... · Posted by u/mrkramer
ablation · a year ago
Is there a good alternative to uBlock in Chrome? Sadly I’m obliged to use it for aspects of my job.
McBainiel · a year ago
I don't use Chrome much but I've been using uBlock Origin Lite when I do for a couple of months and I'd recommend it. I don't watch YouTube on Chrome so I can't comment on how good it is there.
McBainiel commented on Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy   medium.com/@jpolak/why-im... · Posted by u/vouaobrasil
McBainiel · a year ago
I've been thinking a lot lately about why I don't like AI and ultimately I think it's because of its tone. I don't know why OpenAI made ChatGPT so wordy and almost unctuous.

I've realised I don't actually care about people using it for programming or brainstorming or whatever. It's just I feel so inslulted when I read something that is in the default AI voice.

So I don't know that I agree entirely with the writer of the piece but I get where he's coming from. AI writing is unpleasant to read. And I hope Medium reverses their decision.

McBainiel commented on Beware Hollywood's Digital Demolition   theguardian.com/commentis... · Posted by u/McBainiel
McBainiel · a year ago
You used to be able to watch every episode of The Daily Show on the Comedy Central website. They also made the close captions of each episode indexable by search engines so you could find an episode based on remembered fragments of what a guest or Jon might have said and it worked really well.

I remember finding clips I'd never seen requested by people on /r/DailyShow just based on their description but then at some point Google changed focus from finding stuff to answering questions and while the close captions were still in the source of the videos' pages, they weren't coming up on Google searches.

Now you can't even watch the episodes. It makes me sad, how much the internet has changed and continues to change but I guess change is inevitable.

There is a torrent of all the Jon episodes of The Daily Show and maybe the other things the article mentions are similarly archived by a handful of enthusiasts but I still think it's sad.

McBainiel commented on Forget ChatGPT: why researchers now run small AIs on their laptops   nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/rbanffy
McBainiel · a year ago
> Microsoft used LLMs to write millions of short stories and textbooks in which one thing builds on another. The result of training on this text, Bubeck says, is a model that fits on a mobile phone but has the power of the initial 2022 version of ChatGPT.

I thought training LLMs on content created by LLMs was ill-advised but this would suggest otherwise

u/McBainiel

KarmaCake day18February 8, 2024View Original