Not to defend Rowling in any way of course but that's got to be the most snobbish article I've read in a while. Pretty much the entire premise is they've never read Harry Potter but decided they don't like it and look down on people who do.

Oh, very sad news, big fan of his work, underappreciated maybe. Here's one of my favourites:

https://youtu.be/4iIrg4DM078

Oh and I was randomly just thinking of this tune the other day:

https://youtu.be/ETV9fPmieOM

I'll stop there because obviously I can't post everything.

Nope, there are a lot of AI tells in the article.

It seems a more likely that the candidates were cutting and pasting a standard response, either way my point was to question the integrity of the article, which seems itself to be AI slop anyway.

Something is wrong here, LLMs won't spit out the same word-for-word response for the same prompt that's not how they work.

The article said they were the "exact same".

You can give an LLM the same seed and it will spit out the same word-for-word response. That’s how they work. It’s just a bunch of math.

You're assuming that because I missed out that detail I must be ignorant of it, that's not very charitable, I could well have been ignorant of it but you could have made your otherwise useful clarification without telling me I was wrong.

Again, you're telling me what I already know, because you're still assuming. I can make the point that same prompts don't produce the same output without explaining about random seeds.

Where was I wrong? I said nothing that contradicts the detail you added.

Well I worked near one of the venues and I got to work and home every day on time. Maybe it's rose-tinted glasses as it was 14 years ago, I remember plenty of other complaints about the organisation of the games, we like to complain in this country, but I don't remember hearing of any transport problems. London is not a car-centric city like LA which makes this a relevant point for this community.

I wouldn't say that, as a counterexample I was living in London during the 2012 Olympics and have no memory of it being problematic. It all depends on the preparation and quality of public transport, London managed to absorb it all quite well and some areas benefitted from being tidied up in the process.

I just want to add to the discussion that I think it's perfectly healthy if two instances don't like each other and/or have different outlooks - it's the beauty of the fediverse and having decentralisation that they don't have to agree on everything.

That's a really misleading headline; a Mastodon instance has done this, Mastodon as a whole can't do this because it's free software, it can be used for any purpose.

Paying for services isn't philosophically incompatible with FOSS, that's how companies like RedHat broke through back in the day, but paying for "quick and high-quality security updates" strikes me as alarming. Am I to take from that that they're holding back high-quality security updates from some users? Unless maybe we're talking about extended support for EoL software.

YouTube has ads?

Don't see the point, the world doesn't need another Chromium browser.

Who is they?

Yeah, they were making AI slop by hand before we even had AI.

Have they preserved where the sound gets increasingly out of sync with the video the longer you watch it? Because most archived versions don't have this.

It's not about blocking ads for me, that's a happy side-effect, it's about owning your computing and taking the necessary protection against tracking. Before "ad blockers" existed I spent a lot of time manually configuring my browser to block websites from connecting me to unnecessary, potentially intrusive third party servers, after all it's my browser and my internet connection. Now uBlock Origin does that for me, it's not an ad blocker, it's a wide spectrum content blocker and the user should have the final say on what they connect to. I think we should stop calling them ad blockers.