The irony here, I think, is that many people will have actually put together the chair they use to sit in front of their computer.

ah yes. one minute past forty-two. my favourite time of day

Prediction: Dude will have a book out about how to survive it in the next 12. Or he’s aiming to receive a bonus from someone he knows who’s already writing one.

Information entropy. You need roughly as many syllables to explain the same concept with mono- or disyllabic English words as you do with a scientific polysyllable. Admittedly, some of it is “I know this word! See how smart I am!”, but another part is how much more fluid it is to say. “Monosyllabic” rolls off the tongue a lot more easily than “having only one sound”.

(The funny answer here would have been “No.”)

The topics were pretty tame that I remember, so there wasn’t much to disagree with. I was just being… uh. Florid? Verbose? Sesquipedalian?

It might be a neurodivergent trait; the need to use the right word to communicate exactly the right meaning even if it runs to several syllables.

It might lose a few people, but I’ve got to say what I mean.

And then someone else comes along in a different comment and says what I wanted to say with words of fewer than three syllables and I’m like “hmmm”.

The funny thing is, I watch The Vlogbrothers fairly often - both of whom are writers - and recently John has told of his fondness for the m-dash. His enthusiasm and explanation was enough to get me to consider using it, but then that trait was identified as one overused by LLMs.

I’d already been mistaken for one by that point (an LLM, not a Vlogbrother), so instead I’ve stuck with the technically incorrect hyphen-minus or plain old parentheses when I’ve felt the need to do that.

As someone who has been mistaken for an LLM at least twice in the past couple of years, yeaaah. Sometimes I write like that. The LLMs learned from people like me. I can only hope it was smarter, more productive people with the same sort of writing style and not from anything I’ve produced… although it would explain a thing or two.

D*ck measuring contest.

The same used to be said of newspapers (and still ought to be). That is, it’s funny how accurate and informative they appear to be until the topic changes to something about which you have intimate knowledge.

The logical leap to generalise from that is impossible for far too many people and is also an easy trap for those who can make it.

Considering AI is just glorified autocomplete, this announcement is hardly a surprise.

Remember when Microsoft first bought it and not long after they decided that all code in the free repositories was fair game for autocomplete suggestions in Microsoft programs?

This is just the next logical step.

The next, next logical step will be stealing publicly accessible code from other repositories “by accident” if everyone leaves.

“Mbin” literally stands for “magazine bin” though. The use of “magazine” is a gun pun carried over from kbin. Kbin was named after the karabiner rifle, which, somewhat ironically, doesn’t use magazines, but it’s still a gun thing.

The true format-agnostic platform would be named something like “gbin” because ActivityPub calls communities/magazines “groups”. That could be a throwback to Usenet, but it’s a fairly generic term.

… although that being an anagram of “bing” might raise a few eyebrows at Microsoft legal.

You don’t have to use it for both if you don’t want to. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

POTS isn’t quite dead in the UK, but it’s very much on the way out. The transition is slated to be complete by the end of January 2027.

Heh. That’s also my “reason to believe”, but I was trying to get an unruly comment under control and trimmed that part.

Namely, I once took an account right back to no watch history and no likes - either that was a feature at some point or I did it manually - and still got suspiciously familiar suggestions.

There are problems with this. Firstly, people might let their kids watch videos on their “adult” accounts. YouTube’s detection would have to be incredibly fine-grained and be able to flip-flop depending on what’s being watched.

The second one is a “damned either way” kind of deal: Consider the deletion of watch history; Should it forget you’re an adult if you do that? If yes, then you have to go through a different process or watch a load of videos that are not blocked but still sufficiently adult to get your account reidentified. If not, they’re storing metadata that you implicitly requested the deletion of.

I have reason to believe that they do keep such metadata and that they may have been taking steps to hide that fact. A permanent “user is an adult” flag would blow that wide open. As such, I reckon this will be the first, “forget” option. And users will have to suck it until the algorithm works out the user is an adult again (or else never delete their watch history; something that would suit YouTube’s advertising algorithm just fine).

And those who didn’t expect this joke to be interpreted as base 3.

I dunno, some people get confused beyond 11111.

Your company will be forced to make you redundant.

This whole thing smacks of the “anyone who has a sexual proclivity I claim not to share must have all sexual proclivities I claim not to share” logic. i.e. the logic that got gay people flagged as child molesters back in the bad old days. And occasionally still today.

Such logic might actually be rooted in projection, which is a deeply disturbing thought. Deeply closeted people desperately clinging to heteronormativity and traditional gender roles because they think that if they don’t they they’ll do something abhorrent. Maybe even to someone who can’t consent. Or they already have and they desperately want to hide away from it.

Yes, for the love of all that’s holy and secular too, ban the games with apparent child sexual abuse. Children can’t consent. Leave everything else the hell alone.

I don’t even play video games with sexual themes, but I do play ones that contain 18+ violence. I assume those will be next on the chopping block.

What an odd choice of picture. You could barely fit a pared-back shell onto one of those let alone a kernel and everything else.