People that attend Untold, Neversea, and no doubt a whole host of other festivals around the world would look and think “first time?”

The point is very much that yes, for Paris, it is indeed the first time.

That’s kinda the point of climate change. Lots of places will be getting “first times” they’re not prepared for. “Herp derp but Death Valley is hot” is the Fox News formula for dismissing that.

Because being pedantic just to try and make yourself feel superior to someone who was posting in good faith is obnoxious behaviour that deserves to be called out. You knew exactly what they meant, but thought you’d truth-bomb your way in for what, exactly? You did nothing to actually address their point - that the messages being identical is prima facie evidence that (original AI generated or not) it was probably candidates copy-and-pasting a standard form response, which could (and was) be done long before LLMs were a thing - and instead just added “look how clever I am”.

Dick behaviour doesn’t deserve a charitable response.

You really need to learn to read who you are replying to.

Not my interpretation.

And what you were doing was “well, akshuallying”. Own it.

So your hyopthesis is that instead of a load of people cutting and pasting the same response (AI generated or otherwise,) they all cut and pasted the exact same prompt into exactly the same model with exactly the same context running on exactly the same hardware, and went to the trouble of also fixing the same seed?

That certainly seems the simpler explanation.

Unfortunately, the data doesn’t appear to be collected in a systematic way across the whole country, but one police force - West Yorkshire Police - does have data going back long enough for a trend, at least for the arrests on the Communications Act.

For West Yorkshire Police, the arrests under the Communications Act are pretty much constant from 2008 (around 200) to 2024 (actually a little lower, 152).

Given the changes in social media penetration over that time (things like the iPhone and Twitter barely even existed in 2008,) for the rate of arrests to have remained constant throughout I would suggest strongly indicates that there is a very strong element of “absolutely nothing to do with social media” in those numbers The Times quoted.

The numbers for the Malicious Communications Act are less easy to parse, because they don’t go back far enough, and also they show a massive drop in the last 6 years.

All of this of course could be slightly moot - because in 2023, a new act (the Online Safety Act) was passed which specifically relates to “arresting people for their social media posts” [TM Musk et al].

In 2024, West Yorkshire Police made 5 (five! Count them! Hell, you could invite them all round to your house for dinner) arrests under the OSA.

“Thousands” of people are categorically not being arrested for their social media posts in the UK every year. Or even every decade.

Except the number cited isn’t for social media posts. It’s all arrests under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988, which covers far more than social media (as you can probably guess, given social media didn’t even exist in 1988.)

That includes arrests for threatening phonecalls, sharing indecent images (child porn and the like - you lot who bang on about Epstein all the time are meant to be against that, right?) - and not only on social media - stalking and harrasment adjacent offenses like nuisance calling, and a whole host of other offences completely unrelated to social media.

In other words, it’s complete bollocks. And all from one woeful newspaper ‘story’. Congratulations for providing an excellent example of how one right-wing rag with an agenda can confect a story, then have it cited by a load of other ‘sources’ that don’t do anything beyond cutting and pasting the original lie, and then suddenly you’ve made a whole new fact.

Welcome to Lemmy!

Thousands? Source?

What a dumb take.

I make full use of my gigabit broadband (in both the places I have it - Bucharest and Bangkok), so there very much is a “point”. I’m not going to bother enumerating all the ways I use it though, because the response will just be “ohhhh, but normal users don’t do that”. But exceptions are normal - the mistake being made here is assuming that you represent the whole human race just because you don’t have a need for something.

Personally I think sanitary towels are useless, because I’ve never needed one and indeed the majority^* of the population don’t need them…

This is just a cope post; “gigabit broadband is so fucking expensive in the UK I’m trying to justify it not being necessary”. My gigabit fibre in Bucharest costs about 8eur/month, in Bangkok 15eur/month. I suspect if broadband in the UK were reasonably priced, this blog post would never have been conceived…

^* before you argue, remember (pre-)puberty and menopause are things.

I mean, it was before Bitcoin came along.

It’s rather like the hacker/cracker(defunct) thing.

Ahh, I fell hard in love for a full 24hrs with a dancer from Miami in London Stringfellows a few decades ago… She had the looks and body of Grace Jones and was studying Computing at UCL.

Nothing but admiration. I hope she graduated and has a fine career.

Not me; I contacted my pension fund last week to move it entirely out of equities and into bonds & cash.

Which is no guarantee, but… I’m not close enough to retirement that this would normally be sensible, but I know I’m close enough that I’d never earn back the losses from the mother of all crashes that is riding into view on the back of these IPOs (and the “I can’t believe it’s not a crime!” changes to index rules to fast track this nonsense into trackers, guaranteeing that pension funds and the like will be left holding the bag.)

The problem with Starlink is it’s only ever a niche service. There’s a limit to how many satellites you can have in the sky over paying subscribers (as opppsed to, say, deserts or oceans) - I did some back of the envelope maths that put it at about 15 million subscribers with acceptable speeds, maybe double that with terrible service.

By comparison, Deutsche Telekom in Germany alone has 5 times as many mobile subscribers, and a similar number of fixed-line broadband. Amd best of all, Deutsche Telekom doesn’t need to replace all its infrastructure every 5 years when it falls to Earth.

So on what possible basis does Starlink warrant a “to the moon” valuation, and traditional providers don’t? Traditional providers can serve more consumers, at lower cost, with better return on assets…

Starlink, and batshit ideas about datacentres in space, exist for one reason: US infrastructure is complete shit. It would almost certainly be long-run a better investment to fix the power, water, and telecomms infrastructure on the ground, but right now you have a government that would rather private companies fire money into space than pay taxes.

Yeah, so basically he didn’t have cash, wanted to pay by ThaiQR, and they said “sorry, we don’t take that, we do take WeChat Pay”.

Which could just as easily have happened in any 7-11.

Thailand was on its knees begging for Chinese tourists to return after Covid. They’d be wise to do something about the goddamned Russians that are ruining the place - or any of the other endless-repeating-visa-run drug and sex offender contingents - before anyone starts worrying about the Chinese.

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I think that’s more about telling users though that if they let an apl find local devices, that can be used to deduce your location.

Which is exactly the right amount.

Honestly, I hope the AI companies implode as well - and am fairly sure they will; OpenAI’s entire business model is that they will be AI gatekeepers and everyone will have to pay them for access - but even now, the only way they can make this true is by artificially inflating the cost of inference hardware. That’s simply not sustainable - cheap inference accelerators will come from China (ok, maybe somewhere else but at the moment US industrial policy is doing its best to make it China) and then it’s game over for that business plan.

But while that makes OpenAI et al a shitty investment prospect, it won’t stop AI taking your job if you don’t adapt. You would be amazed at the capability of models that you can run locally right now. All the major providers can go out of business tomorrow, and the guy who is running Qwen locally will still be twice as effective a developer as you are.

The genie is absolutely out of the bottle and not going back in. The choice is to either find a new profession (which is totally valid, of course,) or start learning now how to be one of the people who survives by learning to use the tools better than anyone else. LLMs are dumb as a box of rocks, they are always going to need an actual intelligence to understand how to actually use them to accomplish any non-trivial useful thing. The people who get that and learn that will be the ones who still have a job when all this washes out.

(The “herp derp no they’ll replace you too the only thing to do is wail and protest” contingent are inhabiting a weird space where they believe that LLMs are (a) useless but also (b) actually super intelligent and will replace us. Both these things cannot be true… Reality is they’re very dumb, but still very useful. These things absolutely can be true; my compiler has zero intelligence, but it’s still extremely useful and I’m glad I don’t hand write assembler any more…)