“But- but my sTrAndeD aSsEtS”

there is a significant probability we already are at this point,

I personally don’t believe that we are, not here, anyway. If I browse reddit for a while, I get the feeling that it is overran with bots at this point (like, 45 to 50% bots, based on my own subjective intuitions), as I’m not sure reddit itself is actually fighting it all that hard (on the surface, it would seem like AI traffic that isn’t ‘discovered’ to be AI traffic would still be useful to them to artificially boost user numbers for investors as well as for ad revenue. In other words, I’m not sure they have a strong incentive to weed out AI users, at least in respect to short-term profits? Though I could be wrong).

Lemmy/Piefed on the other hand still don’t appear to be very bot-ridden yet, maybe 5 to 10% at most.

I think it is a rising threat, and we’re already sort’ve at a point like it’s depicted in Cyberpunk 2077. In the future it may indeed make the internet an unfun place to be socially, but at least for now, the fediverse appears to holding it back so far. As I say, if it ever becomes overwhelmingly bots, I’m definitely going to be scaling back my participation, and if others do the same, then yes, the internet will suffer for it and be a far less useful resource, but at the same time, the bot resistant alternatives I mentioned in my other comment will benefit from that exodus, and we’ll likely just adapt to that.

Thanks for taking it into consideration :)

I already answered the first part your question at the end of my previous comment. As to the idea that they become more useful/beneficial than actual human members, I personally find actually interacting with other humans more fulfilling than interacting with a machine in a social context, regardless of how ‘useful’ they are.

If AI gets to the point where it’s all pervasive, indistinguishable from real people, and we somehow cannot devise a way of weeding them out of online communities, I’d honestly probably just stop participating socially in public internet spaces, and instead restrict myself to private invite-only communities that do more intense vetting to ensure only humans are in that space, or participate in and help build up local mesh-networks, where people can actually meet up with who they talk to online.

That would probably mean a lot less time spent online overall, and instead going outside and finding connection with people in real life.

I didn’t and can’t guarantee that, I merely said that most bots reveal themselves with the technique I described.

I suspect that using human applications to get an AI through the door will be somewhat uncommon, as hiring people to do that for profit seeking reasons is likely not terribly viable, as a human can only write so many applications per day, and that labor isn’t free, I just don’t see the economics working out. Bot spam is likely only profitable when it is entirely automated.

But if a human specifically targeted an instance in that way, that certainly could happen. I suspect that at least for now, other users may be able to suss-out a bot that gets through, as they still have some tell-tale signs they give off in their writing style, but it’s plausible that at some point they will be able to blend in seamlessly. At that point, we’ll need to devise new ways to weed them out if they begin to take over.

It is correct, it is very frequently used in much of the material LLMs were trained on, and the AI is correctly using it, but generally to excess. It uses it so often, that it has unfortunately become a signal that something might be AI written. That is just the reality at this point, and I suspect Em-dash usage by humans will begin to fall off, at least online to avoid that association (until the AI is trained on material that makes it not use em-dashes, at least).

I’d personally be against it for a few reasons:

1. LLMs are still very much prone to hallucinations, and I strongly suspect most people don’t bother to read the sources of summaries, thus it has potential to spread misinformation with hallucinated, incorrect information within its summary.

2. Simply using an AI that’s run on a corporate data centers encourages the construction of yet more data centers, with all of the environmental/climate negatives they bring, as well as local harms they induce on the people living near them, such as increased electricity rates.

3. Using corporate AI, even through Kagi as a proxy, directly helps the financial situations of those giant corporate AI’s (by boosting usage/user numbers, they are able to attract more investment capital), most of which are owned by right-wing CEO’s who are more than willing to collaborate with and fund fascist governments to ensure that they are not regulated in search of both maximum profits. Some of these companies, such as Nvidia, Palantir and Oracle, genuinely appear to be seeking to use these tools for what would previously be considered crackpot conspiracy theory levels of public control and surveillance.

I personally don’t believe that the benefits of summarizing news articles outweighs the negative impacts of using any form of corporate controlled AI.

I’m also wary of the potential effects of AI usage resulting in declining or stagnating critical thinking based on some preliminary studies (example 1, example 2). But if someone is determined to use them regardless, I would hope they either use a locally run LLM, or use a distributed model like AI Horde, as at the very least that does not encourage the construction of corporate data centers nor boost their financial prospects.

Are Kagi News articles summarized by a person, or are they summarized by an AI LLM?

Yeah it never went out of print, as far as I know. I was a big fan of the ones from the 60’s after reading some on Archive.org, so I put in a year subscription to modern Analog.

To be honest, the quality of writing wasn’t compelling enough on average to subscribe for another year. There were two or three stories I really enjoyed, a handful were pretty good, and the rest (85%?) were either very much not to my tastes or boring.

To me, it seemed like the boring stories were divided between:

Actual scientists/engineers who clumsily shoehorned long descriptions of their own specialty into a flimsy plot full of weak characters who exist just to ask questions for the protagonist to continue their science explanations.

Or,

It’s not written by a scientist, but has no concept of how to craft an intriguing hook, or get a reader invested. One example I can give is a story that was about a woman who helps maintain the life support system aboard a ship, who, after a talk with her mom and looking through family photos, decides not to marry her fiance after struggling with it in her head for a few days. That’s it. Nothing else happens. There was no conflict, nothing interesting going on in the ship, just a person whom the reader will struggle to care about or relate to due to there not being enough pages making a personal decision, and everything is fine. Was really surprised the editor published it.

One of the stories I really enjoyed was The Last Days of Good People, by A.T Sayre (who spun it out into a standalone novel). It was a proper sci-fi adventure, with a very interesting focus on interactions with a well written and fleshed out alien race that really tugged at me and even got me to cry.

From what I’ve read, Asimov’s might have slightly higher quality stories, but I couldn’t justify the price to try a year of that too, especially when the competition, such as ClarkesWorld, is free to read online, and supposedly has higher quality stories than either.

But that’s just my two cents based on my personal fiction tastes (I can be a bit picky). I believe both Asimov’s and Analog have one full issue available to read for free on their site, which can give you an idea if you’d like them or not (if they no longer do that, there’s some fairly recent issues of both on Archive.org)

EDIT: I will say though, that it was really cool to actually receive a real printed sci-fi mag in the mail regularly. I really wished I enjoyed the stories more to justify keeping that, as I do really like that aspect.

They are still quite evident in the way they construct their messages, and of course any em-dash usage is a big giveaway.

Someday they’ll likely be able to answer those questions more convincingly, but right now it works for the most part.

I would personally say that’s unnecessary hairsplitting, since regardless of the specific flavor of evil, it’s still monumentally bad their CEO funded it.

They are nationalist racists trying to cloak themselves with populist leftist ideas. This is the leader of that party:

https://www.friatider.se/markus-allard-om-andra-generationens-invandrare-de-ska-ocksa-ut

Örebro Party leader Markus Allard goes to the election on expulsions. He opens to withdraw citizenship and also expel second generation of immigrants – even if they were born in Sweden.
“I’m prepared to cross corpses,” he said.

One suggestion that he has is that citizenship and permanent residence permits can be torn up – with reference to “Sweden is the country of Swedes”.

In a section of Yoshi’s Podcast, Allard develops his view on expulsions and explains that he prepared to “go over corpses” to bring home unwanted immigrants. The host notes that there will be no beautiful sight when, for example, immigrant mothers who have been on maternity leave for 15 years are to be deported together with their children. “It’s not going to be pretty to send these people home,” he said. Markus Allard agrees, but says: I think you can handle that optics. Even the children will need to be deported, he explains.

He further explains that many of the problems relate to second-generation immigrants. They are going out too. Even if they were born in Sweden, because they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedes. They have not become Swedes. It says Sweden in the passport, but they have not been interested in becoming part of Sweden. There’s a difference. It’s a qualitative difference," Allard said

Remember; the Nazi’s did the same thing by strategically calling their party the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, despite them not being socialist nor a working class party. This was chosen because Socialism was gaining popularity, and thus the Nazi’s thought it would help their chances of getting votes and public support.

From what I recall the 2nd game is regarded by some as the weakest in the series, while the 3rd is considered quite good, so if you don’t click with the 2nd’s school theme and anime tropes, you may want to skip to the 3rd one, which I think has a more serious tone.

But Codeberg just doesn’t want cryptocurrency scams, and Anubis isn’t a currency, it has no ability to pump and dump like cryptocurrencies can. Proof-of-work to weed out bots has little similarity in practical usage with proof-of-work to waste electricity for a digital number that is more often a scam than not.

Anubis isn’t a currency, though.

Valkyria Chronicles 2 and 3 are PSP exclusives, if you liked the first one on PC or PS3 (I think the 3rd game needs a fan translation patch though).

There’s a couple decent Jak & Daxter exclusives, too.

Having manual account approvals combined with a short questionnaire asking why they want to join and which communities interest them has been extremely effective on my instance so far, as most bots reveal themselves at this step.

I beat the first Gabriel Knight from Sierra for the first time. I was surprised how excellent the voice acting and writing for the dialog is, and liked the direction it was going, but the ending was kind’ve off putting, and I ended up needing a hint book toward the end due to some pretty out-there puzzle design, but overall I enjoyed it more than I thought I would.

I tried the sequel, which is rated pretty highly, but found the switch to FMV unfortunately unbearable due to really slow, poorly acted awkward dialog, and a big down grade in the music and setting, so I chose to pass on it.

Instead, I discovered that with a little soldering, I can convert my 90’s sidewinder joystick from game-port to USB, making it usable on modern PC’s. That made me curious to finally try Wing Commander 3, a space dogfighter combined with interactive FMVs. It took some fiddling with Dosbox to get it working right (recommend using Dosbox-staging and reducing CPU cycles to around 40k), but I tried the first few minutes, and was impressed with the quality of acting on display thanks to the cast having Mark Hamil, John rys Davis, and the villain guy from back to the future, Biff. Kinda has a battlestar Galactica 2003 vibe going on with it.

They feel fine to me, and are a little safer to use for noobies in some positions since they have progressive resistance.

I believe they are also considered better suited to the elderly or those who sustained shoulder injuries in the past.

It’s quite possible to do resistance training at home, and it’s particularly affordable if you use resistance bands, which also take up extremely little space.