today in "google AI is fucking useless because it hallucinates things that never happened", i bought a couple CVS thermometers that have both been acting up, tried to search if there had been a problem with the whole product line:
there is no record of this product recall. it did not happen. the date "feb 8 2024" is the date someone listed a thermometer for sale on ebay.
Google's trying to save you the time spent clicking on a site full of AI-generated SEO garbage by presenting the AI-generated garbage right up front! Such efficiency.
#so google probably uses chatgpt right? #because for some time now chatgpt has done this #become utterly insane and make up random bullshit #and nobody knows why
I was under the impression that we did know why: AI isn't actually a brain and can't actually think or understand information, so it has no concept of something being true or not, or what markers indicate truth or falsity, or how to synthesize information. It's putting a bunch of words in a jar, shaking the jar, and then dumping it out, and acting like that means the jar knows how to talk.
Like, in this case, OP asked for information about a recall. The AI knows that, throughout the entire internet, the word "recall" usually is surrounded by information like a date or a number, so it gives you a date and a number. It doesn't know what a date is or what it's for or what it means. (It also apparently doesn't know the difference between "recall" as in "removing a dangerous product from the shelves" and "recall" as in "remembering," since it smooshes the two together)
[ID mostly by @homunculusalphonse : A photo of the Google search results for the phrase "cvs thermometers recall": "On February 8, 2024, CVS Health recalled its rigid tip digital thermometer with memory recall and fever alarm. The thermometers have a memory recall feature that stores the previous temperature. The item number for the recall is 375235991489." Both the links attached to this text are from eBay and Pinterest. This module does say "AI overviews are experimental", in much smaller font. /End ID]
hey here's a website for downloading any video or image from any website.
works w/ youtube, soundcloud, twitch, twitter (gifs and videos), tumblr (video and audio), and most other websites you're probably lookin to download stuff off of.
for anyone wondering about privacy and whatnot, i'm happy to say that the developers are pretty committed to have 0 trackers and 0 data retention. you can read more in their "about" section, but here's the basic important stuff:
if you’re white and wanna write a poc character and feel awkward about it i implore you to ignore any twitblr stuff treating it as a massive ethical burden and instead come in more with the same mindset you’d have if you wanted to write about idk firefighters but didn’t know anything about firefighters so you do... research. Like fuck off with the weird kinda creepy calls for spiritual introspection you’re not writing about god damn space aliens you’re writing about humans and if you think you need more perspective of different life experiences just read?
If I were writing about firefighters I'd also, in addition to just reading about them, take advantage of Our Blessed Internet to ask actual firefighters about how shit works. I'd do the same for a minority I'm not a part of.
I remember when there was this LiveJournal community where you could just ask about anything you needed for your novel - medicine, professions, vehicles, how things function in country X - and people who knew something about that would answer.
Not only are you not scratching the surface, you don't even know where you're digging
So to preface, a couple years ago I joined a Minecraft server with a big group of friends, where every now and again, they would come over to my House. And I thought it'd be really funny if I changed the House ever so slightly but always insisted that it was exactly the same, so occasionally when they'd come over they'd say, "Is this room different...?" and I would do my best deadpan sincere voice and say "no, it's always been like that! :D". Since I live in Europe it was really easy for me to exclusively work at night time for them, so from their point of view I was never really online. So over the course of probably like a year and a half, I just kept Extending The House. Every so slowly. Excruciatingly slowly. I kept making strange rooms with no purpose. Hallways that connected only to each other. Doors that lead to nowhere. Until finally one day, I logged in and there was a new room that I had Not built, and a new staircase that had definitely not been there before. Eventually I stopped adding onto my House because when I would log on it would be different anyway. Without me even doing it. One time I logged on and there were balloons. One day I logged on and my house was made of netherite. I realise it was my friends finally noticing the tomfoolery I'd been pulling for over a year and doing it back, but I like to believe that I'd committed to the bit of my house Growing for so long that I'd accidentally hexed it and it truly did begin manifesting its self :)
Except. the strange happenings did not stop there. Under the cut is all of my memories of unexplainable, weird and just generally Fucked Up things that occurred in my Minecraft House
Before I begin I think it’s important to note that I built this house because I was listening to The Magnus Archives and thought “oh hah hah a house that keeps changing that’s the kind of funny thing that would happen in a spiral statement” except it stopped being funny when it actually started happening. And when it just didn’t stop
There was a room full of mannequins that NOBODY KNEW ABOUT because it was very well hidden, except, when the final server download of the SMP was made available, all of the mannequins had MOVED INTO MY HALLWAYS.
There was a hidden ventilation system that allowed me to move between rooms that weren't usually connected, so I could essentially teleport between far apart rooms without being seen
My basement was only accessible through a 'fake wall' which was a minecraft map that I had put inside an item frame, except the map looked exactly like cobblestone, so it blended in to the rest of the wall. Nobody noticed for like half a year
The basement contained a glass room with a creeper inside of it and a sign that said "DON'T LET IT OUT". One time I logged on and the creeper had become a block of bedrock
One time I logged on and my house was surrounded by black and yellow 'police tape' I don't know who did this
Probably the most fucked up part is that my house became HAUNTED after a while by a server admin with a really creepy skin. They had programmed it so whenever they left spectator mode, it would play a really loud thunder sound and emit smoke particles. They kept showing up in my house literally just to mess with me and make fun of me. But the worst part was they'd made it so they wouldn't appear in the online players menu so I genuinely would not know if I was being watched or not, and like, there was a really high chance that I was being watched because this guy's new hobby was scaring the shit out of me by exploding into existence in front of me in my own hallways but I could Never Know For Sure. So I lived in constant fear. They turned my own home into the panopticon.
Said admin also gave me swaths of illegal items so my house eventually grew a room dedicated to contraband that literally not even the owner of the server could obtain. One time I logged on and a polar bear was in there. Okay
I dug a tunnel from my basement to the neighbour’s house only to discover that they had a HUGE painting of me on their wall inside their basement. I closed that tunnel. They did not mention the painting to me ever
One time a friend managed to get admin but the server owner forgot to deop them. She turned all of my walls into netherite and bedrock, and to hide that this had happened from the server owner, we COVERED THE OUTSIDE WALLS from top to bottom in PAINTINGS. It looked ridiculous. IT WORKED
There were 5-ish bedrooms and none of them were mine
I logged on after my birthday to see my front door adorned with balloons addressed to ‘Charlotte’. My name is not charlotte. Nobody on the server is named Charlotte
The guy who got admin and never had it removed also put stalagmites inside my roof somehow. The server owner did some magic to revert the roofs back to wool, but the stalagmites didn’t fall down, so in my lovely cozy kitchen there are various dripping stalagmites hanging from the ceiling
They also turned my dinner table into bedrock and placed an end crystal on it, so immediately upon entering the front door you were presented with what was essentially a nuke that would explode the house if you even looked at it funny. It never exploded
There are entire CHUNKS missing from underneath my house due to me mindlessly mining away entire tectonic plates of the earth. The caverns are so big that there is fog down there. At one point it started to form its own biome
It had a pond that whenever you placed a fish in it the fish would disappear. Even if the fish was named, the fish would disappear.
A friend was hosting an event and I was supposed to have found the invite in my mail box. My house does not have a mail box, instead I found the invite almost a year later buried under like 10 blocks of dirt a couple hundred blocks away from my house in a forest
The server’s monorail got extended to my house, except there’s nothing beyond my house, so the monorail just stopped. This meant that upon arriving at my house via train you would instantly fall off the railway and die
I forgot to mention but the vents are filled with water. So if you get lost in the vents, which is very easy to do since it’s pitch black, you will probably drown to death in my walls
The curtains look like red banners but they are actually white banners which have been dyed half red, half red
I built a lot of custom trees around my house to make it less ugly since it was REALLY ugly but one day I logged on and all of the leaves in the surrounding forest were Gone. The rest of the server had leaves, it was just my general blast radius that had suddenly lost all of its leaves, so my house ended up being surrounded by a bunch of tree skeletons
Apparently my house has a Girlboss Containment Chamber (?)
I always wanted to play hide and seek in my house since it was so big, so I added lots of small nooks and crannies which you could hide in. We never played hide and seek so now my house is just filled with tiny hiding spots that nobody knows about except me
One of the various kitchens had furnaces that were always burning despite there being nothing actually inside of the furnaces
All of the chests inside of the house are filled with glitched maps that do open, but have literally nothing on them any more
The snow around my house gradually was turning into white carpets and I had to keep replacing them with actual snow
THE SECOND most fucked up part is the time THE VOID consumed my entire world. I logged on and realized I was trapped in my house and that the door wouldn’t open, so I ended up breaking it down, just to find everyone else on the server appeared frozen in place. and it just didn’t change. I was online for like thirty real life minutes while watching someone who was online stream it properly and nobody moved an inch. I ended up wandering around the server in this limbo state like a ghost until I noticed that entire chunks of the world started VANISHING. I tried (increasingly panicked) asking for help but my messages would take like 10 minutes to send and by then it was too late anyway because the entire void corrupted the world, and I fell into it. I didn’t even die I just fell for tens of thousands of blocks into the void and this entire time I was recording it because it was genuinely kind of spooky EXCEPT. THE RECORDING. VANISHED. INTO THIN AIR. It wasn’t even in my recycle bin it just was GONE. This has never happened to me since and from the streamer's perspective, I was just stood in my house the entire time, right behind the closed doors.
I remembered some more bits and bobs and found pictures!! Also I literally had a dream last night btw that someone reblogged this and said "damn bitch you live like this?" and it made me wake myself up from laughing
The house was lit up fine, but for some reason creepers (and only creepers) would sometimes spawn in there. So I had to be careful whenever I turned a corner because there was a nonzero chance there would be one staring me down like freddy fazbear in my doorway
To combat this I had several cats and a fox named Froyo who wandered my house, but one day every single animal on the server spontaneously died on the spot simultaneously
I had plans to build an exact replica of the house underneath the house, I never finished it though because of time restraints but could you fucking imagine
I really like the farlands, so one day while mindlessly mining out the gaping caverns underneath my house I chiseled a chunk of farlands. So in the dimly lit no-man’s land beneath my home there was (what looked like) a chunk from the farlands just hanging out in there
One day while digging down to look for diamonds or whatever I fell down into an exact replica of the backrooms which someone had for some reason constructed. This thing is genuinely thousands of blocks wide I got lost in there within a minute and it was just Below My House this whole time
At one point I built a house made out of netherite, diamond and emerald blocks on my front yard just because it looked like the kind of thing a kid would make when they first get creative and it made me laugh
Sidenote but my whimsical and goofy reputation meant that I got so much insane stuff for free because nobody was worried about me ever actually using it. One time an admin gave me so many hearts that it covered the left side of my screen and they just forgot to take it away for like a week. I was literally immortal and living in a home made of diamonds and netherite like I cannot stress how rich and powerful I was but all I used my power for was making my house really weird
This goes without saying but there is obviously a herobrine summoner in my basement
The “biome” that started growing in my cavernous mining-area basement was a lush caves biome, which wasn’t actually added into the game yet
On the last day of the server, some newer members were given creative and blew everything up for fun. For some reason they were able to roll back all of the other explosions EXCEPT the ones that destroyed my House
I found a brown mooshroom cow thousands of blocks away, so I lead it back but upon entering the threshold of my Home it literally died on the spot. His grave is still there ☹
One day I logged on and someone had built a giant soulsand Totem in front of my home and lit a bunch of my stuff on blue-fire. Still not sure what that meant
Below my home there’s a box named “containment chamber 1” except why is it called chamber one. That implies that there’s more and I don’t know where they are. Maybe my entire home is a containment chamber
At one point, random blocks in my house started turning into bedrock. This means that you literally could not fully destroy my house no matter what. Also I vividly remember an admin came over to my house to do a HOUSE INSPECTION and get rid of any anomalous blocks, and in a panicked attempt to make my home look normal, I covered all of the bedrock up with trapdoors so they wouldn’t stand out and my house could remain weird. This worked btw. This was also the same admin that PUT THOSE BLOCKS THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE
On literally the first day when I moved into the plot of land that would become my House I found an indestructible, invisible floating block right where I wanted to build
I forgot to mention but my house is both a house, a small village and a whole Area called “Sans County” on account of the giant sans undertale statue that appeared on top of my house one day. Anyway through various geo-political disputes and SMP Lore Stuff that I was barely involved in, I somehow accidentally ended up inheriting almost literally the entire server by virtue of being the last one alive. So by the end of the SMP, the entire server was technically my House
Hey, wanna make music? Yeah? Got a buncha money? No? Well that's perfectly fine, check this free stuff out:
Vital - A powerful wavetable synth, my personal favorite VST synth, very easy to figure out creating new synth sounds, with the help of the plenty of tutorials that are out there for the plug-in. (There are paid versions but they are completely unnecessary to get 99% of the features of the plug-in.)
Synth1 - A classic piece of synthesizer software.
Pendulate - An interesting, chaotic synth that you can make weird little sounds with.
Native Instruments' free plug-ins - Various cool VSTs, including the Komplete Start pack.
The Free Orchestra - A set of orchestral instruments for Kontakt Player (see previous link).
BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover - More orchestral stuff! This one has its own player so you don't have to download a separate VST to use it if you don't want to.
Magical 8bit Plug - A chiptune plug-in, intended for producing sounds like that of 8-bit systems like the NES and Master System.
Genny - A synth VST made to emulate the soundchip of the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive.
MT Power Drum Kit - A nice rock n' roll style drum kit plug-in.
This guy's weird VST collection - 6.4 gigabytes of weird VSTs, including some you might know, like Delay Lama and MeowSynth!
sforzando - A free player for soundfont files.
Musical Artifacts - A resource I mainly use to find soundfonts, on which you can find other various things as well.
Kilohearts Essentials - 30 effect VSTs including reverb, delay, compression, pitch shifting, transient shaping, ring modulation, phase distortion, and more.
Xfer's freeware VSTs - Exactly what it says on the tin, including the one and only OTT compressor.
Illformed - The good ol' dblue Glitch 1.3, Crusher, Stretch, and TapeStop.
Hysteresis and Fracture - Two interesting glitch effects, one being a delay and the other being a buffer.
Codec - A cool digital audio degradation effect.
Le Phonk - A slick distortion plug-in.
MAIM - An effect that mimics the sound of MP3 compression.
Soundly Shape it and Place it - One is simply an equalizer VST, the other is an effect that emulates a speaker (ex: a radio) and a space (ex: a cave).
Fresh Air - An effect that adds high end information to your sounds, to provide brightness.
ValhallaSupermassive - A combo reverb and delay plug-in that sounds quite big.
UnplugRed - A collection of various interesting VSTs, most of which have free versions.
Chowdhury DSP - I can't personally speak for all of these but their tape model effect is great for some lo-fi style effects.
TAL-Chorus-LX - A thick sounding chorus, good for "retro" sounds too.
Polyverse Wider - A great effect for widening sounds up, really simple too with only two controls.
Freesound - A good audio file resource, mainly for foley recordings.
Cymbatics Dubstep Starter Pack - A little sample pack with some good drum and synth samples.
fishmonger drum kit - A pack of samples from the album 'fishmonger' by Underscores!
WangleLine's sample packs - Free samples put out by my awesome mutual WangleLine!
aaand I might as well include this set of drums I made awhile back :P
As for DAWs, it's been a long while since I've used anything other than FL Studio (not counting Audacity, which I still occasionally use for specific purposes), which, while being the only one I can directly recommend, is paid. However, I've heard good things about Reaper which has a "free trial" that you can technically use forever, akin to WinRAR. Additionally, I've also heard some good things about Waveform Free.
It's started already. Not with individual consumers so much as corporate customers. The trouble is, every AI query costs way more to run than they've been charging, and they were banking on the costs coming down in the same way as other tech costs, like storage. But they haven't -- they've only gotten more expensive -- and these companies are running at enormous losses that they can only cover with constant VC funding.
So yeah, if things had gone the way they planned, they would have waited until people were a lot more dependent on AI than they are to jack up the prices, and their costs would be low enough that they could make a huge profit. But the financials are starting to look pretty dire. It's an open question which companies will even survive long term -- so it might not be a question of "will the AI be too expensive" but "will the AI even be available."
I'm 43. If I started using AI to do all my work, and then I had to stop using it, I would still have my previous experience to fall back on. I'd probably have to relearn some stuff, and it would be annoying, but I could do it.
If you never learned how in the first place? Well, you can still learn. But it'll take you longer and it'll be even more annoying. Possibly long enough that it could damage your career for a time, as you try to catch up on ways of working that are entirely new to you. Don't do that to yourself.
You see I too often sat in school classes and thought “when am I ever going to need this, I’m never going to be an engineer, I’m never gonna be a scientist, I’m never gonna be a linguist” and then I grew up and it turns out a lot of bigots and cults and scams and grifts hinge their entire business model on you just. Not knowing what a protein is or some shit
If people knew what a fucking atom is and how molecules are defined, at least a quarter of all health related cults like movements and scams wouldn't work.
"Ohh it's a different sugar than refined sugar" it's the same molecule.
"Ohhh my water filtering apparatus making beauty water and cleaning water and alkaline water" Water is H20. What you're doing is reverse osmosis, and if it's alkaline then there is a substance that's not water in there to make it alkaline. You can't purify water to a pH of 12, because pure water molecules have, by definition of how the pH system works and several phyics rules, a pH of exactly 7.
"Ooohh it has ~different~ sodium atoms." That's called an isotope and sodium isotopes aren't created by magic woowoo, and the magical ability of most isotopes is radioactivity.
"Low toxin" what toxin. Tell me their names. What are they doing. "They are endocrine disruptors" what part of the endocrine system? How? Do you have a source that doesn't try to sell you something?
"Just mix vinegar and baking soda to cleanse all the toxins of your fruits" you just created water molecules and CO2, and some calcium and acetate which don't have much chemical property. That's a science fair vulcano. And doesn't have acidic or alkaline properties to chemically influence anything. Just use tap water at this point. "My wood cutting board soaked in an alkaline solution from baking soda to clear out the toxins leaves a nasty looking soup" yeah because you were dissolving the wood with an alkaline solution. Congratulations.
"There is effective microorganisms in this ceramic bead and it can cleanse your laundry and dishes and prevent mold in your fridge and it works for years" what microorganisms exactly? How did you discover them? What are they eating? Are they resistant to 60 degrees and steam? Do they procreate in the fridge? Are they spreading out on all surfaces to prevent the mold or is it an air filtration system that works without airflow or is it just magic? "Put them in your flowers, they can reverse cavities, put them in your walls" what are they eating in my walls? What kind of microorganisms are they? Did you test the safety of those things in human bodies? Are they native to my biotope? How do they survive in those fucking ceramic beads?
"Just use vinegar it's magic" it's a mild acid. Like, cool, sure, it works for several things, but it doesn't have magic properties. It's just a mild acid. Lemon juice is too. And once again, if you mix it with baking soda, they neutralise each other and you get water. Which cleans a lot of things but you dont need to do *all that* to get your hands on some plain water.
Those bracelets that say they'll fix all your health problems using negative ions?
I always assumed they were a scam because ions (an atom with an electron imbalance) really really hate existing and are hard to make.
Lots of ions are ok in water because water is super polar (oxygen hogs all the electrons so every molecule is like a tiny magnet) and therefore they'll soak up all the imbalanced charges.
Go pour salt in water right now. If it dissolves you've created negative chlorine ions! (And an equal number of positive sodium ions)! Good job on being a scientist.
But in air? Nothing polar to stabilise them.
Go pour salt on your table. It stays a solid? Good job. You've proven the atoms in salt prefer being bonded to each other than being free flying ions. You're half way to a chemistry degree.
The only way to force the creation of ions in air is a fuckton of energy. This can be electricity or radiation.
Go attach leads to a 9V battery. Put both into a cup of water. If you see bubbles you've successfully split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen will be on the positive lead because oxygen ions are negative. The hydrogen will be on the negative clip because hydrogen ions are positive. There will also be more bubbles because water has twice as many hydrogen atoms as oxygen atoms. These bubbles won't be ions though, because again, ions hate existing so they recombine into oxygen and hydrogen gas almost instantly. Still. You did technically make negative ions for a split second. Good job.
But most of those negative ion bracelets don't have batteries (which again, only make ions for a split second and require a renewable resource like water to do that with). So they must be a scam right? They're just rocks!
Nope. Remember the other way to make ions? It was radiation! Those bracelets and necklaces you're supposed to wear 24/7 to keep yourself healthy? They're made of mildly radioactive stone.
So they are splitting the air into ions (for a split second. You now know that ions hate existing so they recombine. Although sometimes they'll recombine into ozone (O3) rather than breathable oxygen (O2). Ozone isn't great to breathe in but you also presumably have been near a car so like... It's not a big deal in the scheme of things).
But more importantly!! They're also splitting your body into ions! Which are stabilised by the water in your body (remember the magnet analogy?) and therefore last a lot longer and can get up to more fuckery.
To;dr the negative ion bracelets do what they say on the label. They just do it by dosing you with radiation. And unlike just walking past a radioactive rock or getting an x-ray or a particularly sunny day, they're doing it on a concentrated part of your body, for as long as you're wearing it. And you're supposed to give these to children!!!
I was homeschooled but for some high school classes I went to an accredited co-op, and one of these was high school AP Chemistry
So while I was taking this chemistry class I walked into a health food store one day and saw a bottle of "alkaline water"
Well I bought it and brought it into class the next day and asked the teacher if we could PH test it, since we were learning about acids and bases, and she loved the idea of IRL applied science so we took ten minutes to do a quick PH test on the alkaline water
Guys it was so fucking acidic. It had a PH rating of 4. Don't ever buy alkaline water it is such a massive scam. I don't even know what they did to it or how you get that to happen. That's the PH rating of wine
I saw a bottle of water in the store advertising that it had a "perfectly balanced pH." Well, yeah, duh. It's water. Its pH is 7. You didn't have to do anything all that special to make it that way. You're being asked to pay extra for a basic feature of water
it's funny when quotes from communist figures breach containment online and people are like "btw in case you didn't know this guy was really problematic"
if you don’t remember this man abused his wife to the point where she was so mentally ill she decided to pee for hours on end and starved people to the point where they ate their neighbors kids… maybe
Genuinely what do you mean by “she was so mentally ill she decided to pee for hours on end” what does that mean. I can find nothing on this and the human body cannot physically do that. Is this a typo???
Well, the best description for this would be that she decided she was going to pee on drip, which is why it would take. All day. She also also known for abusing the people who worked for her but given who her husband was, I’m not surprised
Fourth one, and I heard this one from a friend’s dad, who had family working for them at the time. Lived experience is good enough for me, as I know them personally, but you can take it or leave it
As if Joanne couldn't get any shittier, she misgendered and insulted a woman who called for support, all because the woman had PCOS/PMOS and "didn't sound feminine enough."
Fuck her.
Your shitty children's series isn't more important than people's lives.
reminder that the books themselves also suck ass actually. there's an entire plotline endorsing slavery. the one character who advocates to end slavery is bullied and made fun of. the one slave who doesnt like being enslaved is bullied and treated as an outcast. the bankers are the picture of racist stereotypes of jewish people. the one asian character is named fckn Cho Chang. the worldbuilding SUCKS. fuck harry potter and fuck rowling. stop giving her your money.
Nature Documentary: these deep sea creatures can withstand crushing pressures of thousands of pounds per square inch!
Me: they’re not withstanding a goddamn thing. The pressure is a part of them. Their interiors and exteriors are equalized. Just because your respiratory system is built around a pair of fragile poppable bubbles-
vaporwave
germansingergirl
ellievsbear
romaincrisis
2087
amandla
