Flisty
@Flisty@mstdn.social
Just another Twitter migrant. Enjoying it here! Mostly a reader not a poster.
I live near Cambridge (the UK one not the Boston one), I like active transport and I read books to pay the bills.
She/her/they
- Comment on Why joining the local library is the best thing you can do in 2026 1 week ago:
@okwithmydecay NB you can also often join libraries in neighbouring counties too. Useful if you like ebooks and audiobooks as it expands the catalogue you can access if you have more than one library card. They often also give you free access to online newspapers and magazines, and sometimes streaming platforms too.
But please also go in! Ours does free coffee, has desks and free WiFi, and you can use their scanner and pay to use their printer if you don't have your own. - Comment on Microsoft Office has been renamed to “Microsoft 365 Copilot app” 1 week ago:
@glitchdx hmm. I'll have to look into it. Most of the companies I work with are locked into office so I may be stuck with it but it'd be lovely to get rid.
- Comment on Microsoft Office has been renamed to “Microsoft 365 Copilot app” 1 week ago:
- Comment on Cops Forced to Explain Why AI Generated Police Report Claimed Officer Transformed Into Frog 1 week ago:
@Gsus4 @TheBat the more worrying thing is how many times it has made something up that nobody has spotted because it looks normal.
Proofreading spots spelling/punctuation/formatting issues. You need a deeper copyedit, not just a scan, to check the sense of something. And that won't necessarily catch factually untrue, but perfectly plausible, things. - Comment on Librarians Are Tired of Being Accused of Hiding Secret Books That Were Made Up by AI 2 weeks ago:
@NikkiDimes @Wlm racism is about far more than tone. If you've trained your AI - or any kind of machine - on racist data then it will be racist. Camera viewfinders that only track white faces because they don't recognise black ones. Soap dispensers that only dispense for white hands. Diagnosis tools that only recognise rashes on white skin.
- Comment on AI-generated code contains more bugs and errors than human output 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on Tesla Robotaxis Are Crashing More Than 12 Times as Frequently as Human Drivers 4 weeks ago:
@return2ozma so they crash 12* more than human drivers, even though they currently *have* human drivers?! The AI makes human drivers 12* worse. Cool.
- Comment on UK Wants All iPhones to Block Explicit Images Unless You Prove Age 4 weeks ago:
@G4Z yeah in principle I agree but in practice "the internet" is about 4 companies. Until there's more competition your data is being consolidated anyway. And the only way to get competition is to enforce regulation. I don't think this is *good* regulation but I don't see why we should have to do what Apple want just because they're big.
Interestingly this comes at the same time as the smartphone-free childhood thing is gaining steam so there's probably a real-world solution anyway. - Comment on UK Wants All iPhones to Block Explicit Images Unless You Prove Age 4 weeks ago:
@oeuf @G4Z I realise it's never going to happen and there would be loads of other fallout I haven't thought about, but I think governments *should* be allowed to. They can in every other field - our booze laws aren't the same as the US's, why should our dick pic laws be?
It might de-monopolise the industry a bit. - Comment on AI Slop Is Ruining Reddit for Everyone 5 weeks ago:
@IronBird @mirshafie did you use a comma where you should have used a semicolon there on purpose
- Comment on AI Slop Recipes Are Taking Over the Internet — And Thanksgiving Dinner | Food bloggers see traffic dip as home cooks turn to AI, inspired by impossible pictures 1 month ago:
@Rooster326 @xenomor not just SEO; also the blogs are paid for with inline ads so you need enough text to fit the ads in *and* a forced scroll through them to satisfy the view counters, plus you can't copyright a list of ingredients but you CAN copyright the text around a recipe so this is all a method of claiming authorship (not that that will stop the AI scrapers).
- Comment on MPV: The Ultimate Self-Hosted Media Solution You're Probably Sleeping On 2 months ago:
@Peffse @brsrklf our ancient Blaupunkt has a variant of this: https://interlook.eu/product-eng-3115-Universal-remote-control-for-BLAUPUNKT-TV-TV-support-SMART.html
- Comment on Huge internet outage live blog: Amazon, Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max and more experiencing issues 2 months ago:
@CmdrShepard49 @dukemirage If ten people want to store or listen to the same original album at the same time then the creator gets to sell ten copies. Then they might hand them on, but ten copies are still out there. Maybe an eleventh person wants one but they're all in use - they're going to have to go back to the creator and buy a new one. If someone pirates one copy and gives it to nine people for them all to have at the same time then the creator only sells one copy, forever.
- Comment on Huge internet outage live blog: Amazon, Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max and more experiencing issues 2 months ago:
@BananaTrifleViolin @dukemirage a huge proportion of the stuff people watch on Netflix/listen to on Spotify is really old media you could get second hand on CD/DVD for pennies. I mean how much is a Friends box set going for nowadays
- Comment on Apple Banned an App That Simply Archived Videos of ICE Abuses 2 months ago:
@FreedomAdvocate @IzzyJ because you can't establish whether they're in the country illegally without a fair trial.
- Comment on People regret buying Amazon smart displays after being bombarded with ads 2 months ago:
@TheGrandNagus @Cosmonauticus i can see a very dull future of filling in individual details for all minor-brand/non-US/homemade items in your fridge because the fridge doesn't have the details in its catalogue. Or the company changes the size but leaves the branding intact (hi, shrinkflation) so the fridge gets confused...
- Comment on People regret buying Amazon smart displays after being bombarded with ads 2 months ago:
@TheGrandNagus @Cosmonauticus how would a smart fridge know whether a box of something or a carton of something was full or empty? Weight-sensitive shelves? Would you have to show it everything you put in or took out to make sure it registered? Seems like a faff.
- Comment on Arizona ‘VPN’ searches surge amid Pornhub ban in state 3 months ago:
@Jason2357 @funkajunk I mean that was the initial selling point for Gmail wasn't it? Don't worry about deleting or archiving anything, ever, you can just search for it... Basic file management skills sidelined.
- Comment on Amazon is making it impossible to remove the DRM from Kindle Books 3 months ago:
@BitsAndBites @Lushed_Lungfish also also, if you're local library uses overdrive/Libby you can just have free books, easy peasy
- Comment on TikTok To Be Sold To Trump’s Right Wing Billionaire Buddies And Converted Into A Propaganda Mill 3 months ago:
- Comment on Atlassian goes cloud-only, customers face integration issues 4 months ago:
@boatswain @egrets same as firing staff only to use more expensive contractors to do the same job, or selling a building you own only to rent the same building from someone else. It doesn't come from the same budget line, because it's lower risk, in the sense that you could in theory just stop paying the money if your strategy/situation changes, and you won't have ongoing expenses just from "owning" the thing. In reality you're usually still locked in, just paying more.
- Comment on 'X' Marks xAI's Spot: xAI has acquired X in an all-stock transaction. The combination values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion. 9 months ago:
@daddy32 @aesthelete yup I'm sure it's worth quite a lot to some larger private investors
- Comment on After 50 million miles, Waymos crash a lot less than human drivers 9 months ago:
@dogslayeggs I know you were only talking about cars. My point is you can't only think about cars because there are too many other factors, including drivers of other cars who don't know whether or not they can go if the other "driver" doesn't indicate whether they've seen them or not. It's not about "banning people for not waving", it's that if someone doesn't let the other person through, nobody moves. The endpoint will be everyone hating Waymos and always going first.
- Comment on After 50 million miles, Waymos crash a lot less than human drivers 9 months ago:
@dogslayeggs this is not a good solution unless you're expecting to mandate that all pedestrians, cyclists, scooter riders, guide dogs, whatever, wear them too, and that all existing cars are retrofitted with them. Kind of dystopian.
- Comment on After 50 million miles, Waymos crash a lot less than human drivers 9 months ago:
@ripcord unpredictable but maybe not standard practice? Just a guess, could be a bad assumption! British driving culture is reliant on eye contact and waves and nods and flashes - you have to signal if you're giving way (to other drivers as well), and say thank you; lots of places where there's only room for one vehicle on a two way road and someone has to decide who's going. Might be my failure of imagination but I don't know how that works with no driver.
- Comment on After 50 million miles, Waymos crash a lot less than human drivers 9 months ago:
@MoreFPSmorebetter @vegeta I just can't see this type of tech working in places with a more pedestrian-first culture / more unpredictable human behaviour, i.e. countries without jaywalking laws. If you tried to drive this through London and people realised it will just have to automatically stop for you (and also *won't* stop for you out of politeness if you wait hopefully) then everyone will just walk in front of it. What's the plan, special "don't stop the Waymo" laws?
- Comment on After 50 million miles, Waymos crash a lot less than human drivers 9 months ago:
@Curious_Canid @vegeta this is the case for the Amazon "just walk out" shops as well. Like Waymo they frame it as the humans "just doing the hard part" but who knows what "annotating" means in this context? And notably it's clearly more expensive to run than they thought as they've decided to do Dash Carts instead which looks like it's basically a portable self-service checkout. The customer does the checking. https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/17/24133029/amazon-just-walk-out-cashierless-ai-india
- Comment on After 50 million miles, Waymos crash a lot less than human drivers 9 months ago:
@meco03211 @Jayk0b cars can't either - it's a false premise. Not everything is drive-thru. How far is, say, the bakery section from your car when you go to the supermarket?
- Comment on China is practicing ‘dogfighting’ with satellites as it ramps up space capabilities: US Space Force 9 months ago:
@NotSteve_ @alphabethunter the funniest ones are people who go "to Europe" on holiday and then get confused when they can't get exactly the coffee they are used to. I do think the algorithm pushes this stuff in people's faces though. I left after the day the US wasn't on it and I suddenly got shown Aussies and Canadians and English-speaking Africans and Europeans. Made me realise quite how bad the feed was normally.
- Comment on China is practicing ‘dogfighting’ with satellites as it ramps up space capabilities: US Space Force 9 months ago:
@NotSteve_ @alphabethunter spent some time on TikTok between the election and the inauguration and the defaultism is reeeeally apparent on there. There was a big thing about Robbie Williams being "some guy who was big in the UK" at Christmas, and recently another one about how jacket potatoes and baked beans are "war rations". And endlessly recurring takes on how the US is more culturally diverse than Europe because it is ... bigger. The video element makes it all so much more *out there*.