umbraroze

umbraroze , 4 months ago to xkcd in xkcd #2897: Light Leap Years

It's a comic published multiple times a week. Common social etiquette is that if you find it funny (which is known to happen), you give it a grin or a mild chuckle or whatever, and then move on with your morning and, by extension, the rest of your life.

umbraroze , 6 months ago to xkcd in xkcd #2866: Snow

I'm from Finland. This is how it usually goes in the winter:

During the 2 hours of daylight we get at this latitude:

• Ooooooh this is pretty
• Bet I can get some nice photographs
• ...or I would, if the sky wasn't overcast goddamn it

Other times:

• Rummaging through the closet for wool socks and more clothing
• Put on the headphones, hit the metal music collection on my Nokia, and face the Darkness with a grim stare
• Would hit the beer, but not in this economy

umbraroze , 11 months ago to RedditMigration in Reddit Tests is Own Verification Markers with ‘Official’ Profile Tags

Yet another thing that was done by the army of volunteer mods for over a decade, and now Reddit higher-ups are going "well that was cute and all, why don't you go home and let us show how it's really done."

umbraroze , 1 year ago to RedditMigration in Hot take: 18 years of user contributions to reddit will serve as a base model for an AI that generates content and conversations. the reddit experience continues as a simulation, to harvest clicks, sales and ad revenue.

SubredditSimulator was based on older generative algorithms, so everyone could fairly easily tell that it was rubbish. When SubredditSimulator got shut down, someone made a new one based on GPT-2 (I think) and everyone was like "OK, this is getting harder to distinguish from real people".

I'm betting someone has made even more advanced bots by now. I'm betting someone's also not concerned about telling other users upfront that they're bots, and they're not confining them into specific subs. Now, the only reason I'm not accusing Reddit Inc themselves of building these bots is that they aren't exactly a bastion of software engineering excellence; the site barely works as is.