Why do you keep Gemini installed? Does it even work offline?

What the hell happened to Edward’s face?

AI upscaling is the newest vector of digital rot. We already had forced compression, watermarks, people making screenshots instead of saving the picture and now there’s AI upscaling guessing at details that never existed.

Here’s the original picture.

Edit: Found a better resolution that wasn’t decAIed

It also looks like that 1973 picture of Nixon’s bedroom is newer than the website design, so I’m not surprised it isn’t using https.

Wow, you’d think it wouldn’t be this hard. There’s White House archives online, but they all seem to be text only. Articles about the rose garden, but never any pictures. And when it’s an article with pictures from 2000-2016, it’s only historical pictures, as if showing a contemporary picture would be the most redundant thing to do in an article about a rose garden.

Is tysto someone’s personal archive of whitehousemuseum.org? I don’t get the domain name, the home page mentions the other domain (which is for sale). Wikipedia lists whitehousemuseum.org under “External links” for a collection of photos.

It’s not racist to say that a theocracy scares a lot of smart people away. I know multiple Iranian families who all fled Iran after 1979 and came to Europe. All highly educated, all very opposed to the Islamic Republic that ruined their country.

Here, the effect is notable enough to have its own Wiki article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital_flight_from_Iran

The more obvious choice would be to make everyone go dark, instead of setting up nationwide voice mail to pretend everyone is alive. But maybe this way they can keep everyone’s communications open while also fooling most of these intelligence gathering methods (someone answered, in the right language, mark it as active).

Redbubble wojak sticker

Stop advertisiiinngg!!

Charles would never knight an actor called Gary Youngman smh 😞

It’s crazy to me that those are back-to-back Luc Besson films, both starring Gary Oldman. Oldman’s performances are so different, I didn’t even recognize them as the same actor until I saw the credits.

Thought I was looking at

I think if you look at child development research, you’ll see that kids can learn to do crazy shit with very little input, waaay less than you’d need to train a neural net to do the same. So either kids are the luckiest neural nets and always make the correct adjustment after failing, or they have some innate knowledge that isn’t pattern-based at all.

There’s even some examples in linguistics specifically, where children tend towards certain grammar rules despite all evidence in their language pointing to another rule. Pure pattern-matching would find the real-world rule without first modelling a different (universally common) rule.

How do prescriptions for glasses even work on your side of the pond? I assumed it was just jargon of a sort, because round these parts I just go to a glasses seller and ask him for his strongest glasses. Then he says “no traveller, my strongest glasses are too strong for you, you can’t handle my strongest glasses” and does the eye test with me before making lenses at the proper strength.

Yeah, “restore session” will restore whatever you had open the last time you quit Firefox. Closing windows one by one will only quit at the last window, so that’s what it restores. If you want to close Firefox and have it restore multiple windows, you have to use “Quit”.

I find it really easy to tell the difference between a human being polite, neat and well-spoken, and an AI being the same (but soulless). I don’t know if I could put it into words though, there’s just something about AI that lacks subjectivity? A human would phrase something in a certain way and stick with it, because that’s the way they experience it, while the AI takes a phrasing at random, only caring about gaining lexical and grammatical points.

I also think humans overestimate their ability to write clearly and correctly. There’s always some noise in there, even if they’re going full corpo-speak. Unless it’s written-by-committee meaningless corpo, but then I don’t even read it beyond the first sentence. It’s very obvious when someone has tried to strip all meaning from a sentence and the result is not far from AI.

I’m not sure if I understand what you’re talking about exactly. With root I can access all files on my device (including /data/data, where app internal files are kept) and I can give permission to apps to access all files too, it they ask for it. Not that I’d want that, because it’s way safer to keep user data in /storage/emulated/0 and give read permissions on file or folder level (like /Pictures for a gallery app, or just the picture I want to share for a social media app).

If you want to share data between apps, the easiest way would be to give them access to the same folder in user space. That isn’t OS maker’s generosity, that’s basic security controls.

I recently saw terminal access as a feature of Android 16 too, so if you have su access, that should give you all the power you need. Now let’s hope root will become standard, instead of needing to flash Magisk.

People use the internet without ad blockers??

I think there’s a difference between being able to understand and having all the information to understand. Randall has a very wide range of topics that he makes comics on and most readers won’t know enough about every topic to get every joke, even though he does his best to simplify it for a broad audience. That’s the reason ExplainXKCD exists. But his audience is generally nerds, people who like learning new information, which is also what Explain caters to. So it is both true that his audience can (and are willing to) understand and that Explain helps them understand. (I also think that nerds love explaining stuff, so it makes sense that the main fandom website is ExplainXKCD, even if there were no demand for explanations.)

That second picture is peak “men only want one thing and it’s disgusting”