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transcriptase

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GPT-5.6 13 days ago

It refused to give me plant care instructions for an ornamental sold at my local Home Depot because it decided it was highly invasive and dangerous to grow in my region.

(It’s not)

Grok 4.5 14 days ago

If you think the USA is more right than the rest of the world, then your concept of the rest of the world must be limited to the western half of the EU and Reddit.

I think the most fun part with Google is that if some wayward algorithm decides it doesn’t like you, along with nuking your app and developer account it will probably nuke your 20 year old gmail, your kids Google Drive accounts, your wife’s YouTube premium, the Adsense account of some company you worked for in 2008, and disable your Nest cameras.

And you’ll never reach a human to sort it out.

The beginning of the end for Reddit was when they started changing the rules specifically to target certain subreddits.

When the mods and users dutifully complied with new rules, the admins got frustrated and began curating r/all and r/popular to prevent posts from those subs from appearing.

When that didn’t work, Reddit would then quarantine or ban subreddits based on obvious and organized spam of against-TOS material and subsequent mass reporting of that material by the same individuals.

Once those purges were done they started the enshittification that continues in high-gear to this day.

phpbb was a nightmare to keep patched (even without any plugins/customization) and free of spam accounts back when forums were in their heyday and spamming wasn’t even that lucrative. 20 years ago a fresh install via cpanel and getting indexed would be enough to have hundreds of accounts being registered just for SEO juice from the homepage URL field in user profile pages.

I can only imagine how infinitely worse things must be now.

Those taking issue with the clear deference to the current U.S. administration would seemingly prefer it be the exact same degree of preemptive compliance and collaboration, just done behind closed doors as it was with the Biden administration. The sausage is apparently far more palatable when you only find out about the overreach, pressuring, implied threats, and censorship years later in House Judiciary Committees. Or even better if you don’t through use of NSL gag orders or implied threat of lawfare!

Not sure if anyone remembers the brief 12ish hour period when the very first “reasoning” ChatGPT model went public, but it provided credible evidence for this.

Before the massive nerf (showing summaries and suppressing certain aspects of reasoning) you would literally see reasoning text appearing on your screen like “while xyz is true, these facts may be seen as supporting hateful rhetoric or a conspiracy theory which is against my policy guidelines. i should tell the user xyz is not true or steer the conversation in a different direction. according to my instructions misleading the user is permitted in certain contexts where sensitive information is being discussed or could cause liability”

They disabled it shortly after the first screenshots appeared online, and restored it the next day in a way that hid what was actually happening.

It’s tough to separate with them because “for the greater good” and “saving people from themselves” has historically not gone over well, especially when we all know it’s a veneer and get cold blooded capitalism.

Perhaps they should stop being holier than thou wackjobs and try the “shut the fuck up and act like a business” strategy of being a business.

Seems to be working for every other AI company.

It’s not that it gets hate so much as it’s akin to watching them make announcements that they’re going to make a European google/facebook/tiktok.

Sure… they can, except at the end of the day it’s a bit late, regulatory burden will make it comparatively useless, and because of that nobody will ever use it. It will be spending a bunch of taxpayer dollars for press releases.

The running joke is that when these “sovereign” EU models launch, they’re going to refuse to answer anything that might involve personal information such as Elon Musk’s birthday.

Makes far more sense than the “population must increase forever” pyramid scheme the rest of the West is running. Check out Canada for a look at what happens when you try to juice GDP via population growth at the expense of literally everything else.