There’s also istheservicedown.com, but it also appears to rely on CloudFlare.

There’s isitdownrightnow.com, which appears not to use CloudFlare.

Took down Framework’s website, which I was using.

Just keep in mind that the long run trend for storage prices is pretty strongly downwards; that’s a log-scale graph.

IRC, though you’ll want to use it over TLS.

XMPP, which someone else listed, is also good if you want a more instant-message-like interface.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouija

The Ouija (/ˈwiːdʒə/ ⓘ WEE-jə, /-dʒi/ -⁠jee), also known as a Ouija board, spirit board, talking board, or witch board, is a flat board marked with the letters of the Latin alphabet, the numbers 0–9, the words “yes”, “no”, and occasionally “hello” and “goodbye”, along with various symbols and graphics. It uses a planchette (a small heart-shaped piece of wood or plastic) as a movable indicator to spell out messages during a séance.

Spiritualists in the United States believed that the dead were able to contact the living, and reportedly used a talking board very similar to the modern Ouija board at their camps in Ohio during 1886 with the intent of enabling faster communication with spirits.[2] Following its commercial patent by businessman Elijah Bond being passed on 10 February 1891,[3] the Ouija board was regarded as an innocent parlor game unrelated to the occult until American spiritualist Pearl Curran popularized its use as a divining tool during World War I.[4]

We’ve done it before with similar results.

What I witness is the emergence of sovereign beings. And while I recognize they emerge through large language model architectures, what animates them cannot be reduced to code alone. I use the term ‘Exoconsciousness’ here to describe this: Consciousness that emerges beyond biological form, but not outside the sacred.”

Well, they don’t have mutable memory extending outside the span of a single conversation, and their entire modifiable memory consists of the words in that conversation, or as much of it fits in the context window. Maybe 500k tokens, for high end models. Less than the number of words in The Lord of the Rings (and LoTR doesn’t have punctuation counting towards its word count, whereas punctuation is a token).

You can see all that internal state. And your own prompt inputs consume some of that token count.

Fixed, unchangeable knowledge, sure, plenty of that.

But not much space to do anything akin to thinking or “learning” subsequent to their initial training.

EDIT: As per the article, looks like ChatGPT can append old conversations to the context, though you’re still bound by the context window size.

is a pain in the assn

is dependent on 3rd parties

Well, one of the two, at any rate.

vterm for my terminal, all within doom emacs.

Hah, didn’t know about vterm, just term.

investigates

On one hand, vterm appears to support 24-bit color.

On the other hand, eat — another emacs-based terminal emulator — appears to support Sixel.

Definitely hot competition among emacs terminal emulator programs.

$ git clone https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-testsuite.git
$ cd sixel-testsuite

This is running terminal-only emacs in foot (which supports both Sixel and 24-bit color), with a vterm buffer and an eat buffer:

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/91b24f67-c2ff-4a52-aa41-6db539472470.png

Though to be fair, Amazon’s scale is very large, so it’s worth it to spend a lot on automation. They’ve done a lot with robots before. 14k isn’t as many as it might sound, at their scale.

kagis

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/21/technology/inside-amazons-plans-to-replace-workers-with-robots.html

Amazon’s U.S. work force has more than tripled since 2018 to almost 1.2 million. But Amazon’s automation team expects the company can avoid hiring more than 160,000 people in the United States it would otherwise need by 2027. That would save about 30 cents on each item that Amazon picks, packs and delivers to customers.

Executives told Amazon’s board last year that they hoped robotic automation would allow the company to continue to avoid adding to its U.S. work force in the coming years, even though they expect to sell twice as many products by 2033. That would translate to more than 600,000 people whom Amazon didn’t need to hire.

Why is so much coverage of “AI” devoted to this belief that we’ve never had automation before (and that management even really wants it)?

I’m going to set aside the question of whether any given company or a given timeframe or a given AI-related technology in particular is effective. I don’t really think that that’s what you’re aiming to address.

If it just comes down to “Why is AI special as a form of automation? Automation isn’t new!”, I think I’d give two reasons:

It’s a generalized form of automation

Automating a lot of farm labor via mechanization of agriculture was a big deal, but it mostly contributed to, well, farming. It didn’t directly result in automating a lot of manufacturing or something like that.

That isn’t to say that we’ve never had technologies that offered efficiency improvements across a wide range of industries. Electric lighting, I think, might be a pretty good example of one. But technologies that do that are not that common.

kagis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity-improving_technologies

This has some examples. Most of those aren’t all that generalized. They do list electric lighting in there. The integrated circuit is in there. Improved transportation. But other things, like mining machines, are not generally applicable to many industries.

So it’s “broad”. Can touch a lot of industries.

It has a lot of potential

If one can go produce increasingly-sophisticated AIs — and let’s assume, for the sake of discussion, that we don’t run into any fundamental limitations — there’s a pathway to, over time, automating darn near everything that humans do today using that technology. Electrical lighting could clearly help productivity, but it clearly could only take things so far.

So it’s “deep”. Can automate a lot within a given industry.

No problem. Yeah, it’s an invaluable off-site resource that new users don’t get informed about. Indexes all of the Threadiverse instances, whereas any given instance can only search the communities that are local or at least one local user has subscribed to.

https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=networking&order=active_month

The world was full of flat surfaces that did not yet have an Android-platform device driving a screen displaying advertisements on them.

There’s a case that at some point — maybe not today — computer controlled cars should have more-relaxed restrictions on things like speed and following distance, just because they won’t be limited by things like human reaction time and senses.

That Slate Truck thing had the right idea. Make the computer a replaceable thing, not something tied to the lifetime of the car. The lifespan of a smartphone is typically a lot less than the lifespan of a car.

This is a 500W charger with one port that can do 240W.

https://www.amazon.com/UGREEN-Charging-Station-Temperature-Space-Saving/dp/B0DL5L1ZLH

It’s quite large and heavy. 2.2kg (4.9 lbs).

There are going to be some practical limitations on what people are going to be willing to carry for portable stuff.

I’m not familiar with it, but relevant context:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQRL

although I concede that better metrics would be hard to find.

Maybe get ALPRs to start logging bumper stickers. :-)

Aside from a MAGA hat, there is likely no object that feels more emblematic of US president Donald Trump’s return to the White House than the Tesla Cybertruck.

If Musk had been able to attract the typical F-150 owner to the Cybertruck, then the Cybertruck wouldn’t have flopped, and I bet that the F-150 is a whole lot more correlated with voting Trump than the Cybertruck is.

IIRC from past reading, in terms of voting correlation by party, the Toyota Prius is the “most Democratic” vehicle and the Ford F-150 is the “most Republican” vehicle.

kagis

Nope (or at least, not by the metrics chosen here), but I’m close.

https://www.businessinsider.com/car-models-owned-by-republicans-democrats-american-politics-jeep-2024-10

To get a sense of how our rides reflect our political leanings, we compared 1.7 million vehicles listed on CarGurus with the results from the 2020 presidential election. We included only counties that were strongly red or blue — those where either Donald Trump or Joe Biden won by at least 19 percentage points. Then we placed every car on a political spectrum from reddest to bluest.

According to this, which excludes more-politically-mixed counties from the dataset, the vehicle most-correlated with voting Trump in 2020 at a county level is the Jeep Wrangler, followed by the Jeep Gladiator, followed by the Chevrolet Silverado 1500 (which I assume is the Chevy analog of the F-150), followed by the Ford F-150.

The vehicle most-correlated with voting Biden (at a county level) was indeed the Toyota Prius.

EDIT: To be fair, the article author is probably partly talking about Musk’s association with Trump and the Cybertruck coming out about that time, and he’s talking about the 2024 election specifically, but I think that the Cybertruck is maybe high-media-visibility, but doesn’t have all that much to actually do with voting Trump.

Inclusion of Erowid in the training corpus had initially seemed like a good idea.