Medical AI is usually more along the lines of ‘we’ve created a proprietary model for computer aided diagnostics specific to x disease being scanned with y modality and we’ve taken this through the regulatory process in z jurisdiction’ than ‘put your symptoms into an LLM lol’.

I’ve faced this situation at work, we deployed a dedicated windows VM that all the devs shared for the one tedious task. Eventually got replaced with a saner system and we had no Windows dependencies at all.

Windows-free since 2014 in my case! Hated Windows 8’s user experience enough that I decided KDE was a better windows than windows and never looked back.

In 2026 Plasma 6 is genuinely in the conversation for the best graphical environment for the desktop platform in general, partly because it’s very good and partly because Apple and Microsoft have let standards slip a lot in my view.

What worries me is people using it for safety-critical things without appreciating the danger, for a test some of my friends who sail for a living asked various chatbots some questions like ‘how would you approach a berth under sail when the wind is against the tide?’ and every single one but Claude got it dangerously wrong, and Claude wasn’t 100% either it just refrained from suggesting a sail plan that would lead to you crashing into the pontoon.

Will give a shout out to Mistral which got the sailing element of the question very wrong but did sensibly suggest ‘turn your engine on and perform the manoeuvre under power’ which of course is what you should do if you can.

Very well said! Privacy protects the innocent far more than it protects the guilty, and no false positive rate other than zero is acceptable when ‘van bursts in to take your career away over an AI detecting wrongdoing’ in my view.

If a false positive rate of zero is not possible then not building it is the only ethical option.

You’ve managed to nerd snipe me with the colourblind friendly Pride flag, the second one somehow looks really good!

Why is stirring up conflict here beneficial though? I’m intensely critical of the current US government but me and the average American still have more in common with each-other than either of us have with our respective ruling elites in terms of material interest and daily life.

Yes their crowing about being the most democratic country on Earth is a bit silly but that doesn’t mean they deserve to become an outright plutocracy, nobody deserves that. You can object to Washington’s lofty perch in the global pecking order and to Americentrism in general without wishing ill on a whole nationality the vast majority of whom have done nothing to wrong you personally. The only thing I wish for the Americans is for them to fix their backsliding democratic institutions and to adopt a more realistic view of their country’s place in the geopolitical landscape; I don’t doubt these are goals many Americans support at this point.

I was really looking forward to my luxury German nuclear-powered car as well >:(

Not played those games but to be fair in a nuclear wasteland you would expect fresh meat and vegetables to be more radioactive than the general environment. Animals and plants can accumulate radioactive fallout, if it’s diffuse in the soil it can be more concentrated in whatever lives off that soil. Radioactive contamination often consists of caesium-137 which behaves like potassium, and strontium-90 which behaves like calcium, so you’re getting screwed by conventional biochemistry as much as nuclear physics.

This is a concern in the Chernobyl exclusion zone even now, there’s mushrooms and other forage that must be avoided for this reason.

Dylan has more good advice here, when it comes to bubbles you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows!

I’m usually a rationalist but nothing can convince me that Sod’s Law isn’t somehow baked into the structure of the universe.

To be honest it was only ever a proof of concept, I ran it for a week or so and left it a sqlite database on my laptop. If you wanted to make a statistical case for manipulation you’d want to gather a more substantial dataset together, and you’d also want to label the data using NLP techniques.

LLM slop might be cheap to produce at scale, but why would you bother doing that to influence the 13.3k active users per month on this instance (which is one of the larger ones) when reddit, insta, facebook etc exist? Also Lemmy’s recommendation algorithm doesn’t amplify the spam to potentially millions even if they were here, so it’s not a particularly productive place to be spamming.

Also reddit probably isn’t deliberately keeping Lemmy down, we’re a small decentralised community of people motivated for whatever reason to go down a route other than the default approach. That kind of temperament is necessary for some portion of society to have, but it’s also prone to creating splitting and drama. Lemmy’s problems I feel are largely of its own making, but it’s way better than it was and personally I think there’s quite a high ceiling on slow, sustainable growth. Reddit are even kind enough to drip-feed a stream of new users to us through their clown show approach to running the place.

That’s interesting, Wales was fairly prolific around the world on that front. Donetsk in Ukraine was founded by a Welshman for example.

Lemmy was a ghost town last time I visited, it’s actually viable to leave reddit now because discussions are reasonably active. Also you’re way less likely to be talking to an LLM which is nice.

To be fair there was infrastructure then that doesn’t exist now. Most phone boxes are basically just public urinals now for example, I mean they always were but you could usually expect a phone to be in there too. People were also used to remembering numbers, but the only numbers I remember these days are my own and various landlines from my childhood which have been disconnected for over a decade as people did away with traditional landlines, then the VoIP bridge replacements which just became a way to receive international tech support scam calls more efficiently.

I personally want to see smartphones curtailed more generally; if I had absolutist power a lot of the adtech sector (at least surveillance-based behavioural recommendation algorithms) would be legislated out of existence on public health and democratic integrity grounds for example. I’d like to see e-ink smartphones become a wider market segment too, as these inherently break a lot of ‘dark patterns’ and also make short form video content less viable in favour of text content. I don’t think we can just take smartphones off kids and dump them at eighteen into the psychological manipulation engine that is the modern adtech sector without wider structural reforms to our relationship with smartphones and the internet.

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I did such a double take at this place name, I assumed I’d misread it and the piece was actually talking about Wales! Are Welsh place names common in the eastern US? Would love to hear the local pronunciation, I was rubbish at Welsh place names until I’d actually lived in the country. The good news is it’s way more phonetic than English, the bad news is some of the alphabet encodes sounds which straight up don’t exist in English.

Can’t imagine any children getting this kind of grief in the original Bala, it’s a very small town in Eryri national park (commonly known as Snowdonia in English) set in a very beautiful landscape. I wouldn’t have spent a minute indoors if I’d grown up there, I’d have been out on Llyn Tegid / Bala Lake from the moment school ended.

Yeah this is one thing enshittification apologists never seem to understand, they’ll claim ‘well if you don’t like ads just pay for the non-ad version, I want cheaper prices’ but the reality is no matter how much you pay there’s a mandatory side dish of enshittification.

BBC edited the title!

It’s really funny how badly Nigel Farage’s histrionics have backfired on him.