firedoku

Me:

Here's a picture of his Tumblr dashboard, he admitted to me he ran six accounts, and he used AI to generate/enhance pictures as well as stealing some pictures from actual charities. You can zoom in on the screen to see closer. He wouldn't admit more about who was running the whole operation, but with knowledge of similar online scams it's usually a center with multiple employees all running similar scams.

Not sometimes. Not until the next update. Always. They proved it with math.

Even with perfect training data and unlimited computing power, AI models will still confidently tell you things that are completely false. This isn't a bug they're working on. It's baked into how these systems work at a fundamental level.

And their own numbers are brutal. OpenAI's o1 reasoning model hallucinates 16% of the time. Their newer o3 model? 33%. Their newest o4-mini? 48%. Nearly half of what their most recent model tells you could be fabricated. The "smarter" models are actually getting worse at telling the truth.

Here's why it can't be fixed. Language models work by predicting the next word based on probability. When they hit something uncertain, they don't pause. They don't flag it. They guess. And they guess with complete confidence, because that's exactly what they were trained to do.

The researchers looked at the 10 biggest AI benchmarks used to measure how good these models are. 9 out of 10 give the same score for saying "I don't know" as for giving a completely wrong answer: zero points. The entire testing system literally punishes honesty and rewards guessing.

So the AI learned the optimal strategy: always guess. Never admit uncertainty. Sound confident even when you're making it up.

OpenAI's proposed fix? Have ChatGPT say "I don't know" when it's unsure. Their own math shows this would mean roughly 30% of your questions get no answer. Imagine asking ChatGPT something three times out of ten and getting "I'm not confident enough to respond." Users would leave overnight. So the fix exists, but it would kill the product.

This isn't just OpenAI's problem. DeepMind and Tsinghua University independently reached the same conclusion. Three of the world's top AI labs, working separately, all agree: this is permanent.

spiderman dances to the beat

So I tell Jane to bring her boy over to a bbq I'm having and she can tell him she's trans at my place surrounded by queer and trans people who love her and will support her if he ends up being awful.

She waits till the end of the bbq to tell him the news, by which point the rest of us have learned that Jason is a kind, friendly, empathetic, hard working, dummy. So we sit down, all of us a little worried about this gym bro's reaction when she tells him she's trans, and that she understands if he doesn't want to keep dating her it's no big deal.

He's baffled, so we explain what trans is, and after the disclosure that she hasn't had bottom surgery yet...

"Oh you have a dick?"

"... yeah."

He look's around at the room full of people with baited breath, his clearly a little afraid girl friend says

"Oooohhhh! I get it! You think- don't worry Babe! Watch this!"

And ya'll this man jumps up, runs into the kitchen and returns with one of the bratwurst we had for grilling and proceeds to tilt his head back, put it down his throat, hold it in his mouth for a moment, and spit it up without even a whisper of a gag and then looks around at the group absolutely beaming with pride.

"Honey, I must tell you, i am in fact trans and I have not had bottom surgery."

My parents threw away all of these things (even the vacuum cleaners and the dryer) when they got too dirty to function, because no one even told them THAT they could be cleaned. Cost them thousands of dollars over the years.

All I'm saying is that cleaning is not intuitive, and not knowing how to clean is not a moral failing, but it is something you can learn.

I like this video because it does a great job of introducing the basic foundations of house cleaning (and because he doesn't use bleach, which is a common allergy in addition to being awful to inhale). He also talks a little about how to clean a vacuum. And why you shouldn't put grease from your pots and pans down the sink drain. I also love that he mentions that different houses and different people have different needs and different versions of what clean and cleaning looks like.

This is another video from the same guy about cleaning and depression. This advice, especially at the beginning, can feel really really difficult and oppressive to hear. However, I find that it's generally pretty solid. But I'm autistic and so is he, so that gets a massive Your Mileage May Vary stamp on it.

I have a favorite part of this video. It's from 10:52 to 12:36. I think we could all use to hear that. There's a HEFTY pause after that one. I promise the narration does come back.

This is a pair of videos about how to correctly load and use a dish washer.

The first one is a quick 1 minute 30 second overview on loading. I can't find the exact video I'm looking for, so consider this a substitute for that. If I can find the one I'm looking for, I'll swap it in.

Here's a blog post about scrubbing brushes and how to clean them.

And a video for all cleaning tools, including scrub brushes. This video does use bleach. I'll try to find some alternatives to that.

How to clean a top loader (without the removable agitator thing). This should be done every 1-3 months depending on you unit, or every time you wash really soiled clothes.

How to clean a top loader (with the removable agitator thing). This should be done every month, or every time you wash really soiled clothes.

This video is for pet owners.

These carpet brushes are a LIFE SAVER if you have dogs. This thing allows me to go from vacuuming about 4 square feet before my vacuum is full to vacuuming half the living room (I don't vacuum often enough. You should vacuum weekly, and I just can't.). I have to unclog the vacuum less often. It fluffs up some of the flat spots in the carpet. And I also use the brush to shampoo my rugs in the spring.

A spot cleaner (or a carpet cleaner with a spot cleaner attachment) is another life saver, ESPECIALLY if you can afford to splurge on a heated one. I see them at Goodwill or at yard sales occasionally, and they're worth picking up. The shark one in the video is great too.

It's America's Housekeeping Book (1941). Available for free download on the Internet Archive. (Large PDF file at the link here).

The LISTS y'all. The step by step lists. The emphasis on efficiency and arranging spaces for the least resistance possible. The basic concept of "take a tray or basket into a room when you are tidying up so you can put things that belong elsewhere on it and take them out LATER in ONE GO".

> ask the people there whether their resources are international or just for americans

> they laugh and say "they're good resources sir"

I was initially disappointed when switching from Google to DuckDuckGo since it seemed the latter is just as filled with unavoidable AI slop, if not seemingly more so. (Since I previously had a Firefox extension to block all "AI overview" results from Google, which of course didn't work on DuckDuckGo, meaning I was now seeing even more stupid AI search results after the switch than before.)

Then I stumbled across this Bluesky post about DuckDuckGo's dedicated AI-free domain, noai.duckduckgo.com. I'd already switched my default search engine on Firefox to DuckDuckGo, but that post got me wondering if it was possible to replace my default search engine with THIS version of DuckDuckGo instead. Turns out, you can! On both desktop and mobile! So I wrote out a tutorial below if anyone wants to follow the same process.

Note: This no-AI domain might not catch everything, but it does eliminate a lot of the AI slop, which is a win in my book. According to the screenshot in the post: "The system relies on curated blocklists, including uBlockOrigin's Huge AI Blocklist, to detect and suppress Al-generated imagery." While this seems to indicate the site only blocks AI images, I haven't seen any "AI overview" text search results either since I started using it. Double win.

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Desktop instructions

1. In Firefox, open a new tab and look on the left side of the search bar. Click on the dropdown menu with "This time search with..." at the top and all the alternate search engines in the list below. I've already added NoAI DuckDuckGo, so you won't see that option yet; instead, click Search Settings at the very bottom.

2. (Alternatively, go straight to Firefox Search Settings by entering this in your web address bar: about:preferences#search)

3. Again, you won't find NoAI DuckDuckGo in the "Default Search Engine" box at the top...yet. You will have to add it first. Scroll all the way to the bottom where you will find the "Search Shortcuts" menu, and click "Add".

4. This is what I typed to add NoAI DuckDuckGo to my search engine list, which is the prerequisite step to making it the default search engine.

(Typed out below if you want to just copy and paste)

Search engine name: NoAI DuckDuckGo

URL with %s in place of search term: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/search?q=%s

Keyword (optional): @ noaiddg [remove space]

5. Now scroll to the top of the Search Settings page, where you will now be able to select "NoAI DuckDuckGo" from the dropdown menu of default search engine options!

6. Open a new tab and type in a search term to test. I searched "drawing references." It's still using the default DuckDuckGo logo on the left, but as you can see, the search info appearing below the search term is already pointing to the custom NoAI search engine we set.

7. And voila, it did indeed pull from noai.duckduckgo.com as the default search engine, not regular DuckDuckGo.

(I believe the "AI images: hide" toggle is in the basic DuckDuckGo search engine as well, but in the NoAI version, it's toggled off by default.)

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Mobile instructions

The process is even easier on mobile, especially if you copy and paste!

1. Go to the Firefox app, tap on the hamburger menu on the bottom right, and open "Settings"

2. Under "General," tap on "Search" (again, if you haven't manually added NoAI DuckDuckGo, you won't see that option yet)

3. Scroll down to "Alternative Search Engines" and tap "Add Search Engine"

4. Add the same info as you would for the desktop version, BUT look at the link carefully after you paste it, as on mine it added a random extra "25" at the end that I had to delete. Make sure the %s at the very end of the link stays intact, as it won't accept the search engine without it.

Again, here's the URL to copy and paste (make sure you get the whole link with %s at the end):

https://noai.duckduckgo.com/search?q=%s

5. Now scroll back up to "Default Search Engine," and you should see "NoAI DuckDuckGo" (or whatever you named yours when you added it) as an option you can select from the dropdown menu!

6. Again, you can test it in a new tab if you want, and it should pull your search results from the NoAI version of DuckDuckGo instead of the regular version.

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This tutorial was just for Firefox and the screenshots are both from Apple devices, but I'm guessing it's also possible to set a custom default search engine on other devices and browsers using a similar process.