An (un)obvious connection between Eraserhead and Bloodborne (spoiler!):

https://www.reddit.com/r/bloodborne/comments/xgu21c/eraserhe...

Apple Books has some rare exclusives. To name one, all of Norman Berrow's novels are only available there.

Tangent. Yesterday I tried Gemini Ultra with a Django template question (HTML + Bootstrap v5 related), and here's its totally unrelated answer:

> Elections are a complex topic with fast-changing information. To make sure you have the latest and most accurate information, try Google Search.

I know how to do it myself, I just want to see if Gemini can solve it. And it did (or didn't?) disappoint me.

Links: https://g.co/gemini/share/fe710b6dfc95

And ChatGPT's: https://chat.openai.com/share/e8f6d571-127d-46e7-9826-015ec3...

I've seen multiple people get that exact denial response on prompts that don't mention elections in any way. I think they tried to make it avoid ever answering a question about a current election and were so aggressive it bled into everything.

They probably have a basic "election detector" which might just be a keyword matcher, and if it matches either the query or the response they give back this canned string.

For example, maybe it looks for the word "vote", yet the response contained "There are many ways to do this, but I'd vote to use django directly".

I'm pretty certain that there is a layer before the LLM that just checks to see if the embedding of the query is near "election", because I was getting this canned response to several queries that were not about elections, but I could imagine them being close in embedding space. And it was always the same canned response. I could follow up saying it has nothing to do with the election and the LLM would respond correctly.

I'm guessing Google really just want to keep Gemini away from any kind of election information for PR reasons. Not hard to imagine how it could be a PR headache.

i wonder if it had to do with the Django hello-world example app being called "Polls"

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.0/intro/tutorial01/#crea...

If that was the reason, Gemini must have been doing some very convoluted reasoning...

It's not reasoning, it's fuzzy-matching in an extremely high dimensional space. So things get weird.

I think the only difference between what you described and how we reason is the amount of fuzziness.

Asking it to write code for a react notes project and it's giving me the same response, bizarre and embarrassing.

"Parents" and "center" maybe? Weird.

It gave me this response when I simply asked who a current US congressman was.

It's only the other way around, no? Abusing your monopoly position in one area to advance your product in another is wrong, but I don't see a clear issue on the other direction.

It's interesting to note that you consider having children a selfish choice, because in some cultures, not having children is considered selfish.

Cultural anthropology might have an answer there. I guess that some cultures and traditions view not having kids as selfish because there's a cultural push for preserving society (kids will become workers, help parents, pay taxes, fight in the army, and so on). I consider myself selfish because I've done it to fill my life with something I felt was lacking. I've no rational excuse.

I think both options are selfish.

You don't do it or not do it for humanity, society or whatever random shit you make up.

If both are selfish, then neither is selfish. You conveniently deconstructed the concept of selfishness and I like it a lot.

I live in Germany. After dual-using Google Maps and Apple Maps for a year, I've finally uninstalled Google Maps and now use only Apple Maps.

Try osmand, it's based over the openstreetmaps data and you can download the map, so it works also with no internet.

In germany it should be very good.

I resonate with the top comment on Tildes that suggests we need a singular conglomerate to cover all media types. We actually had one from China, douban.com, but the situation of censorship there makes it unusable. There are also a few new alternatives, such as nicedb.org and its fork, neodb.social, but I find them somehow lacking.

Does anyone remember scriptogr.am? It was a similar idea, but it's long gone now.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=scriptogr.am

As the saying goes, "no news is good news".

Once upon a time, if the BBC didn't have anything else to report, they'd play music for the rest of the news time slot.

Is there anyone out there building a federated Wiki based on ActivityPub, given it's such a fad nowadays?

Hopefully that is a fad that won't go away that easily. Walled gardens holding users hostage because they would lose all their friends if they switched are a real problem.