ptz

Cross-posted from "TIL that the name Beverly means "beaver clearing" or "beaver meadow"" by @[email protected] in [email protected]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beverly_(name)

Outdated lightning safety advice is making the rounds again, prompting experts to speak up about what actually keeps you safe in a storm.

If you get caught outdoors during a lightning storm, safety experts once recommended adopting a crouched position to lessen your chances of being struck by lightning. It turns out, however, that the position doesn’t make you any safer.

“If you’re caught outside during a thunderstorm, the best plan of action is to move as fast as you can to a safer place,” John Jensenius, a lightning safety specialist with the NLSC, said in a statement released by Loehr Lightning Protection Co. “The sooner you get to a safe place, the lower your risk. Crouching only prolongs the risk of being struck,” explained Jensenius.

The crouch isn’t just outdated—it was debunked almost 20 years ago. But despite the fact that the NLSC and the National Weather Service stopped recommending the crouch in 2008, institutions such as the American Hiking Society and the city of Bellmead in Texas continue to include it in their lightning safety guidelines.

Lemmy.World is running a charity event running for the month of April, and I’ve signed up this community to participate. I'm not going to do a post for all four, but in addition to this community, [email protected] , [email protected] , and [email protected] are also enrolled.

Details in this post.

The gist of it is that you comment !LemmySilver under posts or comments you think deserve attention, and at the end of the month, the users with the most awards will have money donated to a charity in their name.

Let’s spread some positivity in this community, and good luck!

Lemmy.World is running a charity event running for the month of April, and I’ve signed up our community to participate.

Details in this post.

The gist of it is that you comment !LemmySilver under posts or comments you think deserve attention, and at the end of the month, the users with the most awards will have money donated to a charity in their name.

Let’s spread some positivity in this community, and good luck!

Cucumbers are a pretty wasteful vegetable. They require a lot of water to grow and aren't very nutritious. Since Mars has to be very efficient with their agricultural output, cucumbers would be a rare treat.

Instead of the sane approach of specifying 5, 9, 12, 15, and/or 20 volts and the amperages, products insist on listing every model of device in existence instead.

Most will do 12V, but I always want to make sure it'll power my laptop (20V) as well.

A big thank you to reviewers who post images of the actual products where it shows the relevant info in one short line on the labels:

e.g. PD Output: 5V=3A, 9V=3A, 12V=3A, 15V=3A, 20V=3A

A federal judge struck down Arkansas' Social Media Safety Act, ruling it unconstitutional for broadly restricting both adult and minor speech and imposing vague requirements on platforms. Engadget reports:

In a ruling (PDF), Judge Timothy Brooks said that the law, known as Act 689 (PDF), was overly broad. "Act 689 is a content-based restriction on speech, and it is not targeted to address the harms the State has identified," Brooks wrote in his decision. "Arkansas takes a hatchet to adults' and minors' protected speech alike though the Constitution demands it use a scalpel." Brooks also highlighted the "unconstitutionally vague" applicability of the law, which seemingly created obligations for some online services, but may have exempted services which had the "predominant or exclusive function [of]... direct messaging" like Snapchat.

"The court confirms what we have been arguing from the start: laws restricting access to protected speech violate the First Amendment," NetChoice's Chris Marchese said in a statement. "This ruling protects Americans from having to hand over their IDs or biometric data just to access constitutionally protected speech online." It's not clear if state officials in Arkansas will appeal the ruling. "I respect the court's decision, and we are evaluating our options," Arkansas Attorney general Tim Griffin said in a statement.

Tech manufacturers continue misleading consumers with impressive-sounding but less useful specs like milliamp-hours and megahertz, while hiding the one measurement that matters most: watts. The Verge argues that the watt provides the clearest picture of a device's true capabilities by showing how much power courses through chips and how quickly batteries drain. With elementary math, consumers could easily calculate battery life by dividing watt-hours by power consumption. The Verge:

The Steam Deck gaming handheld is my go-to example of how handy watts can be. With a 15-watt maximum processor wattage and up to 9 watts of overhead for other components, a strenuous game drains its 49Wh battery in roughly two hours flat. My eight-year-old can do that math: 15 plus 9 is 24, and 24 times 2 is 48. You can fit two hour-long 24-watt sessions into 48Wh, and because you have 49Wh, you're almost sure to get it.

With the least strenuous games, I'll sometimes see my Steam Deck draining the battery at a speed of just 6 watts -- which means I can get eight hours of gameplay because 6 watts times 8 hours is 48Wh, with 1Wh remaining in the 49Wh battery.

Unlike megahertz, wattage also indicates sustained performance capability, revealing whether a processor can maintain high speeds or will throttle due to thermal constraints. Watts is also already familiar to consumers through light bulbs and power bills, but manufacturers persist with less transparent metrics that make direct comparisons difficult.

Reporting Highlights

• Unexpected Role: Flight attendants were told they would fly rock bands, sports teams and sun-seekers. Then Global Crossing Airlines started expanding into federal deportation flights.
• Human Struggles: Some flight attendants said they ignored orders not to interact with detainees. “I’d say ‘hola’ back,” said one flight attendant. “We’re not jerks.”
• Safety Concerns: Flight attendants received training in how to evacuate passengers but said they weren’t told how to usher out detainees whose hands and legs were bound by shackles.

Note: I know it's probably a little early depending on your time zone, but I scheduled this to send at midnight UTC (8pm my time) because I wanted to release version 4.1 on 4/1 as I'm an absolute sucker for gimmicks (which will become very apparent as you read the release notes).

About

I've been working on this in a new repo for months, and I'm extremely excited about this release. In fact, this is such a major release and paradigm shift that I'm jumping 3 major and one minor versions (this was originally slated to be v2.0).

It's still AGPL, and I hope to make the source code public soon, but until I've done some cleanup, the repo is still private and is only released as pre-built Docker images. Unfortunately, only amd64 is supported at the moment since I'm having trouble with Github Actions and can't do arm64 builds locally. Hope to have that resolved by the next release. 🤞

What's New?

Absolutely everything!

I'm tired of being John Henry / "old man who yells at cloud", so I scrapped the crusty, old, human-written code and asked ChatGPT and CoPilot to rebuild it from the ground up. I've also completely integrated and embraced AI since that's apparently what everyone in the world wants in every piece of software and household appliance (according to the people making and selling the AI, anyway, and surely they wouldn't lie about that).

Without further ado, let me introduce you to TesseractGPT (aka Tesseract 4.1)!

Feature Highlights

Feed

I got rid of the feed completely. Since nobody wants to think anymore (who has time for that, amirite‽), ChatGPT will now just summarize each page of posts for you. However, beta testing indicated that was still too much reading and thinking (what are we, a bunch of nerds?), so now it also summarizes recursively for the convenience of the unthinking majority (i.e. it summarizes the summaries and then summarizes that again).

Now, instead of the old way of having to scroll through a bunch of wordy posts (boring!), pictures with words on them, or worse, pictures of words, you'll get a nice two-word summary of the entire day's feed in big, block letters in the middle of the screen.

And, just like that, I'm all caught up and done scrolling for the day. Thanks TessGPT! Uh, I think?

Posts

Are you tired of feeling pressured to be creative all the time? Tired of being expected to actually have something to say when you want to say something online? Well, TesseractGPT's got your back!

Gone is the big, empty text field where you previously had to make your brain muscles do work. Now, you just tell it what you want the post to be about, and TessGPT will put it into internet words for you. And if you can't even think of something for that, no problemo! Just tell TessGPT to "make some shit up" by pressing the intuitively named "Make Some Shit Up" button.

Community Auto-Selection

You don't even have to select the community anymore. How cool is that?! Based on either the prompt you gave it or the shit it made up itself, TessGPT will take care of that for you by finding the 5 most appropriate communities and blasting it out to them all. If you're not subscribed to any communities appropriate for the generated post, no worries; it's hardcoded to fall back to c/Technology, c/News, c/Politics, and c/WorldNews because, hey, no one else reads the rules, so why should you? Reading is for nerds, and following the rules is for squares!

Comments

A lot of work has gone into modernizing the comment system.

Multi-Reply

First, there's also a new feature called "Multi-Reply". To use Multi-Reply, click the checkboxes on any number of posts and/or comments, and your single reply will go out to each of the selected items. It's hard to capture that functionality in a screenshot, so just picture this but with your own opinions.

Overhauled Comment Form

The second big upgrade is that there are now two, brand-new ways to comment on posts. Additionally, the old-timey text input has been removed from the comment section in favor of a more modern approach to online interactions. I think you'll find the two replacement methods quite convenient and way better than the old text input.

Comment Method 1: Just hit the button labeled "Whatever you think, ChatGPT".

GPT will analyze the post or comment and compose + submit a response on your behalf. No critical thinking or understanding the subject matter required!

Pro Version Only: If you upgrade to TessGPT Pro, you will be able to preview the GPT-response before committing to it. Standard plan is "take what it gives you".

One of my less-informed friends penned this wee testimonial and was kind enough to allow me to include it in the release notes:

Comment Method 2: Use the "You're a Nazi" button.

Godwin's Law has won, and I'm fully embracing that as of this release. Instead of having to spend precious time calling everyone on the internet who disagrees with you a Nazi, you can just hit a single button and move on with your day. Combine this with the new "Multi-Reply" feature, and everyone on the internet will quickly and conveniently know that you think they're a Nazi.

Pro Version Only: If you upgrade to Pro, it will automatically switch to an alt, reply "Yeah, that {account_name here} sure is a Nazi", and upvote you while also downvoting the person you slightly disagree with.

I'm confident this feature alone will triple the productivity of many here on the platform.

Actually, you don't even have to hit the Nazi button if you don't want to. TessGPT studies your voting patterns and submission history. When it detects a post or comment that it thinks you slightly disagree with, it'll automatically and kindly inform the other person that you think they are, indeed, a Nazi.

Sorry, drinking bird, but you're out of a job.

DMs

It's just Nicole now. The reply text field has been removed, and you can only enter your credit card and/or bank info.

All hail the Fediverse Queen.

Pro Version Only: Pro allows you to use a crypto wallet. We totally won't be skimming off of that, though 🤥

Funding Model Change

Until now, I was happy to produce this client with no donations. Starting with this release, and in order to feed the AI companies it relies on, TesseractGPT now has a mandatory monthly minimum donation or else the software locks after a grace period of 4 minutes.

Additionally, there is a Pro version which can be unlocked by an optional mandatory monthly minimum donation of $40. The Pro version unlocks additional features.

It's not a subscription. I hate subscription models, so I would never release software that way. That said, I do find the mandatory monthly minimum donation of $20 more than fair. You can donate more, though, and we encourage that. For example, Bryan here donates $35 a month. Do you want to do the bare minimum or be like our superstar Bryan?

Known Bugs

• Occasionally, the feed summary will just say "Go Outside". It's not necessarily wrong, so I may keep that as a feature. However, it doesn't take the weather into account, so might need to tie in a weather API for liability reasons.

• The signup process hasn't been revamped yet, so there's still some brain cells required to come up with a username. Our engineers are hard at work and hope to make that process thought-free in the next release.

• The "Whatever you think, ChatGPT" API response isn't cleaned up before submitting the comment. This leads to some comments containing fewer grammatical errors than would be expected of comments with so little thought put into them.

• Occasionally the "You're a Nazi" button will erroneously and automatically reply to your own posts/comments. This bug is marked low priority because, hey, if you don't say it, someone else will.

Planned Features (Not Yet Implemented)

Sealion Button

Mom, can we stop and get some Hexbear?

No, we have Hexbear at home.

[Hexbear at home...]

Pressing the "Sealion" button will prompt TessGPT to relentlessly argue against the selected comment thread in 100% bad faith. Due to the computational overhead and expenses, this is limited to one thread at a time in Standard and 15 at a time in Pro.

Pro Version Only: Combine the "Sealion" button with the "Multi-Reply" feature to have your own mini troll farm. The limit of 15 still applies, but any beyond that will be added to a queue and processed in order.

Get Tesseract

• Docker: ghcr.io/asimons04/tesseract:AprilFoolsEdition

Update: I'm sad no one noticed the Ghostwriter cameo :(

The news outlet has had to correct at least three dozen A.I.-generated summaries of articles published this year.

The giant financial news site Bloomberg "has been experimenting with using AI to help produce its journalism," reports the New York Times. But "It hasn't always gone smoothly."

While Bloomberg announced on January 15 that it would add three AI-generated bullet points at the top of articles as a summary, "The news outlet has had to correct at least three dozen A.I.-generated summaries of articles published this year." (This Wednesday they published a "hallucinated" date for the start of U.S. auto tariffs, and earlier in March claimed president Trump had imposed tariffs on Canada in 2024, while other errors have included incorrect figures and incorrect attribution.)

Bloomberg is not alone in trying A.I. — many news outlets are figuring out how best to embrace the new technology and use it in their reporting and editing. The newspaper chain Gannett uses similar A.I.-generated summaries on its articles, and The Washington Post has a tool called "Ask the Post" that generates answers to questions from published Post articles. And problems have popped up elsewhere. Earlier this month, The Los Angeles Times removed its A.I. tool from an opinion article after the technology described the Ku Klux Klan as something other than a racist organization.

Bloomberg News said in a statement that it publishes thousands of articles each day, and "currently 99 percent of A.I. summaries meet our editorial standards...." The A.I. summaries are "meant to complement our journalism, not replace it," the statement added....

John Micklethwait, Bloomberg's editor in chief, laid out the thinking about the A.I. summaries in a January 10 essay, which was an excerpt from a lecture he had given at City St. George's, University of London. "Customers like it — they can quickly see what any story is about. Journalists are more suspicious," he wrote. "Reporters worry that people will just read the summary rather than their story." But, he acknowledged, "an A.I. summary is only as good as the story it is based on. And getting the stories is where the humans still matter."

A Bloomberg spokeswoman told the Times that the feedback they'd received to the summaries had generally been positive — "and we continue to refine the experience."

Speaking to Collider, Aghdashloo credits Expanse fans with sparking her interest in joining Wheel of Time, now in its third season on Prime Video. “As soon as I was done with The Expanse, the fans of The Expanse and those who liked my work on The Expanse, they started saying, ‘We need to find her another TV series because we want to see her at work,'” she recalled with delight.