aune

@aune

  • she/they

pdx queer dev, now an Old

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aune
@aune
ChaiaEran
@ChaiaEran
horseonvhs
@horseonvhs

fucking, come on man. (edit from the future: a few hours after i posted this, the feature was reportedly turned off - see here for more info)

horseonvhs
@horseonvhs

i just sent them a narsty email via the contact form

i mean not that narsty but y'know pretty clear on how i feel about this lol. if you are a neocities user and this also has your blood boiling i would urge you to do the same (that name again is contact@neocities.org)

invis
@invis
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aune
@aune

the thing that sucks about stuff like this is that it's rapidly a financial black hole, which has resulted in a lot of places "having to" raise prices and make everything else suck to cover the costs

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in reply to @horseonvhs's post:

horseonvhs
@horseonvhs

as far as i can tell there hasn’t been an official announcement; it just showed up when i opened the text editor. the closest thing I found was the tweet announcing their April Fools thing, which was the Daria chatbot mentioned in other comments. sorry i couldn’t be more help there

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listeninggarden
@listeninggarden

there has been no official announcement at all, the only sign of it was in the commits via github

https://github.com/neocities/neocities/commit/8ba6005c67ba3d19d223caaaa4b2600f0edf2f5b

the above links to the initial commit where the assistant code is introduced, a week before april fools. the day after, he begins replacing the "penelope" code with "daria" code, to set it up as the april fools prank, and another last-minute round of "turd polishing" to finish the gag

https://github.com/neocities/neocities/commit/a975c9c2be5c1316f4e035c55b1357801dfbb6a8

https://github.com/neocities/neocities/commit/3db080b7f78461222a47013017b1bcb30f9826e0

which is then immediately reversed on april 2nd, restoring the "penelope" function but leaving the chat bot completely intact, with its prompt designs meant to be more "helpful" than irate

https://github.com/neocities/neocities/commit/c16c5272e2783783cff6af48600631cadecdc95e

https://github.com/neocities/neocities/commit/bb430d455fe7985a3b5e29bb955039dec7a52881

i hope this helps a little, as it's the only "official" information available about this

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in reply to @horseonvhs's post:

in reply to @invis's post:

AcuteRabbit
@AcuteRabbit

I think I'm more upset that it just sort of... rolled out with no warning? It just feels a little... underhanded? Like, I'm fine if you wanna ask cat bot how to change the color of a link or whatever, but at least own up to implementing cat bot. It always seems a little redundant since there are so many links and even a tutorial that helps you get started. Why not just... finish the tutorial?

Right now, I don't see an option to engage with it, so I guess it's only rolled out for paid users to try first? But it sounds like they didn't get any warning either. Just seems a little... iffy to me. If cat bot doesn't start scraping data from the bazillion of sites that... ah, fuck.

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widr
@widr

this manifesto is driving me insane. too many points to list where it's just facially stupid and wrong, all in service of an enlightened genius centrism techno-optimist babble. literally what innovation and progress my god man

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NireBryce
@NireBryce

yeah like all the people saying it helps creativity or makes it easier for people etc isn't any of the generative part, just the natural language interface.

unfortunately no one knows how to reliably map those things without running an entire lookahead-word-guessing-algorithm that returns garbage

so all the money goes to generative crap, and not figuring out how to bolt the language parsing onto something useful

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widr
@widr

it's not progress. it doesn't even look like what progress would look like. it looks like what people think progress would look like. it is designed and selected purely because it reduces the insurmountable problems of the space into a form that is very relatable and seems easy to solve to the user, because they project onto the system what they would do if they were tasked with the problem (and then underestimate how much work that would take them), yet in no way even attempts to tackle or even chip away at the insurmountable problem itself

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in reply to @aune's post:

internet-janitor
@internet-janitor

The truly baffling thing about this is LLMs cost money to run. Adding junk like this to a site makes it more expensive for the maintainers, provides limited to nonexistent help to newbies, and alienates a substantial segment of the "small-web" creative community. Nobody wins here!

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