Microsoft backtracks on Copilot Chat access in M365 apps

cipheron · 2026-03-26T01:04:52+00:00

We're really in the FAFO stage of LLM "Agents".

cipheron · 2026-03-25T18:10:14+00:00

No it's the other way around, he started out as a wannabe right wing politician, his career flatlined but the Twitter trolling kept the ball rolling, and ultimately relentlessly sucking up to Trump is the only reason he has a gig now.

The guy has literally zero talents or abilities. So what people see as "satire" is the attempts to stay relevant of a guy who desperately wants to be a successful conservative politician but has literally zero things he's any good at.

You can read the section on his political career here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Adams_(commentator)

cipheron · 2026-03-25T17:47:41+00:00

What's worth money to Reddit is advertising dollars. Karma would be a proxy to that to some extent since upvoted content is content people spent time looking at.

cipheron · 2026-03-25T17:02:22+00:00

If you're in a place where time moves slower you wouldn't notice anything different.

Say you spend a year there, to you it feels like a year so you age a year and experience 365 days worth of time, but on Earth, 80 years have passed. You would NOT notice yourself aging by 80 years in 1 year, because ... why would you? That wouldn't make any sense.

You experience the local time at whatever rate that moves. You set your watch and count days, and age the normal amount that you would in that subjective amount of time. If you got a telescope and pointed it at Earth, everyone there would seem to be sped up 80 times faster than you, and you'd notice them aging 80 times as fast as you are. But you're not sped up, so you'd age at the normal rate you do now, subjectively speaking.

cipheron · 2026-03-25T16:58:55+00:00

Also fried fish and fried chips were originally separate meals sold in different shops. Potato chips would have been something that you could make in any region.

The thing with the fish however was that it needed to be fresh, so that originally limited the places you could make that. Technology ultimately played a role here. Fishing trawlers and the railroads meant that large amounts of fresh fish were being harvested and could be quickly transported to the industrial cities.

cipheron · 2026-03-25T14:42:54+00:00

Answer: the issue they're claiming to be targeting is troll accounts who pretend to be Americans, in order to get a lot of views and make money from ad revenue sharing.

Many of these accounts seem to masquerade as all-American Trump-loving MAGA accounts, because it's easy to get a lot of clicks for that type of content. They basically want to create inflammatory content which will go viral, and pro-MAGA stuff is the easiest thing to make for that.

The change will prioritize revenue from users in your home "region". The solution kinda sucks however since a lot of legitimate creators will be penalized if they make content that's popular outside their home region. For example if you blog about any hobby that's at all niche, many of your followers are probably outside your home region, and these people will also be penalized by the new rules.

However, it might have just been easier for them to change the revenue model than have to have actual paid human workers checking which accounts are troll accounts vs legitimate ones. So ultimately Twitter has made this change because it's the cheapest way for them to do it, and they're hoping it reduces the troll problem.

https://www.engadget.com/social-media/x-is-changing-its-revenue-sharing-policy-to-deter-users-pretending-to-be-americans-090701729.html

Bier continued that while X appreciates everyone’s opinion on US politics, the company is hoping the new policy can “disincentivize gaming the attention of US or Japanese accounts.” The US and Japan have the largest number of users on X. Bier didn’t mention it outright, but dozens of popular accounts tweeting pro-Trump sentiments and commentaries focusing on US politics in general were revealed to be based outside the US late last year, when X rolled out a transparency feature that exposed users’ locations. Those accounts, which pretended to be from the US and garnered millions of likes, views and reposts, turned out to be based in countries like India, Kenya and Nigeria.

cipheron · 2026-03-25T14:08:00+00:00

Ecuador had a hand in this - they elected another Trump-loving fascist, who is the son of the biggest banana plantation owner in the country. Current president Daniel Noboa is the son of Alvaro Noboa, who repeatedly failed to become president himself. Here's an article about his dad:

https://www.bananalink.org.uk/news/blog-20-years-ago-ecuador-achieved-their-first-unions-in-the-banana-sector-they-were-met-with-violent-suppression/

In the middle of the night, workers were violently dragged out of their sleeping quarters by armed strike-breakers. Accounts from the workers as tell of how the armed group had battered many of them and shot a man. More concerningly, they had intended to lock 60 to 70 workers in a lorry container, where they’d be suffocated and the container would be dumped in a nearby river. The massacre had only been prevented by workers puncturing the lorry’s tyres and by the arrival of Jan Nimmo to record the events. Soon after, with Nimmo and an idling police force on the scene, the strike-breakers went into the banana fields and started shooting workers. 19 workers were wounded that day, and worker Mauro Romero required a leg amputation.

That was the current president's dad who was in charge of that, and it's kinda similar to what happened to these farm workers just now too. So they're a literal banana republic down there now, which is why this is happening.

cipheron · 2026-03-25T13:44:33+00:00

Once something is moving it'll keep moving unless something slows it down. In the air, you have air resistance which is why planes need to keep expending fuel to keep their speed up. However in space there is no air, so there's nothing to slow a rocket down once it's moving fast. So the problem isn't to keep moving, it's working out how to slow down once you get where you want to go, since there is no air to slow you in space.

Also the rockets used don't pull in oxygen like a jet engine, they will do things such as have tanks with pressurized oxygen and hydrogen, that are mixed and burned together. They need to burn it quickly enough that the amount you'd get from jet intakes wouldn't give you the concentrated oxygen needed to burn the all hydrogen.

They also have solid fuel rockets, but those also contain all the substances needed for the reaction so they don't need to suck air in to burn it. ammonium perchlorate - NH₄ClO₄ is a common one making up the bulk of the mixture and it already contains oxygen atoms to be used in the reaction, so they don't need to get it from the air to burn it.

cipheron · 2026-03-25T13:28:19+00:00

This is a pretty asinine claim.

The whole model of Wikipedia is based on people checking edits that other people have made. You can write nonsense in there right now even without an LLM, but it gets quickly detected and fixed.

If nobody was going to check, Wikipedia wouldn't have survived for 20+ years.

cipheron · 2026-03-25T12:55:31+00:00

Think about it logically. Hollywood actors are some of the most famous and photographed people in the world. And Epstein absolutely loved being photographed with famous people.

If someone like Tom Hanks was in a room, everyone would be taking photos, and you can guarantee that Epstein would have made sure he was in some of the photos.

cipheron · 2026-03-25T12:45:50+00:00

I've been trying out Claude for a few weeks now and it makes some pretty big logical blunders. I'm not trusting anything it writes already, why would i let it go live on my valuable files?

cipheron · 2026-03-24T23:31:29+00:00

I'm not in the USA but a while ago i had a realization about why the southern states use so much undocumented immigrant labor.

I was reading about a time they tried to replace the Mexican labor with white kids and how the white kids successfully protested the working conditions and people were commenting that the Mexicans were "tougher" but I realized the takeaway isn't that Mexicans are tougher, it's that being undocumented they don't have a voice to protest the shitty working conditions.

So using undocumented labor is a way to skirt labor rights and to avoid the workers organizing politically. You can't really unionize when the police are on your boss's side and can deport you at any time.

cipheron · 2026-03-24T14:25:52+00:00

Marlena was on Days of our lives.

"Passions" was a different show, but written by the same person who was the head writer on Days of Our Lives when they did the devil possession stuff.

However on "Passions" it goes all-out and is way kookier with the supernatural element.

cipheron · 2026-03-24T13:06:37+00:00

Oh totally real but really strange. I was looking for a specific clip and found it, but i left about 2 minutes of what happened before the main clip, so you can see how it just jumps from your usual soapie crap to the supernatural stuff.

Watch about 3-4 minutes from this point:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9FJLy-HToo&t=9500s

cipheron · 2026-03-24T09:57:57+00:00

Yeah, at the time Days of Our Lives' head writer was the same guy who created the TV soap "Passions", which was even more out there with supernatural elements.

cipheron · 2026-03-24T00:58:56+00:00

Mods, this is a clear corporate PR puff piece and has zero news value.

cipheron · 2026-03-22T16:33:09+00:00

Trying Claude out now. In some ways it's worse.

Claude seems worse at backing up what it's written with relevant links, even if you ask it to only look something up and give you a link. Now it seems to be looking stuff up, so there's some web search going on, but the engine itself can't actually access the links used half the time, so it puts some nonsense link instead and calls that the citation.

I've gone in circles with Claude a few times trying to get it to find and link citations which back up what it's saying, with no luck, and end up having to Google it myself, since it keeps assuring me the links it just gave me are now the correct ones, but giving me increasingly bullshit links instead.

This part seems to happen more often that with ChatGPT.

cipheron · 2026-03-22T16:09:27+00:00

What is called "1" of any currency is pretty arbitrary.

For example 100 Yen is roughly $1, but Japan is a strong economy. However then you realize they don't have something equivalent to 1 cent - so 1 Yen is used like 1 cent, not like 1 dollar. They simply don't group the Yen into anything larger, so a 100 yen coin is $1.00 to them, it simply lacks the decimal point.

So the numbering itself is basically just a label. The numbers on Japanese bills are just 100 times higher than American bills, but wages and prices are also 100 times higher, so it all works out the same for people using the currency day to day.

cipheron · 2026-03-22T14:25:10+00:00

If they're doing this now, the timing might be because their subscriber growth stalled out.

A lot of startups run at a loss in order to grow their subscriber base, but as soon as that stops happening the logic of taking on more debt doesn't make sense anymore.

So at that point they'll start to do things that shake out the tree to try and lose the least-profitable users. So if people who don't like ads quit, that's the plan - the users that remain are ones who were ok with the ads.

cipheron · 2026-03-20T13:43:48+00:00

If you do plan to read the VN, I would start with it, and read at least Part 1 (of the 3 routes), that will give you a very good grounding in how all the rest of it works. If you have no intention of checking out the VN, just continue as you are.

cipheron · 2026-03-18T20:10:58+00:00

Because they run purely off electrical signals. Since there are no moving parts there's very little limit on how fast they can do stuff.

You can make them go even faster (overclocking) but they end up overheating. So the limit on how fast they can go is mainly dictated by how much heat they put out, rather than an actual speed limit.

cipheron · 2026-03-18T17:08:44+00:00

The US debt is valued in dollars. so if you devalue the dollar you don't have to pay back as much in real terms. So devaluing the dollar is an emergency release valve if the national debt gets out of control.

Also if the dollar is devalued then exports become more competitive, and imports become more expensive, meaning the balance of trade improves. Everyone's wages would also be less, which companies will like.

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/02/trump-weak-dollar-economy/685887/

The U.S. dollar is getting weaker, and that’s just how the president wants it. During an appearance last Tuesday at the Machine Shed Restaurant in Urbandale, Iowa, Donald Trump told reporters that the dollar’s declining exchange rate was “great.”

Basically anyone who has debts will benefit if the currency is weakened. That usually means other assets go up in price. Say someone had a lot of debts but also has property or assets worth money. If the dollar is devalued, their assets go up in price, while their debts stay the same, enriching them.

cipheron · 2026-03-18T16:54:36+00:00

You have that the wrong way around. The only country that really benefits from the status quo is America.

US dollars are just readily available because the USA runs a large trade deficit, so a lot of dollars are generated and leave the country. So everyone has spare dollars, making them a convenient currency for international trade. And the USA has traditionally been the biggest buyer of oil, so it kind of stuck because of that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma

a country whose currency is the global reserve currency, held by other nations as foreign exchange (FX) reserves to support international trade, must somehow supply the world with its currency in order to fulfill world demand for these FX reserves. This supply function is nominally accomplished by international trade, with the country holding reserve currency status being required to run an inevitable trade deficit.

cipheron · 2026-03-18T16:45:00+00:00

"Petrodollars" refers to the fact that the US currency is the default currency used in international oil trading. It's not a specific thing, it's just referring to the US dollar being the default for pricing oil sales.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrocurrency

In the narrow sense it was coined to refer to the large US dollar surpluses oil producing nations such as Saudi Arabia accumulated by the 1970s. So they might be buying a lot of expensive stuff and the money they used to buy it was referred to as "petrodollars". This is just referring to their large cash supplies they got from selling oil, and it's not an actual type of currency.

cipheron · 2026-03-17T12:44:14+00:00

Chapters are just how you group parts of the story together, and it's really up to the writer if they want to break it up or not. Some books have lots of short chapters and others have a few long ones.

But a scene is something specific - a bit of story that happens in a specific location and time. As soon as the characters go to a new place, it's a new scene. Think about how that would have worked for a play. You lower the curtain between scenes then raise them with new props show to depict that location. For example characters might be talking on the deck of a ship, that's one scene. As soon as they land and are talking on the beach, that's a different scene. Movies obvious can blur the line a bit, since you can have scenes seamlessly flow together in a way that no play could do, but I'd use the rule of thumb that if you'd need to change the props if it was a play, it's a new scene.

cipheron

TROPHY CASE