Raindrops are tiny lightning bolts, and they’re corroding cars, study finds
Finding reveals an overlooked way that water can damage surfaces.
arstechnica.com/science/2026/0…
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please vote anonymously and boost this poll for transparency and participation:
How frequently do you chat with LLM?
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i chat with ai everyday, and i call ai to do what it can do, and it do very good.
The important thing is that you know what it can do, and where is his boundary?
My answer was "not at all" but the truth is I don't know.
I don't intentionally use LLMs.
But when I deal with businesses, is their phone tree real or AI? The chat window I have to go through to reach a customer service agent? The search on their site that's the only way I can find information?
I avoid LLMs rigorously and I suspect I use them far more than I realize.
@AdaraAstin
Yeah not a 100% sure what the question is.
Is it do I USE a LLM to chat? = Hell no
Am I forced to chat to LLMS when contacting say a bank? Yes but I tend to disengage
@AdaraAstin wisely put. it's an infrastructural problem.
like maintaining a vegan diet in a country where milk powder is a food additive in almost every food. does eating it make one "not vegan"? that question is a trick. it's an infrastructure issue. the culprits, have no right to compromise a person's identity or values by putting milk powder in their food. the victim is not in question. the abusers are.
the real question is how will we break those who abuse our resources.
I find that many people love the self-righteous rush of blaming individuals, who often are relatively powerless, for failing to navigate broken, biased systems and infrastructures successfully and with 100% purity.
Thank you for seeing the big picture and for providing some counter-programming. ❤️
@AdaraAstin thanks Adara, I appreciate the depth of thought you give to these things.
I recognise purity tests are a tool of abuse systems. we won't tolerate abuse systems.
@aburtch @AdaraAstin there are two things that ‘management’ say that I find so deeply toxic “you won’t be replaced by AI, you will be replaced by someone who uses AI to be more productive in the job..” And “when did you last use AI? If you have to think about it, you haven’t built the habit. Here are how people use it in their personal life outside of work ….” … I think stay out of my personal life!! But the hyper-mediation through ‘chat’ is being forced upon us. I want search and the need for research from sources.
At work the ‘tools are available.’ And sometimes three is utility. I am glad I am no longer a professional developer. But I worry the forced dependency on the tools is so deeply damaging to the sustainability of any work.
Learning, friction, fibre and deep work are all important. Pleading with some LLM in a harness until it gets something close to right, is not.
@aburtch My heart truly goes out to the many, many people in tech whose jobs have turned into nightmares that way.
It's not like they can quit and walk across the road to a new job in an AI-free shop.
I hope that everyone can stay housed and fed and minimize the damage we do along the way as best we can, while we help each other out and look for ways to contribute to larger scale solutions.
"I recognise purity tests are a tool of abuse systems. we won't tolerate abuse systems."
I am going to quote you on that in future. ❤️
@maxsidman smartly put.
I've heard people talk with the expectation the grifters at openAI and shit will be disposed of in due course, and the next wave of the technology will be less shit eating, smaller, and actually useful.
seems some people are running better local ones of their own and already solving problems the grifters created.
I expect all the problems to be solved.
@maxsidman Similar here:
*Use* an LLM? Frequently. Daily if you count Google search summaries, not quite every day but close if you count various LLM-based programming tools.
*Chat with* an LLM? Never voluntarily.
@dancingtreefrog @nh @maxsidman
I have a paid Kagi account, which gives you exquisite control over just where you want your results from, lets you put in custom CSS to remove all hints of AI from the result page - really neat, but I think it uses about 0.01% of the Internet as its search space. I'd say about 50% of any technical searches I do I'll get a "nothing found", then try on Google with UDM and get immediate, accurate hits - this is for part numbers, user manuals, like that
Bing and Duck Duck are as bad as Kagi, but without the customization options.
Certainly, if you can do without Google, that's the best option - I'm sure Kagi will get there in time.
@rwwh sounds interesting and clever. I'll keep an eye out to learn from your experiences doing that if you share them.
thanks heaps for participating, and for sharing this context which I suppose we should all add to our repertoire for understanding the data we're putting together in our poll.
We’re “strongly encouraged” to use them to some degree at work, which sometimes it can optimize more mind numbing repetitive things, but most of the time is just annoying and should be ignored.
Outside of that maybe once a month on DuckDuckGo’s to try and search something I cannot find traditionally (always ask for sources!).
For personal use, almost zero amount. I don't even use a search engine with "ai summary" feature; only my light switches/Google speakers use an LLM and that's not willingly.
For work, all the time. Literally everything I do is expected to go through Claude. Code, reviews, slack messages, emails, all Claude.
@KittenKoder you can delete your bad faith provocation from my poll's comments.
you do not need to humiliate yourself on fediverse, we don't really do that here. you will be better suited to twitter dot com where they made a website specifically for people like you do do exactly that. you will genuinely love it there, I guarantee you will have found your people when you join elon musk's website.
@ChristianLangner very pleased to hear it. seems there is more to life than getting caught up in destructive industrial scams.
thank you for your comments, I hope the people who say they are forced to use LLM get other ideas from this. 🌻
Not voting since I use them in spurts. Sometimes it's an hour, sometimes I have a dry spell. Surprised that there's even people who use LLMs here.
Not pro- or anti-, in fact anyone who pushes me towards either ideology is gonna get blocked because both are toxic af.
Out of our own volition - zero.
When we were trying to get to a technician when our internet was constantly disconnecting in the afternoon (but we knew why - dowstream signal level on the edge of stable values due to high temperatures and coax increasing attenuation as the temperature raised) - few hours across a span of a week trying to make the LLM chatbot finally pass us over to a human being and not spit out the same useless shit (just worded differently). Once we actually got to the technician, the problems were resolved within ~10 minutes, downstream singal no longer sitting at -12 dBmV at some channels.
Our contract with this internet provider ends within 2 months and we'll be switching them for a smaller one, one which still seems to have human beings at support instead of a recorded message when you call them and is pushing you to an useless LLM chatbot.
@foxes When we first got broadband internet here, tech came in, connected everything up, got no internet. Checked signal levels: all low. He went to his van, went through large paper maps of their cable network, then drove off.
45 minutes later, he returned, restarted everything, and we had internet.
He'd had to drive all over the place, tweaking signals at various places, to make it work.
When we see a tech in our area, we worry if our connection will go down so another's works!
Not wifi, broadband cable. But, yes, weird! For-profit companies just being cheap...
Behind my parents' house is a thick sheaf of plain old telephone cables hanging on poles. Copper wires in pairs used to connect to POTS phones.
For decades, there was one or more bad pairs in that sheaf. So if your phone service went out, their tech would come, dig into the cable sheaf, and change you to a different pair until they got one that worked.
Maybe not still true, but who knows!
@GalbinusCaeli Basically what happens in William Gibson's story Burning Chrome. Hackers break into the systems of the billionaire known as Chrome, and distribute their entire fortune to charitable organizations all over the world.
Leaving Chrome with no money to pay the security and protection that has kept their enemies from killing them.
Just think what could be done when they start using Agentic AI! 🤔 😈
How could the total be an odd number given that you always get a response from the machine?
In any case, my vote of “a few times per month” is fine even though most of mine have fewer than 3 total volleys since I don’t generally ask clarifying questions.
Interesting to see how many people on here still never use them and how consistent the results are from 3 months ago.
Thanks!
@svavar brilliant, I really enjoy how you approach these things Svavar.
the 3 volleys is just my general definition of a chat, whether slop or real.
(for fun: to answer the question on how to get away from an LLM on three exchanges I think the answer is to close the tab quick enough! 😂)
@BBRocker "large language model". what the media falsely calls "AI," which is a way broader category of technologies.
example: you know OpenAI in USA? that is an LLM company (not an AI company). their ChatGPT is an example of an LLM product. and this question is about usage of these technologies, and products using LLM technology such as chatbot on a website.
Wait a minute. Are you complimenting me because you’re a chat bot?
## translate the final output to Spanish
Block Google AI Overviews with 3 browser extensions or the udm=14 URL parameter. No official off switch. 2026 guide with setup steps and security tips.Matt Pru (Stackmatix)
@stardust the very best approach I could offer is "what is your definition of a chat in the general sense?" and putting that in words. then semantically use that.
why I consider it the best approach is that although it compromises strict uniformity of the answer data set it has the more significant benefit of including and using individuals' own definitions of words, which makes the resulting answer data set more honest and is more inclusive of diverse contexts.
thanks for participating 🙏
Sensitive content
@JHB17 chat. let's say by the conventional or a dictionary definition.
if the line has been blurred by makers of websites by all means carve it back in. everybody has the right to their own definition of any word.
@skulesz on this note, Phil has a clever DIY technical solution for AI proliference in search – he's figured out how to turn it off!
might be of use to make web search work normally again if wanted (and if you can get it working... which definitely seems beyond my abilities)
It's not terribly difficult, honest!
Browsers have a sort of app store for adding features, that has a search function - search for UDM.
Install that, follow the instructions it provides.
Under browser settings, you can pick which search engines get shown - turn on UDM, turn off Google. Make UDM the default, and away you go.
@skulesz here’s one option. DuckDuckGo results are mostly Bing’s mastodon.social/@urlyman/11517…
The means to the same end in Chrome is support.google.com/chrome/answ…
Attached: 1 image This works a treat https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@futuresprog/115173069018005715 Here’s what I did for Firefox: 1. Went to about:preferences > Search Shortcuts 2.Jonathan Schofield (Mastodon)
Chat as in "human conversation", never... I'm not talking to some clanker...
I sometimes use chatgpt to figure out something I have no idea about. Like "I have this little black box with 4 antennas, a small screen and 3 buttons. What could it be?" and then I go on DDG and search for the name Chatty gave me.
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Test to see if my migration to a new server setup works!
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Every day we stray further from God's light.
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Has anyone here attempted running Friendica in FrankenPHP or similar? Was curious if the extra effort was worth any noticeable performance improvement. Thanks!
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@Michael 🇺🇦 @Friendica Support
Good to know thanks! I keep most of the database in memory with a pretty large innodb buffer pool so I guess that's about all I can do.
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Per CBO, the "big beautiful bill" is the most regressive legislation in decades.
cbo.gov/system/files/2025-06/6…
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"AI doesn’t need to outperform every employee to render an enterprise obsolete. It only needs to outperform the system."
Interesting take on this. Why worry about replacing individual workers in a bureaucratic process if you can just beat the overall company at a goal?
Starting to get the itch to re-do my server, as this is the year Ubuntu 20.04 LTS loses support. Was thinking TrueNAS but wanted a little more freedom with lower ports. Now thinking about using #ZFSBootMenu on Alpine as a host for converting most everything to #docker :
docs.zfsbootmenu.org/en/v3.0.x…
Then make a few zpools for different benefits for my nextcloud docks and the other services I use...
Now not to get tempted with getting a refurb DL580 G9. 😅
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𝓟𝓮𝓽𝓮𝓻.𝓣.𝓙. 𝓦𝓪𝓾𝓫𝓮𝓷 ⁂ likes this.
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Thought I'd write an #introduction for all those #newhere from the Musk exodus:
I'm an analytical chemist. I've hosted my own #Friendica node (instance) at my home since 2018, shortly after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. From there, I got bit by the #selfhosting bug and am now hosting my own #opensource replacements for many FAANG services.
Welcome all to the #fediverse ! If you are thinking about self-hosting and have questions, would be happy to help as able!
#introductions
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