Stumbled upon this golden joke that says volumes:WinRAR is more profitable than OpenAI.

@chesheer that's not even a joke though

@chesheer Hear me out: WinRAR is weirdly beloved, often bought by people who say "this got me through my childhood of sneaking stuff out of school on floppies, thanks", isn't predatory, just guilts you gently.

@chesheer WinRAR doesn't claim it's going to "change the world." It isn't gunning for anyone's job. It has no pretensions of what it is. It isn't trying to lock you into a "cloud-based subscription model." It doesn't even make you pay for it, it just nags you gently and keeps working. It just claims it will compress and split your files and help you recover them (important back in the day with floppies!).

And that's way more earnest than anything being made today.

@Elizafox @chesheer winrar is generative AI! you need a good prompt (a .rar file) and from that the AI can create wonderful images! It also has a mode for music, although the prompt is very complicated and not much smaller than the mp3 file it outputs.

@uint8_t @chesheer The generative AI for "split this into 1.4MB sized chunks" still works tho :p.

@chesheer winRAR is actually useful (although i'd argue better alternatives exist). openAI's products are not.

@chesheer@mastodon.bsd.cafe At least WinRAR is somewhat useful for something. I don't see what OpenAI is useful for, other than literally ruining our world.

@navi @chesheer sometimes a fact is just funny enough it still counts as a joke

@uint8_t @Elizafox @chesheer actually the prompt is a magnet link a lot of the time,

@chesheer paid for WinRAR. Worked great. Big part of my early usenet life. PAR files gave me a good RAID 5 working knowledge when I was, well, alt.binaries. younameit. Likely still have my receipt.

I have access to AI tools, am directly encouraged to use it, but I just saw in the episode of The Pitt where the AI ambient listening charting app miss hears the drug name leading to a conversation about proof reading. The problem is spell check, grammer check, even reading it won't solve the problem if the provider doing the medication reconcilitation wasnt really paying close attention and just rubber stamps the auto charting. I have been working with medical providers for 30 years, some of them, I know, will phone it in. Others are very good and will use the tool sensibly.

I used AI to ask a work related issue and it did a reasonable job reading public websites for content, but the bulk of the whole answer was a single reddit post, by which I mean directly quoted/lifted. I also have watched someone give a briefing where the language was more complicated/flowery than how they normally speak. So when asked to paraphrase, simplify, explain the basic point -- they just stammered out their grammerly written slop rereading their slide, clearly not even comprehending their "own work". Reminds me I need to hunt down that app and remove it from the network. Unauthorized software installs, GRRR.

Time to play infosec whac-a-mole again.

@chesheer

And more useful

@chesheer i would love to quote this. but i'd need a fact check lol

@piggo @uint8_t @chesheer @Elizafox

Now that's a cursed idea.

Train the LLM on the old wareZ sites, then prompt it with a magnet link and tell it to fetch the contents.

Run whatever it spits out.

#yolo

@chesheer might purchase WinRAR to tip the scales even more.

@chesheer the shitty kebab shop down the road is more profitable than openai.

@chesheer More useful too, for all that I dislike how it's proprietary as well.

@chesheer i'm more profitable than OpenAI

@Elizafox @chesheer This almost made me weep it was so accurate.

Plucky old WinRAR.

Wut iz dis OpenAI? It sounds Scottish.

@pseudonym @piggo @chesheer @Elizafox that thing already existed 20 years ago it’s called kazaa