#Chat Application Software

[multipurposethemes]

Designing Intuitive Chat Software Template to Enhance User Experience

As online chat has become an integral communication channel between businesses and customers, developing an effective chat software platform is crucial. A key component that can make or break the user experience is the Chat Software Template interface. Thoughtful dashboard design enhances agent productivity and satisfaction while providing customers with a smooth and seamless chat journey.

What Defines an Optimal Chat Dashboard?

An optimal Chat Application Dashboard allows agents to efficiently monitor ongoing chats, access customer information, switch between conversations, and leverage tools to provide quick resolutions. Meanwhile, customers should experience fast responses, personalized service, and issues resolve in a seamless flow.

Specifically, a well-designed Chatbot Dashboard has the following key features:

Clean, intuitive layout: A clutter-free interface with logical grouping of functions reduces confusion and improves ease of use for agents. This is the main reason why you should select an appropriate chat software dashboard.

Unified messaging: By combining live chat, email, SMS, and messaging channels into one Chat Software Template, agents can efficiently manage multiple conversations.

Smart assignment: Using algorithms to match chat inquiries with the best-skilled agents based on availability, expertise, and past performance leads to better customer service.

Agent status settings: Options to manually set statuses, such as online, offline, busy, enable agents to control availability and inform team members. You can consider this as one of the must-have features in a chat tool.

Real-time monitoring: Seeing details like wait times, abandon rates, and customer satisfaction scores allows agents and leaders to proactively address issues.

Quick access to customer data: Instant visibility into visitor profiles, past interactions, and open orders helps agents personalize chat conversations. This must be clearly visible in the chat UI.

Collaboration tools: Capabilities like file sharing, co-browsing, screen sharing, and transferring chats facilitate agents supporting one another.

[hlkgminfluencer]

https://icompass.io/?red=keyaffb4a68a

[ikiprian]

Barbara Gordon's Coding & Computer Cram School is a popular YouTube series. Tucker Foley is a star student.

Barbara Gordon's Cram School posts free online courses for both coding and computer engineering. Think Crash Course in terms of entertainment, but college lecture in terms of depth. Hundreds of thousands of viewers flock to it— students who missed a class, people looking to add new skills to a resume, even simple hobbyists. It’s a project Barbara’s proud of.

Sometimes, when she wants to relax, she’ll even hop in the comments and spend an afternoon troubleshooting a viewer’s project with them.

User “Fryer-Tuck” has especially interesting ones. Barbara finds herself seeking out his comments, checking in on whatever this crazy kid is making next. An app for collecting GPS pings and assembling them on a map in real-time, an algorithm that connects geographic points to predict something’s movement taking a hundred other variables into account, simplified versions of incredibly complex homemade programs so they can run on incredibly limited CPU’s.

(Barbara wants to buy the kid a PC. It seems he’s got natural talent, but he keeps making reference to a PDA. Talk about 90’s! This guy’s hardware probably predates his birth.)

She chats with him more and more, switching to less public PM threads, and eventually, he opens up. His latest project, though, is not something Barbara has personal experience with.

FT: so if you found, hypothetically, a mysterious glowing substance that affects tech in weird and wacky ways that could totally have potential but might be vaguely sentient/otherworldly…. what would you do and how would you experiment with it. safely, of course. and hypothetically

BG: I’d make sure all my tests were in disposable devices and quarantined programs to keep it from infecting my important stuff. Dare I ask… how weird and wacky is it?

FT: uhhh. theoretically, a person composed of this substance once used it to enter a video game. like physical body, into the computer, onto the screen? moving around and talking and fighting enemies within the game?

FT: its been experimented with before, but not on any tech with a brain. just basic shields and blasters and stuff, its an energy source. also was put in a car once

FT: i wanna see how it affects software, yk? bc i already know it can. mess around and see how far i can push it

BG: […]

FT: … barbara?

BG: Sorry, thinking. Would you mind sharing more details? You said “blasters?”

Honestly. Kid genius with access to some truly wacky materials and even wackier weapons, she needs to start a file on him before he full sends to either hero or villain.

[OR: Tucker is a self-taught hacker, but if he were to credit a teacher, he'd name Barbara Gordon's Coding & Computer Cram School! He's even caught the attention of Dr. Gordon herself. She's full of sage advice, and with how she preaches the value of a good VPN, he's sure she's not pro-government. Maybe she'll help him as he studies the many applications of ecto-tech!]

[characteroulette]

Happy Layton Big Bang!!! @proflaytonbigbang !!

Here's my contribution: a whole new ukagaka to play around with!! (Grab them here!!)

Layton and Luke come with a few features --

Sit on your desktop and chat to themselves

Serve them a spot of tea! (Be careful not to jostle them)

Read through Luke's journal and get anecdotes from all their adventures!

A simple affection system!

Update functionality! So if they get more dialogue in the future, all you need to do is tell them to update and they'll grab it automatically!

Other ukagaka functionality (checking your email, deleting the files in your recycling bin, recognising certain files you drag and drop onto them)

And three whole shells! One made by the fantastic Danganny_art (Instagram) (X/Twitter) (check her post on it over here!!), the other made by @smooley (Instagram) (Itch.io) (coming soon!!)!! (I made the third but it was mostly for sprite sheet reference haha)

They come with their own unique balloon as well, made by @ageofzero!! It comes with designs from all 6 of the mainline games, so you can choose your favourite!

I have also posted all of their dialogue lines on ao3 in case you can't get ssp to work, though it's only the barebones dialogue from their release version.

Here's how to grab them --

Download SSP (you are looking for the ダウンロード button)

(as a note, SSP currently only runs on Windows. for solutions to a linux setup, check here!)

Make sure to place SSP in its own folder! Don't extract it directly onto your desktop and don't remove any of the files from its folder. Not even the application.

(You might have to add ssp to the exceptions on your virus protection software so it can run.)

Say hello to Emily (the cat girl)! She will always be there to greet you the first time you run ssp.

Download Layton and Luke's .nar! (You can download their balloon separately, but they come bundled with it so that's not necessary)

Drag Layton and Luke's .nar file onto Emily once she's finished speaking so she will install it.

(Alternatively, if you are having trouble with this, a .nar file is just another .zip, so you can grab the files from it and place it into a folder yourself! Make the new folder in the Ghosts folder of ssp's files (you will see Emily's folder in there!) (make sure to name it the same name as the .nar itself) and place all of Layton and Luke's files inside it!)

Then you can switch or call up Layton and Luke by right clicking on Emily and selecting them from the Switch Ghosts or Call Ghosts options! Simple as that!

Thanks so much for everyone involved!! Happy Layton big bang!!

[beesmygod]

if you were making a syllabus for a comics class, besides the obvious (homestuck, hark a vagrant, a comic from KC green, a comic from ONE), what comics would you say best represent webcomics as a medium/ are needed to represent the medium? I always liked your hitmen for destiny rec and was wondering if you knew anything else like that

if we're talking about representations of the format rather than just examples of good comics, i think the choices would be really different. for one thing i would cut hark a vagrant and kc green comics since, while both good, they "operate" more or less the same as print comics and utilize the internet primarily as a means of distribution rather than incorporating it into the creation process (beyond making colors websafe, when applicable)

as a lowbrow example, jerkcity (or whatever its called now) is a purely web-based creation. the scripts are private chats dumped into microsoft comic chat and generated from pre-made software assets. im not a fan personally, but there are xkcd comics that make conscious use of the web-medium/infinite canvas to create comics that can literally only exist in a web format (homestuck is the same, but on a massive scale which would make it hard to teach in this scenario). bouletcorp (english website dead? huge loss imo) featured quite a few comics that took advantage of readers needing to scroll in order to obtain more information. e.m. carroll's horror works capitalized on the use of scroll and click to induce tension in the reader. dinosaur comics managing to squeeze decades of comedic juice out of clip art dinosaurs arranged in the same layout every day.

i feel like a class about webcomics should be about the comics that differentiate it from the print medium, if that makes sense. manhua would also fit into this but i would choose cutbu as the example bc i love cutbu comics lol. they came back last year just so everyone knows. with a comic called 28th century superfan

[lookismaddict]

Kouji + Reader (Sister) Headcannons

A/N: This is a familial relationship between you and Kouji. Don't be weird about it lol.

Kouji can be a mean brother who teases his sister a lot, but he tries not to overdo it

He's recognized as the genius kid of the family, and he would point that out to you as if that were obvious. But, he also tries not to do it often and he doesn't want you to feel insecure about it since he still cares about you.

Kouji is super protective over you, especially whenever you use his computer at home

One day, you were curious, wondering why he’s always so addicted to using his PC (computer in the day, computer at night) so you decide to snoop through his computer when you got home from school before him

While passing through his login on his computer, you look through his desktop on his computer and you find normal files relating to school, gaming applications, and… a spreadsheet document that’s titled “Money Log”, which you don’t find too suspicious. (He’s just a teen who wants to properly organize his money. How is that suspicious? 🤔)

Nothing seems to catch your eye, so you decided to look deeper by going through his history of accessed documents, files, and software installations

You noticed a software installation called “VPN” and a folder that says “Private” on there. But, his private folder was locked and it was under password authorization

While you were still trying to figure out his password, Kouji would catch you right when he came home from school and ask you what you were doing on his computer with a stern face, trying to hide his nervousness. However, when you cut him off and asked about how you so happened to find a “Private” folder on his PC, he immediately admitted that it was p*rn for you to shut up about it. (Is he really telling the truth though? You can't tell.)

Obviously, Kouji can also be secretive towards his sister, but also wary of what he does online and at home whenever you decide to crash and hang out in his room

The both of you would often play PC games together like horror games like "Welcome to the Game" (totally up his alley), Minecraft, Roblox, Valorant, etc. He usually does the game controls for you, while you sit there with him and watch him do all of the work. But, if you ask him if he can take control of the gameplay, he lets you but he teases you by saying, "You suck at this." which then leads to a never-ending banter between you two.

However, you don't just play PC games together, but also multi-player mobile games like Genshin Impact (he doesn't want to admit to you that this is his favorite game), Among Us (yes on mobile), and Stardew Valley.

Whenever you guys are bored together, you'd go on weird websites like Omegle or Chatroulette. Often times, he'd try and hack the other person on the other side of the screen ("just for fun" he says) and you had to scold him and try to convince him not to do it for the sake of the poor person on the other side. Most of the time, he just ignores you and just does it anyway. He justifies his own actions as some sort of necessary justice by pointing out, "See? These people are sick, just look at them! Nasty old geezers..."

You noticed how he's a Discord addict who's a part of a bunch of servers online with various aliases. He's a Discord mod for many servers, whether those servers serve as a purpose for gaming and hacking communities. But most of the servers he's on, he mostly hacks into them to troll people online through phishing links and sends random files in group chats that are actually malicious.

You have a strong feeling that he occupies his time doing something more than just trolling online users and playing video games. Since he's so good at hacking and online security, you have to admit that your brother is a technical genius. If that's the case, then you would assume that his hacking capabilities might exceed more than just surface web level. Even if that possibility might lean towards him exploring the Dark Web. (He's your brother. Of course, he would.)

Sometimes whenever he would take a break from using his computer all day doing God knows what, he would join you on the couch and watch a horror movie or a game show

While watching that movie/game show, he would criticize the show or movie by saying, “They are so dumb. I mean, why can’t they just run?” or “Why can’t they get such a simple question right? Are they stupid?” And your only answer for him is: “They just aren’t as smart as you, Kouji.” and your responses always boosts his ego, even if your replies were a bit sarcastic

While watching TV together, he would often eat candies or sweets and he would share them with you

In the living room whenever you two are free from homework or just so happened to be bored, you'd challenge him to play Super Smash Bros. on the Switch. And every single time, he'd mostly beat you in every single round by using his favorite character to fight: Ness (Of course he would use him. I call this canon.)

While playing Super Smash Bros, he would call you out for choosing weird characters to fight like Isabelle, the Villager from Animal Crossing, the Pirahna Plant, and even the Wii Fit Trainer (YES, THE FUCKING WII FIT TRAINER.), and he would call all of them weak. "What the hell? Out of all of the characters you chose, you decided to fight as them? No wonder you died so quickly." His insults didn't stop you from challenging him for rematches.

Whenever you ask him to help you on your homework, he would begrudgingly help you. (Basically, you’re the only person who he would help without blackmailing or without charging you with anything in return for his service.)

Kouji would eat the treats you bake, whether that be cookies, cakes, and other desserts. Especially, the strawberry cakes that you'd make and you would share it with him.

Whenever you mention a boy or a male friend, he would seem very nonchalant about it and dismiss the subject. But you wouldn’t know that he would do research on the poor boy, social engineer to hack into that boy’s accounts (financial accounts or not), and commit cyberattacks on him (viruses, DDoS attacks, phishing, etc.)

Whenever the both of you end up in an argument, you apologize a few days later by sneaking into his room and place sweets on his desk with a bottle/can of grape soda in front of his computer with a little note that usually says small messages like, "Truce? :)" or "I'll give you this peace offering if you let me off the hook." and he would usually accept the gifts and reluctantly eat them.

You would dye his hair purple for him, whenever he asks you to do it and recolor his hair once in a while.

As siblings, you'd do each other a solid at home with the typical "you owe me" exchange. This is your own little way of showing how much you care and look after each other.

You're aware that Kouji has a job, since you caught him one day with a check in his hand that had a bunch of 0's for its amount. You asked him, "Where'd you get that from?" and he would simply say, "My job."

You were a bit shocked to hear that he has a job so your conversation with him ended up being sarcastic and blunt. This is how it went:

"What job?"

"The job that I work for."

"No shit. I meant, where do you work at?"

"Some company."

"Some company? Bullshit. And they'd actually hire someone as young as you? You're barely 16."

"And? The other people that they've interviewed before me were all a bunch of idiots in the first place."

"Huh... I guess that makes sense."

Finally, you two left it at that and decided to never tell your parents about it. After all, what are siblings for anyways?

[aratedfreyjablog]

Corner Talk about in Regards to PB's Announcement in Sharing Paid Contents

So, at this point everyone has read the recent announcement PrettyBusy has posted in regards to sharing ANY paid content. For the full announcement you can access it here but for those that just wants a sweet, small summary, it's essentially them taking legal action on anyone who:

Share any DATAMINE of PAID characters

Share any of the PAID characters FULL story, chats, etc.

So, they still allow players to share parts/bits and pieces of the paid content, just not all of it.

Though it seems like everyone can understand the whole business side of things, there's still confusion on the datamine aspect as in how is datamining is illegal, why is there legal action taken against datamining, etc.

First, I feel like people need to understand that datamining, itself, it NOT illegal. The problem is sharing datamines publicly on any social media. The reasons are for the following

Intellectual Property Rights: when companies release games, all of their contents are protected by trademarks, copyrights, and intellectual property laws. When posting content that company didn't share themselves on their own social media page or to EVERYONE (both F2P and P2W), it's infringing copyright laws since the one sharing it wasn't the one to have produced/created the work or data (think of it reposting artists work without their permission but you're sharing a work that was put in by artists and game creators of the company without their permission).

Terms of Service Violation: Many software applications, websites, and digital platforms impose terms of service (ToS) that users must agree to before using their services. These ToS often prohibit activities like reverse engineering, data scraping, or extracting data in a manner that circumvents the intended use of the service. By datamining and posting content obtained in violation of these terms, you are breaching a contractual agreement between yourself and the platform, which can lead to legal consequences.

Security: there are certain codes and firewalls set up that many (if not ALL) game companies put in as a means to detect if there is any malicious activity happening within the system that could potential harm the players (e.g., hacking and extracting players' personal information). When datamining, most people aren't aware in what form these protective barriers are set-up, so when extracting contents from the game, rather than being seen as simply getting contents for one's amusement, it can be detected as a threat by the security system.

What I wrote are only snippets of the few reasons as to the legal concerns in sharing datamine contents. And despite for other fandoms, it's not as prevalent, game companies are starting to take up action in regards to datamining, some being obvious about it while others are being discreet.

However, if we were talking about solely on the announcement, it's understandable why it would bother players, especially F2P. For other games (not saying ALL or MOST), they do eventually make the paid content accessible at some point for F2P without having to make them wait for so long. However, PB isn't taking much initiative with that, where now they're adding characters from the Solomon Seals after 3 MONTHS while, for now, not letting F2P have ANY ACCESS to limited characters from Nightmare Pass. To top that off, previously PB had promised re-runs of events, which would've allowed newer F2P to have a chance to play the event and obtain resources/characters from it. But now they have their previous events accessible behind paywall, decreasing the likelihood for event re-runs to happen. As for P2W, players are literally paying to get the character and related contents related to said character so there shouldn't be much restrictions in sharing their paid content on public platforms in the first place (this is not to say they should disrespect PB and share everything though). This is without mentioning some of the promises that have already broken based on the announcement earlier this year and last month (?) (Main story drop every 2 months, Friendship System, Comics related to Cards being posted on their Social Media, etc.).

Hopefully PB will reconsider and address some of these issues with the upcoming event for Bethel and Belphegor dropping on 6/26.

[fakezircon]

hellooo zircon, for no particular reason (/silly) do you have any tips for beginner streamers? Your streams are always clean and well put together esp from a technical side imo so I trust your advice on this one :) - @helsex

This is gonna be long so get comfy.

#1 best tip: Get familiar with your streaming software of choice (most likely OBS) and don't be afraid to play with it. Your first streams are not gonna be a polished as you'd like no matter what you do. You don't need to know the software inside and out to use it well and familiarity will come with use. The best approach (in my opinion) is to figure out what you like in other streams and figure out how to do that for yourself, don't worry about learning absolutely everything right from the start.

Another good tip is to do some mic checks beforehand, if you just record instead of streaming you'll be able to see what your mic sounds like on stream, and there are tons of tutorials out there for figuring out mic settings (this is the one I followed I think, although with some differences just for my own preference).

Yet another helpful resource: this is a link to an obs plugin that will help manage audio sources so you can actually control what plays on stream, instead of it just playing your whole desktop audio. (I think OBS has a version of this going now? But I tried using it and didn't get far) You'll have to add an audio source individually for each application but the greater control is a godsend.

For overlays (things like chat on stream and alerts that play when people follow/subscribe/raid that sort of thing), there's a few routes you can go down. Twitch has their own alerts thing but personally I use streamelements (they also have a very popular chatbot which I don't use myself but may be worth looking into if that's something you want). Whichever service you end up using should give you some sort of link, which will be added to your obs as a Browser Source. (Also if you're using the obs plugin I linked, the browser source audio would be under the name "obs-browser-page.exe" after you set up the browser source)

My final bit of advice is that hotkeys are your friends! It is absolutely worth setting up a few hotkeys to make controlling your stream while in game easy. Personally I have hotkeys set up for toggle muting my my mic and discord audio, as well as for changing between my most common scenes (Also my catcam when my animals deign to show up). Typically if you are just using a regular keyboard you'll want to use key combinations as hotkeys to avoid accidentally activating one while trying to type in game (Something I have done many a time, but hey you never stop learning!).

Shoutout to @addaxbones for teaching me literally everything I know about streaming btw. He's the guy that got me into this mess and also the reason I met most of my friends today. (love that guy)

One last thing under the readmore to cover my shame /silly:

I am flattered you consider my streams "clean and well put together", and you can maybe take this as proof that on screen != behind the scenes, but here is my desktop from a few streams ago, not a tidy look I can tell you that.

It doesn't normally get this bad, but it's also not a whole lot better.

[multipurposethemes]

Building Chatbots: An Overview of Key Chat Application Dashboard

  Importance of Chat Application Dashboard

Chatbots have become a crucial customer engagement channel for businesses today. To build a robust conversational interface, developers can leverage a range of helpful Chat Software Template, admin UI frameworks and web app templates. This allows faster development and customization of chatbots suited to specific business needs.

Introduction to Chatbots and Use Cases

Chatbots are AI-powered programs that simulate human-like conversations through messaging interfaces. Key capabilities include:

Natural language processing to understand text/voice inputs

Generating relevant voice/text responses

24x7 availability for instant customer queries

Integration with backend databases to offer personalized experiences

Chatbots are leveraged across sectors for use cases like customer support, lead generation, product recommendations, appointment booking and more.

  Read More: Chat Application Dashboard

Like Us

[dirtybg3confessions]

DBG3 is Looking for Mods!

What we're looking for:

As we continue to grow and the inbox continues to explode, we're looking to add 4-5 new mods to the team.

Our ideal mods have a great sense of humor, are not easily squicked by unhinged confessions, and can easily meet the below qualifications:

Ability to take high quality screenshots within BG3

Proficiency and access to Photoshop, GIMP, or equivalent photo editing software capable of manipulating .psd files

Wiling and able to join a discord server for mod related group chat

Able to add min. 30 edited confessions to the dbg3 queue a week

How to apply:

Drop in the ask box OFF ANON to state your interest! Let us know (briefly) what experience, if any, you have with photo editing/community moderation/etc.

Within 24 hours you will get a message from me (mod tri) with the confession template and a confession to edit

After completing your edit, you will send the completed png back to me (still mod tri) before the deadline below.

We're looking to get new people in the mix sooner rather than later, so ASK BOX APPLICATIONS WILL CLOSE AT 12:01 AM EST ON SATURDAY, DECEMBER 2nd

ALL CONFESSION EDITS ARE DUE BEFORE 10AM EST ON SATURDAY, DECEMBER 2nd Everyone who applies will be notified of the result later that day.

Thanks in advance to everyone who throws their hat in the ring, and we look forward to having you join the ranks of horny wardens!

[paperometria]

Una domanda a cui credo tu abbia già risposto ma di cui non riesco a rintracciare nessun post in merito.

Ci sono software validi (e che non ti fottano tutti i dati) per poter fare un backup del blog?

Il mio! 😍

Però non fornisco gli eseguibili, ti scarichi il codice e usi Java.

Oppure posso farti io il favore senza problemi (ma il mio software non salva le chat, occhio!!), mi dici dove inviarti il file e ti giro tutto.

Oppure puoi usare la procedura di Tumblr, che a quanto ho capito di recente funziona anche abbastanza bene (Account => <selezioni uno dei blog che hai> => Impostazioni Blog => Esporta (in fondo alla pagina). Il backup ci metterà un bel po', quindi, quando è finito, riceverai una notifica/email con il link dal quale scaricare lo ZIP (e questa procedura ti fornisce anche tutte le conversazioni private).

Se hai ulteriori domande, sai dove trovarmi :)

[nanowrimo]

How to Find Hope for Completing Your Writing Goals

Every year, we’re lucky to have great sponsors for our nonprofit events.��Campfire, a 2023 NaNoWriMo sponsor, is a writing and worldbuilding platform to help you create an immersive experience benefitting both authors and readers. Today, Campfire Community Manager Emory Glass shares some words on having hope when writing feels overwhelming:

It has been 3,265 days since I won NaNoWriMo. I was 16 and wrote 75,000 words. It was exhilarating and cathartic and everything I ever dreamt of.

Tomorrow it will be 3,266 days since I won NaNoWriMo. I look back on my projects thinking, “2,500 words a day is lightspeed. The words flowed so freely then, so quickly.” I want to be a writer–I am a writer. It is my identity, my purpose, my reason, yet I cannot bring myself to finish what I have begun.

The next day it will have been 3,267 days since I won NaNoWriMo. The words do not fly from my fingertips but crawl, sapped of energy, the page a grave for ink stains posing as letters. I talk to my characters often. My writer friends tell me I speak of them as if they were real people, but I cannot seem to lift the weight of their stories from my mind. Still, I have no platform, no audience, no one eagerly watching for the next installment.

The day after it will have been 3,268 days since I won NaNoWriMo. Two publications, no published novels, hundreds of thousands of words gathering dust. I am no writer, I am a collector of words. There must be something wrong with me. I have so much to tell, so much to share, so much to create, but here I am not telling, not sharing, not creating.

One day it will have been 3,269 days since I won NaNoWriMo. I will not have published a book, I will not have a new story, I will not have an audience or a platform or one–just one–person looking forward to what happens next.

But I will not give up.

"...and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." (Friedrich Nietzsche)

It's rather typical for a dark fantasy writer to peer into the void, but it quickly becomes an intoxication and an excuse to never move a muscle. Do not succumb. Push forward, even if you barely move an inch. If you wish to be a builder, you build. If you wish to be a fighter, you fight. If you wish to be a writer, you write.

Brute force seems barbaric. Should words not spill onto the page? It is said that art cannot be coerced or bent to one's own will; it comes easily, naturally, swiftly. The very best art is created in a creative frenzy, so they say, and the very best artists are recognized in memoriam.

But if you delay and evade and wither your ambition as you count the days since your last success, your oeuvre halts and is buried and perishes by your own hand. So if you, like me, too often find yourself peering into the void where the words have gone to fade away, cleave to the remedy for its gaze: hope. This is the heart of creation. Laudation and lucrativeness are but two measures of success. They will not themselves burst a dam of words within you and imbue every project with Midas' touch. Creative fever is not catching–you must seek it out.

Give yourself a reason to write even when you do not want to or it feels too Herculean a task. If you seek new horizons, a useful tool, or a supportive community to accompany you on this odyssey, enlist Campfire to help. Whether it behooves you to squeeze out words on your mobile device, stay focused offline with a desktop application, or keep inspiration at hand via browser-based work and Discord chats, it's the best place to bring your stories to life.

NaNoWriMo participants can save on Campfire’s writing software! Use the discount code LETSGONANO23 for 30% off your first year of an annual subscription to our Standard Plan. It’s free to create an account. Offer expires March 31, 2024.

Emory Glass is an avid artist, worldbuilder, and author with a passion for strong female characters in leading roles and meticulous attention to detail in lore. She loves tea, learning Scottish Gaelic, continuing her work on The Chroma Books, a series of interconnected stories, and running Inkblood Book Company for similarly enthusiastic dark fantasy writers. When not chasing down stories, Emory works as the Community Manager at Campfire.

Top photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash.

[peggycatrerr]

i think it’s really really important that we keep reminding people that what we’re calling ai isn’t even close to intelligent and that its name is pure marketing. the silicon valley tech bros and hollywood executives call it ai because they either want it to seem all-powerful or they believe it is and use that to justify their use of it to exploit and replace people.

chat-gpt and things along those lines are not intelligent, they are predictive text generators that simply have more data to draw on than previous ones like, you know, your phone’s autocorrect. they are designed to pass the turing test by having human-passing speech patterns and syntax. they cannot come up with anything new, because they are machines programmed on data sets. they can’t even distinguish fact from fiction, because all they are actually capable of is figuring out how to construct a human-sounding response using applicable data to a question asked by a human. you know how people who use chat-gpt to cheat on essays will ask it for reference lists and get a list of texts that don’t exist? it’s because all chat-gpt is doing is figuring out what types of words typically appear in response to questions like that, and then stringing them together.

midjourney and things along those lines are not intelligent, they are image generators that have just been really heavily fine-tuned. you know how they used to do janky fingers and teeth and then they overcame that pretty quickly? that’s not because of growing intelligence, it’s because even more photographs got added to their data sets and were programmed in such a way that they were able to more accurately identify patterns in the average amount of fingers and teeth across all those photos. and it too isn’t capable of creation. it is placing pixels in spots to create an amalgamation of images tagged with metadata that matches the words in your request. you ask for a tree and it spits out something a little quirky? it’s not because it’s creating something, it’s because it gathered all of its data on trees and then averaged it out. you know that “the rest of the mona lisa” tweet and how it looks like shit? the fact that there is no “rest” of the mona lisa aside, it’s because the generator does not have the intelligence required to identify what’s what in the background of such a painting and extend it with any degree of accuracy, it looked at the colours and approximate shapes and went “oho i know what this is maybe” and spat out an ugly landscape that doesn’t actually make any kind of physical or compositional sense, because it isn’t intelligent.

and all those ai-generated voices? also not intelligent, literally just the same vocal synth we’ve been able to do since daisy bell but more advanced. you get a sample of a voice, break it down into the various vowel and consonant sounds, and then when you type in the text you want it to say, it plays those vowel and consonant sounds in the order displayed in that text. the only difference now is that the breaking it down process can be automated to some extent (still not intelligence, just data analysis) and the synthesising software can recognise grammar a bit more and add appropriate inflections to synthesised voices to create a more natural flow.

if you took the exact same technology that powers midjourney or chat-gpt and removed a chunk of its dataset, the stuff it produces would noticeably worsen because it only works with a very very large amount of data. these programs are not intelligent. they are programs that analyse and store data and then string it together upon request. and if you want evidence that the term ai is just being used for marketing, look at the sheer amount of software that’s added “ai tools” that are either just things that already existed within the software, using the same exact tech they always did but slightly refined (a lot of film editing software are renaming things like their chromakey tools to have “ai” in the name, for example) or are actually worse than the things they’re overhauling (like the grammar editor in office 365 compared to the classic office spellcheck).

but you wanna real nifty lil secret about the way “ai” is developing? it’s all neural nets and machine learning, and the thing about neural nets and machine learning is that in order to continue growing in power it needs new data. so yeah, currently, as more and more data gets added to them, they seem to be evolving really quickly. but at some point soon after we run out of data to add to them because people decided they were complete or because corporations replaced all new things with generated bullshit, they’re going to stop evolving and start getting really, really, REALLY repetitive. because machine learning isn’t intelligent or capable of being inspired to create new things independently. no, it’s actually self-reinforcing. it gets caught in loops. "ai” isn’t the future of art, it’s a data analysis machine that’ll start sounding even more like a broken record than it already does the moment its data sets stop having really large amounts of unique things added to it.

[meret118]

Worst Interview Ever

Pitched by tech companies as a cost-efficient means of automating a laborious screening process typically done by an HR representative or recruiter, this A.I. software has the capability to “interview” hundreds of candidates, whom it can then recommend for further interviews with actual human beings. But for those on the other side of these chats, the experience of auditioning for a computer can feel somewhat surreal—and leave a rather unpleasant impression of a potential employer.

. . .

The shift to A.I. among human resources sectors is real. Earlier this month, the CEO of IBM confirmed that the company had laid off “a couple hundred” HR workers and replaced them with A.I. agents. A recent survey of 500 HR professionals also found that almost three-quarters of them believe they’re adopting the technology more quickly than other departments. Despite this, HR remains among the fastest-growing sectors in the U.S., with the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicting an 8 percent growth by 2033. According to the HR Digestmagazine, although A.I. can be used in this field to automate “an unnecessary amount of manual work,” like payroll management and vacation requests, it can’t yet “oversee the human section” or company culture. Still, amid concerns that the technology may develop algorithmic biases in hiring, Peditto believes that recruiters should be worried. “Good recruiters are more than just box-checkers and 15-minute screeners,” he said. “But for the people who this is sort of all they do, that can be scary, especially those early in their careers.”

The recruiters that are using A.I. are, in one sense, leveling the playing field. After all, some applicants, like Mayfield Phillips, who’ve been interviewed by A.I. bots have themselves used A.I. to boost their chances of landing a job by receiving help in polishing their résumés or tailoring cover letters. (You can even use the tech to practice your answers in mock interviews—a feature highlighted by Google in a recent Super Bowl ad—or have it listen to your job interview in real time and secretly suggest responses.) But Phillips, a 55-year-old IT project manager in New York, said he still found his experience this week of being interviewed by an A.I. chatbot, one also made by Apriora, to be profoundly surreal. Although he knew in advance he’d be conversing with an A.I. program that would listen to his verbal answers and ask him questions via text, he still had to schedule a time to chat with “Alex” (whose avatar appeared as a white woman with brown hair), and a preplanned interview had to be postponed due to technical difficulties the A.I. was experiencing. Phillips said he was also particularly frustrated and unimpressed after the A.I. was unable to answer a question he posed about what success might look like in the position.

slate.com/life/2025/05/jobs-ai-job-hiring-character-interview.html

[motsimages]

Some basic distinctions coming from my understanding of them as a millennial with "user knowledge" of IT. Many things may be wrong, I am doing this as a kind of test for myself and also as basic info for those who haven't really stopped to think about this.

- Internet: as the name says, it is a NET of INTERconnected computers. How does it exactly work, I am not sure, but some computers are servers, which means they hold information that other computers (not servers) can access. Your phone is not a computer and is not a server. I don't know if it could turn into one, I think it would require a lot of RAM memory and other things to power it. If a server disconnects, you can't access the information it has. If all servers of the internet disconnect, I guess there would be no internet??

- RAM memory: one of the important things that makes the computer run. Not the same as the hard disk or the other memory (I don't remember the name now). It doesn't save files or programs, it helps manage tasks when you use the computer.

- File: information you save in your computer. It can have different formats and uses, like a .doc Word document, a PDF (file), an image in .jpg, etc.

- Folder: a place to put several files. I am not sure if it is a program.

- Browser: it's a program that you use to access the internet. You can see webs, databases, blogs... I think you cannot access the internet without a browser or other specific program for it.

- Search engine: it's a website that allows you to look for information in a database or several. Google is the most famous one. It used to be good and is now shit. Libraries also have search engines to look for books. I think outside of the internet, your computer could potentially also have a search engine to find files and folders? Unsure about this last part.

- Corpus: this is very specific but very useful for translators. It has a lot of documents of specialised content that you can look up and compare. For instance, historical documents to look for an idiom in the 16th Century. Or texts in French and Italian to see how they refer to the same information and compare the way native speakers speak.

- Program: I think this can also be software (maybe not all software are programs but all programs are software?). A specific thing you install in your computer to do something. For instance, Adobe Photoshop. I am now unsure if Microsoft Office is a program or not. Feels like it is but...

- Application: tbh I am not sure what is the difference with a software or program, but I know they don't exactly do the same things even if it looks like it. I feel it's like a smaller version of a program that the user can modify less.

- Chat GPT: I have never used it but from what I hear, it's a program that you can access remotely through some website? A specialised search engine/corpus that makes up things based on the information it can access.

I have to say that making this list I can see why people confuse program with website with browser with internet. Many programs can be accessed remotely from a website that you open in a browser, or maybe with an app. And then there's the whole thing of the Web 2.0, which is mainly all social media websites and I don't fully understand.

Feel free to comment and correct stuff.