Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
snrk
https://mastodon.social/@Daojoan/113228461302575676
I’m going to start replying to everything like I’m on Hacker News. Unhappy with Congress? Why don’t you just start a new country and write a constitution and secede? It’s not that hard once you know how. Actually, I wrote a microstate in a weekend using Rust.
App developers think that’s a bogus argument. Mr. Bier told me that data he had seen from start-ups he advised suggested that contact sharing had dropped significantly since the iOS 18 changes went into effect, and that for some apps, the number of users sharing 10 or fewer contacts had increased as much as 25 percent.
aww, does the widdle app's business model collapse completely once it can't harvest data? how sad
this reinforces a suspicion that I've had for a while: the only reason most people put up with any of this shit is because it's an all or nothing choice and they don't know the full impact (because it's intentionally obscured). the moment you give them an overt choice that makes them think about it, turns out most are actually not fine with the state of affairs
I wanted to see how much lactose was in Monterey Jack, and this was the very first result on bing for:
monterey jack lactose per 10 grams
https://thekitchencommunity.org/the-nutritional-profile-of-monterey-jack-cheese/
It's absolutely over. This is why every other search I make has "site:reddit.com" attached to it.
And no, the site didn't tell me how much lactose there was per gram
I can’t decide if calimisinit is better pronounced in a surfer bro or British accent, so my brain combined the two and I hate it
Found while poking around today: the Wikipedia club for cleaning up after AI.
Example: the article Leninist historiography was entirely written by AI and previously included a list of completely fake sources in Russian and Hungarian at the bottom of the page.
I’m just thinking about all the reply guys that come here defending autoplag, specifically with this idea:
“GPT is great when I want to turn a list of bullet points into an eloquent email”
Hey, you butts, just send the bullet points! What are you, a high schooler? Nobody has time for essays, much less autoplagged slop.
No no no it's fine! You get the word shuffler to deshuffle the—eloquently—shuffled paragraphs back into nice and tidy bullet points. And I have an idea! You could get an LLM to add metadata to the email to preserve the original bullet points, so the recipient LLM has extra interpolation room to choose to ignore the original list, but keep the—much more correct and eloquent, and with much better emphasis—hallucinated ones.
As previously mentioned, the "Behind the Bastards" podcast is tackling Curtis Yarvin. I'm just past the first ad intermission (why are all podcast ads just ads for other podcasts? It's like podcast incest), and according to the host, Yarvin models his ideal society on Usenet pre-Eternal September.
This is something I've noticed too (I got on the internet just before). There's a nostalgia for the "old" internet, which was supposed to be purer and less ad-infested than the current fallen age. Usenet is often mentioned. And I've always thought that's dumb because the old internet was really really exclusionary. You had to be someone in academia or internet business, so you were Anglophone, white, and male. The dream of the old pure internet is a dream of an internet without women or people of color, people who might be more expressive in media other than 7 bit ASCII.
This was a reminder that the nostalgia can be coded fascist, too.
a user called "crypto-bitcoin" raises an issue with the World Wide Web Consortium's Accessibility List
.Image description
Image shows user joined two weeks ago.
Yikes. Could be a troll (I hope it's a troll)
a lost not very computer literate dude who just got scammed i guess
Today in "Promptfondler fucks around and finds out."
So I'm guessing what happened here is that the statistically average terminal session doesn't end after opening an SSH connection, and the LLM doesn't actually understand what it's doing or when to stop, especially when it's being promoted with the output of whatever it last commanded.
Shlegeris said he uses his AI agent all the time for basic system administration tasks that he doesn't remember how to do on his own, such as installing certain bits of software and configuring security settings.
Emphasis added.
"I only had this problem because I was very reckless," he continued, "partially because I think it's interesting to explore the potential downsides of this type of automation. If I had given better instructions to my agent, e.g. telling it 'when you've finished the task you were assigned, stop taking actions,' I wouldn't have had this problem.
just instruct it "be sentient" and you're good, why don't these tech CEOs undersand the full potential of this limitless technology?
My current hyperfixation is Ecosia, maker of “the greenest search engine” (already problematic) implementing a wrapped-chatgpt chat bot and saying it has a “green mode” which is not some kind of solar-powered, ethically-sound, generative AI, but rather an instructive prompt to only give answers relating to sustainable business models etc etc.
See my thread here https://xcancel.com/fasterandworse/status/1837831731577000320
I’m starting to reach out to them wherever I can because for some reason this one is keeping me up at night.
They’re from Germany and made the rounds on the news here a few years back. They’re famous for basically donating all their profits to ecological projects, mostly for planting trees. These projects are publicly visible and auditable, so this at least isn’t bullshit.
Under the hood they’re just another Bing wrapper (like DuckDuckGo).
I actually kinda liked the project until they started adding a chatbot some months back. It was just such a weird decision because it has no benefits and is actively against their mission. Their reason for adding it was “user demand” which is the same bullshit Proton spewed and I don’t believe it.
This green mode crap sounds really whack, lol. So I really wonder what’s up with that. I gotta admit that I thought they were really in it because they believed in their ecological idea (or at least their marketing did a great job convincing me) so this feels super weird.
ah, sweet, manmade horrors beyond my comprehension:
(This would've been more shocking to me in 2023, but after over a year in this bubble I have stopped expecting anything resembling basic human decency from those who work in AI)
So, today MS publishes this blog post about something with AI. It starts with "We’re living through a technological paradigm shift."... and right there I didn't bother reading the rest of it because I don't want to expose my brain to it further.
But what I found funny is that also today, there's this news: https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/1/24259369/microsoft-hololens-2-discontinuation-support
So Hololens is discontinued... you know... AR... the last supposedly big paradigm shift that was supposedly going to change everything.
Ex-headliners Evergreen Terrace: "Even after they offered to pull Kyle from the event, we discovered several associated entities that we simply do not agree with"
the new headliner will be uh a Slipknot covers band
organisers: "We have been silent. But we are prepping. The liberal mob attempted to destroy Shell Shock. But we will not allow it. This is now about more than a concert. This is a war of ideology." yeah you have a great show guys
By "liberal mob" he means "people who asked for their money back and aren't coming anymore"
Small FYI, not a sneer or anything, you can stop reading if you don't know what the godotengine is. But if you do and hear of the fork, you can just ignore the fork. (the people involved also seem to be rather iffy, one guy who went crazy after somebody mentioned they would like gay relationships in his game, and some maga conspiracy theory style coder. That is going by the 3 normal people the account follows (out of 5) who I assume are behind it).
amazing work they've achieved so far though
yes, that's the complete change set for the fork
oh and a Godot discord moderator turned out to be extremely into dropping n-words in chat
This is fucking hilarious. GIT is my favorite blockchain
god these people are fucking losers
as seen via jwz, the tail wagging the dog continues (archive) at mozilla
"if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" but the wrong way around. I guess they got tired of begging google for money?
And, for the foreseeable future at least, advertising is a key commercial engine of the internet
this tracks analogously to something I've been saying for a while as well, but with some differences. one of the most notable is the misrepresentation here of "the internet", in the stead of "all the entities playing the online advertising game to extract from everyone else"
Thanks I hate it.
[Advertising is] the most efficient way to ensure the majority of content remains free and accessible to as many people as possible.
Content is a scarce resource y'know. Heaven forbid the content farms go out of business; or we might end up having to read Sherlock Holmes isekai fanfiction rather than a content farm's two paragraphs and three screen-fulls of ads surrounding the tweet du jour. That would be ~~terrible~~ actually quite nice.
We know that not everyone in our community will embrace our entrance into this market. But taking on controversial topics because we believe they make the internet better for all of us is a key feature of Mozilla’s history
WTF. How is it possible for a company to be this self-congratulatory about entering the advertising space?! Someone needs to fork Firefox.
(Another post so soon? Another post so soon.)
"Gen AI competes with its training data, exhibit 1,764":
Also got a quick sidenote, which spawned from seeing this:
This is pure gut feeling, but I suspect that "AI training" has become synonymous with "art theft/copyright infringement" in the public consciousness.
Between AI bros publicly scraping against people's wishes (Exhibit A, Exhibit B, Exhibit C), the large-scale theft of data which went to produce these LLMs' datasets, and the general perception that working in AI means you support theft (Exhibit A, Exhibit B), I wouldn't blame Joe Public for treating AI as inherently infringing.
from the (current?) prick-in-chief at YC in this post:
and everyone in our industry owes a debt to open source builders
nice of you to admit it. now maybe pay down some of that debt by using sending of your piles of money to those projects
oh, what's that, you only want to continue taking from it and then charging other people service rent, without ever contributing back? oh okay then
r/SubredditDrama's watching shit go down in r/EffectiveAltruism, and there's a lotta sneers going on
I'm not in support of Effective Altruism as an organization, I just understand what it's like to get caught up in fear and worry over if what you're doing and donating is actually helping. I donate to a variety of causes whenever I have the extra money, and sometimes it can be really difficult to assess which cause needs your money more. Due to this, I absolutely understand how innocent people get caught up in EA in a desire to do the maximum amount of good for the world. However, EA as an organization is incredibly shady. u/Evinceo provided this great article: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/effective-altruism-is-a-welter-of-fraud-lies-exploitation-and-eugenic-fantasies/
Man, that hits close to home. It's a hard sell to sneer at people ostensibly doing their best to do good. Any kind of altruism, particularly one ostensibly focused on at least trying to be effective, feels like a such a rare treat that I feel like the worst kind of buzzkill letting newcomers know what cynical doomer ass death obsessed sex cult (and not even in a kinkily cool way*) a big chunk of EA and other TESCRL are. I can relate to them in so many ways, especially remembering what my teenage self was like, but at the same time it's weirdly hard to articulate how immature those opinions (some of which) I used to, and they continue to hold, are**.
Anyway, charity is a symptom of the failure of society. Luxury is a human right. Profit is exploitation. Nobody gets a billion dollars without mass homicide.
* but unfortunately often in an uncool, very rapey way
** not all of them, there are levels of cringe I managed to avoid even in my teenage years
https://fixupx.com/CultureCrave/status/1840858182840877084
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Elon musk voice: 'So euhmmm euuhhh ummm you are ummm euhh saying it has umm some value?'
E: But wait there is more
Tweet from Paul Graham: "Renaming Twitter X doesn't seem to have damaged it. But it doesn't seem to have helped it either. So it was a waste of time and a domain name."
And more
Reply tweet from Elon Musk: "You know nothing"
(And as is tradition when Musk replies to a famous person, the famous person doesn't even react).
This gonna end in a gofundme
hatreon
This exchange on HN, from the Wordpress meltdown, is going to make an amazing exhibit in the upcoming trial:
Anonymous: Matt, I mean this sincerely: get yourself checked out. Do you have a carbon monoxide detector in your house? … Go to a 10 day silent retreat, or buy a ranch in Montana and host your own Burning Man…
Matt Mullenweg: Thanks, I carry a co2 and carbon monoxide monitor. … I do own a place in Montana, and I meditate several times a day.
