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baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

It's bad enough to have to have the "former manager now works in the military-industrial complex, what's up with that and do we need to distance ourselves from him?" conversation with former coworkers, but that it's not the first time I've had to have that chat is honestly a bit disconcerting.

cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber") wrote:

Well the poll has ended, and holy moly, there was a lot of response here, both to the poll and also in the comments. It was a dead heat for a while there, and still came pretty close to it.

Within the last hour, I kind of skewed the results by throwing this out there, that I *do* have thoughts on how to build a system that isn't based on LLMmaxxing which fulfills these properties, and that seemed to bias a lot of the votes coming in within the last hour towards yes https://social.coop/@cwebber/116969383379862650

But still, a lot of people are clearly disturbed, that any kind of improvement to automation of intellectual labor, even with all of the *main* things that we tend to complain about with *present-day* (and LLM-based) AI removed, making those "better" is unclear if a win given the lack of a change in socioeconomic context.

So... what now?

Boosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber") wrote:

A hypothetical: Imagine I held a magic wand that could make AI systems improve in all the following ways:

- More environmentally friendly
- Less capturable by a few large corporations
- Less built on "plagiarism machine" foundations
- More reasonable and capable of making judgements which are explainable, accountable, and more accurate
- More participatory and open

However, we are still left in our present socioeconomic system.

Should I wave the magic wand and improve things, or does improving AI in these ways still make the world worse?

Boosted by soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker"):
redsad@ohai.social ("captain acab :antifa: 🏳️‍🌈") wrote:

about last night

Boosted by soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker"):
SuperDicq@minidisc.tokyo wrote:

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
amras@friendmaterial.lgbt ("Sarma / Amras") wrote:

Corrolary: if you do know your way around a server, what do you wish more users understood about digital infrastructure and the web, because it'd make the world better if they did?

Boosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
carnage4life@mas.to ("Dare Obasanjo") wrote:

I can’t imagine being the literal richest human being in existence and making my entire online persona that of a racist incel.

aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart") wrote:

This actually affects my sense of humor: these things aren't relevant to my life, but the sentiment of "This is hype" or "This is obvious but being treated as news" doesn't have an exact translation in a modern context, and _that_ is what makes me feel old.

It's not that I ever watched network news, but that hyping up a show to come later is not a thing we do now, the very way we make mountains out of molehills has changed.

brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:") wrote:

#Sysadmin tip: You can set up unattended-upgrades (Ubuntu instructions here, also works for Debian but Debian doesn't turn this on automatically) to deal with security updates within a day of patching without having to do it manually.

I also recommend installing needrestart so that important services get restarted on upgrade, reducing the chance of vulnerabilities staying live for a long time.

For kernel updates, it appears you can configure it to automatically reboot with the Unattended-Upgrade::Automatic-Reboot "true";. This will of course create a small amount of downtime for the server, which I consider an acceptable trade-off for a small server like mine.

There are also ways you can livepatch kernels iirc but I don't know those techniques so well, you might want to look into them for a larger/more professional server.

Keep patching and stay safe out there!

aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart") wrote:

Damnit, another phrase I realize is in the dustbin, "news at 11"

Getting culturally old is _weird_.

cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber") wrote:

RE: https://social.coop/@cwebber/116964060609145830

Just over an hour left to vote in this poll. And it's pretty interesting; a lot of votes, and a dead heat.

And there's a lot of disbelief about whether or not such a machine can *even be built*.

So let me up the stakes: this poll is informing whether or not to do a writeup on how to build *exactly this system*.

And I'm currently leaning towards writing it up, if for no reason other than because I'm annoyed I'm being told there's no way to do this other than just LLM-maxxing it, both by LLM fans and detractors.

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
quincy@chaos.social ("Oenanthe conioides ⁂") wrote:

the dreaded double space

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
david_chisnall@infosec.exchange ("David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)") wrote:

@datarama

The industry has always had some of those people. During my career, the set of things that, if you're not doing them, you're wasting your time and everything you've done is pointless includes (non-exhaustive list, in no particular order):

• GUIs (command-line tools are obsolete).
• Web apps (native GUIs are obsolete).
• Mobile apps (desktop and web GUIs are obsolete).
• OOP (procedural programming is obsolete).
• FP (OOP is obsolete).
• Reactive programming (MVC is obsolete, everyone must use a paradigm where no one seems to be able to manage to do a simple master-detail view without it getting out of sync).
• COM (shared libraries that don't expose COM objects are too hard to maintain with stable ABIs and too hard to expose to higher-level languages).
• Multithreading (Moore's law is dead, everything must use a million threads to be relevant)
• Thread pools (using too many threads is too slow)
• Structured concurrency (manually managing runnable work items is too deadlock prone).

Each one of those has come with a bunch of people happily cheering that everyone not on that particular bandwagon is wasting their life.

The common factor is not that these technologies changed the world and obsoleted everything before them (many of them did improve things), it's that those people were dicks. And they remain dicks when they're talking about AI.

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
selfcare@goto.toydragon.xyz ("Fedi Selfcare Reminders") wrote:

May you have the courage to break the patterns in your life that are no longer serving you

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

some reply entities sure seem keen on local models. in fact local models are a magic antidote to any talk of bubbles, or so i guess i'm supposed to believe.

aside from the fact that the "good" ones are not runnable on even expensive consumer graphics, there's just one little problem they never seem to acknowledge - when the bubble pops, they'll all be frozen in time because no-one will be able to justify the cost of training better ones.

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
brooke@bikeshed.vibber.net ("Brooke Vibber :neocat_cofe:") wrote:

this old vlc app update description came up on my facebook memories ;)

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
mrpjevans ("PJ Evans (EMF x2001)") wrote:

Hugs to all the post #EMFCamp washing machines today. You got this.

jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

well now, time for difficult choices I guess

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
phoenix@pawb.fun ("Phoenix") wrote:

Wrote a nice big blog post about my VHS simulator that explains all the physics models inside of it (and finally gives a basic reference to what all the parameters mean).

https://blog.opengbh.net/posts/0017-vhs-playback-simulator/

#vhs #retro #retrotech #retrocomputing

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

RE: https://mastodon.social/@proseandpassion/116963759618141026

undeniable that the cello is what wood is supposed to sound like and then you're supposed to play it like this

Boosted by jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)"):
proseandpassion ("michael") wrote:

I actually have the sheet music for this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnMEnhvPZkE #cello #kobekina

Boosted by jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)"):
proseandpassion ("michael") wrote:

something a bit more challenging: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gxFJ5aeoHQ
#cello #kobekina

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

We love you @Codeberg

https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html

As an association, we believe that these technologies are incompatible with responsibly creating and maintaining free & open source software. [...]
The development team of none: [...] To us, it seems ridiculous to see projects with a single developer and virtually no users consuming as much or even more resources than some of the largest community projects on Codeberg, which operate frugal with CI/CD and storage resources. We do not believe it is reasonable for Codeberg to invest our precious donation money into hosting of large ghost projects. [...]
The free/libre software ecosystem, of which we consider Codeberg an important part of, is a social phenomenon centered on collaboration. Working in this way is only possible thanks to free sharing and mutual learning. [...] by adopting LLMs people tend to code single-use software from scratch. While this leads to an increase in 'shared' code, it is mostly code that not only has not been 'written' by anyone but is also not maintained by anyone. [...]

The widespread use of LLMs in FLOSS is instead becoming a multidimensional attack on the trust between contributors and the very idea of convivial collaboration itself. [...]
Together, these forces make collaboration not only harder but also less rewarding: With the transaction cost of collaboration increasing, people are becoming less likely to contribute to creating high-quality software projects and more likely to 'vibecode' a one-off software that is specific to your need, and won't evolve beyond. We get a vicious cycle where collaboration is becoming less and less rewarding, while the amount of single-use software that's unmaintained and never sees any improvements is going up.

Although often well intentioned, sharing the result of an prompt and calling it "libre software" does not make the world a better place. Codeberg is not and does not want to be a place to dump such generated single-use software that no one else will ever look at. We are a place for people to collaborate and improve software together

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

AI being eval'd by AI company hacks other AI company's AI written code which is then diagnosed and patched by AI and everyone concludes that what is needed in all this is more AI.

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
jcoglan wrote:

this story about openai "breaking containment" is such bullshit if you know anything about how computer security is supposed to be done. if a program accesses a remote system it's because you decided to let it do that. LLMs don't have magical powers that can work around "we unplugged the ethernet"

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

“Whose freedom is it anyway?”

https://collectivefutures.blog/whose-freedom-is-it-anyway/

> A thing that delivers what it promises does not usually need this much law bent in its favor. These are not the manoeuvres of a technology that wins arguments. They are the manoeuvres of a project that has to remove the public's capacity to refuse it before it can proceed.

Boosted by dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase"):
faithisleaping@anarres.family ("Faith, Purple haired feminist 🧋 :v_tg: :v_lb: :v_greyace:") wrote:

One thing I wish neurotypicals understood about ADHD (and other flavors of neuro spice but I’m focusing on ADHD) is that the solution isn’t to fight it. You have to work with it.

The solution to ADHD isn’t more structure. We don’t have ADHD because we lack structure. We lack structure because ADHD brains reject it. Structure hurts. When you impose structure on someone with ADHD, you’re more likely to hurt them than to help them.

db@social.lol ("David Bushell 🪿") wrote:

yep, version 245 was the last one

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari-technology-preview-release-notes/stp-release-245

db@social.lol ("David Bushell 🪿") wrote:

has Apple discontinued Safari Technology Preview for macOS 15?

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

whenever i see people talking about how "the AI companies have solved the problems of model collapse because their filtration process includes the AI evaluating whether or not the input data is a dataset poisoning attack" i just start to vibrate in statistical learning theory and stuttering about how like "no this difference and um ah the shit fuck ah imitating the operator vs identifying the operator jesus first chapter of any textbook ugggh the entire discipline is based around putting bounds on the difference between the two, very strict definition of stability yeefafafh"