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jscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi") wrote:

I went ahead and blocked that account about that TV series.

Boosted by kornel ("Kornel"):
valthonis@dice.camp ("The Duke of Fall :d12:") wrote:

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@brian%5Fgreenberg/117201997266526749

Assume every entity that tries to capture your ID or your photo and tells you that they delete it as soon as it's no longer needed, they are lying.

kevinevans@hachyderm.io ("Kevin") wrote:

Picked some wild-ish plums, got em soaking in booze for clafoutis

#food

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
ehashman@cloudisland.nz ("e. hashman 🇵🇸") wrote:

Long shot but: if you're a 1Password employee and you want to talk about what's happening, DM me for my Signal!

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

Hung up momentarily on the discourse re: "human writing/code/art is on average pretty bad, so the median AI output is better than the median human work." Writing on phone to get the thought out without proofreading so sorta rough.

Say the average human craft is something like a pair of worn denim jeans. Its not perfect, it doesn't do everything you want, but its form is honest. You run your hand along the fabric and it holds its shape, continues smoothly where you expect it to. Your finger finds a rivet, the stitching at the seams, a small hole from wear. The hole is only a hole where it is a hole - you know where it ends, so you know to take care and handle it gently around the area. You start to worry and rip it, the rip extends along the grain of the fabric. It degrades in a predictable path. The fabric is a meshwork of thread, an affordance that supports stitching, mending - if I bring the two edges of the tear together and sew them, then they will rejoin, with a seam, with an amended shape, but still rejoin. In their normal use, the pants are pants, and the edges of pathological pants behavior are visible but predictable.

The average AI craft might be some kind of alien LED-laden fast fashion garment. Cheaper, higher tech, maybe even more adventurous and exciting. They aren't pants per se, its not exactly clear how its intended to be worn. You can put your legs through some of the holes and it covers most of your body, but instead of a fly there's a long conical sleeve you have to knot closed. There are collars around the knees. Hundreds of belt loops ring the entire waistline, for redundancy, in case any of them gives out. it is advertised as having twice the pockets as normal pants. Some are sewn shut and have no pocket in them at all, and as you reach into one of the open ones, you find it has two openings in the bottom. The pocket is a hand size pair of pants sewn into the pocket, which itself has four pockets you can fit just the edge of your pinkie into. Each of the features in isolation is plausible, and it certainly comes with a lot more of the elements of clothing, but as a garment it doesn't make a lot of sense - like it was designed by something that had never worn clothes before.

You run your hand along the material, some areas are pliant, stretchy, as expected, but invisibly it transitions to a chalky texture that crumbles and gives way. There doesn't seem to be any pattern to this, and as you stand up you find the chalky residue has stained your couch. When you crease it, it becomes dangerously sharp, and so you need to make sure to avoid bunching or handling it too roughly. The first time you unzip the zipper, it separates neatly in half into what at first seems like two pieces, but on closer inspection is a single Möbius strip, you can't fathom how it would have ever been zipped in the first place. Tightening your belt, you hear a distant tear in a part of the fabric you didn't know had tension on it. Attempting to stitch it is futile, each time a needle pierces it, the fabric seems to deflate (unclear that it was holding air at all) and decay around the puncture.

reaching for a word, AI output is.... Punctate? Human art, craft, code, writing is a surface where neighboring elements belong with each other, support each other. They have a history of creation that aligns with use, and desire paths get cut along the way - you hang a hook to hold your keys by the door because experience says you need them when you walk out the door. You finish the thoughts you started several paragraphs ago, building them into a larger idea. The AI output can produce isolated things at the scale of a context window that appear well crafted, but there is no joinery, the edges are sharp and invisible. A thousand counterfeit odd-sized legos jammed haphazardly into a sack. They degrade poorly, suddenly, and in ways that are difficult to imagine any human work would. The LLM book is a hundred two page, five paragraph essays whose table of contents insists tells a story, but each chapter appears to have been written without having read the others, full of odd repetition, conflicting, superfluous argumentation, ending with a confident flourish as if each is the end of the book.

So if the argument that median AI output is "better" than median human output isn't being made cynically, then what it betrays a profound shallowness about the ability to evaluate "quality." The code is well formatted, commented, comes with things that appear to be tests, but doesn't compose into a coherent work. The prose is grammatically correct but makes a readers skin crawl and imparts no intended meaning. The vibe coder just makes more code to cover over the shallowness, widening but never deepening similarly to how the fast fashion shopper buys a new pair of pants every week because laundering the old ones destroys them.

The deeper irony is that "total continuity" is the thing that LLMs provide as an interface and as a UX - every button already exists, and no error state is terminal. The utterly forgiving nature of being able to talk your way out of any spot, the constant reassurance that every idea is right, is exactly the affordance space that people argue is the UX virtue of LLMs. Maybe the punctate sense of local "quality" that collapses on contextual inspection is made up for by the process of creation in the mind of the AI user - the appearance of unity, completeness, is not provided by the thing that is produced, but by the means of producing it, and it is never actually experienced by itself. The natural extension of "generate an email so it can be summarized by the recipients LLM" - materials, objects, works, have a disembodied, delocalized nature that is always expected to be "filled in" by the recipient. The bugs in the software aren't bugs if they're being used by something with infinite brute force tenacity and without need for intuition. The story doesn't need to be coherent when it will be completed by each reader's personalized reality model.

That's the only way I can make sense of people claiming that the LLM output is "high quality", assuming its a truly experienced and believed feeling, which you must in order to understand how someone might believe something that seems incomprehensible to you.

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

Good news (after a fashion); this DHH/1PW thing has crossed a cultural blood/brain barrier, and now DHH is toxic even to politically influential normies:

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:nvfposmpmhegtyvhbs75s3pw/post/3mukxhyqegs2q

Boosted by pixxl:
atax1a@infosec.exchange ("mx alex tax1a - 2020 (6)") wrote:

the entire tech of the LLM is built entirely on exploitation and you can't fix that by jacking yourself off about "open models"

jscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi") wrote:

I mean on one hand HEY NOW, but on the other hand, fair

RE: https://www.threads.com/@alexandra.cascio/post/DczGtZEEoH8

Boosted by pixxl:
tpolecat ("Rob Norris") wrote:

haz blinkenlight

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
TodePond@mas.to ("Lu wilson") wrote:

(serious) i explain my approach to music theory in this video
https://youtu.be/Y0ZPAL70E78

Boosted by jwz:
mwl@io.mwl.io ("Michael W Lucas :flan_on_fire:") wrote:

If you gotta market, do it well.

Wile E Coyote doing a Reddit AMA about Coyote vs ACME is disturbingly wholesome. https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/1w58qjb/hi%5Freddit%5Fim%5Fwile%5Fe%5Fcoyote%5Fim%5Ftaking%5Fon%5Facme%5Fama/

When asked "Another coyote just went viral in SoCal for being the first known coyote to capture a roadrunner. How does that make you feel?" he said:

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
ehashman@cloudisland.nz ("e. hashman 🇵🇸") wrote:

Alright folks, it looks like the #1Password execs aren't budging. Their co-founder is framing critics of DHH as calling him "evil," saying this is "unfair" and creating a chilling environment. This is a nonsense response to critique of a man who has called for ethnic cleansing. https://www.theverge.com/tech/988536/1password-dhh-linux-controversy

It's time to #Drop1Password. Cancel your subscription and share a screenshot. Tell them why you're cancelling. You will not lose access to your service until your subscription expires, giving the 1Password team the opportunity to reverse their sponsorship and/or you time to migrate.

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
timnitGebru@dair-community.social ("Timnit Gebru (she/her).") wrote:

Any guesses as to why this isn't prime time international news with over 200+ articles per minutes and abuse on social media and think pieces and such?

What could possibly be the reason? 🤔 I can't possibly imagine.

This is what real academic fraud looks like.

https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/duke-university-professor-dan-ariely-accused-of-additional-research-fraud-fabrication-tampering-epstein-data-colada-replication-20260902

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

I am aware that 1Password's response has been tepid and useless corporate bluster, but I've sent in my own personal support email in the hopes that continued pressure might get them to wake up. This is not a template as it contains quite specific personal details, but feel free to use it as a basis to tailor it if you remove those. (Unless they also apply, in which case, have at it.)

https://gist.github.com/glyph/c4c86ea19e47f9e6e3862ce23d4053d1

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

Text updated in response to all the quick feedback, so if you want to give it another round it should be rendered by now. Thanks!

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
nileane@nileane.fr ("Niléane") wrote:

RE: https://mastodon.social/@verge/117202983989699195

kudos to The Verge for juxtaposing one of DHH's many insane racist/fascist statements right next to the bullshit victimization rhetoric of that 1Password cofounder

Boosted by jwz:
zzt@mas.to ("[object Object]") wrote:

anyway how many LLMs saying “you’re absolutely right” do you think it took to design the toothbrush camera

krig@goto.liten.app wrote:

bye

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

smh, calling an INTERCAL feature a "joke" is so disrespectful

Boosted by pixxl:
Scriddie@mathstodon.xyz ("Alexander") wrote:

@EUCommission this post has AI-slop written all over it. Disappointing to see so little effort from the EU commission.

Boosted by pixxl:
solderandchaos@mastodon.me.uk ("Tanya") wrote:

I am in a rage because I saw an advert for an art class that was made with AI, so obviously the right thing to do was doodle in pen, scan it, and print it on a cheap thermal label printer so I can go out and stick them on this abominations.

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

A British sitcom (sometimes called a Britcom) is a situational comedy programme produced for British television.

thank fuck for wikipedia, we never could have worked that out.

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

Re: Skeletor, in all seriousness I really appreciate the ton of work that other folks in the Twisted community poured into the previous attempt, and to Hynek and the attrs community before that. I didn't end up in the same place but without that perspective to compare against, I would probably have been writing mountains of sprawling digressions.

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

Feedback is appreciated (particularly copy-edits, writing this kind of stuff melts my brain!), but please only if you're actually a _plausible_ potential contributor (i.e. a Python programmer, does stuff with networks, finds Twisted at least a _little_ interesting). The pull request is here: https://github.com/twisted/twisted/pull/12835

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

As Skeletor once said, if you want something done right, do it yourself: https://twisted--12835.org.readthedocs.build/en/12835/development/ai-policy.html

krig@goto.liten.app wrote:

A doodle from last year that I don’t think I posted anywhere back then. Enjoy

Boosted by firepoet@tech.lgbt ("Stephen 🌈 (he/him)"):
simontatham@hachyderm.io ("Simon Tatham") wrote:

I noticed today that an update to the #Linux #Zoom client has made it start proactively reading _everything_ written to the X11 clipboard.

If you keep interesting secrets in your clipboard – particularly, if a password manager uses it as a means of getting the password to where it needs to be – this might be a thing you need to know about!

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

the backyard bunny buffet is OPEN

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
cstross@wandering.shop ("Charlie Stross") wrote:

Mad D&D monster idea:

The gelatinous tesseract.

Looks and acts just like a gelatinous cube *except* it extends through the fourth dimension (time). If an adventurer is ingested then fights their way out, roll a d6 to determine which instance they emerge from. (DM needs to pre-plan the history around the monster and work out when each facet exists.)

If you don't kill the jelly you can dive back in and try for another time. But once it's dead you're stranded whenever you killed it.

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
NatalieDavis@journa.host ("Natalie Davis") wrote:

Poll: U.S. belief that government is corrupt hits 20-year-high https://www.upi.com/Top%5FNews/US/2026/09/02/gallup-poll-government-corruption/7571788378826/