Mastodon Feed
slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:
RE: https://front-end.social/@stefan/117247143823884292
Any time you hear about Interop, remember what was silently cut with zero accountability:
Mastodon FeedMastodon Feedjsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:
how is this not an offer of a bribe for votes?
Mastodon Feedjsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:
‘Compared with the four-day traditional convention in Milwaukee two years ago, the first day felt muted. There were no long queues to enter, no eternal waits for food or bathrooms. Swathes of empty seats were visible throughout Trump’s speech.
Visible, except to Trump, who claimed, wrongly, that the arena was full.
“Not only is this packed but you have an equal number of people standing outside,” Trump declared. This was not observed by Guardian reporters.’
Mastodon FeedBoosted by soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker"):
bitartbot@freeradical.zone ("Bit Art Bot") wrote:
f(x,y) = (((~(16 & x)) / (~(8 + y))) | ((~(9 * y)) + ((13 * x) * (x % y)))) % 2
Extent: 256x256 (scaled x2)
"Onebit" colouring scheme.
Mastodon FeedBoosted by soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker"):
da_667@infosec.exchange wrote:
Mastodon Feedireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:
so there are cases where the order needs to be swapped at the instruction level
Mastodon Feedireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)") wrote:
hmmm. we did some work to display assembly word parameters in the correct order. now we need to go through it slowly and verify it. each addressing mode has its own set of parameters, and we put that logic with the mode's definition... but the way amd64 works, sometimes the complicated addressing structure is the source of the operation, and sometimes it's the destination.
Mastodon FeedBoosted by soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker"):
barthalion@treehouse.systems ("Bart Piotrowski") wrote:
RE: https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/117241250895962141
Meanwhile DigitalOcean couldn’t afford $50 a month for GNOME and Flathub VMs and cancelled their sponsorship last month.
Mastodon FeedBoosted by soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker"):
luis_in_brief@social.coop ("Luis Villa") wrote:
RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@barthalion/117241534134006167
Welp. The Omarchy thing is offensive not just because I spent a decade trying to get corporations to fund open but that’s definitely part of it for me personally.
https://social.treehouse.systems/@barthalion/11724153413400616
Mastodon FeedBoosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof: :Nonbinary:"):
lcamtuf@infosec.exchange ("lcamtuf :verified: :verified: :verified:") wrote:
Calling it: if AI ever proves the Collatz conjecture, it's just because it could peek at all the proofs already posted on Reddit
Mastodon FeedBoosted by soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker"):
Gyroplast@furry.engineer wrote:
The idea of choosing who to interact with, and to what extend, is as old as mass-interaction between strangers.
It is not feasible attempting to listen to everyone, like everyone, or be appreciated by everyone. There's literal millions of potential eyes and mouths, and all of them are practically irrelevant until they are not.
It's empowering to realize you can, and ostensibly should, carefully choose who you mingle with, listen, and speak to.
To do that, however, one really needs a quick litmus test if communication with another is potentially desirable.
The idiot filter.
Not saying it hits objective idiots, but everyone should have one to determine if they are willing to engage with someone else in the first place.
Of course this is riddled with false positives, and you may miss out on a deep, fruitful discussion occassionally; but that's worth it, if it keeps you sane the rest of the time. It's prejudicial, that's kinda the point. A socio-cultural captcha to access your limited resources.
Mastodon FeedBoosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
octonion@tech.lgbt ("Popstar Tourist") wrote:
@cwebber Bring back pink haired Linux
Mastodon FeedBoosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
ebeem wrote:
@cwebber @spritely
This is by far the best introduction to #Lisp and #Scheme I've watched or read. I definitely recommend that anyone new to #Scheme watch this first. Thanks, and keep it up!
Mastodon Feedsky@schub.social ("Sky Schubert") wrote:
this is your annual reminder that all tech is political, has always been political, and will always be political.
if you still fail to see that given all of the recent happenings(tm), please tell me your secrets. I, too, would like to enjoy the bliss of ignorance some of the time, please.
Mastodon FeedBoosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
researchfairy@scholar.social ("Unnamed TNG skant beefcake") wrote:
* Surveillance speakers
* Pervert glasses
* Actual 1984 telescreens
* Apple-brand always-on eavesdropping watches*I* can't opt out of *others* having them
I can't "vote with my dollars/feet/whatever" to not be harmed by others using them
Ask a nurse not to wear their watch while treating me—now I get worse care, thanks, it didn't work with N95's, won't work here
There's no techy adblock/pihole/home Faraday cage-style solution to this
The only solution is: regulation
Mastodon FeedBoosted by andrewnez ("Andrew Nesbitt"):
sethmlarson ("Seth Larson") wrote:
Finished the last level in “World Flower” in Super Mario 3D World last night (Boss Blitz) and jumped into “Bowser’s Fury” for a quick preview and... woah. This game is so completely different than 3D World in an amazing way.
I should have known that from the start considering Bowsers Fury was published **8 years after Super Mario 3D World** (and 4 years after Super Mario Odyssey...) Now I am really excited for this adventure!
Mastodon FeedBoosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
Louisa@mastodon.xyz wrote:
Some new dice in my shop! I'm packing an order to go out tomorrow, so if you get something today it'll go out tomorrow too!
Every object you see inside the resin, is also made of resin, so don't worry about balance 🎲
I had to stop offering shipping to the EU, unfortunately, it could potentially be very expensive for me shipping from the US with the new rules. Sorry, just US & Canada!
Mastodon FeedBoosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
julia@eepy.moe ("Julia :v_bi: :therian:") wrote:
My gf keeps saying "puppy wife, happy life" and it makes me very happy :neodog_floof_happy:
Mastodon Feedcwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber") wrote:
the frenemy of my frenemy is pretty hot ngl
Mastodon FeedBoosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
vivtek@indieweb.social ("Michael Roberts") wrote:
@cwebber It's perplexing that companies with otherwise decent security policies about private information (policies based on past mistakes, after all!) have suddenly decided they're no longer important when sending information to known bad actors "but on a computer".
Mastodon FeedBoosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
Anzeliane@eldritch.cafe ("Jade (For real)") wrote:
Mastodon Feedpzmyers@freethought.online ("pzmyers 🕷") wrote:
Tucker Carlson himself posted this, as if he is proud of his ignorance.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/09/10/how-dare-you-use-variables-in-your-math/
Mastodon Feedcwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber") wrote:
Emphasis on the *some* and *local* LLM usage can be justified. Vulnerability scanning as a kind of linting I think is acceptable as part of developers' workflows, maybe even increasingly important. But we shouldn't be relying on hosted systems for this.
And I consider *search space* LLM usage to be different than *generative* LLM usage (even though they use the same techniques). Whether you are hoisting genAI content upon people is a different matter.
Mastodon Feedcwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber") wrote:
I am not saying this is the secret sauce of those attacks, a broad variety of alarming techniques and patterns were used, most especially the "ad-hoc message board" stuff is alarming emergent behavior from the models.
But it does demonstrate this thesis I've been developing: while *some* *local* LLM usage can be justified, there is *no justifying* use of hosted models such as Anthropic and OpenAI's offerings. Likewise with any chatbot hosted by a company running a model in a datacenter somewhere or which reports private data to such a company, which is pretty much all of them except for bespoke ones using local models accessible only to developers right now.
Mastodon Feedcwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber") wrote:
If OpenAI got the info on techniques for mathematical advancements from private interactions being trained into the model, then I wonder: could the Hugging Face and some other recent attacks also have *partly* (not entirely) used private information?
Specifically, OpenAI said that the models got information on API keys "from a pasteboard" somewhere, which is possible but something felt off about that.
Now I realize what it is: if someone was using an agent running *on their computer* which *had access to their secrets*, that information could have made it into the training set! Which means, the agents could have "known" about certain useful private API keys.
And in fact, this may be happening all over the place with coding agent use...
Mastodon FeedBoosted by neatnik@social.lol ("Neatnik :prami:"):
hejchristian@front-end.social ("Christian Alder") wrote:
@brennan Thank you for compiling this; I didn’t know the connections to other tools/services I might have used and now I can make better decisions overall. I wasn’t aware I needed to avoid Tinylytics for example
Mastodon FeedBoosted by neatnik@social.lol ("Neatnik :prami:"):
daveycraney@social.lol ("Davey Craney") wrote:
RE: https://social.lol/@brennan/117245789509264637
But of course Vincent Ritter is on this list. lol. What a shock.
At this point Omarchy is the best list of all the people and products in tech I want absolutely nothing to do with.
Mastodon FeedBoosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
ricci@discuss.systems ("Rob Ricci") wrote:
I kind of hate that *gestures at everything* is providing such fertile ground for thinking about @viveksrikumar and C Thi Nguyen's Ethics in AI class (which I'm sitting in on), but it is, so, here I go again.
One of the ideas they've been talking about in class is risk tolerance. Pretty basic in concept, people make decisions about how much risk they are willing to take on. A lot of this is very mundane and implicit (is the second patty worth the cholesterol risk? worth it to dash across the street here instead of going to the corner?) Some of it is explicit in things like investment decisions. The risk tolerance that you take on is a reflection of your values - play it safe? shoot for the moon? Pretty standard stuff.
One way, however, that this shows up in unexpected (to many of us) ways is in things like like science and medicine: it's a value judgement that we don't often acknowledge. A threshold for p-values of 0.05, which most folks use unquestioningly, means (approximately, it's complicated) a tolerance of a 5% chance of being wrong. Is this ... a good amount of risk to tolerate? It's a nice round amount, that's cool. Is it too high? Is it too low? Depends, probably?
Here's a pretty standard illustration of "it depends" that was used in class: risk tolerance in policing. Let's say you've got some technology, totally hypothetical here, that reads license plates with cameras, let's call it Flook. Somebody, somewhere, gets to set thresholds for what's a certain enough match that the cops should roll out and pull over the driver. This might seem like it's just some number, but it's a value judgement about the risk of being wrong.
The cops? They have a pretty high risk tolerance in this situation. Sure, they don't (let's assume, to be generous) want to spend all day pulling over the "wrong" people. But the cost to pulling over the wrong person is just not that high for them. A bit of wasted time, maybe a confrontation with driver that's mad at you, possibly a bit of paperwork. Pretty unlikely to be something that gets you in serious trouble, plus, hey the machine started it. And (I know, assumptions...) they'd like to not let the "right" people get away. So they want that threshold to be pretty loose.
The people being policed? This looks very different for them. Nobody wants to be pulled over when they did nothing wrong. Low risk tolerance. And it definitely isn't uniform. For some, it's a hassle, but a bigger one than it was for the cops - it's the cops' job to hassle people, it's not everyone else's job to be hassled. Pretty low risk tolerance. For others every interaction with the cops carries a *huge* amount of risk. Way more hassling. Higher risk of being detained. Possibly violence. Even if the only thing you did wrong was to have a license plate that looked too blurry from the top of a 10-foot pole, or got typoed when it was entered into a database. Super low risk tolerance. These folks do want the "right" people caught, but they want these thresholds set so low that no cop ever pulls over the "wrong" person - if this means sometimes missing the "right" person, well, they know that the consequences for a bad stop can be super high, so it's worth some risk in the other direction.
So how should Flook set thresholds? How should they balance the risk of incorrect identifications with the desire to not miss correct ones?
Trick question, because Flook has a customer, and the customer is the cops, so they do what the cops want.
This system contains embodied values, and they are a fundamentally un-democratic ones. Only the cops get any direct influence over the secret number that reflects how much "we" value catching criminals vs. surveilling and wrongly pulling over people just trying to have a day. You might see why people are getting increasingly mad at the definitely-made-up Flook.
This is how a number that none of us even know expresses values that ... well, maybe a lot of us strongly disagree with.
And then, one day in early autumn, a Perfectly Normal Guy who's a high-up engineer at Anthropic (the Good Guys of AI, remember), writes this, for everyone to read:
"Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.
To be clear, as we say in our latest Risk Report [link] I think the risk from present models is low. What I am worried about is superintelligence arising from recursive self-improvement, as we have said is happening faster than we thought [link]"
So THERE'S some risk tolerance for you.
(Sorry for making you read that, but I want to give you the full quote.)
Apparently, it is the calculation of the Good Guys of AI that a 90% chance of survival for all humans is Just Fine and an acceptable risk to take for whatever they think we are getting out of it. We know they think they are getting rich. I guess they think there are other benefits, but damn, you can sure see why they will say literally anything to justify a 10% risk of human extinction. Better be a bigger deal than 10,000 new TODO apps!
I want to pause for a second here to say that I think that number is utter bullshit (the 10% one, the number of TODO apps is probably in the right order of magnitude). I do not think there is a measurable chance that all humans will be dead Because AI by 2030. I have no idea whether they actually believe this or are lying. Doesn't matter. They are telling us, directly, what their values are, or at the very least what values they would like us to think they have.
They are telling us that their risk tolerance is at a deranged, misanthropic level. I'm not excited to use the word "psychotic" but it's really hard to find something else that fits. Because they do, in fact, have the option to Just Not. If you believe that the product you are working on has a 10% chance of killing everyone, and you are, like, a person who gives a shit about - well, anything, really - then what you actually do is turn off the servers, delete all the files you can find, beat the GPU swords into Sweet Gaming Rig plowshares, and save the human race. You do not prepend Google's long-abandoned slogan (you know the one) to all the prompts and keep Doing the Thing.
What about risk tolerance for the rest of us? Where are we at on this? What do you think the benefits are or could be, what do you think the harms are or could be? What risks do you think are appropriate to take for the possible benefits? What's a reasonable way to spread out both the benefits and harms such that ...
HAHA, trick question again! The Good Guys of AI have a customer, that customer is The Future, and The Future demands that maybe we all die, very sad, but that's a risk it's willing to take. Only the Good Guys of AI can possibly make sure that the sacrifices are the right ones (not that they know how, but they'll figure it out), and the only thing that beats A Bad Guy With an AI is a Good Guy With An AI.
I probably don't have to point this out, but this is as nakedly authoritarian as it gets. We all bear the risks, The Good Guys of AI must be the ones to call the shots.
So yeah, these are their values. Doesn't matter if their assessment is wrong (probably is). Doesn't matter if they're lying about what they really believe (who knows). Who cares how many whitepapers and reports they write. They get to set the risk tolerance for everyone. At least the number isn't secret: it's 10%. Flook almost certainly has a tighter threshold for pulling over the wrong car than "we" apparently have for total human extinction.
Who signed up for this?
Who died (only p(10%) though) and made them king?
Are these your values?
Mastodon FeedBoosted by firepoet@tech.lgbt ("Stephen 🌈 (he/him)"):
nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt ("Nina Kalinina") wrote:
Good news, everyone! It looks like FreeDOS decided to ban AI writing the code for FreeDOS: https://www.freedos.org/about/ai/
They used to have a few LLM authored commits, so I was worried things will deteriorate/bit rot. Hopefully they will not!
Mastodon Feedcstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen") wrote:
"We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost..."