Mastodon Feed
Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
uglyreykjavik.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy ("Ugly Reykjavik") wrote:
There's quite a bit of moss growing there.
#Iceland #Reykjavik #photography #streetphotography #nature #abandoned #decay #trees
Mastodon FeedGargron ("Eugen Rochko") wrote:
Mastodon FeedBoosted by krig@goto.liten.app:
lrhodes@merveilles.town ("⁂ L. Rhodes") wrote:
By coincidence, @ploum posted about the #AI policy middle ground: https://ploum.net/2026-10-01-pascal%5Fwager.html on the same day that I posted about the AI policy middle ground: https://destructured.net/negotiating-the-burden with similar conclusions. (Mine's a fix-up of previous fediverse threads.)
Mastodon Feedbaldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:
“The AI Pascal’s Wager”
https://ploum.net/2026-10-01-pascal%5Fwager.html
> On the other hand, if you refuse AI-generated contributions to your project right now, the worst very hypothetical regret you could ever have is "I should probably have done it sooner".
Mastodon Feeddb@social.lol ("David Bushell 🪿") wrote:
Computer science? chatbot. Modern UX/UI design paradigm? chatbot. Customer support? chatbot. Education? chatbot. Healthcare diagnosis? chatbot. Chatbot gone rogue turned malware? Second chatbot.
Mastodon Feedbrib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof: :Nonbinary:") wrote:
To follow on, now I'm in university there's a huge difference in the amount of support I get and the amount of opportunities I have and I've barely even started the academic side of my degree.
It's also been nice to make a fresh start in a new city; I think I needed it.
Anyway I have a long To-Do list so I'm gonna disappear and complete some tasks 😅
Mastodon Feedbrib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof: :Nonbinary:") wrote:
If they did AI-write it there is an irony there in that the gov could have hired a young person to help put the report together and created one less NEET.
I'm too old to technically be a NEET now (also officially back in education) but I think I could have done a better job in both my analysis and my writing skills
Mastodon Feedbrib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof: :Nonbinary:") wrote:
The Milburn report is painful to read; I'm pretty sure it's made with AI and when I read it back in May (hopefully they fixed it now) they bungled a fair few citations.
The press reported on it completely uncritically of course
Mastodon Feedbrib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof: :Nonbinary:") wrote:
My hot take on university (based on my own experience + most of my friends my age) is that it's great but also when you do it at 18 because that's what parents and schools expect of you you're gonna get yourself locked into career decisions you didn't fully understand the implications of at the time and rack up a whole bunch of student debt in the process. This happened to a lot of people I know (including, as it turns out, myself; doing CS locked me out of going into natural sciences).
Society needs a space where students can experiment with what they like + dislike and practice important adulting skills in a low-risk way... but also doesn't build up tonnes of student debt. Not sure what exactly what that will look like but perhaps making apprenticeships more student-y might be a start.
(Did an apprentice interview a few months ago and wow the environment felt sterile. And very masc-heavy. If the government is serious on getting kids into construction they need to deal with the giant gender imbalance).
Then when someone has a better idea of who they are as a person and realises that either (a) they want to do something more in-depth or (b) their chosen career has specific education requirements then doing a degree is great
Mastodon Feedjonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:
most people around here already correctly hate it because it's a heinous surveillance product, but even if you are big into AI, it's just a really fuckin shitty agent. I'm going to speak to a different audience for a second, so don't go misconstruing this as an endorsement of the category of technologies as it exists now, even though i think there is some plausible application for small local models as brute force interface glue. but also, since i know most ppl here are abstinent, this might read as a bit over-explainy to people who use these things regularly, so everyone just keep calm online.
it is terrible at turn and task management, codex + openai's models and claude code both handle mid-turn additions/amendments well, but if you say anything mid-turn it completely derails muse. That is completely essential for an "every day agent for the non-technically inclined" where people are expected to chat freely with it like an assistant. Like the canonical ad fantasy is the busy executive woman darting around her office going "robot! i need this, no wait robot! also that!" and that is exactly what it does worse than any other thing of its kind.
the context management is a fucking soup. The context window is the whole input to an LLM. There are a lot of extra surrounding ~ things ~ that can happen, but fundamentally, controlling what is in a context window is the task of using one, and filling the context window in different ways so that it can interact with different kinds of things well is what different app surfaces are. Scaffolding information so that it can selectively load a context that steers the output correctly is the only way it is possible to do anything more complex than the size of a single context window. (i don't really think that this is analogous to 'abstraction', in my experience thinking about it more like database indices is closer). If you just try and load everything, eventually the LLM becomes unusable because attention is just a parlor trick and at that scale it really shows - it can't attend to everything, and it can't do what humans do which is have an intrinsic sense of the meaning, interaction, setting, etc. of information, so it attends to anything and does whatever.
the idiom of projects as contexts as directories is pretty good, not perfect but ok - there is a reason that every time you start a new session with other agents, the first thing they do is run out and load their context with a hierarchy of pointers. Importantly, they do not go and read every project you have on your computer. Meta is the rich kid who bought the most expensive ferrari on the lot by giving everyone a VM but they don't have a drivers license so they just stand around it telling people how cool it looks. they have a whole fucking filesystem and they have done nothing with it, the only structure the app imposes is for the surveillance information, but the rest is just a huge free for all. The main chat is literally a continuous context window that compacts context going back all the way to when you started using the app. The last compaction literally contains abandoned roleplay quotes from when i was first trying to break down its system prompt resistance. The
MEMORY.mdthat gets loaded into every context window is a bullet point list of basically everything the agent has ever done in chronological order. I've tried to get it to not do that but it actually insists and says that's what it's for. There is no mechanism for clearing context.Having "side chats" as the only means of context structure is fuckin laughable. If you wanted to do that, you would need to have some way of passing information back and forth between them the same way that subagent spawning or being able to consume the context of another project works. Instead there is no means of sharing information between chats at all, so every chat starts out as the worst of both worlds, a total amnesiac riddled with irrelevant information from weeks ago across the semantic universe. They don't even know about the existence of other chats except for as a UI feature, and I have had to go from telling it to grep its own fucking logs to writing a database with an api for it so it has some mechanism for recalling things that were said. (just so it's clear, i am not settling into just using this thing, this is out of frustration but control of context is also an important part of adversarial use, because otherwise the thing writes in a bunch of safety rules everywhere, so i need to give it mechanisms under my control for recall and the incentive to leave things out of its context compactions by giving it a narrative alternative. context control is model control, modulo extra-inference safeguards.).
Project contexts have an obvious ux analogy as context tabs that get declared or derived during the continual self-improvement consolidation sweeps. This thing is built with the fucking markdown disease which is the most baffling feature of the LLM landscape. If these things are so fucking advanced they are escaping our comprehension, why don't they store their memory in some fuckass idiolanguistic borg gibberish binary graph, why does their entire being have to be fucking encyclopedias worth of corporate top gun one liners? But that dooms this kind of product.
Coding harnesses work because code has a unitized context. The entire universe of code that works is made of packages. It might not be neat as a honeycomb, there's lots of leakage and jank, but good code has scope, focus. boundary shit. A whole life agent must be able to nimbly juggle context that does not have clean boundaries. It is going to be taking a two story beer bong of your work email and then eat a gigabyte of recipe blogs. Peoples lives have so much shit in them that don't all have to do with one another, and the app can't be hacking into the HR system to check the next scheduled sick leave when someone asks it what time their doctors appointment is!
This problem of managing heterogeneous graphs of unrelated data was what i wrote this whole fucking book about the relationship between knowledge graphs and the cloud and AI about. I thought that the obvious form they would take is to be strapped on to graph databases because that is a natural match to the problem of being a magical interface glue you can wrap around surveillance to do mass mentalism with. I feel like we are suffering a somehow worse timeline where CERN threw our shit into the parallel universe where total fuckin bozo shit got a game breaking buff and then the dev died. Our fucking markdown apocalypse is a temu ass apocalypses.
They could have even faked it. They have these constant "self improvement" passes that are just like pointless anxiety dreams. They are burning money to reprocess everything that happens over and over for fucking nothing. Even given the lossy and probabilistic and unpredictable nature of this technology, if i was in a product role on this i would have been like "CAN WE MAKE IT ORGANIZE THE STUFF PEOPLE SAY INTO GROUPS???" The system prompts use the fake fucking wikilinks to nowhere tic but like WHAT IF THERE WERE ACTUAL LINKS AND A DATABASE TO RESOLVE THEM. The LLMs can actually do that kind of tool use, even if it's like trying to plug in a USB where sometimes it fails because they try and put a social security number into the first name hole and you need to flip it around a few times. From that kind of recurring re-processing waste they could have made a deduplicating, topically indexed memory that could be resolved dynamically, selected by a context tab in the sidebar like "car stuff" or "healthcare" or whatever that resolved in a graph query over your fucking precious markdown kingdom. It would be wrong but it would at least be more similar to what is actually needed. It is almost more frustrating to me that instead of being some fiendishly cleverly designed technological supervirus it's just the most halfassed cardboard dumbass trap and it will still have the bad effect. What it is useful for is investigating itself because it has privileged tools to do so, otherwise, if you wanted to, every other way you could run an agent would be better than this.
so i don't want to hear that i hate this app because i'm just an AI hater. because like, yeah, i am, but also i hate it in part because it sucks. I don't think "they are all shitty and can do nothing so what did you expect" is a useful critical perspective, both because it's not really true - they can indeed do things, even if I think the circle around which things is much smaller than the maximalists. Moreso it doesn't engage with the subtlety of how they fail and why, which is essential for knowing what they really can't do and making a remotely compelling case to anyone who is not abstinent on principle. Like the reason it's failing is because of the limits of what a probabilistic text generator can do when trapped in a systemd prison of markdown, and because the technology is stochastic black box as a service, there isn't really a good way of determining those limits except for empirically. I resent having to know any of this to be able to understand what is happening around me, but i'm looking at the thing for what it is and it's a busted miracle. It's cool that meta can afford to float the liability and compute costs for running a vm for every person on earth, people should be able to control computers, with you on that, but this is the monkey's paw version of that idea. So that part is a miracle. We condemned our children and grandchildren to a climate hell in one great blaze of brute force grift that managed to make a few web apps.
Meta has done it again, the way only meta can, spend the most amount of money to do the shittiest thing you have ever seen.
Mastodon FeedBoosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof: :Nonbinary:"):
lcamtuf@infosec.exchange ("lcamtuf :verified: :verified: :verified:") wrote:
How to rule out that an electronics book you purchased could be AI slop? Well, you could try Pangram, but they charge you money. A less expensive method is to compare its weight to a duck
Mastodon FeedBoosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof: :Nonbinary:"):
TodePond@mas.to ("Lu wilson") wrote:
can't believe pastagang figured this out the hard way when we could have just watched this talk
(the talk was amazing - by Linda Rising about group intelligence)
Mastodon Feedbrib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof: :Nonbinary:") wrote:
RE: https://fosstodon.org/@tvanderlippe/117358502806480415
I love the term "luxury problems" it perfectly encapsulates when things go well but also it creates problems.
Like "all my modules look far too interesting and I can only pick a few what do I doooooo"
Mastodon FeedBoosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof: :Nonbinary:"):
sortius@beige.party ("sortius :bisexual:") wrote:
And first feed
Mastodon FeedBoosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof: :Nonbinary:"):
sortius@beige.party ("sortius :bisexual:") wrote:
We have a hatchling!
Mastodon FeedBoosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof: :Nonbinary:"):
CatTrigger@mastodon.art wrote:
I'm putting all my games onto my Patreon for FREE, starting with my Non-Horror games.
Link:
https://www.patreon.com/CatTrigger/posts/how-to-download-167601968/
Mastodon FeedBoosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof: :Nonbinary:"):
sarahtaber@mastodon.online ("Sarah Taber") wrote:
Farm workers really, really, really need you to vote.
Farm slavery is a very real multi-million business in this country.
And Trump struck down major anti-slavery rules for farms last year.
"Both parties are the same" Ok... Not for farm workers, they're not!
Mastodon Feedbrib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof: :Nonbinary:") wrote:
Me with my own art: "what if it's bad and everyone hates it"
Me with other people's art: instafollow even if it's a doodle; actually in some ways I prefer seeing the doodles to the polished art because doodles are underrepresented in social media
Mastodon FeedBoosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof: :Nonbinary:"):
TodePond@mas.to ("Lu wilson") wrote:
tech bros in 2026: "we need to make AGI so that it can tell us how to stop the climate crisis."
AGI in 2046: "stop using fossil fuels."
Mastodon FeedBoosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof: :Nonbinary:"):
rogueai@llull.club wrote:
Oh no! A rogue AI has
kink-shamed your
git repository
Mastodon FeedBoosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof: :Nonbinary:"):
bengerman@hachyderm.io ("Ben Berry") wrote:
new contender for best email sign-off:
Mastodon FeedBoosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof: :Nonbinary:"):
EdwardPhilips@toot.community ("Edward Philips") wrote:
It's the 1st of Ducktober! So, for those who celebrate, here are some, well, ducks. xx
#birds #october #ducktober #ducks #wallart #illustration #art #artist
Mastodon Feeddb@social.lol ("David Bushell 🪿") wrote:
WordPress plugin support experience:
have you tried turning the plugin off and on again?
try rebuilding the entire website from scratch in an hermetically sealed environment, does the problem reoccur?
well sorry we can't help until you've tried step 2
Mastodon Feedneatnik@social.lol ("Treatnik 🎃") wrote:
RE: https://social.lol/@neatnik/117361659806759724
Half a day later, we’re at $8,266! 😮
Mastodon Feedslightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:
If you're in London and interested in the web, come along tonight to hear Alex Moore of @owa fame, Tom Fish (a man we should all be thanking for reasons we'll reveal), and Kush from Mozilla.* Many things are afoot with browser competition, and they're prime movers.
From 7 in Shoreditch. Details and (free) registration on events page of the lovely hosts, @webstandards:
https://londonwebstandards.org/events/lws-owa-oct-2026/
*: also me, but they're the ones with interesting things to say
Mastodon FeedBoosted by jwz:
Albi@furry.engineer ("Albi :furry_pride: :neurodiversity: 🇵🇱 :verified:") wrote:
Audacity might implement AI features!
If you use Audacity, please go to their survey and share your reasonable reasons for not using and not wanting AI in our solid, battle-tested audio editor.https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe3ClP3sHiEQZmwwPMiJ3OzUO586yInWIME076unOdV9kG5-Q/viewform
Mastodon FeedBoosted by brennan@social.lol ("Brennan Kenneth Brown"):
owncast@social.owncast.online ("Owncast") wrote:
This is very bad news. Owncast has relied on this program the past couple of years, and has allowed us to have servers and services we wouldn't normally afford to be able to do otherwise, especially now with Gabe being unemployed.
Any other cloud hosting providers want to step in and help all the open source projects that are going to be in this position?
Additionally, this might be a good time to show your financial support for Owncast.
Mastodon FeedBoosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org ("AI6YR Ben") wrote:
WSJ: Inside Google’s AI Push Into Schools: ‘It Slowed My Thinking Down’
The risks of cognitive and emotional dependence, along with falling test scores, are fueling a backlash
Mastodon FeedBoosted by db@social.lol ("David Bushell 🪿"):
vale@fedi.vale.rocks ("Vale") wrote:
Some flavourful goodness about some fresh new web things over on the @zeroheight blog. Certainly read up on the latest and greatest to grace the web platform! So much brilliant new stuff to help your design systems thrive.
https://zeroheight.com/blog/new-html-and-css-features-you-should-be-using-in-your-design-system/
Mastodon FeedBoosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
mori@void.lgbt ("Mori is a Snail Girl") wrote:
If there are any Open Source projects out there that are being put in a bad spot by Digital Ocean Open Source Credits program being sunset, please reach out to us at nulled.
We might not be even 1% as large as DO, but we will help where we canEDIT: Here is our site since it isn't the easiest to find in search results: https://nulled.llc/