@alan@mindly.social

· 2mo ago

RE: https://dair-community.social/@timnitGebru/117006488074722424 Ah come on, $3T in debt and no profit, how is that a problem? 😂

Quoting

Timnit Gebru (she/her).

@timnitGebru@dair-community.social

"As Japanese financial newspaper Nikkei Asia found in a recent investigation, just five US tech giants — Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle — are hiding an estimated $1.65 trillion in debt that doesn’t appear on balance sheets. That’s even more than the $1.35 trillion in debt the five companies officially reported in their financial data for the most recent quarter." https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-companies-hide-debt-off-balance-sheet

Open quoted post

dair-community.social

Timnit Gebru (she/her).: ""As Japanese financial newspaper Nikkei Asia foun…" - Distributed AI Research Community

37

4

32

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@pivic@kolektiva.social @pluralistic@mamot.fr "passing the same $10B IOU around really fast so they can all pretend they have it" is the best quote ever.

46

4

9

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 2w ago

Replying to

@ArtGeek@mastodon.social @waysideollie@mastodon.sdf.org @benroyce@mastodon.social That's somewhat anglicized. Options would be: Ontarí'io (Huron) Oniatarí:io (Iroquois) Niigani-Gichigami or Gichi-zaaga'igan (Anishinaabemowin)

2

1

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 4mo ago

My Editorial Assistant is NOT HELPING!

#writing #editing #WritingCommunity #CatsOfMastodon

mindly.social

35

3

4

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@kimlockhartga@beige.party @ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org @EllenInEdmonton@yeg.bike You can pry my induction stove top from my cold, dead hands.

10

4

1

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org @kimlockhartga@beige.party @EllenInEdmonton@yeg.bike I have this strange sense of smell that's attenuated for most things, but really tuned to chemicals. Virtually every house I've been in with a gas stove, I've known there was one the moment I walked in the door. When renting "gas stove" was an immediate disqualifier.

10

6

2

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 1mo ago

Replying to

@waysideollie@mastodon.sdf.org @benroyce@mastodon.social If we're renaming lakes, then we should use the names used by the indigenous peoples who named them long before our ancestors showed up.

2

1

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@randahl Also, once again proving he has no concept of profit, as evidenced by his multiple bankruptcies. "Well yes, we used a billion dollar ship, staffed by dozens of well-paid, expensively trained personnel, to fire a multi-million dollar missile at a ship that we're now going to have to tow someplace halfway across the planet, while caring for and feeding the crew, before we can extract some oil from the ship. Very profitable my ass! Edit: also, the ship is probably loaded with light crude, so in the maximally stupid case, they'll tow it to Texas, get told it can't be processed there, and then have to tow it back to someplace like Japan (or offload it to another ship and send it there.) It's deep, deep layers of stupid.

21

8

9

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@briankrebs@infosec.exchange I have it installed... they can see that I use it once every few months and I force stop it shortly after I've looked at whatever I needed.

5

0

1

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@sergio_101@social.sixdegreesofohio.com @IrrationalMethod@social.coop It was my legendary project. A four month project, two months underway when they brought me in to save it. Got it working about 30 minutes before the execs came in for a make-or-break demo. Hardware, software, three layers of computing from the micro in the phone to the mainframe that did billing. We made it by the thinnest of margins!

4

1

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org One of the characters in my novel started out running drugs into the city, then eventually graduated to shipping stolen luxury vehicles to buyers in the middle-east who were unconcerned about provenance.

5

2

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 1mo ago

Replying to

@waysideollie@mastodon.sdf.org @benroyce@mastodon.social Two problems with that, the first of which is if it's not money he truly doesn't fucking care, he's a narcissist. If you called it Trump's $80M lawsuit loss, that would bug him more. The only other thing that bugs him is being laughed at, which is why Colbert is off the air, and the basis for Dumbdonald. Second problem is that has the air of permanence, so let me be clear: once that asshole is out, it's back to Lake Ontario. Still someone should erect an E. Jean Carroll statue before he croaks, so we can laugh at him even more.

1

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 1mo ago

Replying to

@benroyce@mastodon.social I'm going with "Lake Dumbdonald" largely because it *sounds* like a real name. We can switch it back when the moron is out of office.

1

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@alexmdunne@mastodon.social @carnage4life@mas.to Except comments like: x += 5; // Add 5 to x Are a complete waste of space. Unless the AI can explain WHY that's happening, you're better off with nothing.

3

1

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@sergio_101@social.sixdegreesofohio.com @IrrationalMethod@social.coop It's an autistic thing, but I live for those kinds of project and built a bit of a career around that. Reasonable projects with reasonable deadlines are the ones I mess up. Never, ever, ever say "no rush" when handing something to me, it's deadly (I have three of those nagging at me right this moment.) But call me at 11:30pm on a Thursday night to tell me that a project my old employer has been working on for a YEAR is due on Monday and mismanagement has just discovered that it's utterly fucked, would I like to come in and work 40 hours over the weekend with a bunch of other people from my former team to save them from a $10 million embarrassment, and MAN, I AM IN! By 5:00 Friday we had a game plan and started work. At 5:30 mismanagement came in to help us get started (LOL.) Most of us caught naps on the boardroom floor. Late Sunday we had the whole thing working. Client approved it on the Monday, agency looked lie a hero and less than a dozen people know what a cluster-fuck it really was. That job paid real well, too. 😂

3

1

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@sergio_101@social.sixdegreesofohio.com @IrrationalMethod@social.coop You might, you might not. It can be radically different from person to person. For some, what I love would be absolute hell for someone who exhibits different characteristics.

3

1

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 4mo ago

"This is a follow-up message regarding the abuse report that you submitted to AWS. The content or activity you reported has been mitigated."

Or in other words, if you use AWS to launch an attack against my sites, I will get your ass banned off of AWS.

Next player, please.

6

1

3

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@sergio_101@social.sixdegreesofohio.com It wasn't, but the odd connection is that maybe 15 years later I wrote the code for a prototype of a payphone that was deployed all over North America, and then years after that, a switching system for private payphone networks. cc @IrrationalMethod@social.coop

2

1

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@sergio_101@social.sixdegreesofohio.com Decades back, I scored $1.10 from a payphone. At the time that was enough to buy a three scoop ice cream cone and have some change left over, which is exactly what I did next.

2

1

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@henriksundstrom@mastodon.nu Come on, grant me a little hyperbole here ;)

2

1

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@ellenmorrisprewitt@writing.exchange I have seen a fair bit of educational/business writing form a century ago. It is, comparatively speaking to what we would see pre-genAI, ludicrously flowery and tedious. In many cases I think it was written with the sole objective of maximizing word count. I doubt that this trend will cause us to see repetitive, boring text as better than quality writing. For a while we'll have person A give a concise prompt to a GenAI, then send it to someone who will use a LLM to reduce the message to something resembling the concise prompt, but in the not too distant future it will become prohibitively expensive to do so, and we'll return to a better place. I'm sure there will still be a pile of AI dreck out there, but eventually we'll adapt, much in the way that click-bait article titles have largely lost their effectiveness.

2

1

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@johnefrancis@cosocial.ca Bears a striking resemblance to something... can we call this the "Sewerfall method?"

2

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@sundogplanets@mastodon.social An author reported that they got an inquiry from, and I kid you not, someone purporting to represent the estate of William Shakespeare.

5

0

1

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@FuturisticRobert@infosec.exchange @ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org It is my understanding that this is what happens in a lot of cases. Money talks.

2

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 4mo ago

In other words, in the online space, fuck with my stuff and I will do my best to hunt you down and kill you, digitally speaking.

3

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@thomholwerda In fact, they looked like total dumbases before this particularly extravagant display of dumbassery.

4

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Nonya_Bidniss @randahl That's insulting to dumb criminals. "So fucking Dumb He Couldn't Aspire to Being a Dumb Criminal" maybe.

3

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 4mo ago

Meta-Quote of the Day: "it looks like a vibecoding bot broke {app} while hallucinating a bugfix."

2

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 4mo ago

An update to my spam filters to kill the latest wave of particularly irritating spam killed 55 messages over the past week, with three false positives. All of the false positives were from the SpamAssassin mailing list that was discussing how to kill this particular form of spam, which I found amusing. I've adjusted the rule to compensate for that particular quirk.

2

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@WizWritaObscura@mastodon.social @Bwaretheleopard@mstdn.ca It starts that way. Follow some hashtags, interact (as in comment, not just like/boost) with people who post stuff you like. Follow them, then follow the people they follow who post good stuff. This process cascades until your timeline is chock full of too much interesting stuff and very close to zero bullshit. Once you get over the slow start bit, you will find this place is full of like-minded people.

1

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 4mo ago

I just had an installer say "in order to install {app}, you must install {app}"

Gosh, this must have been why I started the installer for {app}!

Duh.

1

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 4mo ago

Man, you do not want to be 45 minutes late for a CSFFA AGM.
[Zooms into an empty room] 😂

1

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 4mo ago

When the marketing says "SAVE [tiny print] UP TO [/tiny print] $4,000!" I just assume that whatever it is, I can't afford it and move on.

Doubly so if I wouldn't even pay $4,000 for whatever it is they're pushing.

1

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@spellingmistakescostlives@mastodon.ie That whole shop runs out of a mobile home in Iowa, USA A scam detector site gives it a score of 28.6/100, which is the lowest I've seen. Odds that they're actually shipping anything seem pretty low.

1

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@ferrix@mastodon.online The airtight cap really helps. I've managed to use a full tube up over the span of two years. First time ever! Buying the caps paid back first time.

1

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Nonya_Bidniss@infosec.exchange eew.

1

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@gnate @MLE_online Certainly I have days when I want it to work one way and days when I want it to work the other... maybe a keyboard switch is the answer! 😂

1

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@MLE_online There are many cases where that's useful, and at least in most applications, a shift-paste will strip the formatting, so getting an unformatted paste isn't too onerous.

1

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@newsthump I predict this marriage is going to suck, hard.

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@MLE_online I suggest always holding shift, then. This is true for me too, probably about half the time. But the cost of Undo followed by shift-paste to get around it is a lot less than trying to duplicate the formatting of something were I want to keep it.

0

1

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@packagist@phpc.social Great. Now if you can just convince AWS to not include their entire f***ing git history in their packages, that would be cool.

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Nonya_Bidniss@infosec.exchange Two words: AI narration.

0

2

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@WizWritaObscura@mastodon.social @Bwaretheleopard@mstdn.ca That might be an instance restriction, although I can't seen mstdn.ca being that restrictive. Someone else posted a good one this morning. Paraphrasing: "What I didn't know about Mastodon when I joined is that each instance is like its own pirate ship." I need to check to see if I have any gifs that are not designed to offend spammers. One sec... I had to go back to 1996 😂

0

1

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@adamshostack@infosec.exchange Yikes. You get caught like four times over two years up here and you're on the cusp of having your license suspended.

0

1

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@MLE_online@social.afront.org There's a specific brand of caulking cap with a long pin in the centre. This ensures there's a pathway to uncured caulking. I've saved several tubes from the trash this way.

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@mattsheffield@mastodon.social Sorry, I'm lost here. Which previous state of society is it that an "atheist reactionary" wants to return to?

0

1

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@mitch @the A federated system, naturally!

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@the @mitch yeah, but Apple supports a fascist administration, so no.

0

2

0

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 @alan@mindly.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@gnate @MLE_online Not that I'm in favour of it, but the counter-argument is that if someone put formatted text into the buffer with a copy command, they should expect to see the same thing on a default paste command, unmodified. In this case the source application should allow both types of copy. I actually have a browser plug-in for this that lets me "copy plain text" because some applications don't understand "paste unformatted" at all, or they hide it three or four interactions away. Maybe an OS level preference would make people happy (excluding support people, who would *hate* that. LOL)

0

1

0