Replying to
@nileane@nileane.fr Wow, that's an aGPTology if I've ever seen one.
@protonprivacy@mastodon.social , if you wanna convey sincerity, maybe use an author capable of sincerity? Because machines aren't.
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Elton Cora (Honorary)
@cora@hachyderm.io
mastodon 4.7.3Cúmplice e dilettante. Principalmente fotos pontuadas por pepitas ocasionais, autoafirmação disfarçadas de opinião. O alinhamento com os Ensinamentos da Igreja da Felicidade Corporativa é puramente coincidente e provavelmente infeliz.
Ocasionalmente NSFW. Se trabalharmos juntos e você me seguir, considere seu consentimento aqui informado. Digital nas ruas, analógico nas folhas.
Sinto falta de mim com a polícia do pensamento, seja qual for o deslo.
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Joined November 17, 2022
Blog and scribbles and crap:
Bandeiras, em Nenhuma Ordem Específica:
🏴☠️🇪🇺🏁🏳️🌈🇺🇦
Replying to
@inthehands@hachyderm.io @ketan@climatejustice.social Periodic reminder because the world needs it: corporations cannot be virtuous. They can, at best, be neutral. Any surplus benevolence is indistinguishable from uncaptured or unrealizable shareholder profit, and is therefore a grave offense.
This tends to hold for more non-profits than most people expect, as well.
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- We’re re-organizing R&D to create roughly 60 smaller, more empowered teams with end-to-end ownership, nearly doubling the number of independent teams.
HFS, they had approximately 30 "larger" R&D teams?
I mean, I don't use GitLab; it's only ever been an annoyance for me pushing back on accommodating its use by contractors who didn't understand how to use git in the first place, but I regularly find myself agog at the sheer sizes and breadths of some of these teams.
It's almost like we've had middle and upper management treating engineering as a quantity problem rather than a quality problem for decades because that's how everyone is incentivized when the C-suite has contracted a summarization fetish, and they've been looking for an off-ramp that AI and some creative word salad provides.
Also, that's as far as I could bear to read. I find ingesting someone else's LLM output as savory as rifling through a meth den clothes hamper.
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@Natasha_Jay @quinn Holy crap, this is the first time I've heard of this.
I once worked as a developer with a team attempting to use ML for a non-invasive medical diagnostic device. The training data we had were... bad. Inconsistent, low quality, heavily class biased, and overall quite scarce.
I had to peace out when the CEO founder insisted that the answer was data synthesis—that we should just make random data with the same statistical distributions as existing data to even out class representation, and was completely bewildered at pushback that this was ludicrous.
I think I just heard him orgasm upon learning of silicon sampling.
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@movq@tilde.zone @pluralistic@mamot.fr fun fact: if one knew where to punch the notch, the black floppies would store colour data as well.
NBD, but it's NBD.
People who argue that #ai democratizes any sort of art understand neither #democracy nor any sort of #art.
@tante There must be something in the air; I think this is something that has been on many folks' minds for a while... not criticisms of Cory, but rather the general cognitive difficulty of reconciling survival in a world far less under our control than we thought it was when our character and values accreted and congealed.
It's a nuanced phenomenon especially for a limited-attention-span world. It's good to see people taking up the challenge. Thanks for this.
It's been a minute since I posted a photo, and I think we'd all rather be sitting in the park feeding the birbs at the moment, so please enjoy "Alimentando Os Pombos de Trindade"
#slowshutter #FotoVorschlag #abstractPhotography #photography
The Five Basic Laws of Human Stupidity is a gem of quasisatirical genius by economist Carlo M. Cipolla.
In summary:
1. Always and inevitably, everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
2. The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular, non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.
5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person. Corollary: A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.
A PDF, which has some typographical errors but fun illustrations can be found here: https://gandalf.fee.urv.cat/professors/AntonioQuesada/Curs1920/Cipolla_laws.pdf ; an ebook with a forward by Nassim Taleb can be found at most sources.
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@Chip_Unicorn @cstross I like to think of vibe coders as fertilizer nourishing a future bountiful harvest of desperately needed critical maintenance by those who kept their tools sharp.
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@RickiTarr@beige.party If only it were just the guys. Also every US anchor in training should have to do a semester abroad in the UK.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv-6UN9zj30
Republican commentator forced to watch Trump's racist video of Obamas as monkeys
I've used #homebrew on my mac since its early days—days in which, generally, one could feel comfortable that open source software was written by actual humans who cared about freedom.
Whatever the timeline or vectors of colonization have been, I now _feel_ far less confident in the software that I have been up to now arguably too comfortable just typing "brew update && brew upgrade" to update.
Including transient dependencies, I count 328 packages managed by homebrew on my system right now. Given how long Homebrew has been around, its dual role as package manager and indirection point for code it doesn't own, and the convenience of the happy path and therefore muscle memory and inertial trust many of us have acquired, has there been any critical analysis of its trustworthiness from a user's perspective? What about the relative risks of not updating working software that might have bus versus updating to new versions that introduce exploitation?
I probably speak for a very small minority, but PSA to dudes posting intimate photos of younger female models: not coming off as a creep is a delicate art.
Not saying it is impossible, but if in doubt, people would probably appreciate your landscapes and architecture work more.
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@quinn@social.circl.lu “hose water” sent me into a 45-second fugue. Can still taste it. Or smell it. It was kinda both.
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@jgeorge just some art photography related hashtags i’m afraid; nothing exotic. Hence the admonition.
It was completely unforeseeable. No one could have seen this coming. Everybody is talking about how this was impossible to anticipate.
Perhaps a tariff would work.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-iran-russia-intelligence-35afae34198408d670941f971d383378
Tired: footguns
Wired: facelasers
Replying to
@koehntopp @timbray It's really fucking dangerous right now, and I think many of even the highly informed among us underappreciate just how dangerous it is. It's the financial equivalent of trying to hold on to that last bit of molly high at 4:30 am with the brightening horizon warning that the party will have an end.
I know market talk and fedi threads often have an uneasy relationship, but I think this is really important, but data are data: major indices, in the US at least, are showing some worrying signals. The market is incredibly overvalued in historic terms versus productivity, and volatility over the past few weeks is oddly low and it feels like there is a _lot_ of pent up nervous energy. People who are used easy money are looking harder and harder for those opportunities, and if they don't find them, either seeing them where they don't exist. Bond yields going down and rising real-asset inflows are reflecting an institutional safety flight. And a lot of people are passively investing in funds which may not be oriented for this footing. And precious metals prices and associated regulatory capture. And sizeable puts with expirations in the 2-month timeframe being bought against the major US indices. And, and.
And a biased, self-enriching, and highly capricious entropy source governing by meme.
A lot of this stuff is obviously ridiculous on its own, but in concert it is a highly volatile feedback system hidden behind sensory overload. It _might_ be a good time for folks to start looking at their retirement compositions.
Replying to
@EricLawton@kolektiva.social @inthehands@hachyderm.io @bich@apobangpo.space
Sorry, this struck a nerve. I know it can be filed in the "well, actually" and "technically" families of reply-person responses. Judge thusly, block accordingly, all cool.
I think one can simultaneously find the reported events ghoulish and draw a bead on the abdication of obligations to the overriding rights of the child by the parents, and to the erosion or absence of accountability for that abdication, and still call the assertion—that parents' rights don't exist—counterproductive.
Accountability to obligations must come with associated decision rights in a functionally free society. It's a three-legged stool.
A recognition of a parent's decision rights regarding how best to fulfill their obligations according to their child's rights, meaningfully accountable to objective standards, rests upon that stool.
What we're seeing, and what we're being distracted by with rhetoric and chaos, is a progressive breakdown of that structure, from something about which can be reasoned about into something that is arbitrary and subject to and dependent upon the whim of whomever is in power. The answer isn't the elimination of parental determination. It's the articulation and reinforcement of that structure and of those accountabilities, and their disentanglement from whim.
Saying this as a parent with a very clear understanding of my obligations and would absolutely object to the notion that because of the existence of horrible ideas in the world I am accountable for decisions, none of which are under my control.
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@therieau @glynmoody No, the World Cup does not need an ICE truce. The would should see and experience America as it is, now, rather than some softened, sanewashed version. If that is a drag on attendance, so be it. If it's a drag on FIFA and the reputation of their peace prize, so be it.
If one argues that the world already knows, well, knowing hasn't made it go away now has it?
If one argues that a truce is needed so as to not besmirch the hard work of the athletes who made it to the tops of their games, well, that's on FIFA. They're the ones with location decision rights, not the athletes, nor the spectators.
It's not going to get better by making it less visible or by granting benevolence and clemency when it is convenient or profitable. I'm so tired of people treating global sporting events like they somehow should transcend the petty abject suffering people experience every day.
Fuuuck. #kneecap . I can’t understand 75% of the lyrics and I’m balling over here.
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@thibaultmol @bruces Unpopular opinion: overemphasis on encryption is counterproductive and a hazardous opportunity cost.
Bitchat shouldn't even mention "encrypted private messages" in the description. "postcards that route around censorship" would be a compelling pitch on its own.
Absolutely not saying encryption is bad. It's critical for much of modern life. But it's not necessary for _everything_, and the assumption that it is leads both users and produces of these apps to make questionable choices that could be avoided through expectation-setting and impulse control.
I think the thing about ascendant #LLM usage that I have the hardest time connecting with is the amount of self-congratulation I see from people who... asked an LLM to do something for them.
When I was working on software systems professionally, there was often a clear and sincere pride expressed—whether when building something new or fixing a tricky bug—in having developed a new understanding of the underlying problem. Yes, elegance in solutions was valued, but more importantly I would see people get this instinctive spark from having acquired a bit of enlightenment, however niche.
My partner is the primary developer in the house now, so my experiences are more vicarious. However I get the sense, from overhearing her meetings and from our conversations, that the satisfaction stops at being able to prompt the machine to make something that approximates the prompter's understanding of the spec. In fact, some of her biggest frustrations are with developers who explicitly _don't_ want to understand the problem at hand, in favor of "velocity".
I know that my observations are partly second-hand, and I'm only getting the high- and lowlights, so I don't assert that that impression is The Global Truth. But I'm pretty sure there's a nugget of truth to it, and to the extent there is, it really saddens me.
Developing mental models of the inner workings of complex systems was the biggest thrill of software development to me. Yes, code had to ship, and yes it had to work. But for me, that started with the mental model. With experimentation. With getting it wrong and figuring out why before getting it really right.
I wonder how foreign this experience is and will be to current and future developers, and I can't help but find it a bit weird when someone seems to solicit attaboys and participation ribbons for asking the robots nicely.
About that US military crusade-to-armageddon speech story. Not that it didn't or doesn't happen or that crazies don't exist (they do), but reportage is crap all over.
Replying to
Each distraction a misdirection from a deeper and more consequential hidden truth, scaling upward and downward just far enough beyond what rationality allows, the sensible public and their remaining upright leadership finding their last opportunity for denial being that of being on the losing end of a pursuit curve.
We find, too late, that while we have spent our energy persuading ourselves that these things are highly improbable, the conspiracists have been broadening their minds to the possible.
3/3
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@mattblaze it’s that these tend to be obscure, overlooked, and forgotten that feels like a missed opportunity to me. The Cold War era seems to be wrapped more in kitsch and style (some of it quite good to be sure), but nothing really captures the feeling of being a 10 year old kid watching The Day After on network TV, and how seriously things wer being taken by serious people.
But even the most solid of monuments has its pedagogical half life, lasting a few generations at best, and while they might ensure some things are never forgotten, it’s difficult at best to reliably reinforce second- and third-hand memories.
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We're so used to #conspiracy theorists being on the ever-encroaching fringe, with soapboxes and megaphones, selling insurance and supplements, that we're unequipped to see what happens when they are given actual power.
We expect the conspiracies to be additive at worst. Then we see them multiply and think that they're just multiplicative. And we're left wondering what happened we realized they positive feedback loop we've allowed.
2/3
RE: @anon_opin@mastodon.social
We added an extra syllable to “realtor” and blew our budget.