Cassandrich

A thought I had while out shopping on the AI cult/"true believers": They don't necessarily believe in their own narrative that chatbots are intelligent or progressing towards intelligence. What they fundamentally believe in is The Singularity. What they think they need is to rob humanity's resources long enough for their chatbots to *get lucky* and vomit out something that's capable of the "recursive self-improvement" they believe is possible. Saying they believe we're on the right path is just a justification for hoarding the resources. Much like religious fanatics throughout history, they want us to believe ridiculous things about their god for the sake of organizing social and economic structures that will make their god's power real.

Was just reminded of how much I *viscerally* hate the "cattle not pets" ideology. I want to say more on this but I don't even know where to begin.

Mastodon has way too many "shitty genx and boomer dudes who took part in the rise of evil tech and are committed to a narrative that they weren't the bad guys". Thankfully they're mostly outside of my circles, but ffs. 🤮

Best thing about Codeberg's new anti-slop policy: When someone shares a link to a project on Codeberg, I don't have to dig thru the project information trying to figure out of it's slop before boosting or considering using it. It makes the Codeberg name a sign of some minimal level of trustworthiness.

@alwayscurious@infosec.exchange @ska@social.treehouse.systems @ell1e@hachyderm.io @aelspire@aelspire.info @ariadne@social.treehouse.systems To me slop is a matter of provenance not quality. If there could legitimately be unknown copyright claims on the code because it's a derivative of some unknowable part of the corpus in a meaningful way (i.e. large enough to be subject to copyright), then it's slop. It's also slop even if it's smaller than that, if the submitter does not understand it. If it's small and the submitter understands it, I still don't want someone working that way contributing, because they're degrading their own cognitive capability and likely to push for pro-AI policies that drive away good contributors. But at least it's not tainting slop.

RE: https://mstdn.social/@_L1vY_/117054464858959823 "New Orleans no longer has 911 emergency service." Fixed the headline.

Seeing the Base Browser Project https://codeberg.org/basebrowserproject/organization/ patches to remove even the smallest shit is mind blowing. The clowns at Mozilla somehow managed to make functionality that should be a few tens or at worst hundreds of kB of js code into >18 MB of source code (size of the patch to remove it). This is a project where literally everything is 2+ orders of magnitude larger than it should be, for no reason other than management incompetence.

@aharper@mstdn.social @mattdm@hachyderm.io Even further back, the mistake was not installing bollards or equivalent.

@nullagent@partyon.xyz The damning part is their response to it not the fact that it happened. Deleting evidence to gaslight folks, claiming it's only for review when it was clearly for generating slopcode, etc. I read the official project account's responses and they were *very* concerning and indicative of someone who can't be trusted.

With the locale overhaul project drawing to a conclusion in the next couple weeks, I'll be back to not having any funded projects on #musl. I would really like to get some funding for C23 support (this is a mix of merging/revising existing patches and writing some new code) and POSIX 2024 support (some new code, lots of review of new specification text and bringing existing code for newly-standardized stuff up into conformance) as the next big project(s). Any good leads on making this happen would be most welcome!

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange @whitequark@social.treehouse.systems Package manager forcing a reboot is Windows level of 🤦 🤬

@javier@col.social @mhoye@cosocial.ca Yes, it's even worse slop. Slop isn't slop because it has bad repetitive style. It's slop because it's wasting your attention/cognitive capability processing it as though it's meaningful information when in fact it's just information-shaped text lacking any information content. The difference is provenance, not the shape or even the words. The exact same sentence can be slop or non-slop with the only distinction being provenance.

@smn@l3ib.org The terminology is part of what makes it so visceral, but the concept of "humans managing things at scales beyond what a human can individually care about" is something I fundamentally dislike and think we should be aiming to reduce or eliminate.

@khm And we've decided not to be afraid of very real things just because the industry doesn't want to sacrifice the performance to fix them. 🤡

@darwinwoodka@mastodon.social @aharper@mstdn.social @mattdm@hachyderm.io Sooooo many cases of irresponsible and incompetent drivers killing pedestrians and even ppl minding their own business in their own homes and businesses would just not be a thing if bollards were universal anywhere roads go near people.

@khm I couldn't tell from his post what he was defending, but the sorts of replies I saw supporting him made it clear that it couldn't be anything good. The replies to the post you linked are a great seed for a blocklist.

@ShadSterling@mastodon.social @veil_im@infosec.exchange I don't think so, at least on Signal, but I'm not sure about others.

@ShadSterling@mastodon.social @veil_im@infosec.exchange They can! In WhatsApp, there's Linked Devices under the ... menu and you can see any linked devices and remove them. AIUI removal is cryptographic. Surely it is for Signal, but I'm not entirely sure about WhatsApp.

@veil_im@infosec.exchange The server cannot unilaterally add sessions. That's not how it works. Rather, the primary device receiving the e2ee messages sets up a relay to the secondary device the user has been tricked into linking.

@WiteWulf@cyberplace.social @simonzerafa@infosec.exchange @ChrisWarwick@mas.to Nope, they have contracts with major ISPs to piggyback on the ISP-issued routers/modems like roaming customers would, independent of your own customer VLAN segment. Unless you live far away from other people, if it doesn't get on your network, it'll get on one of your neighbors'.

@jstevenyork@mastodon.social @futurebird@sauropods.win Then that's why it's important to do. Disregarding a nobody you never cared about is easy - it's the default. Unpacking what someone who's acted unethically has fed you through their position of information influence is a lot harder but actually matters.

@LucidH3X@defcon.social @evacide@hachyderm.io Kids already know opsec way better than the boomer/genx clowns supporting these laws.

@nullagent@partyon.xyz I don't think that's at all a serious position. Yes in their position you probably want someone running whatever heuristic vuln scanning utilities attackers are using, even if some of those are LLM-slop. You do NOT need to be actually using "LLM code review" from those things as part of your development process. You can take a list of potential issues, condensed down to 1 line descriptions with a pointer to the line/function in your code, and actually review them like you would anything out of a static analysis tool.

@andrewt@mathstodon.xyz @olivia@scholar.social Erik is a strongly pro-AI concern troll who likes to pretend he's asking questions in our interest without disclosing his actual position. I have a Mastodon account note on him about this pattern already.

@majorlinux@toot.majorshouse.com @mhoye@cosocial.ca They're not making the slop invisible by hiding it from you. They're making it invisible by tuning the generation better to make it less distinguishable from actual legitimate writing.

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange @0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange That was a bonkers choice in the part of browsers and only forced by very bad safety/performance tradeoffs they made in the interest of being able to run vastly more adtech malware. Specifically, their insistence on JIT shenanigans and on giving JS references to complex-lifetime objects implemented outside of the JS runtime environment.

Clownflare really needs to be forced to take legal responsibility for the stuff they're hosting - and yes, when they're serving it for a customer, they are hosting it not acting as a common carrier. Their business model would collapse immediately if they had to react & respond to legal complaints and customers couldn't just hide behind them while one party claims they're not involved and the other party is hiding their identity.

@briankrebs@infosec.exchange Oooh even better! So if you just don't attach them to a TV, they do adtech fraud fulltime! Where do we sign up?

@trondhjort@hachyderm.io Wow, I was not familiar with this Wikipedian acronym "AfD" and its clash with a more widely known meaning of AfD is very fitting to who these deletion warriors are...

@sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social Yeah, newtab widgets absolutely do not belong in the core browser in general. If you want them you can add them.

@briankrebs@infosec.exchange IOW they rent out your ip address as a residential proxy but they also defraud adtech companies, so who can tell if they're good or bad?

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange And it's almost always the right thing to do. The job is to describe the unifying principles of existing implementations so that people can write portable software that works on any of them, not to redefine a new thing incompatible with everything else out there but "more aesthetically right in the committee's opinion".

@neatnik@social.lol This is something of a strawman because I don't think anybody is ostracizing folks for whatever games or workplace activity they do with slop bots that we don't have to see. The thing is, the people who use these things are largely very pushy about it, constantly violating our boundaries, trying to get us to ingest their slop. Being vegetarian, I don't have any problem with people who eat meat. But if I had a "friend" constantly trying to get me to try meat then escalating to trying to slip meat into my food, they would no longer be my friend.

@dcoderlt@ohai.social @khm Thanks! Picked up some more good blocks.

The linux-man project has been quietly taken over as a hostile fork of what it was/was supposed to be. https://lore.kernel.org/linux-man/am0RdPxvbIYUKAL-@devuan/T/#m277b916c39713d644d36a42d82debbff1df6bfc5

RE: https://thingy.social/@malcircuit/117004313132588251 @khm The whole PQC thing feels like an instance of "anti-problem-solvers".

@sodiboo@gaysex.cloud Does that mean load times actually increased? Or that average load time increased because of a large number of new users who were now loading it usably slow rather than just abandoning it because it was unusably slow, who are now dragging up the average load time? The way it's stated it sounds like it implies the former but I'm pretty sure it's actually the latter.

@sodiboo@gaysex.cloud Yeah. I'm pretty sure the load time didn't increase for any given user.

@lukaszcjokiel@101010.pl @ErikJonker@mastodon.social It's an ideological choice, motivated by goal to bamboozle and deceive, to have instructions and data be the same stream. It's not fundamental. You could have rigorous code, or even an isolated control layer slop model, controlling the invocation of the model working with the data and itself having no access to data. But this would break the illusion/appeal of users feeling like they're interacting with a person who can't say no.

@kalleboo@bitbang.social @ahihi@anticapitalist.party Yes absolutely. The only problem is the excess verbosity. Nobody cares that the file is sparse or that it's the precallocate operation failing. "Out of space" is the important part. And most contemporary garbage wouldn't even tell you that but would just say "Something went wrong". Ideal fix would be just showing "Out of space" by default, but with a place to click for more details and see the full version above.

@alwayscurious@infosec.exchange @jangray@mastodon.social "Privacy preserving" doesn't make it ethical. Research on human subjects, especially when it will be used to make decisions about how to treat them, requires their consent. It's not about a risk of individually identifying them but that measurement of their actions may be used in ways contrary to their interests, and that they have a right not to participate in that.

Interesting. I'm not sure yet what the usefulness of this is, but you can make "DMs to yourself" on Mastodon by setting post privacy to "private mention" (DM) but not @'ing anybody.

@neatnik@social.lol Yes, deciding to enjoy being with the people who voted for the extermination of folks you care about is... a choice. 😬 A very mainstream, very gross choice you seem to be presenting as if it's some sort of novel idea folks should consider.

@alwayscurious@infosec.exchange @ska@social.treehouse.systems @ell1e@hachyderm.io @aelspire@aelspire.info @ariadne@social.treehouse.systems It depends on what you mean by "avoiding". If you mean "not letting anyone process any data about you with any software that contains slop" then yes of course it's unavoidable because the parties processing data about us do it without consent. if you mean "not running software on our own machines that contains slop" then of course it's also largely unavoidable because of "software" includes the garbage js or even css on a random site you visit, but it's of no consequence because you don't trust it anyway. If you mean "not running slop on our own machines with actual privilege or to process and produce things we care about" then it's rather tenable, but difficult depending on what you do. If you mean "not allowing slop to be included in our own projects that we publish and vouch for" then it is absolutely 100% tenable and should be bare minimum baseline of decent behavior.

@f800gecko@mastodon.online I share the sentiment, but I also think it's more complex. There are lots of things that make sense to be single-use, because the resource cost of cleaning them for reuse is comparable to the resource cost of producing them, before you even consider the added resource requirements to make something that can withstand many (or even a single) cycle of cleaning. This is particularly the case for a lot of health care/personal care items. What's important is that these things be sourced from renewable materials and externalities of manufacture be minimized.

@troy_frizzell@mstdn.social @jonsnow@mastodon.online You should uninstall it. Otherwise it's too easily to accidentally click something and wind up with all of your private data exfiltrated to their servers. 😱

@azonenberg@ioc.exchange @foone@digipres.club If you don't want it to be a page reload, you need some js for xhr ("ajax") and updating the dom to show the result. But it's very minimal. The awful frameworks we have now were invented to justify charging clients for "software development" ("technical" = 💸) instead of "web design" ("artistic" = 🤏). 🤬

@carnage4life@mas.to I know an even better secret for reducing token cost...

Wow, latest Signal has separate buttons for "not now" and "no thanks" in the request to write a review!