datarama

"Never thought I'd die fighting side by side with a pope." "How about side by side with a Luddite?" "Aye, I could do that."

@jwz@mastodon.social She then thought it over, and remarked that if she was "CEO of an AI cult" (her choice of words), she'd look for employees who looked like they weren't doing well and seemed to have a foot out of the door already. Then she'd discreetly offer them 20 million dollars in cash to leave with a public story about how the tech is so awesome it's soon going to become a science fiction machine overlord.

I am in awe of how Jensen Huang from nVidia has somehow managed to make black leather jackets, of all things, uncool.

It's 2026. We're years into this bullshit by now. Why are we still anthropomorphizing AI company executives?

I read somewhere that "the industry is losing the narrative on data centres". I can't imagine why. Here's the pitch: "The purpose of these giant buildings is to take away your job. But think about the benefits if we place them in your neighbourhood: Electricity and water will be more expensive, background noise will rise, and if you're *really* lucky we'll drive the whole thing using gas-fired turbines so air pollution rises too! And also they look like shit! What's not to love?"

We're gonna pulp a bunch of rare books! We're going to spy on you! And we'll use the surveillance data to take away your job! Why not destroy the internet now we're at it? We'll make sure nobody knows what's real or fake anymore! And we're going to pollute more than the entire coal industry of Russia! We will put the entire cultural history of the human species behind a paywall! And if you want to share anything, we're going to steal it.

@mattblaze@federate.social @gooba42@mastodon.social I think "going rogue" is a bad term because it diffuses responsibility. Compare: "OpenAI's AI went rogue and meddled with US government websites" vs. "OpenAI meddled with US government websites". "but the agent did it" is precisely as bad an excuse as "but my computer did it", just with more steps.

Seriously - the playbook is like a child's concept of evil. The sort of villain who owns and operates a Pollution Factory.

It occurs to me that if that goon from Anthropic ("a book is just a delivery mechanism", shoving it into AI training doesn't destroy anything but simply moves it from one encoding to another) believes what he says, then he has just admitted that they're still committing industrial-scale copyright violation. If they're *not* doing that (because the book contents are no longer meaningfully available through their LLM), then they're destroying books. Pick one. They can't have both.

@zzt@mas.to This wasn't a one-off. Every leaving employee during his tenure got handed a picture of him when they left. And more often than not his little goodbye speech felt like a collection of diplomatically phrased insults. One coworker, during one of these grotesque farewell ceremonies, decided to congratulate him on, and I quote, "having taken over the place when it was headed for disaster, and then successfully turning it 360 degrees and going full speed ahead". He didn't get it.

There's a deeply depressing picture going around of Anthropic's enormous collection of books that they shredded to build their anti-library. So here is a picture of my collection of well-cared-for and -about books. I will add a picture of each subcollection in the comments - and please, *please* add a picture of your own book collection, if you have one. It doesn't matter if it's humble, as long as it is books that are meaningful to you and that AI companies *aren't* adding to the book burning pyre. I would especially appreciate if your picture comes with a little story.

@MaddieM4@raphus.social @kde@floss.social It increasingly feels like a lot of FOSS projects *want* to be nazi bars.

@zzt@mas.to I am absolutely convinced that my last boss before I switched jobs was an actual, certifiable sociopath. When he said goodbye to laid-off or leaving employees, he *actually gave us a picture of himself* as a gift.

@Soyweiser@awful.systems @HotGarbage@awful.systems "This makes me want to sound Omarchy", to me, sounds like the nerd version of "This makes me want to wash my eyes with bleach".

@zzt@mas.to Probably fewer than you'd think. We were a creative bunch. I know that one became a dartboard. One was burned on a midsummer bonfire. Mine was used as target site in an (unsuccessful) attempt to potty train a lizard. (That is to say, he did shit on the picture, but he didn't learn that pieces of paper is where you shit.)

@Soyweiser@awful.systems @HotGarbage@awful.systems usage examples: (Windows pops up a friendly dialog telling you in a cheery tone and with Corporate Memphis avatars that Microsoft would like to install a smörgåsbord of spyware on your machine. You can submit now, or maybe later. Resistance is futile.) "Jesus Christ, what a fucking shitshow. This makes me want to try omarchy." (Apple launches an ad where they proudly announce that they mean to pulp all human creativity into a marginally thinner iPad. Then they tell you that they are going to make their devices spy on every real-life conversation you have! The future is AWESOME!) "Fuck me, this sort of shit makes me want to abandon all technology and live in a cabin in the woods. Or try omarchy."

@cstross@wandering.shop @jplebreton@mastodon.social @petealexharris@mastodon.scot unfortunately, the powers that be are willing to sacrifice every single one of us to keep that genie around.

A Dymaxion map is made by first projecting the Earth onto an icosahedron and then choosing some vertex and unfolding it from that. It traditionally centers the North Pole (and the one I found above doesn't show antarctica at all - normally, they end up with little bits of Antarctica spread along the edges). But you could choose wherever you want. The North Pole one is popular because it neatly turns the continents into a mostly connected landmass. It has the very nice property that it greatly reduces distortion *both* of size and shape - Mercator maps screw up relative sizes, and Peters and Equal Earth maps screw up shapes. Dymaxion gets both of them *almost* right. The price is that it is completely useless for navigation. You can't even easily tell where north, south east and west is, so you get a completely fucked-up view of how a ship or a plane would have to travel to go from any two spots. One thing that I find it's *very* neat for - especially in the north-pole-centered configuration - is illustrating land-based migrations, such as those of prehistoric humans. You can plot in any arbitrary migration route and never have to do a Pac-Man teleport from the east edge to the west edge! And since you can pick any point as centre (which its inventor, Buckminster Fuller, himself promoted as a feature), you could quickly make a reoriented version that could be used to illustrate eg. marine animal migration instead. As a pedagogical map for kids, it has an absolutely *killer* feature: You can fold it back up into an icosahedron, and neatly illustrate 1. the relation of a map to a globe, and 2. the compromises that necessarily happen when trying to project a spheroid surface onto a flat one.

@deech@mastodon.social @MaddieM4@raphus.social @kde@floss.social I'm on Niri myself.

(There is still a part of me that is deeply melancholic about abandoning Vim and Neovim on the 30-year anniversary of me first plopping in a disk with Vim on my ancient Amiga.)

(with apologies to Diogenes.)

@zzt@mas.to I've been struggling with depression, severe anxiety, and keeping *just* on the right side of total burnout for three years at this point, and I really have a hard time keeping my ear to the ground about all the software I use - when I come home from work, I'm usually all out of spoons. So until this weekend, I genuinely had no idea that there were Palantir employees or other fascists among the neovim core maintainers. (I *did* discover a while ago that Vim itself is apparently primarily maintained by Claude now - and the actual lead maintainer calls Claude "he" and "him" now.) So, as someone who pays less attention than you: Do we know if Helix is maintained by AI goons or fascists? If I have to move away from Vim entirely (after *30 fucking years* at this point), another spin at "modal editing on top of treesitter and LSPs" seems to be what's most appealing to me., (Still hoping for a viable neovim community fork.)

People like to talk about tricks and useful behaviours they have trained animals to do. Is there something an animal has trained *you* to do?

@sundogplanets@mastodon.social I mean, if you're holding a duck, is it even possible to *not* be excited?

@kestral@masto.hackers.town the hackerspace I used to frequent has become the world's most depressing Claude Fanclub. one person describes himself as a "meat terminal for Claude". it is also there that I had the dubious pleasure of having someone, during an actual face-to-face conversation, take out their phone and ask ChatGPT what to say to me.

@EI3JDB@mastodon.radio Many of the Diogenes aphorisms read like Zen koans. (We don't know how many of them ever actually happened. Most were written down by another Diogenes (namely the historian and biographer Diogenes Laertius) centuries after Diogenes the Cynic died.)

@futurebird@sauropods.win i personally think that (cool + interior decorating) = K, where K is a universal human constant. (kind regards from a dude who's pretty good at interior decorating and also almost pathologically uncool.)

@gwynnion@mastodon.social Same (though in another country). I remember it as the Year And A Half from Hell because I lived in near-total isolation the entire time (I saw other human beings in person a grand total of 2 times from march 2020 to june 2021), and the social life I'd managed to build up before got completely destroyed, and my mental health took a plunge it's never come out of. But it was still the right thing to do.

@groctel@floss.social i actually agree with "my software my rights" - which is one of the reasons I loathe AI companies' scraping without consent. also, it seems to me that it doesn't apply to the Codeberg decision at all - Codeberg isn't denying anyone the right to take their software somewhere else. *They even suggest alternatives to Codeberg themselves*.

@grumpygamer@mastodon.gamedev.place as a leftist, i am obligated to say no.

@faithisleaping@anarres.family @gwynnion@mastodon.social I gained absolutely nothing, myself. I was fucked up when I went in, and I was more fucked up when I came out. Then the AI boom started and everything I spent most of my life doing started feeling meaningless, which took away the one thing I was clinging to. I still have a job, but it has become incredibly depressing and I expect it will soon be gone. At this point, I really just mostly feel like I wish it would all soon be over. I can't keep on like this.

Suggest me some video games! (I don't like first-person shooters, and I don't like photorealistic graphics - the latter is because I actually enjoy letting my imagination do a bit of the work, archaic as that might seem today.)

@justvanrossum@typo.social Now I can't help but wonder what to fill into the other intersections!

is it unconscionable and selfish to even *want* to remain alive in a world that is in the middle of a deep environmental crisis and where you no longer have any value?

@kestral@masto.hackers.town well, i just stopped going.

@Gaolaitch@cupoftea.social i haven't experienced it for years, and honestly barely remember it. but i'm sure i would recognize it if i ever were to feel it again. at the moment, i don't think i'm even capable.

Say what you want about the AI industry, but it has successfully created a flavour of comic book villain for every taste. xAI: Let's re-enact Nazi Germany, but run by a 13-year-old boy with infinite pocket money! OpenAI: The literal final boss of late-stage extractive capitalism. Meta: The only thing the Stasi did wrong was that they weren't a private for-profit corporation. Anthropic: We will take away your mouth, and you will need to scream.

@d1@autistics.life My Gmail account exists, but I never use it. I check it periodically to see if there's some old service I registered a long time ago that still sends things there, but the last six months it's been completely empty - so I expect to close it soon.

@cmars@infosec.exchange increasingly it looks like it's not going to be quite so fine after we're gone. as i said elsewhere, i'm not advocating policy (because turning this into policy would be two steps removed from eco-fascism), but i'm wondering how i can justify my own existence, now that i no longer have any value

@jwz@mastodon.social A while ago, a guy from Anthropic quit over fears that he was working on something that would kill all humans, and it made headlines that the other Anthropic guys also thought that. One of them even said that he believed that the chance of AI eradicating human life within the decade was "about 10%".

So my 70-year-old mum came over for a visit, and she had some very concerned questions to her computer scientist son. They were:

1. "Where do they get those percentages from? Do they just make them up, or do you think they have their chatbot make them up?"
2. "How can the lead researcher for Anthropic be someone who looks like his biggest worry should be whether his parents have packed his school lunch?"
3. "Are the staff at Anthropic swindlers, or are they actually mentally ill?"

Or, alternately (and perhaps even better) - a time delay between pressing one of the keys that can trigger a help popup and showing the popup. That way, if I just do a quick two-key combo the distracting flicker of a popup doesn't trigger, and if I hesitate a bit, I get offered help.

it presently feels like everybody in the software trade is scrambling to cash out with as much value as possible before it's all automated away. i sorely miss moving slow and fixing things. and, even more, i miss even having any place in the world. i miss the future.

@EI3JDB@mastodon.radio even assuming the social system here doesn't collapse (which it will): if i become and remain unemployed for more than two years, i can no longer access the union unemployment fund, and then i *will* lose my home.