@fred@social.fthevenet.eu

Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@44@defcon.social well yeah. Sam Altman said exactly that, in so many words: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter" We're sooo past even the "Bond villain" caricature stage... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange 💯 On the specific topic of "AI" and not just contributions to FOSS but education in general, I believe this is absolutely the crux of the matter. So incredibly short-sighted!

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 2mo ago

With my apologies to Sun alumni (and my thanks to @NanoRaptor@bitbang.social for the inspiration). #vibecoding #slop #technicaldebt

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@cstross@wandering.shop @zzt@mas.to @davidgerard@circumstances.run the best way to enforce an LLM ban in a FOSS project is... to do strictly nothing outside of banning the use of LLMs, IMO. If a careful reviewer gets fooled by someone secretly using an LLM i.e. the submitted code is reasonable and purposeful, the general use of language around it -- comments, docs, commit messages, etc... -- not hell bent on wasting everybody's time, and the submitter answers questions with a demonstrable understanding of the problem they're claiming to fix, then fine. Who cares? The thing is, it's not even remotely believable that this could happen outside of the most trivial of cases without requiring the submitter to work harder massaging the slop than doing the work in the first place. Then, they'd invariably get both so goddamn proud they fooled you and gutted no-one even noticed, that they wouldn't be able to strop bragging about it... A which point you'd just throw out their PR and ban their arses for breaking the clearly stated rules ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@metacosm@mastodon.social @TheDonRaab@mastodon.social Same here. But whatever happens at work, the red line I'm drawing for myself is that I'm never going to spend a dime of my own money on any of that bullshit. I have resigned myself to the thought that if my employer insists on setting giant piles of their own cash on fire, as much as I may disagree with that... *cough*... "strategic alignement" (because I know I won't be spared the consequences when it all goes pear-shaped), as long the majority merrily flocks to help -- lighter fluid in one hand and a box of matches in the other -- there isn't much I can do to stop them. But I'm certainly not going to give away part of my own wages to help a handful of billionaires with a God complex "make intelligence the new utility" and then sell it back to me, metered by usage. "Oh but you cannot resist! It's the Future! It's inevitable! You'll be left behind! bla bla bla". Well, I've never signed up for a Facebook account. I never set up a Linked-In profile. I've never paid for an Uber ride. Hell, I've never even paid for a badly drawn monkey jpeg!! And yet, I'm pretty sure I still exists...

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@tante@tldr.nettime.org "industry best practice (derogatory)"

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@davidgerard@circumstances.run Breaking News: Vice President JD Vance denounces the authority of the Pope and proclaims himself "Supreme Head of the Church of America"

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@davidgerard@circumstances.run Hey, I see King Tut's Wah Wah Hut is still going! Went there to see dEUS back in... 98 or something? God, I'm so old.

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@davidgerard@circumstances.run Also, I've got pretty fond memories of Glasgow, even though I only went there a couple times, to attend gigs and visit mates, back when I lived on the east coast of Scotland. That was a loooong time ago, though.

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@davidgerard@circumstances.run 💯

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@davidgerard@circumstances.run Congratulations! Also,good luck; we moved a couple years ago -- after 17 years -- *literally across the street* and that was a total pain. The older you get, the more moving house becomes hell... (and yes, this is indeed the actual *best case scenario*, the one that assumes you're privileged enough to have accumulated more shit as you reach middle age than you had as a student...)

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@Gilou@mastodon.social @mithfindel@mastodon.social Not at all! A "merde request" is just one or more "vommits" that you try to inflict onto someone else's project.

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@mttaggart To be fair, whenever someone tries to pull that "oh yeah?? and yet you use electricity when you stream video! How ironic!" bullshit, I just tap the sign.

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@jukkan @vampirdaddy @davidgerard Further proof that 'YOLO Engineering' goes hand in hand with 'FOMO Leadership'

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@vampirdaddy @jukkan @davidgerard A Microsoft Teams squad tasked with mapping out how to wire the agent into the surface where 320 million people already work. On this team, everyone builds. I contribute code. The PM prototypes. The architect ships features. That's not a slogan. He's got that right; that's not a slogan; that's a damning piece of evidence in an inevitable class action lawsuit!

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@davidgerard perfect analogy, down to the fact that none of it actually fucking works. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X19305371

sciencedirect.com

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@antoinechambertloir@mathstodon.xyz One can only dream that concerned parties would consider doing the same about the upcoming FIFA world cup and Olympics (not exactly holding my breath though...)

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 14mo ago

Replying to

@murraylivingston@mas.to "Farewell to the mountains, high-cover'd with snow, Farewell to the straths and green valleys below; Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging woods, Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods. My heart's in the Highlands my heart is not here, My heart's in the Highlands, a-chasing the deer; Chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe, My heart's in the Highlands, wherev'r I go"

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 18mo ago

Replying to

@holly_cummins

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@fribbledom@mastodon.social yeah... I think if I had to pinpoint a defining moment for my vocation as a professional computer toucher, teenage me successfully getting Wing Commander 3 to run would probably be it! (Damn you, Mitsumi CD-ROM drive!!)

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 7mo ago

Today's #303day so it is very fitting that TIL about Charanjit Singh's Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat; a 1982(!) album of classical Indian ragas entirely performed on #TB303, #TR808 and a #Jupiter8 synths.
It was pretty much forgotten everywhere -- including in India -- until re-discovered around 2010, and then credited as the first Acid House record, since it predates Phuture's Acid Trax by five years!

I've listened to it twice in a row today, grinning all the way through it! :acid_guy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHEWnFgUCwM

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@pikesley There is but one truly serious problem in tech, and that is tokenmaxxing.

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@tante@tldr.nettime.org "industry best practice" The term's been so badly abused by everyone -- from million-dollar consulting firms to every wanker with a podcast -- and for so long, that, yeah, sure, they can have it if they want!

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@NanoRaptor@bitbang.social and maybe, deep down, there's a commentary about how we shouldn't have allowed corporations to confiscate our own words, like "copilot", or "apple", or "windows", etc... Maybe.

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@graydon@canada.masto.host @johnzajac@dice.camp @jwz@mastodon.social @mikej@mastodon.online @mjg59@nondeterministic.computer @glyph@mastodon.social As someone who does debugging for a living, I'm tempted to say that a lot of devs were never any good at it, generally lacking (or not wanting to acquire) the most basic skills required to establish a diagnosis, like "only change a single thing at a time if you want to assess which change affected what FFS!!" Also -- and as a possible way of explanation -- the whole process is very often seen as menial, and certainly as being beneath the wannabe founders/10x eng/clout chasing crowd and those enamoured with them. I'm not debating the central thesis here, that COVID made this whole story even more sad, btw. Just thinking aloud that it maybe kinda always was, and that for many the LLM crutch isn't so much something they need because they can no longer do the job, but something they want because they never liked it in the first place.

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@compfu@mograph.social @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange Yeah. In a similar vein, imagine allowing kids in schools to ride motorbikes or e-scooters during physical education classes. It should be obvious to all that it's just defeating the purpose of the whole thing. Yet we keep hearing people advocating for LLMs in the classroom, generally under the absolutely infuriating pretense of "teaching the next gen to be AI-natives" or such inane bullshit.

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 7mo ago

Hi software developers!

Quick question, especially for those of us most keen to indulge in those sweet, sweet company ~~provided~~ ~~encouraged~~ mandated Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT subscriptions: you do remember the race to "pivot to the cloud", right? How everything had to be moved to AWS or Azure or whatnot yesterday, or we would all be left behind?
And you also remember how, a few years down the line, after we'd done exactly as asked, an alarmed CFO would come down on us urging to slash those goddamn AWS bills by half, or else? All the while somehow keeping the same level of production and quality with the on-premise infra gone for good and the team "right-sized" by 10~20%? "Doing more with less", all that bullshit?

How the fuck do you think this whole "let's all voluntarily deskill ourselves and set budgets on fire so a text extruder can pretend to do our job for us" thing is supposed to pan out, exactly?

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@dangoodin@infosec.exchange Fedora https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/update-to-fix-dirtyfrag-available/190864

discussion.fedoraproject.org

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@graydon@canada.masto.host @johnzajac@dice.camp @jwz@mastodon.social @mikej@mastodon.online @mjg59@nondeterministic.computer @glyph@mastodon.social A good debugging story is a goddamn murder mystery, where you spend 3 days exhuming and decrypting bits of code like you're fucking Indiana Jones, and in the end, all you have to show for it is a diff that says you changed a + sign for a - one...

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@mhoye@cosocial.ca From "Don't Repeat Yourself" to "Boil The Oceans To Reinvent All The Wheels, All The Time"... It's pretty sad indeed.

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@jwz@mastodon.social Nice article. Unrelated: I realize the domain for that website is named after its owner (@db@social.lol), but I first read it as "D-Bus Hell Dot Com", and I don't think I can ever unsee it.

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@clayfoot@mastodon.social @ubernostrum@infosec.exchange they rightly point out that machine-generated code cannot be copyrighted That's not quite the issue here. The reason Oracle requires contributors to own the rights to code they contribute is so that they are in a position where they can grant co-ownership to Oracle, by signing a legal agreement (the "OCA"). The worry is that an LLM may regurgitate from its training material verbatim portions of a work copyrighted by a third party, that the contributor has no ownership over -- and therefore cannot transfer to Oracle, nor guarantee compatibility with the GPL.

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@tante@tldr.nettime.org yeah, I think we're all utterly sick of hearing from the men of AI. Even those of us not fucking married to one...

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@glyph @aredridel @ceejbot "Always has been", quite literally. I went to one of those reputed to be wise [...] and when I considered him and conversed with him, men of Athens, I was affected something like this: it seemed to me that this man seemed to be wise, both to many other human beings and most of all to himself, but that he was not.[...] For my part, as I went away, I reasoned with regard to myself: “I am wiser than this human being. For probably neither of us knows anything noble and good, but he supposes he knows something when he does not know, while I, just as I do not know, do not even suppose that I do. I am likely to be a little bit wiser than he in this very thing: that whatever I do not know, I do not even suppose I know. An excerpt from Plato's Apology of Socrates, written over 2400 years ago.

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@mhoye@cosocial.ca I, too, am reimagining my way of engaging with the outside world for the AI era, and it increasingly boils down to: don't.

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 1mo ago

Replying to

@tante@tldr.nettime.org b) "someone else does the thing you criticise" is not a good legitimization for the bad thing 💯

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 2w ago

All 666 functions were compiled because no usable IPDB/IOBJ from previous compilation was found. Oh my... Should I be worried?? 😨 #softwareofthebeast

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social I never played Quake with a modem: I used a car instead. As in, I would load my PC and monitor in my trunk, drive ~30km to a friend's house, wait for the others to arrive, spend anywhere between 30min to a several hours laying out the 10-baseT cables and troubleshooting the IPX LAN... Fun times! 😃

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Frederic Thevenet @fred@social.fthevenet.eu

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@clayfoot@mastodon.social @ubernostrum@infosec.exchange But the overwhelming concern for the project's maintainers is that they don't want to get drowned in PRs full of "plausible-looking code, with plausible-looking tests, which is nonetheless incorrect or, even if it is correct, is poorly designed and therefore difficult to maintain". Slop, by another name. OpenJDK has a very thorough reviewing process for contributions, which ensures a very high degree of quality, but puts a large burden on reviewers. This makes the project particularly vulnerable to being drowned under a wave of LLM-fuelled garbage contributions.

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