And, whilst I’m here, a post from someone who tried using copilot to help with software dev for a year.
I think my favourite bit was
Don’t use LLMs for autocomplete, use them for dialogues about the code.
Tried that. It’s worse than a rubber duck, which at least knows to stay silent when it doesn’t know what it’s talking about.
https://infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/113690087142854474
(and also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging for those who haven’t come across it)
Interesting article about netflix. I hadn’t really thought about the scale of their shitty forgettable movie generation, but there are apparently hundreds and hundreds of these things with big names attached and no-one watches them and no-one has heard of them and apparently Netflix doesn’t care about this because they can pitch magic numbers to their shareholders and everyone is happy.
“What are these movies?” the Hollywood producer asked me. “Are they successful movies? Are they not? They have famous people in them. They get put out by major studios. And yet because we don’t have any reliable numbers from the streamers, we actually don’t know how many people have watched them. So what are they? If no one knows about them, if no one saw them, are they just something that people who are in them can talk about in meetings to get other jobs? Are we all just trying to keep the ball rolling so we’re just getting paid and having jobs, but no one’s really watching any of this stuff? When does the bubble burst? No one has any fucking clue.”
What a colossal waste of money, brains, time and talent. I can see who the market for stuff like sora is, now.
For VPNs, at least, I can offer some suggestions. If you wanted to securely access a specific box or network of yours, tailscale is pretty great and very painless to use. If you wanted to do stuff without various folk noticing then that’s a bit trickier but I’ve been happy using mullvad… they’re not the cheapest, though they have some splendid anonymous payment mechanisms (you can literally mail them a wad of banknotes with a magic code on a bit of paper… you don’t even need to muck about with bitcoin).
In further bluesky news, the team have a bit of an elon moment and forget how public they made everything.
https://bsky.app/profile/miriambo.bsky.social/post/3ldq2c7lu6c25 (only readable if you are logged in to bluesky)
Bluesky’s approach to using domain names to mean identity is now showing cracks that everyone can see: https://tedium.co/2024/12/17/bluesky-impersonation-risks/
(it was always shaky, but mostly only shown by infosec folks who signed up as amazon s3, etc)
TL;DR: scammer buys .com domain for journalist’s name, registers it on bluesky, demands money to hand it over or face reputational damage, uses other fake accounts with plausible names and backgrounds to encourage the mark to pay up. Fun stuff. The best bit is when the sockpuppets got one of the real people they were pretending to be banned from bluesky.
Nvidia doing their part to help consumers associate AI with unwanted useless bloatware that’s foisted upon them.
What’s a hard quality of life indicator?
Interesting post and corresponding mastodon thread on the non-decentralised-ness of bluesky by cwebber.
https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
https://social.coop/@cwebber/113527462572885698
The author is keen about this particular “vision statement”:
Preparing for the organization as a future adversary.
The assumption being, stuff gets enshittified and how might you guard your product against the future stupid and awful whims of management and investors?
Of course, they don’t consider that it cuts both ways, and Jack Dorsey’s personal grumbles about Twitter. The risk from his point of view was the company he founded doing evil unthinkable things like, uh, banning nazis. He’s keen for that sort of thing to never happen again on his platforms.
It’s a long read, but a good one (though not a nice one).
Someone on mastodon (can’t remember who right now) joked that they were expecting the c++ committee to publicly support trump, in the hopes he would retract the usg memory safety requirements. I can now believe that they might have considered that, and are probably hoping he’ll come down in their favour now that he’s coming in.
The austin allegro was far ahead of its time.
big walmart is watching you.
https://old.reddit.com/r/walmart/comments/1gqphel/body_cameras_for_front_end/
If it were merely a search engine, it risks not being ai enough. We already have search engines, and no one is gonna invest in that old garbage. So instead, it finds something that you might want that’s been predigested for ease of ai consumption (Retrieval), dumps it into the context window alongside your original question (Augmentation) and then bullshits about it (Generation).
Think of it as exactly the same stuff that the LLM folk have already tried to sell you, trying to work around limitations of training and data availability by providing “cut and paste as a service” to generate ever more complex prompts for you, in the hopes that this time you’ll pay more for it than it costs to run.