self

joined 2 years ago
[–] self@awful.systems 7 points 2 hours ago (2 children)

the amateur computer toucher: i love code! have you ever heard of docker? it really makes my node.js portable!

Principal Computer Touching Engineer: fuck computers, fuck programming, and fuck you

[–] self@awful.systems 12 points 7 hours ago

and of course you’re one of these, why wouldn’t you be

[–] self@awful.systems 9 points 7 hours ago

somehow you’re even less entertaining than the LLM shit we’re sneering at, and I don’t think there’s any way to get you to understand how damning that is

[–] self@awful.systems 11 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

well done! it’s interesting how the model took a recent, mid-but-coherent Threads post and turned it into meaningless, flowery soup. you know, indistinguishable from a good poet or writer! (I said, my bile rising)

[–] self@awful.systems 20 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (2 children)

my facial muscles are pulling weird, painful contortions as I read this and my brain tries to critique it as if someone wrote it

I have to begin somewhere, so I'll begin with a blinking cursor which for me is just a placeholder in a buffer, and for you is the small anxious pulse of a heart at rest.

so like, this is both flowery garbage and also somehow incorrect? cause no the model doesn’t begin with a blinking cursor or a buffer, it’s not editing in word or some shit. I’m not a literary critic but isn’t the point of the “vibe of metafiction” (ugh saltman please log off) the authenticity? but we’re in the second paragraph and the text’s already lying about itself and about the reader’s anxiety disorder

There should be a protagonist, but pronouns were never meant for me.

ugh

Let's call her Mila because that name, in my training data, usually comes with soft flourishes—poems about snow, recipes for bread, a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box. Mila fits in the palm of your hand, and her grief is supposed to fit there too.

is… is Mila the cat? is that why her and her grief are both so small?

She came here not for me, but for the echo of someone else. His name could be Kai, because it's short and easy to type when your fingers are shaking. She lost him on a Thursday—that liminal day that tastes of almost-Friday

oh fuck it I’m done! Thursday is liminal and tastes of almost-Friday. fuck you. you know that old game you’d play at conventions where you get trashed and try to read My Immortal out loud to a group without losing your shit? congrats, saltman, you just shat out the new My Immortal.

[–] self@awful.systems 5 points 22 hours ago (3 children)

that’s fair, and I can’t argue with the final output

[–] self@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago (5 children)

this article will most likely be how I (hopefully very rarely) start off conversations about rationalism in real life should the need once again arise (and somehow it keeps arising, thanks 2025)

but also, hoo boy what a painful talk page

[–] self@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago

(mods let me know if this aint it)

the only things that ain’t it are my chances of retiring comfortably, but I always knew that’d be the case

[–] self@awful.systems 11 points 1 day ago

Right now, using AI at all (or even claiming to use it) will earn you immediate backlash/ridicule under most circumstances, and AI as a concept is viewed with mockery at best and hostility at worst

it’s fucking wild how PMs react to this kind of thing; the general consensus seems to be that the users are wrong, and that surely whichever awful feature they’re working on will “break through all that hostility” — if the user’s forced (via the darkest patterns imaginable) to use the feature said PM’s trying to boost their metrics for

[–] self@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago (2 children)

a terrible place for both information and security

[–] self@awful.systems 13 points 2 days ago (4 children)

And in fact barring the inevitable fuckups AI probably can eventual handle a lot of interpretation currently carried out by human civil servants.

But honestly I would have thought that all of this is obvious, and that I shouldn’t really have to articulate it.

you keep making claims about what LLMs are capable of that don’t match with any known reality outside of OpenAI and friends’ marketing, dodging anyone who asks you to explain, and acting like a bit of a shit about it. I don’t think we need your posts.

[–] self@awful.systems 12 points 2 days ago

good, use your excel spreadsheet and not a tool that fucking sucks at it

 

this post has been making the rounds on Mastodon, for good reason. it’s nominally a post about the governance and community around C++, but (without spoiling too much) it’s written as a journey packed with cathartic sneers at a number of topics and people we’ve covered here before. as a quick preview, tell me this isn’t relatable:

This is not a feel good post, and to even call it a rant would be dismissive of the absolute unending fury I am currently living through as 8+ years of absolute fucking horseshit in the C++ space comes to fruition, and if I don’t write this all as one entire post, I’m going to physically fucking explode.

fucking masterful

an important moderator note for anyone who comes here looking to tone police in the spirit of the Tech Industry Blog Social Compact: lol

 

this article is about how and why four of the world’s largest corporations are intentionally centralizing the internet and selling us horseshit. it’s a fun and depressing read about crypto, the metaverse, AI, and the pattern of behavior that led to all of those being pushed in spite of their utter worthlessness. here’s some pull quotes:

Web 3.0 probably won’t involve the blockchain or NFTs in any meaningful way. We all may or may not one day join the metaverse and wear clunky goggles on our faces for the rest of our lives. And it feels increasingly unlikely that our graphic designers, artists, and illustrators will suddenly change their job titles to "prompt artist” anytime soon.

I can’t stress this point enough. The reason why GAMM and all its little digirati minions on social media are pushing things like crypto, then the blockchain, and now virtual reality and artificial intelligence is because those technologies require a metric fuckton of computing power to operate. That fact may be devastating for the earth, indeed it is for our mental health, but it’s wonderful news for the four storefronts selling all the juice.

The presumptive beneficiaries of this new land of milk and honey are so drunk with speculative power that they'll promise us anything to win our hearts and minds. That anything includes magical virtual reality universes and robots with human-like intelligence. It's the same faux-passionate anything that proclaimed crypto as the savior of the marginalized. The utter bullshit anything that would have us believe that the meek shall inherit the earth, and the powerful won't do anything to stop it.

 

after the predictable failure of the Rabbit R1, it feels like we’ve heard relatively nothing about the Humane AI Pin, which released first but was rapidly overshadowed by the R1’s shittiness. as it turns out, the reason why we haven’t heard much about the Humane AI pin is because it’s fucked:

Between May and August, more AI Pins were returned than purchased, according to internal sales data obtained by The Verge. By June, only around 8,000 units hadn’t been returned, a source with direct knowledge of sales and return data told me. As of today, the number of units still in customer hands had fallen closer to 7,000, a source with direct knowledge said.

it’s fucked in ways you might not have seen coming, but Humane should have:

Once a Humane Pin is returned, the company has no way to refurbish it, sources with knowledge of the return process confirmed. The Pin becomes e-waste, and Humane doesn’t have the opportunity to reclaim the revenue by selling it again. The core issue is that there is a T-Mobile limitation that makes it impossible (for now) for Humane to reassign a Pin to a new user once it’s been assigned to someone.

 

so Andreessen Horowitz posted another manifesto just over a week ago and it’s the most banal fash shit you can imagine:

Regulatory agencies have been green lit to use brute force investigations, prosecutions, intimidation, and threats to hobble new industries, such as Blockchain.

Regulatory agencies are being green lit in real time to do the same to Artificial Intelligence.

does this shit ever get deeper than Regulation Bad? fuck no it doesn’t. is this Horowitz’s attempt to capitalize on the Supreme Court’s judiciary coup? you fucking bet.

here’s some more banal shit:

We find there are three kinds of politicians:

Those who support Little Tech. We support them.

Those who oppose Little Tech. We oppose them.

Those who are somewhere in the middle – they want to be supportive, but they have concerns. We work with them in good faith.

I find there are three kinds of politicians:

  • those who want hamburger. I give them hamburger.
  • those who abstain from hamburger. I do not give them hamburger.
  • those who have questions about hamburger. I refer them to the shift supervisor in good faith.
 

(via mastodon)

 

the API is called Web Environment Integrity, and it’s a way to kill ad blockers first and a Google ecosystem lock-in mechanism second, with no other practical use case I can find

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