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antifuchs @awful.systems
Posts 4
Comments 58
None of those words are in the Bible 2.0 (Tossed Salads And Scrumbled Eggs — Ludicity)
  • Yes we do AGIle: we ask ChatGPT what our customers want and then ask it to write software to fulfill those requirements. Every two weeks it writes up some imaginary sprint retrospective meeting notes. Planning poker doesn’t work so well, this iteration isn’t so good at bluffing yet.

  • Salesforce invites a horse into the hospital
  • The industry called it “field engineering” previously, and “customer support” prior to that; renames happened every time the execs heard how this portion of their business is only a cost center and can easily be done by chat bots (to which the customer success people would say, good luck with that).

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 22 September 2024
  • Hm, I don’t really see the sneer. They wrote a nasty bug, got notified and had a patch out for it within 36h. The remediations look reasonable too: better privacy, less firebase, actual security audits; even the bounty program is probably the right call (but they result in so many shit reports, it’s probably a wash).

    I gotta admit I’m kind of partial to them and their browser? It’s the non-Brave one that ships with an Adblocker by default, has much nicer UI than the existing ones, and the sync thing isn’t half bad (if it doesn’t sync security badness to all your instances, ouch). Sure they sound like a cult but I guess that’s how browser dev gets funded since the 1990s.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 22 September 2024
  • Hm, what do you mean by js-ware? That its front end uses JavaScript libraries? I guess, fair. Backend is python though (:

    As a stunt (when I was unhappy with the previous linkding frontend), a pal and I wrote https://github.com/lz-bookmarks/lz, which is basically just linkding without the useful api and frontend (which is rust+webassembly, lol). Has a decent cli though, and interlinking between bookmarks and other URLs.

  • Random Positivity Thread: Happy Computer Memories
  • LOL, now that you mention it, I think installing FreeBSD was exactly the thing that got my MBR blown up that way. Ever since, I’ve taken a snapshot of the first 512 bytes of any bios-formatted drive…

  • Random Positivity Thread: Happy Computer Memories
  • Some cool stuff: I went to a cs high school kind of deal and we learned some pretty fun stuff, then were encouraged to experiment:

    • teacher showed us to render the Mandelbrot set, and when I had that written I wrote a little thing that lets you zoom into it (it was buggy, but who cares! Infinite fractals!)

    • in school, I installed Linux on my pc, played around and then fucked up my primary disk’s boot sector and partition table. That meant my DOS install would be fucked up too (and I needed that for homework!), so I read up on MBRs and realized that if I remember the size of the partition, I can restore it to how it was.… and ext2 gives you a correct size even if the partition table is screwy, meaning that with the first primary partition activated I could find the correct size and then make an entry for the second one, and so on, until everything was working again. Data loss prevented!

    • I’d written a pretty good solution to a homework problem in C, but typo’d a cleanup command and deleted the source file. The previous data loss scenario had prepared me: I rebooted into a rescue disk, grepped the disk drive for parts of the source and got the file back! (Got multiple copies of the file back, in fact. That’s when I started using version control, hah)

  • California governor: Generative AI will fix homelessness — based on a 2023 sales pitch
  • What a blessed world we live in - 2014 a homeless person had to learn to code in order to deserve the things they need to live. Today, they just need to become a prompt engineer. The trajectory of the world bends towards justice, after all!

  • Nature: Al generates covertly racist decisions about people based on their dialect

    www.nature.com AI generates covertly racist decisions about people based on their dialect | Nature

    Hundreds of millions of people now interact with language models, with uses ranging from help with writing1,2 to informing hiring decisions3. However, these language models are known to perpetuate systematic racial prejudices, making their judgements biased in problematic ways about groups such as A...

    Got the pointer to this from Allison Parrish who says it better than I could:

    > it's a very compelling paper, with a super clever methodology, and (i'm paraphrasing/extrapolating) shows that "alignment" strategies like RLHF only work to ensure that it never seems like a white person is saying something overtly racist, rather than addressing the actual prejudice baked into the model.

    6

    Yet another completely normal use of generative AI: not-obviously-illegal CSAM

    School student tells AI to put 20 other students’ faces on nude pictures, shares them in chat; it takes months for anyone including the school administrators to act because of some extremely, uh, dubious loophole.

    If someone does that in photoshop, it’s a crime; if they do it in AI pretending to be photoshop, it’s somehow not. Gotta love this legal system’s focus on minor technicalities rather than the harm done.

    3

    The “I will piledrive you” post, discussed on the Better Offline podcast

    They have Nik Suresh (the author) on, as well as Robert Evans. I haven’t listened to it all yet, but it’s fun so far.

    8

    Nix project: ban? What ban?

    discourse.nixos.org Should jonringer get his commit bit back?

    Hi, I haven’t read this thread and I don’t really care to read all of it. I’ve always intended to get back into the Nix community after the issues with community management are sorted to my satisfaction. If jonrigner gets his commit bit back, I’m gonna be gone for good. Create whatever future you...

    Should jonringer get his commit bit back?

    They invited that guy back. I do have to admit, I admire his inability to read a room.

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