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• Post #4500544

  It is remarkable to me that you cannot directly copy-paste the text of an error message out of the Chrome web console. The advice I find about copying the "object" to a global variable and then stringifying, or variants of this, are insane. The web runs on text. The console is displaying text on my screen, which means the "object" was already converted to text. This is gratuitous bureaucracy. I have to fill out the appropriate form to access text I can see with eyes. Maybe I...

• Post #4298889

  Re: https://lipn.info/@mevenlennonbertrand/116997917683191056 To riff on this a bit from a very different field at a very different scale, as a pretext to share an anecdote: When I was a graduate student I spent a fair amount of time (an embarrassing amount of time) trying to get a computer to learn how to play Tic-Tac-Toe (naughts and crosses) by self play, given minimal help. Why? Because it turns out to be significantly harder than you might think based on the simplicity of the game...

• Post #4218263

  Amy sufficiently advanced book scanning project is indistinguishable from book burning https://mstdn.ca/@dbattistella/117004005387778336 #AI #GenAI #Anthropic #books #BookBurning

• Post #4100594

  Re: https://discuss.systems/@ricci/116961677110890384 I've taken part in numerous computer science research projects that involved IRB review. I believe the system can work, even for cases like the above post. But Google and Stanford are bad actors that are taken at their word, and no system, IRB based or otherwise, is going to function properly if it cannot appropriately metabolize this reality. I was once in a meeting where a Google X person gushed about a project that used smart...

• Post #4100593

  Re: https://social.freebitcoin.gay/users/drew/statuses/01KY7HAXB9R8BZ60CXWB3P2B7Y I think the most important question is: why does anyone comply with what one incurious, self-centered, and self-important man, Linus Torvalds, says? Why is that most important? Because Linux does not belong to Linus Torvalds. It belongs to the world. Torvalds only gets to dictate if the people who are best-positioned to take that power from him fail to do so. From where I sit (as an outsider), he should have been...

• Post #4100592

  A lone quintillionaire cannot enjoy the outputs of the fully automated luxury capitalism machine if there is no surrounding human world to luxuriate in.

• Post #4069232

  I think I earned some kind of dad achievement today by twisting my beard up in a screwdriver trying to take the doorknob off my son's bedroom door, which he locked from the inside and for which we had no key

• Post #4013515

  The USA is engaged in a war of choice to defeat itself. It certainly is a special moment. https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/midweek-update-20-each-day-the-us #USPol #USWar #TrumpWar #US #Iran #geopolitics

• Post #3909014

  It's interesting (*) to me how sex robot/sex chatbot vendors pivot to classrooms and students in a climate where the so-called grownups in the room are regularly screaming about CSAM and introducing all manner of surveillance in response. Replikka: https://theluddite.org/post/replika.htmlRealDoll: https://neuromatch.social/users/jonny/statuses/116939614764592845 (and the links)#AI #education #SexBots #SexDolls (*) I'm using "interesting" as a tepid stand-in for a mix of emot...

• Post #3887909

  @Arindam@universeodon.com This says little-to-nothing about the "ongoing energy disruption this is causing and what the likely effects will be", nor about the absence of public dialog about it, which were the topics of my post.

• Post #3833553

  Yellow-orange skies from Canadian wildfire smoke, ever-worsening news about federal agents murdering an innocent person for no discernible reason, and the US continuing along its "war crimes as policy" trajectory. The Dystopia Index is high in Maine today. #maine #dystopia #USPol #MEPol #ClimateChange #wildfires

• Post #3762312

  @yoginho@spore.social Seems to be right up your alley, if you haven't come across it already: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262053617/towards-a-biosemiotic-theoretical-biology/

• Post #3742590

  Re: https://infosec.exchange/users/lcamtuf/statuses/116901998490591428 I don't find it surprising that people send LLM-generated docs, publish LLM-generated blog posts, etc. Writing is a chore and there's this big button labeled "get it done". Writing can be many things, but a chore? That's not something I entirely understand. I don't mean to sound like I'm hollering at this single point from this person's post, but it's a sentiment I've seen expressed b...

• Post #3723060

  Billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham on SpaceX and AI: "we should wish that it’s hype, because if it’s not, it’s a lot worse." From https://global.morningstar.com/en-gb/stocks/jeremy-grantham-spacex-it-will-be-amazing-if-it-doesnt-collapse #AI #SpaceX #hype #billionaires #economy #finance #investors

• Post #3672928

  Only a mind so subdued by slop and propaganda and advertising, a mind unpracticed in observation and inquiry and imagination—only such a mind could be complacent as its pockets are picked to fund that most terrible of horrors. Into the Gap

• Post #3629078

  It's like having a second brain. #fungus #LeafyBrain

• Post #3627369

  @soletan@brandenburg.social @christineburns This is not a "plan", it's carnival barking.

• Post #3604335

  Re: https://social.wildeboer.net/users/jwildeboer/statuses/116860157329810170 I realize this is beside the point, but personally I view the fact that code review is not considered interesting as a serious failure of computer science education. I'm invested in the latter, so it stands out for me. On the whole writers tend to love to read. I think they love it in part because their education led them to realize that learning to read well is both a good in itself and helps you become a better...

• Post #3579594

  A bit of a rant: the US culture wars have made it difficult to find reasonable, helpful parenting advice online. #US #USPol #CultureWar #parenting

• Post #2323700

  My wife has a new article in The Conversation honoring women's power from her perspective as a classicist in time for Mother's Day. From ancient goddesses to modern peace activists − Mother’s Day celebrates women’s political power On Mother’s Day, Americans go all out with gift-buying and dining out to honor the women in their lives. In fact, according to some estimates, consumer spending in the United States on this day is around US$34 billion. This consumerist emphasis has long been...

• Post #2323699

  Re: https://better.boston/users/athorn/statuses/116539002124892696 This is good news. ShotSpotter doesn't work, and functions to launder racism. Somehow the spotters are always installed in, and the "shots" are always "detected" in, certain kinds of neighborhoods, and you can probably guess which ones. I worked in Cambridge for many years, and more than once a police officer showed up at my place of work to demand security camera footage from us because ShotSpotter had...

• Post #2323698

  Technology demands that the world be a subset of itself.

• Post #1998523

  I just had an interaction on LinkedIn in which the person claimed we don't code anymore, we "manipulate data". When I pushed back, they gave a PHP regular expression as an example. Apparently what they meant by "manipulate data" is "modify highly-structured strings according to a syntax", an activity they don't seem to recognize as coding. 🤦‍♂ Do instructors just not teach the code-data duality anymore? Data is code is data is now a mystery? #ComputerScience...

• Post #1998522

  That anti-datacenter-moratorium article in Jacobin folks are talking about is embarrassingly bad, and wrong in basic facts that could have been easily verified. By my read this is carrying water for tech companies, something you'd think any self-styled socialist would be so allergic to they'd burst into flames. What a world. #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #DataCenters #NoAI #NoDataCenters #Jacobin #socialism

• Post #1998521

  I had to move an 84 Gbyte file from one physical disk to another, and found myself feeling impatient about how long it was taking. So, I calculated that 84 Gbyte is roughly the storage space of 58,333 1.44 Mbyte floppy disks, which was the largest storage unit I had available when I was a kid, and my sense of proportion returned. It would have taken considerably longer to copy over 58,000 floppies. #tech #dev #computers #storage

• Post #1998520

  I heard someone suggest that "bar rules" need to be amended. Besides avoiding politics and religion, people should avoid talking about AI too. My first thought was that AI is already covered, since depending on who you're talking to it's a political project, a religion, or both. #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #BarRules #religion #politics

• Post #1998519

  Another in a growing list of evidence that the financial underpinnings of the AI mania are coming unglued. One speaks of "exposure" to a concerning risk, not to a bonanza of wealth creation. Some of the quotes in this article seem to be cherrypicked to minimize alarm, which I disagree with: there is cause for alarm. Looking between the lines (e.g. use of words like "exposure" and "choking"), one sees a dismal picture emerge. Banks seek to offload risk to avoid ‘ch...

• Post #1890384

  "KDE Connect has unexpectedly crashed". Oh no, KDE, I expected it to crash. It crashes every single time I turn off my bluetooth headphones, and always has. In fact I've come to think of the headphones' off button as a KDE Connect off button, that's how much I expect it to crash. #KDE #Linux #KDEConnect #computers #software

• Post #1663936

  The typical webapp login process for me is anywhere from 5 to 7 steps, and I'd say I give up about 5-10% of the time after the 2nd CAPTCHA. I can't imagine this is good for anybody, and it almost surely does not reduce abuse either. Just a swirling dark pattern feeding on itself. Everyone likes to ape post-9/11 airport "security" for some reason. #tech #dev #SecurityTheater #DarkPatterns #UI #UX #security

• Post #1553217

  One of the things I'm finding stunning about the Vercel breach is how many people are saying "I had $VERY_LARGE_NUMBER of OAuth apps authorized to my $VERY_IMPORTANT_ACCOUNT and had to go through them all". I have like 2 OAuth apps authorized on any account that matters to me, and I review them fairly regularly and remove ones I don't use or don't remember. I also never accept "allow all" for any app. Apparently I'm weird in this way? I just feel like not doin...