← Feed

Posts

• Post #4325500

  Say what you want about the AI industry, but it has successfully created a flavour of comic book villain for every taste. xAI: Let's re-enact Nazi Germany, but run by a 13-year-old boy with infinite pocket money! OpenAI: The literal final boss of late-stage extractive capitalism. Meta: The only thing the Stasi did wrong was that they weren't a private for-profit corporation. Anthropic: We will take away your mouth, and you will need to scream.

• Post #4310777

  One day, Alice was at her computer, pondering a tricky programming problem. Seeing her, Bob remarked: "Poor Alice. If only you knew to pay subscription to AI companies, you wouldn't have to program." Alice responded: "Poor Bob. If only you knew how to program, you wouldn't have to pay subscription to AI companies."

• Post #4297641

  People like to talk about tricks and useful behaviours they have trained animals to do. Is there something an animal has trained *you* to do?

• Post #4289543

  It occurs to me that if that goon from Anthropic ("a book is just a delivery mechanism", shoving it into AI training doesn't destroy anything but simply moves it from one encoding to another) believes what he says, then he has just admitted that they're still committing industrial-scale copyright violation. If they're *not* doing that (because the book contents are no longer meaningfully available through their LLM), then they're destroying books. Pick one. They can&#...

• Post #4270278

  Suggest me some video games! (I don't like first-person shooters, and I don't like photorealistic graphics - the latter is because I actually enjoy letting my imagination do a bit of the work, archaic as that might seem today.)

• Post #4243132

  There's a deeply depressing picture going around of Anthropic's enormous collection of books that they shredded to build their anti-library. So here is a picture of my collection of well-cared-for and -about books. I will add a picture of each subcollection in the comments - and please, *please* add a picture of your own book collection, if you have one. It doesn't matter if it's humble, as long as it is books that are meaningful to you and that AI companies *aren't* adding...

• Post #4115965

  is it unconscionable and selfish to even *want* to remain alive in a world that is in the middle of a deep environmental crisis and where you no longer have any value?

• Post #4062796

  it presently feels like everybody in the software trade is scrambling to cash out with as much value as possible before it's all automated away. i sorely miss moving slow and fixing things. and, even more, i miss even having any place in the world. i miss the future.

• Post #4046316

  "oh, but you're funny! and you know so many things! people like having you around!" any currently existing llm chatbot can tell better jokes *and* has a better supply of useless trivia than i do

• Post #3987341

  The promise of generative AI is creative works without friction, but the only thing that has no friction is the void.

• Post #3920442

  It will never stop being funny that AI company execs keep shouting a variation of "Gentlemen, you can't plagiarize this! This is the plagiarism machine!" every time a Chinese lab releases a model.

• Post #3406721

  "Humans are to blame for climate change". Really? Is a Bangladeshi seamstress to blame? Is a street child from a Brazilian favela to blame? Or perhaps a subsistence fisherman from Somalia or an elderly tribeswoman from Papua New Guinea? While those who are to blame are definitely human, they are some quite specific humans.

• Post #3077883

  I'll readily consider myself an AI hater, but I will not participate in internet pile-ons against open source maintainers for using AI, however disagreeable I find it.

• Post #3077882

  I have apparently discovered the perfect tenting stands for a Model 100, by accident. (I replaced my loudspeaker stands with some raised ones, and decided just for fun to see if the older ones fit the M100. They do! The screw holes line up in the perfect position to have the keyboard in, no less. However, they are *heavy*, and non-adjustable.)

• Post #3054966

  I've had to use AI at work for a while now, and I have a lot of thoughts about that that I'm still working out how to express and how I feel about. But one thing that I keep coming back to when interacting with conversational systems is this: It feels downright insulting to be misunderstood by a computer.

• Post #3054965

  All turtles, crocodilians, birds and tuataras lay eggs (well, except the males), but there are some examples of live births among lizards and snakes. But how common is this?

• Post #3054964

  I have crawled down a memory allocation and GC rabbit hole. I've brought some things with me that I didn't have last time, and there are some other obstacles than last time too. This is my natural habitat, though. It feels like home. (The neighbouring interpreter design rabbit hole also beckons, though.)

• Post #3054963

  Denmark has a government again! I'm not entirely sure this is an improvement of affairs.

• Post #2972257

  I sometimes see people remark on pictures of balding men (usually right-wing men with weird ideas about masculinity) who have had hair implants or the like that this is "gender-affirming care", and I genuinely don't understand this. Isn't male-pattern baldness pretty much by definition an element of masculine gender? (Myself, I started going bald in my teens. I really hated it back then, but even then I never really figured it made me any more or less of a &amp...

• Post #2972256

  So, my alternate-history-retrocomputer / fantasy computer project. I want to limit how much RAM it can have, and I've already decided on a 32-bit address space and register size. But how much RAM would seem reasonable for a "home Lisp Machine" from that other timeline where my Amiga had been a Lisp Machine?

• Post #2826923

  My baobab pre-bonsai had sprouted a leaf in a place where I didn't particularly want it to have one, so I decided to clip it off and eat it. (It still produces very large leaves, because I haven't started actually bonsai training it yet). The good: The flavour itself is yummy. You could definitely make salads or the like out of this. Tastes like a fairly typical leafy green, but very intense, a bit "peppery". The YMMV: While the leaf surface itself is dry, it...

• Post #2826922

  I miss liking computers.

• Post #2513191

  Which of the following pairs of animals are more closely related?

• Post #2459413

  ...and two of my bonsai have an aphid infestation. I live on the fourth floor. How the hell do aphids even get here?!

• Post #2459412

  (It's odd, really. I've reached a point where I basically feel like I've managed to attain a pretty nice life, in spite of it all - if only it wasn't for AI.)

• Post #2459411

  I've tried tenting my Model 100 using a pair of Maglift stands. Because the M100 is a bit heavier than the little 40% boards these things are made for, it's *hard* to find a correct placement.

• Post #2459410

  I'm playing Everything is Crab. But since I am who I am, I have taken upon myself a special challenge (aside from not becoming crab): After I got the "patient" genetic (in itself a highly reptilian trait), I am playing it as Everything is Reptile. I only pick reptile-like mutations. No fur, no exoskeleton, no pincers, no tentacles, etc.

• Post #2118449

  Also, I've reached the point where I basically live in a library now. I am very happy with this. (And I've literally spent my entire life on this collection. The very first book I ever read - the actual, physical copy - is in here.)

• Post #1952485

  "Who is the bigger threat: Xi, Putin or Trump?" is an actual headline on the national public service TV channel's news feed, and I am tired of living in interesting times.

• Post #1952482

  (I think I'm going to make another round of the animal family tree quiz I did last year, because that was so fun! But I already used up all the most head-scratching ones I know, so first I have to gather new material.)