V0ldek

joined 2 years ago
[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago

I'm sorry but this is zero percent surprising like ye of course he is, he was addicted to anime porn before AI generation probably

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That's because we haven't helped them achieve their full potential

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 5 points 2 days ago

Watch till end the third option made me choke on my drink it was way too funny

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 9 points 2 days ago (3 children)

We should have a cognitohazard tag

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 8 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Finally, after years of research, we have managed to connect the smartest Orca to a text-to-speech device! What great wisdom will those superinteligent creatures bestow on us? How can we solve our world's problems?

Eat the rich.

... What?

Like take your billionaires, right, roast them and then eat their flesh. Burn their yachts too. We can help.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 11 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Don't they just radiate animal magnetism

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 10 points 2 days ago

Sorry darling, but according to my game-theoretical model this discussion ends in my victory in every possible combination of moves, so can we just skip to the point you apologise?

Where... where are you going

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I, for one, am excited, because this could be the ultimate bubble. Like think about it, crypto was shit, but at least it was vaguely a thing, like you could buy Bitcoin and order drugs through SilkRoad and you'd have drugs, that's a material use case. LLMs suck ass but ChatGPT exists, you can go to that website and type shit and it will respond, it's garbage but it's garbage you can touch and smell.

Quantum has none of this. It's ultimate vaporware, a technology that literally does not exist, you can't have a PoC, you can't have an early version that you'll lie about being a "big step towards General Quantum Computing" or whatever. This is SV's wet dream, can we make money from basically nothing at all?

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 10 points 2 days ago

I wrote this post quickly and without thoroughly studying what people have historically written on this topic.

I think that goes without saying on LW but glad someone put it in writing

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Banning him just before the funny number too, oof

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 7 points 3 days ago

Nice, I petittion for this to be the new description of SneerClub just like that magnificent Yud quote was on Reddit

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 2 points 1 week ago

So I was thinking about this recently with a colleague and there are two things that I think would be useful:

  • I would actually like a HUD? Like a minimap when walking through the city. Or the ability to popup a small YT video in the corner of my eye. I have no idea if it would actually work with how human vision works, but that's a cool idea for me.
  • Universally good idea: smart glasses that detect advertising billboards and other shit like that and automatically replace them with something. Could be just with white space, or with pleasant landscapes, or giant dicks if you're into that. The possibilities are quite endless. Would be universally beloved by everyone.
 

This is a nice post, but it has such an annoying sentence right in the intro:

At the time I saw the press coverage, I didn’t bother to click on the actual preprint and read the work. The results seemed unsurprising: when researchers were given access to AI tools, they became more productive. That sounds reasonable and expected.

What? What about it sounds reasonable? What about it sounds expected given all we know about AI??

I see this all the time. Why do otherwise skeptical voices always have the need to put in a weakening statement like this. "For sure, there are some legitimate uses of AI" or "Of course, I'm not claiming AI is useless" like why are you not claiming that. You probably should be claiming that. All of this garbage is useless until proven otherwise! "AI does not increase productivity" is the null hypothesis! It's the only correct skeptical position! Why do you seem to need to extend benefit of the doubt here, like seriously, I cannot explain this in any way.

 

An excellent post by Ludicity as per usual, but I need to vent two things.

First of all, I only ever worked in a Scrum team once and it was really nice. I liked having a Product Owner that was invested in the process and did customer communications, I loved having a Scrum Master that kept the meetings tight and followed up on Retrospective points, it worked like a well-oiled machine. Turns out it was a one-of-a-kind experience. I can't imagine having a stand-up for one hour without casualties involved.

A few months back a colleague (we're both PhD students at TU Munich) was taking a piss about how you can enroll in a Scrum course as an elective for our doctor school. He was in general making fun of the methodology but using words I've never heard before in my life. "Agile Testing". "Backlog Grooming". "Scrum of Scrums". I was like "dude, none of those words are in the bible", went to the Scrum Guide (which as far as I understood was the only document that actually defined what "Scrum" meant) and Ctrl+F-ed my point of literally none of that shit being there. Really, where the fuck does any of that come from? Is there a DLC to Scrum that I was never shown before? Was the person who first uttered "Scrumban" already drawn and quartered or is justice yet to be served?

Aside: the funniest part of that discussion was that our doctor school has an exemption that carves out "credits for Scrum and Agile methodology courses" as being worthless towards your PhD, so at least someone sane is managing that.

Second point I wanted to make was that I was having a perfectly happy holiday and then I read the phrase "Agile 2" and now I am crying into an ice-cream bucket. God help us all. Why. Ludicity you fucking monster, there was a non-zero chance I would've gone through my entire life without knowing that existed, I hate you now.

 

Turns out software engineering cannot be easily solved with a ~~small shell script~~ large language model.

The author of the article appears to be a genuine ML engineer, although some of his takes aged like fine milk. He seems to be shilling Google a bit too much for my taste. However, the sneer content is good nonetheless.

First off, the "Devin solves a task on Upwork" demo is 1. cherry picked, 2. not even correctly solved.

Second, and this is the absolutely fantastic golden nugget here, to show off its "bug solving capability" it creates its own nonsensical bugs and then reverses them. It's the ideal corporate worker, able to appear busy by creating useless work for itself out of thin air.

It also takes over 6 hours to perform this task, which would be reasonable for an experienced software engineer, but an experienced software engineer's workflow doesn't include burning a small nuclear explosion worth of energy while coding and then not actually solving the task. We don't drink that much coffee.

The next demo is a bait-and-switch again. In this case I think the author of the article fails to sneer quite as much as it's worthy -- the task the AI solves is writing test cases for finding the Least Common Multiple modulo a number. Come on, that task is fucking trivial, all those tests are oneliners! It's famously much easier to verify modulo arithmetic than it is to actually compute it. And it takes the AI an hour to do it!

It is a bit refreshing though that it didn't turn out DEVIN is just Dinesh, Eesha, Vikram, Ishani, and Niranjan working for $2/h from a slum in India.

 

I'm not sure if this fully fits into TechTakes mission statement, but "CEO thinks it's a-okay to abuse certificate trust to sell data to advertisers" is, in my opinion, a great snapshot of what brain worms live inside those people's heads.

In short, Facebook wiretapped Snapchat by sending data through their VPN company, Onavo. Installing it on your machine would add their certificates as trusted. Onavo would then intercept all communication to Snapchat and pretend the connection is TLS-secure by forging a Snapchat certificate and signing it with its own.

"Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted, we have no analytics about them," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a 2016 email to Javier Olivan.

"Given how quickly they're growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them," Zuckerberg continued. "Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this."

Zuckerberg ordered his engineers to "think outside the box" to break TLS encryption in a way that would allow them to quietly sell data to advertisers.

I'm sure the brave programmers that came up with and implemented this nonsense were very proud of their service. Jesus fucking cinammon crunch Christ.

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