V0ldek

joined 2 years ago
[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 3 points 1 hour ago

Oh look, it's literally "we're still early", I missed the classics

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 4 points 1 hour ago

My completely PIDOOMA take is that if you're self-interested and manipulative you're already treating most if not all people as lesser, less savvy, less smart than you. So just the fact that you can half-ass shit with a bot and declare yourself an expert in everything that doesn't need such things like "collaboration with other people", ew, is like a shot of cocaine into your eyeball.

LLMs' tone is also very bootlicking, so if you're already narcissistic and you get a tool that tells you yes, you are just the smartest boi, well... To quote a classic, it must be like being repeatedly kicked in the head by a horse.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 17 points 5 days ago

Oh for fuck's sake

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Ye it's called a "grift"

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 4 points 1 week ago

What brilliant observation, your mom must be proud

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 10 points 1 week ago

They clank when you hit the gpu with a big hammer

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 19 points 1 week ago (2 children)

"If you said something different you would've said something different" what brilliant rhetoric, your mom must be proud

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 8 points 1 week ago (4 children)

I think everyone can agree on "this is a slur that we took from StarWars to be derogatory and justify our distaste and opposition to genAI", it's just that some people think that's a bad thing?

Like it appears some people think using the n-word is bad because it's Bad™, not because there's an actual dehumanising effect on a group of people. What's your argument, that we're dehumanising Grok? Ye because it's not a human! "But if it was about the Jews it'd be bad" ye and if my grandmother had wheels she would have been a bike, what the fuck is your point?

As for the origins I also think it is very important that the word is "clanker" from StarWars, since their droids are not sentient, whereas both "toaster" and "skinjob" are actually used as a hateful term towards sentient beings. BSG goes out of its way to drive in the fact that genociding Cylons would also be bad, actually. The sentience of "skinjobs" is like the whole point of Blade Runner.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago

Isn't it insane that there is a separate special fapcircle of open-source contributors that are also untenable human beings?

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 11 points 1 week ago

Unrelated note but why is fashtech even a thing and why did no one warn me about it before I made my career choice, I could've been a happy person

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

the fash papertrail for Ladybird really shouldn’t have to go much farther than them receiving money from fascists in a group that included other fascists but here’s more anyway

https://possum.city/notes/a504c0e7vwdj000h

That link goes to a post that links to 4 Twitter posts, the first one of which is just a screenshot of a PR (?); then a post "basically @BrendanEich right now", name I haven't heard before but apparently that's the guy that made Brave (how the fuck does that project still exist) so at least this one tracks; then there's a donation from ProtonPrivacy so I'd need receipts for them being fashy, I know they were doing that stupid AI bot but that's all; and finally some talk by a guy I've never heard of at a conference I've never heard of for FUTO which the only bell it rings for me is the university in Nigeria but that doesn't make sense

I need a fucking codebook to read these receipts, what is going on

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 6 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

At both unis I was at (U of Warsaw, TU Munich) courses with heavy loads contract out grading to students of the university. E.g. during my M.Sc. I was grading submissions for one of the B.Sc. courses I already completed. You get a small amount of money for that.

Contracting out to a company sounds extremely USA-pilled, as in "the university does not have enough resources so, instead of increasing their budget, we use THE FREE MARKET BABY and have a company whose whole existence is dependent on that resource hole continuing to exist."

 

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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