Seminar2250 @ Seminar2250 @awful.systems

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8 mo. ago

old gell-mann amnesia problem

I didn't know this had a name. Thank you!

I think, if you can wait long enough, there is a chance employers will be champing at the bit to hire people who actually know what the fuck they are talking about and whose ability to think hasn't been short-circuited by a tool that pretends to think for them.

That's what I am counting on. Could just be (definitely is) copium.

Very out of my depth here but thank you for this post and the links. This was delightful to read. 💖

in the fall of 2024, i was getting teams messages from my students that were clearly llm-generated

The purpose of this block of code is to efficiently BLAH FUCKING BLAH WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT

i have to assume it's only gotten worse

no need to apologize, i understand what you mean. my experience with mathematicians has been that this is really common. even the theoretical computer scientists (the "lemma, theorem, proof" kind) i have met do this kind of bullshit when they finally decide to write a line of code. hell, their pseudocode is often baffling --- if you are literally unable to run the code through a machine, maybe focus on how it comes across to a human reader? nah, it's more important that i believe it is technically correct and that no one else is able to verify it.

I don’t like how taking an approach of mediocre software engineering to mathematics is becoming more popular

would you be willing to elaborate on this? i am just curious because i took the opposite approach (started as a mathematician now i write bad python scripts)

The least-worst of the Chrome reskins is Vivaldi, which has no AI. It has its own adblocker, but it’s not as good a blocker as FIrefox with uBlock Origin. And Vivaldi’s not open source. But they’re relatively non-evil.

this made me cackle

very nice

I used Firefox for largely political reasons (summarized as "Google needs a competitor"), but it was becoming harder and harder to justify. Eventually, I just switched to a Chromium-based browser. I will say that, as an almost-good-enough solution until I wake up from this nightmare to a functioning Servo (🙏🙏🙏) , DNS level ad blocking (using Mullvad's DNS servers) + uBlock Origin Lite (filtering mode set to "complete") has been sufficient for me. It even blocks Spotify ads. I think it blocks YouTube ads as well, although I barely watch YouTube on my browser.

Ungoogled Chromium supports MV2 extensions and seems like a good choice if Firefox becomes unusable or you get fed up. I use Trivalent, a security hardened Chromium-based browser, but it may be tough to install if you aren't on Secureblue. Also it only supports MV3 extensions.

this shit is so fucking frustrating, just leave our browsers alone. we want security updates, not an unethically sourced bullshit-and-vulnerability-generator stapled onto the biggest attack surface on our fucking machine

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/my-goal-is-to-eliminate-every-line-of-c-and-c-from-microsoft-by-2030-microsoft-bets-on-ai-to-finally-modernize-windows

My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030. Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases. Our North Star is “1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code”. To accomplish this previously unimaginable task, we’ve built a powerful code processing infrastructure. Our algorithmic infrastructure creates a scalable graph over source code at scale. Our AI processing infrastructure then enables us to apply AI agents, guided by algorithms, to make code modifications at scale. The core of this infrastructure is already operating at scale on problems such as code understanding."

wow, and algorithms? i didn't think anyone had gotten that far

Alice: what is 2 + 2?

LLM: random.random() + random.random()

Alice: 1.2199404515268157 is better than nothing, i guess

yeah it was pretty wild

like we get it, you think your farts smell good, but this is an elevator sir

https://awful.systems/post/5776862/8966942 😭

also this guy is a bit of a doofus, e.g. https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/853934, where he is a dick to someone reporting a bug, and https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/885027, where someone points out that you can execute anything as root because of a security issue, and he argues like a total shithead

You mean that a program designed to let an unprivileged user
\ mount/unmount/eject anything he wants has a security flaw because it allows
\ him to mount/unmount/eject anything he wants? I'm shocked.
\
\ Implement a system that allows an appilcation to mount/unmount/eject USB
\ devices connected to the system securely, then make sure that system is
\ universally adopted on every linux install in the universe. Once you've done that, feel free to
\ re-open this ticket.

i would not invite this person to my birthday

the chair of my cs department at a public university expressed this sentiment

"the cat's out of the bag, now we must teach students to use it responsibly"

BECAUSE THAT HAS WORKED SO WELL BEFORE

(sorry for shouting)

something i was thinking about yesterday: so many people i respect used to respect have admitted to using llms as a search engine. even after i explain the seven problems with using a chatbot this way:

1. wrong tool for the job
2. bad tool
3. are you fucking serious?
4. environmental impact
5. ethics of how the data was gathered/curated to generate^[they call this "training" but i try to avoid anthropomorphising chatbots] the model
6. privacy policy of these companies is a nightmare
7. seriously what is wrong with you

they continue to do it. the ease of use, together with the valid syntax output by the llm, seems to short-circuit something in the end-user's brain.

anyway, in the same way that some vibe-coded bullshit will end up exploding down the line, i wonder whether the use of llms as a search engine is going to have some similar unintended consequences --- "oh, yeah, sorry boss, the ai told me that mr. robot was pretty accurate, idk why all of our secrets got leaked. i watched the entire series."

additionally, i wonder about the timing. will we see sporadic incidents of shit exploding, or will there be a cascade of chickens coming home to roost?

tom sawyer literally rolling in wealth

but he never helps huck finn out financially?

pretty shit story, mark

seize the meowns of production

sorry

as someone who identifies greatly with diogenes, i say: do not trust anyone who compares themself to diogenes

Like a complete fucking idiot, I paid for two years of protonmail right before discovering they are fascists. I would like to move to another provider. I have until August. I have been considering Forward Email. Anyone have thoughts on this provider or recommendations?

I just saw this. I sent an email to Framework a few days ago asking if they would delete my account and letting them know this was the reason.