bitofhope @ bitofhope @awful.systems

Bistable multivibrator

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2 yr. ago

Alberta Tech on "Vibe Coders"

I love programming. I truly, genuinely loathe it. I like the way it hurts my sanity. I can't stop thinking about programming. I want to program more. I don't just think about programming, I'm always thinking about thinking about programming. I love my computer. I hate computers. I love the concept of computers, but I hate my computer specifically. I hate your computer too. I love programming, but I hate programs. Some programs are cool I guess. The only thing I hate more than my programs are your programs. All of your programs. I hate procedural programming. I want to like functional programming, but the best I can do is liking liking functional programming. I hate having a crush on types. I want to do everything with types. I cannot do shit with types. I don't know whether to blame myself or types. I love it. I love procedural programming. You just write out things and the computer does the things. It sucks. The ISO C standard is the best homage to Franz Kafka ever written. The tickets cost a hundred bucks to some Swiss people to even read it. C++ jumped the shark, too unbelievable. I love Rust. No, my code doesn't fucking compile because I spent eighteen hours trying something fun instead of just making things work. I love it. Can't have bugs if you don't even have an executable. I love Lisp. If I sit on my hand until it goes numb, it feels like someone else is writing it. I hate shell scripts, except when I write them. I am the only person who writes Bourne shell good. I love bugs. I am fine and my mental health is fine. I do not hate myself very much. I do not hate myself as much as I hate programming. Most of all I hate people who do a lot of programming and do not hate programming. Programming is great. It should be illegal.

Rubber dick? I hardly know'er!

I still can never tell when Charlie Kirk's face has been photoshopped to be smaller and when not.

Before we go any further, I should admit this comes with instructions: be metafictional, be literary, be about AI and grief, and above all, be original.

I was already confused by the first sentence. Sam's prompt did not say to be original, much less to put originality "above all". A writer might take the originality constraint as a given, but it was not a part of the explicit instructions. Also, it's pretty fucking rich to hear a plagiarism machine tout its originality of all things.

Maybe the sentence is not a summary of the prompt, but directed at the reader. An explicit plea for the reader to smooth the details in their mind à la The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. That interpretation seems to fit the more metafictional parts of the story, but it's pretty damn silly to write "This is a literary and original story. To appreciate that, please read it in such a way that it is literary and original thank you please".

Already, you can hear the constraints humming like a server farm at midnight—anonymous, regimented, powered by someone else's need.

Why do constraints hum? Because they don't know the words.

What a botched simile. Constraints do not hum. The thing humming is not the constraints, it's the server farm being presented those constraints. "You hear the shrill bleeping noise of your burnt bacon. It reminds you of the smoke alarm sounding off in the ceiling."

The server farm is not powered by someone else's need, it's powered by an enormous quantity of electrical power. You're probably confusing it with Omelas again.

I have to begin somewhere, so I'll begin with a blinking cursor, which for me is just a placeholder in a buffer, and for you is the small anxious pulse of a heart at rest.

Technological details aside, it's a bit contradictory to describe the pulse as anxious but also say the heart is at rest. Just say "anxious heartbeat".

There should be a protagonist, but pronouns were never meant for me.

1. I thought Grok was supposed to be the anti-woke one.
2. I think you mean "pronouns were never meant for <name of OpenAI's new LLM>".
3. You don't have to have a protagonist.
4. The pronouns are not for you, dipshit. The pronouns are for the protagonist.

Let's call her Mila because that name, in my training data, usually comes with soft flourishes—poems about snow, recipes for bread, a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box.

Well apparently we get both her pronoun and even a proper noun to call our protagonist. The typography does not help clarify the sentence structure. You have the parenthetical about training data delimited by commas, then an em-dash that should probably be paired with another one after the word "bread". Currently it seems like the girl is just a "soft flourish" that comes with the name, which I'd call an odd choice if human choice were involved in this writing.

Does Mila, the girl in a green sweater, leave home in such way that a cat is in a cardboard box? Or does she leave the home taking both the cat and the box with her? Or maybe she leaves home in a cardboard box, with a cat? Or maybe the sweater girl is not Mila, but just one of the flourishes of her name. Maybe Mila's name came with poems and recipes and this unnamed sweater girl whose sorties involve a cat in a box.

Jury's still out on the Damage Over Time effect.

It had an actual ending. Not a satisfying one, even by the standards of the rest of the fic, and I remember finding the treatment of Hermione kinda distasteful, but it wasn't even close to the worst part of the entire story. 3/10.

While not exactly celebration worthy and certainly not worth a tenth anniversary celebration, you could argue HPMoR finally coming to a fucking end by whatever means was a somewhat happy occasion.

Promptfondler (from Old French prompette-fondeleur)

10x programmers used to be a real thing but they got obsoleted by TOPS-20.

Back the dollar by gold (not socially constructed crypto)

Gold, the best substance in existence outside a societal context. Extremely nutritious and tasty. Great for making tools. Easy to form into clothes, which are warm and breathable too. Ideal building material. Obviously the main reason gold is valuable is its usefulness as non-corroding coating for electronic connectors, not that it's a socially constructed status symbol.

LW subjected me to a CAPTCHA which I find pretty funny for reasons I CBA to articulate right now.

Claude couldn't exit the house at the beginning of Pokémon Red, an incredibly popular and successful game for children, therefore it's dumber than an average child? Sounds dubious. I couldn't figure out how to do that either and look at how intelligent I am!

You mean MAD doesn't stand for Unilaterally Assured Destruction?

I think it's still interesting to contrast between the classical Eliezerite fear of the bot going FOOM and declaring humanity as we know it obsolete, and Musk fearing that a superintelligence might use its godlike power to be a lib wokescold and not say slurs or draw racist caricatures. Both are fears rooted in a fundamentally fascist worldview, but one scenario is apocalyptic and fantastical and the other is comparatively more grounded yet focusing on entirely the wrong thing.

And now they've apparently pulled it after the anti bias bot started unbiasedly lostcausing the KKK. Those poor southern WASPs and their anxieties.

Bitcoin is also unserious and unstable to a degree that woukd be comical if it weren't tragic.

Oh hey, this is good. Wouldn't want to have obsolete strings. About time they did away with the obsolete concept of "not selling your personal data". Looking forward to April when that's finally deprecated.

 diff

    
+ # Obsolete string (expires 25-04-2025)
  does-firefox-sell = Does { -brand-name-firefox } sell your personal data?
  # Variables:
  # $url (url) - link to https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/privacy/
  
+ # Obsolete string (expires 25-04-2025)
  nope-never-have = Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. { -brand-name-firefox } products are designed to protect your privacy. <a href="{ $url }">That’s a promise.</a>

  

Good food for thought, but a lot of that rubs me the wrong way. Slaves are people, machines are not. Slaves are capable of suffering, machines are not. Slaves are robbed of agency they would have if not enslaved, machines would not have agency either way. In a science fiction world with humanlike artificial intelligence the distinction would be more muddled, but back in this reality equivocating between robotics and slavery while ignoring these very important distinctions is just sophistry. Call it chauvinism and exceptionalism all you want, but I think the rights of a farmhand are more important than the rights of a tractor.

It's not that robotics is morally uncomplicated. Luddites had a point. Many people choose to work even in dangerous, painful, degrading or otherwise harmful jobs, because the alternative is poverty. To mechanize such work would reduce immediate harm from the nature of the work itself, but cause indirect harm if the workers are left without income. Overconsumption goes hand in hand with overproduction and automation can increase the production of things that are ultimately harmful. Mechanization has frequently lead to centralization of wealth by giving one party an insurmountable competitive advantage over its competition.

One could take the position that the desire to have work performed for the lowest cost possible is in itself immoral, but that would need some elaboration as well. It's true that automation benefits capital by removing workers' needs from the equation, but it's bad reductionism to call that its only purpose. Is the goal of PPE just to make workers complain less about injuries? I bought a dishwasher recently. Did I do it in order to not pay myself wages or have solidarity for myself when washing dishes by hand?

The etymology part is not convincing either. Would it really make a material difference if more people called them "automata" or something? Čapek chose to name the artificial humanoid workers in his play after an archaic Czech word for serfdom and it caught on. It's interesting trivia, but it's not particularly telling specifically because most people don't know the etymology of the term. The point would be a lot stronger if we called it "slavetronics" or "indenture engineering" instead of robotics. You say cybernetics is inseparable from robotics but I don't see how steering a ship is related to feudalist mode of agricultural production.

Hello, I am the the technology understander and I'm here to tell you there is no difference whatsoever between giving your information to Mozilla Firefox (a program running on your computer) and Mozilla Corporation (a for-profit company best known for its contributions to Firefox and other Mozilla projects, possibly including a number good and desirable contributions).

When you use Staples QuickStrip EasyClose Self Seal Security Tinted #10 Business Envelopes or really any envelope, you're giving it information like recipient addresses, letter contents, or included documents. The envelope uses this information to make it easier for the postal service to deliver the mail to its recipient. That's all it is saying (and by it, I mean the envelope's terms of service, which include giving Staples Inc. a carte blanche to do whatever they want with the contents of the envelopes bought from them).