bitofhope @ bitofhope @awful.systems

Bistable multivibrator

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2 yr. ago

Oh my god, the incredibly important numpy import and the way it's not even reading the piped input but the clipboard using a shell command of all things are sending me. Is this the expertise you can gain in two weeks?

There's a little bit of new stuff in there, but it's all just corroborating the old or relatively minor. Still, it's a lot in one place.

No, obviously opinions like

• "if my MIT AI Lab mentor had sex with an underage sex worker on Epstein's teen rape island, that was only because he thought she consented",
• "stealing a kiss from a woman is fine and not a sexual assault, maybe perhaps at most it's supposedly sexual harassment which is not real and is actually fine",
• "I don't believe in bereavement leave. What if all your close friends and family die one after another? It’s conceivable you would be gone from the office for days, or weeks, if not months.¹ What if you lie about who is dying?",
• "Overtly sexualizing 'parody' ceremonies for a semi-fictitious church of Emacs centering around unprepared girls and women in my audience are fine and when people participate in them, there is certainly no peer pressure involved, not that I care if there is",
• "It's fine to throw a tantrum about Emacs supporting another compiler infrastructure Not Invented Here. LLVM/Clang is supported by Apple and has a permissive license instead of GPL so it's basically proprietary, right?",
• "You may have heard or read critical statements about me; <a href=https://website.made.by.my.sychophants.example.com>please make up your own mind.</a>",

are in the same category as "I think pineapple on pizza is delicious/disgusting" when it comes to evaluating someone's aptitude as a leader.

I advocate for Free Software despite RMS. I recognize the value of his good contributions and that I might not even have the concept of Free Software and its value without him. I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and the editors of the report make it clear that neither do they. I think Stallman is an embarrassment and a liability for the Free Software movement. I respect his moral integrity on software freedom and some other political causes (including his clumsy, yet justified condemnations of police brutality, and boycott of Coca-Cola company due to their use of fascist death squads to suppress Colombian trade unions), but his awful takes on issues of basic respect and empathy toward women, suspiciously fervent wilingness to defend sexual relations between teenage minors and adults, and a number of other gaffes (both ones listed in the report and some that are less morally detestable, but still embarrassing) are still bad enough that I'd be willing to elect an inanimate carbon rod as the leader of the movement before him.

1: It's conceivable that Richard Matthew Stallman has a secret humiliation fetish he indulges in by installing Oracle products on his secret Windows 11 computer while drinking Coca-Cola. I do not wish to imply that Richard Matthew Stallman has a secret humiliation fetish he indulges in by installing Oracle products on his secret Windows 11 computer while drinking Coca-Cola, but I will simply point out it's conceivable that Richard Matthew Stallman has such a secret humiliation fetish involving the aforementioned details, and that I have conceived such a scenario simply to prove it is conceivable, that (etc.).

And yet there are some tasks I wish I could do in NETCONF instead of the thing we're actually using, but apparently the documentation for this interface is difficult and expensive for the company to get my hands on, for reasons.

Little of this was news to me, but damn, laid out systematically like that, it's even more damning than I expected. And the stuff that was new to me certainly didn't help.

Very serious people at HN at it again:

The only argument I find here against it is the question of whether someone's personal opinions should be a reason to be removed from a leadership position.

Yes, of course they should be! Opinions are essential to the job of a leader. If the opinions you express as a leader include things like "sexual harassment is not a real crime" or "we shouldn't give our employees raises because otherwise they'll soon demand infinite pay" or "there's no problem in adults having sex with 14 year olds and me saying that isn't going to damage the reputation of the organization I lead" you're a terrible leader and and embarrassment of a spokesman.

Edit: The link submitted by the editors is [flagged] [dead]. Of course.

Ahh, of course it's from a spam blog. I was trying to come up with a reason for this picture to exist, the purpose it might be trying to serve, and all I could come up with was "a placeholder header image in a lorem ipsum blog template".

Well that's a mystery solved. I can now stop wasting my precious life thinking about this image.

while true; do fortune; done is a good way to spit information out fast.

Why was this a thing?

Publicity stunt for both SpaceX and Tesla, as well as Musk himself, and a successful one at that.

That was a wild ride of an article. It's also a good showcase of why it's usually not the best tech that wins, but who can secure the funding and the marketing.

A social app for uploading and swiping through short videos is not technically all that impressive. It takes quite a bit of infrastructure to scale and implement well, but it wasn't exactly science fiction in the early 2010s. He was not the only one around that time with a similar idea, anyone remember Vine? Ultimately, Snapchat and TikTok (née Musical.ly) had the bigger backing and more successful marketing. Maybe ten years from now the same idea will have been reinvented and people will point out what TikTok is today.

I remember the signs of a new AI spring from 2015 when DeepDream was in the news. It's entirely expected that a techie serial entrepreneur with an Open Source mindset would have tried to foster open collaboration in a potential new and exciting AI renaissance. For all his techbro tendencies I think his goals for his Open AI project seem laudable enough and he's entirely correct in blaming OpenAI for not living up to its name. It's not the biggest issue we should have with OpenAI -- being transparent about their research and open sourcing their products wouldn't make them environmentally sustainable or morally fair to us mortals who have to abide by copyright law -- but it's a legitimate point.

This, as it happens, is the nearly identical contention of Musk, in a federal lawsuit filed on Aug. 5 accusing OpenAI, Altman and Brockman of deceiving him into giving $44 million to a nonprofit that isn’t.

In a twisted way, this makes sense as an exercise for English class. Why would someone go to an autoplag image generator, type in a prompt (perhaps something like "laptop and smartphones on a table at a lakefront") and save this image. It's a question I can't easily answer myself. It's hard to imagine the intention behind wanting to synthesize this particular picture, but it's probably something we'll be asking often in the near future.

I can even understand the shrimp Jesus slop or soldiers with huge bibles stuff to an extent. I can understand what the intended emotional appeal is and at least feel something like bewilderment or amusement about the surreality of them. This one would be just banal even if it were a real photo, so why make this? The AI didn't have intent or imbue meaning in the image but surely someone did.

If he's so smart, why did he put the car in the asteroid belt and not on a road?

Oh man, XML is such a funny hype. What if we took S-expressions and made them less human readable, harder to parse programmatically and with multiple ways to do the same thing! Do I encode something an an element with the key as a tag and the value as the content, or do I make it an attribute of a tag? Just look at the schema, which is yet more XML! Include this magic URL at the top of your document. Want to query something from the document? Here you go! No, that's not a base64-encoded private key nor a transcript of someone's editing session in vim, that's an XPath.

JSON has its issues but at least it's only the worst of some worlds. Want to make JSON unparsable anyway, for a laugh? Try YAML, the serialization format recommended by four out of five Nordic countries!

I need to look up what auth protocols this guy has worked on so I can stay away from them.

I think we should require professionals not to use the thing currently termed AI.

Or if you think it's unreasonable to ask them not to contribute to a frivolous and destructive fad or don't think the environmental or social impacts are bad enough to implement a ban like this, at least maybe we should require professionals not to use LLMs for technical information

"I can safely bet that by 'all upvotes come from programming dot justworks dot dev dot infosec dot works' you actually mean 'a vast majority of upvotes come from these tech instances' even before reading your comment."

"Or in other words I correctly interpreted what you meant but apparently the way you said it is a problem because I prefer to blame users rather than peddlers."

Yea yea guns don't kill people, bullet impacts kill people. Dishonesty and incompetence are nothing new, but you may note that the wedding planner's unfounded confidence in ChatGPT exacerbated the problem in a novel way. Why did the planner trust the bogus information about Vegas wedding officiants? Is someone maybe presenting these LLM bots as an appropriate tool for looking up such information?

Sure, but you might have to sit next to a poor.

I'm sure a lot of people like WordPress, but for me personally this is a win-win situation.