bitofhope @ bitofhope @awful.systems

Bistable multivibrator

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Here's a card for the CAH thing @self posted

Snowclone Titles Considered Harmful; or: __________

If I post this kind of inane drivel, I'll at least make sure the title does not suggest it to be my best work.

Yea kinda like during a famine the best course of action is for everyone to hoard and binge on as much food as possible. That will force the crops to become more bountiful.

FAANG? What is this, 2021? Lol Netflix.

Well if you drop Netflix from the acronym it kinda becomes a slur.

I'm just happy "MANGA" didn't catch on. Japanese comics don't deserve to ve associated with giant tech corps.

I agree, except with the first sentence.

1. I don't think a computer program has passed the Turing test without interpreting the rules in a very lax way and heavily stacking the deck in the bot's favor.
2. I'd be impressed if a machine does something hard even if the machine is specifically designed to do that. Something like proving the Riemann hypothesis or actually passing an honest version of Turing test.

Seeing as the notion of "progress" in this space is entirely subjective and based on general vibes, it's easy to make a case for any curve shape.

I could make a passable argument that it's actually a noisy sinusoid.

Cooperate as in turn someone into a barrel maker.

All those years and thousands of person-hours of education and public awareness campaigning. The incredible work put into organizing efforts to inform the populace through PSAs, grassroots programs and viral influencers. Tireless attempts to work with educational institutions to make this common knowledge, but a lot of you all still don't get it. Ape holders can use multiple slurp juices on a single ape

Yes yes, or the tree or the song or the band or the game developer or any of the towns… lots of things are named after the plant.

I think Star Citizen was the true NFTs before NFTs became a thing. Essentially the same thing as this with cosmetic differences at best.

Especially funny when you remember he got kicked out from PayPal for insisting on Windows Server intead of a unix platform.

Makes sense. Since buying Twitter he has seemingly prioritized (minimizing) its benefit to humanity even at the cost of profits and commercial interests.

Basic Bayesian reasoning. Assuming the near-certain and certainly not at all racist (except in the good way of course) prior that any insititution from Chiyeena should be considered a malevolent and incompetent actor, P(LL) turns out very high.

Now one might object that there have been multiple outbreaks of various coronaviruses in the last handful of decades, quite a few of which became or had the potential to become pandemics, and as far as any credible evidence is concerned, all of them were zoonotic in origin. Thus we should, absent strong evidence to the contrary, assume zoonotic origin of SARS-CoV-2 as the default null hypothesis. However, this postulate is debunked by the fact that it doesn't explain how the commies are evil and out to get us.

Calling it a majority might be unwarranted. EAs have bought a lot of mosquito nets, and most of those donations were probably not made with the thinking "can't lift-and-shift this old brain of mine into the cloud if everyone dies of malaria".

That said, the data presented on that page is incredibly noisy, with a very small sample size for the individual respondents who specified the cause they were donating to and numbers easy to skew with a few big donations. There's also not much in there about the specific charities being donated to. For all I can tell they could just be spinning some AI bullshit as anything from public health to criminal justice reform. Speaking of which,

AI charities (which is not equivalent to simulated humans, because it also includes climate change, nearterm AI problems, pandemics etc)

AI is to climate change as indoor smoking is to fire safety, nearterm AI problems is an incredibly vague and broad category and I would need someone to explain to me why they believe AI has anything to do with pandemics. Any answer I can think of would reflect poorly on the one holding such belief.

Pixel art of an adult person female holding a text sign that says adult person chicken.

BigTech, which critically depends on hyper-targeted ads for the lion share of its revenue, is incapable of offering AI model outputs that are plausible given the location / language of the request.

Hardly surprising given how insistently the ad industry seems to be to show me ads for things I actively dislike or otherwise wildly missing with the products, services or attention seekers it tries to match to my interests and demographic profile.

If it is indeed true that AI companies just do naive search-and-replaces on the inputs to have more diversity in the outputs, that seems like a really crude and low-effort solution and also way more giving a shit than I would expect from an AI company.

Ultimately I think the main disagreements between me and hackernewses is twofold. I don't mind seeing black people, but I also don't take LLMs and ML image generation models seriously as a tool for anything other than shitposting and spam production.

I distance myself from the findings presented in my texts last night where the article claimed I "need u pleasee come back", postulated you are a "hrartless bicht" and concluded that further inquiry is required into the question of whether you would be willing to "send nudes". I distinctly remember my drinking buddies who peer reviewed them unanimously recommending publication.

there’s an upvoted post on here about how to take away the average working class tech worker’s job

Are you talking about mine? The point of the post was that techbros and tech industry workers are not the same thing, and that actually the tech workers whose valor those CEOs are stealing are vulnerable to the same tactics techbro startups have used to fuck over workers in other sectors.

A lot of software devs and tech workers are marginalised, neurodivergent or otherwise socially disadvantaged. Too many people in this thread are completely ignoring any kind of intersectionality just because they’re men.

A lot of people in every industry are marginalized, neurodivergent or otherwise socially disadvantaged.

I am a queer, neurodivergent, left wing tech worker myself. Most of the regulars here are probably at least two or three of those things as well. I know lots of tech workers who are in no way techbros, but I've also met some of the least class conscious, most obliviously racist and misogynist opportunist motherfuckers who would lick the boots of every billionaire on earth for a chance to join their ranks. This is about the latter.

No, that is not what I meant. Not all software devs are techbros at all. Techbros are people characterized by their romanticization of computing history viewed through a corporatist lens; an obsession with IT and Fintech megacorps and trend-du-jour bandwagons like blockchains or AI; a façade of laid back trendiness; business ideas based on rent-seeking and value extraction; or attempts to minimize, excuse and deny the deep-seated misogyny and racism within startup and tech corporate culture.

What I'm saying is that there is a certain prestige (albeit a steadily diminishing one) associated with the technical professions, paricularly software development, and the venture capital types are taking advantage of that fact by acting as if their wealth is built on their technical talents (e.g. Paul Graham appointing himself and his news site as champions of hacker culture or Elon Musk attempting his out-of-touch idea of code review).

The idea was that if you hated both techbros and actual computer nerds, you could help ruin that prestige by taking a page from the VCs themselves (Airbnb in particular being an Y Combinator startup). Make everyone an "independent contractor", shift the ever-accumulating capital expenditure on them, make the crabs drag each other back into the bucket and position yourself as the purely extractive middle man. See how the techbros like it when you do it to their little sacred cow industry.

And as @froztbyte points out, some of this has already happened. I'm just trying to imagine the cognitive dissonance of pretending you're a genius programmer while also believing (even celebrating) that LLMs will replace software developers.

Yes, I know gig economy for programmers already exists, but to really make it the UberBnB for Upwork, the idea is to push the CAPEX to the workers themselves.

Uber became the world's biggest taxi company while owning no cars. Airbnb became the world's biggest hotel chain while owning no hotels. Imagine being the world's biggest cloud while owning no servers.