You’re thinking of my brother, Zathras.
- 1 Post
- 70 Comments
deborah@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•The CIA is using generative AI as a search engineEnglish2·10 months agothey probably do. I worked for a content-as-a-service company that had a contract to deliver our product, airgapped, to a three-letter agency on a regular schedule, and we were a tiny company. Microsoft’s biggest customer is probably the U.S. government; I’d be shocked if they don’t provide an in-house airgapped set of full Azure services for the entire intelligence agency system.
deborah@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 14 July 2024English17·10 months agoFrom the just released GOP 2024 party platform (PDF), this is a single bullet point in CHAPTER THREE: BUILD THE GREATEST ECONOMY IN HISTORY:
Republicans will pave the way for future Economic Greatness by leading the World in Emerging Industries.
Crypto
Republicans will end Democrats’ unlawful and unAmerican Crypto crackdown and oppose the creation of a Central Bank Digital Currency. We will defend the right to mine Bitcoin, and ensure every American has the right to self-custody of their Digital Assets, and transact free from Government Surveillance and Control.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
We will repeal Joe Biden’s dangerous Executive Order that hinders AI Innovation, and imposes Radical Leftwing ideas on the development of this technology. In its place, Republicans support AI Development rooted in Free Speech and Human Flourishing.
Expanding Freedom, Prosperity and Safety in Space
Under Republican Leadership, the United States will create a robust Manufacturing Industry in Near Earth Orbit, send American Astronauts back to the Moon, and onward to Mars, and enhance partnerships with the rapidly expanding Commercial Space sector to revolutionize our ability to access, live in, and develop assets in Space.
When your party platform is just a long-form weird tweet that you wrote after bong rips with Elon Musk.
deborah@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Actual comedians try to use LLM in a writing room. Result: “cruise ship comedy material from the 1950s, but a bit less racist”English13·10 months agoThat’s a lot of fucking work and obviously if you’re starting out you can’t exactly afford to pay for assistant writers to do the menial labour that comes with it.
Give this promptfucker the props they deserve: usually they don’t just come out and say it.
deborah@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 7 July 2024English4·10 months agoI’m sure they would find some way¹ to ruin it, but it would be fun if we could convince them to pass a law in some vice-signaling US state that bans private equity’s purchase of every vet and general contractor and empty house.
¹ Anti-semitism, probably.
deborah@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 7 July 2024English2·10 months agodeleted by creator
deborah@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Actual comedians try to use LLM in a writing room. Result: “cruise ship comedy material from the 1950s, but a bit less racist”English22·10 months agoThe adverse impacts section was just the comedians saying “we’ve already lost friends, everyone hates us” but the conclusion was “here’s how comedians should use our tool.”
deborah@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Why do people who hate IP laws/copyright think we should be allowing AI companies to copy the whole internet when pirates still get arrested for piracy?English4·11 months agoIt is not, in fact, bad that copyright applies to a wider group than publishers, unless you are using “publisher” extremely broadly to apply to “creators”.
If “someone gets attacked for posting an image on social media”, that rarely means “lawyers came after me because I posted a screenshot of a page from Sandman”. It often means that the poster took someone else’s art, snipped off the artist’s signature, and posted without attribution, and the artist is rightfully angry. Copyright is what enables that artist to continue to eat and make more art. The same goes for music, or software, or movies.
Sure, the system is horribly abused by uneven power structures, as every system in the world is. For music especially, we all know that the takedowns are usually issued by people who have nothing to do with the creation of the protected work, because of the way licensing and rights grants work in that industry. Automated takedown systems (which have to exist because of the scale of online content) also have no reasonable appeal mechanism, and the people making the decisions don’t (and can’t) make reasonable assessments about fair use and transformative works.
I’m not saying that everyone who participates in piracy is a bad, wicked thief–I absolutely participate in it myself. But copyright is not the villain here; that’s just trying to make us feel justified about our actions. Someone made a creative work I enjoyed, and I don’t have a moral right to the product of their effort for free.
deborah@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 7 July 2024English9·11 months agoIf you concede that there exist humans that are bullshit in the same way that ChatGPT is
If you concede that cats are made of marmalade and always win Texas Hold 'Em games, then I don’t think the argument against squaring the circle holds up.
deborah@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 7 July 2024English6·11 months agohahaha no failfandomanon is extremely at Dreamwidth, but I think the wankiest people mostly moved to other places in recent years.
deborah@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 7 July 2024English9·11 months agoas a former member of multiple livejournal fanfic circlejerks, I am so sad that LW didn’t join the rest of LJ in (1) getting off or (2) being mean on fandom_wank, and instead decided to create the torment nexus.
deborah@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 7 July 2024English10·11 months agoIf you always bet on “everything confusing that weirdos say is a euphemism or proxy for Jews or Black people”, you will beat the house. Canadians, lizards, trans people, common punctuation marks, apparently also the seelie court I guess.
deborah@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•A Rant about Front-end DevelopmentEnglish14·11 months agoRemember when our industry cared about loading times?
deborah@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•A Rant about Front-end DevelopmentEnglish18·11 months agoThis is so cathartic to read.
I have worked with multiple static sites delivered with React, because somebody built an enterprise design system which is so tightly tied into React that it can’t be applied any other way.
deborah@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 30 June 2024English18·11 months agoNo, all you lawyers explaining to me how the practice of law works in the U.S., you would totally benefit from GPT. Complete with bonus:
- Everyone explaining to me that lawyers actually read all the documents in discovery is really trying to explain to me, a computer scientist with 20 years of experience[1], how GPT works!
- [1] Does OP have actual tech expertise? The answer may (not) surprise you!
- You lawyers admit that sometimes you use google translate and database search engines, and those use machine learning components, and all ML is basically LLMs, so I’m right, Q.E.D.!
- Lawyers couldn’t possibly read everything in discovery, right?
- Lawyers couldn’t possibly pay for professional translation for everything, right?
- Even when it’s mandated by the court?
- Really?
- and many, many more
deborah@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 30 June 2024English10·11 months agoI use it, but at least on my browser the
next
button is disabled so I can only see the most recent page of updates. I treat that as a the jank is a feature moment, though; if there’s more than one page of new comments, I’m forced to stop reading.
deborah@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 30 June 2024English9·11 months agoPour one out for opera presto, which I will always mourn.
deborah@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 30 June 2024English12·11 months agoOne last hurrah for the EPA and the clean air act before the scotus shanks the administrative state in a day or two.
deborah@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Neither the devil you know nor the devil you don’tEnglish9·11 months agoMarx (who to be fair was operating in a very different global economy) explicitly excluded servants and other service labor from the proletariat, because he had an extremely industrial (cough gendered) definition of “productive labour.” That being said, he was friends, intellectual collaborators, and possibly lovers with the housekeeper.
Disclaimer: I am no marx historian; my knowledge of marxist theory tends toward literary analysis. I may be simplifying to the point of wrong.
It’s even worse when you add the next few words:
The machine readable docs is the docstrings (or XML Documentation Comments or whatev), and the code itself. LLMs have completely melted these people’s brains.