MajorHavoc

joined 10 months ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

When you make a lot of money, the number you see in your account starts to become part of your identity because it differentiates you between you and the people you see every day.

"Tres Comas is for winners." (A wonderful line delivery by the huge asshole venture fund bro in Silicon Valley, that illustrates your point)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago

Lol.

"But honey, I left you a README file..."

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Providing competition against media monopolies is illegal.

If they can't sell you your memories, they think no one should have them. They will let your memories burn and be lost before they let you own or share them.

They'll keep this up and they will continue to work to make intellectual property never enter the public domain.

I'm too chicken to be a pirate, myself. But I'm aware that pirates and librarians are the only ones with any intent to preserve works of art for the public.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Ha! I have an AI for that! Gotcha!

...

On, but the AI trains now on other docs that I used an AI to write...

...

Oh shit...

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Yeah. When I need additional insights on a difficult technical configuration, it's nice to be able to speak to an artificial insufferable dipshit, rather than a real human insufferable dipshit.

The AI ones continue helping me even after I explain to them how they come across to real humans. (I do my best not to mention it to the insufferable Human dipshits, of course.)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah. We desperately need anti-trust laws to actually be enforced. I think we've proven that nuanced and thoughtful rules don't cut it, so I'm in favor of some deeply restrictive new rules that are impossible to mis-interpret.

I also think we should create laws with immediate financial incentives for breaking up monopolies.

I'm essence, we need a law that I, as a random citizen, can just climb into any parked Amazon truck and take it home.

I think Amazon would be a lot more interested in splitting the company along appropriately legal lines if the alternative was the owned capital just getting declared public property on a random Tuesday next year.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I've found enshittification to go in cycles, with mixed results for recovery.

  • Google successfully embraced extended and extinguished XMPP, but now it seems like most folks use Discord, Skype, Zoom, Signal, and whatver Meta calls their spyware today. Our chat experiences certainly aren't living the FOSS dream, but at least Google Talk doesn't feel mandatory anymore like it briefly did after it "extinguished" XMPP. (Did Google kill Talk? I can't keep track of what Google hasn't killed yet.)
  • Mobile operating systems have been a bumpy ride with highs and lows, but Android, the current most common mobile OS, is a lot more open than anything we had before. The vendor builds of Android that most people accept are, indeed, enshitifying now, so I guess the verdict is still out.
  • The web itself tried hard to go fully proprietary several times: with Microsoft COM, Microsoft ActiveX, Adobe Flash, and Microsoft Silverlight, among others. These are all completely gone now. Today, almost every scrap of technology serving and browsing the web is open source. Of course, most of search is still closed and enshitifying, and the open options for social media are very new, so there's still plenty of room to improve or lose ground.
  • The Commodore 64, a (delightful, but closed) proprietary platform, was once the single best selling single computer model of all time. Today that title goes to the Raspberry Pi, a mostly open hardware specification that is rapidly improving.

Anyway. There's cause for hope, along with plenty of reasons to be concerned.

 

"We need policies that keep middlemen weak."

stood out to me.

Many of my influences have railed against middle men, and I think that's unfair. I've worked with plenty of middle men that made everyone then better off.

I've also had the unique displeasure that at least half of all links shared with me in recent years have been to a site called "Instagram", where I am unable to access the content without an account (which I refuse to make because Zuckerberg is a creepy stalker.)

I find it deeply weird that such a locked ecosystem now controls so much attention.

I find Cory Doctorow's thoughts on the problem and potential solutions to be both hopeful and cathartic.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 week ago
// portability

Gave me the giggles. I've helped maintain systems where this portable solution would have left everyone better off.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I am unable to speak using contractions.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Same. I am anxious that the alien dopplegangers will figure this out, though.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I've run almost every OS.

My daily driver is Debian. It's practical, efficient, stable, and with just a few commands clipped out of blog articles, it morphs into whatever weird silly thing I happen to need it to be, this year.

127
The Cult of Microsoft (www.wheresyoured.at)
submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

Kind of an inflammatory title, but I like to let it match for accessibility.

I've been enjoying Ed Zitron's articles lately, because they call out CEOs who aren't doing their jobs.

I'm sharing this partly because I'm honestly surprised to see criticism of Satya Nadella's leadership. I think Satya has been good for Microsoft, overall, compared to previous leaders. And I was as convinced as anyone else when the "growth mindset" first hit the news cycle. It sounds fine, after all.

TL;DR:

  • Satya has baked "growth mindset deeply into the culture at Microsoft"
  • Folks outside of the original study authors have generally failed to reproduce evidence of any value in "growth mindset"
  • Microsoft is, of course "all in" on their own brand of AI tools, and their AI tools are doing the usual harmful barf, eat the barf, barf grosser barf, re-eat that barf data corruption cycle.
  • Some interesting speculation that none of the AI code flaunted by Microsoft and Google is probably high value. Which is a speculation I confidently share, but still, I think, speculation. (Lines-of-code is a bat shit insane way to measure engineer productivity, but some folks think it's okay when an AI is doing it.)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I don't believe that you can use traditional algorithms to teach the car street driving, because there are to many different variations... Even if your autopilot is 99% correct and you drive 20000km a year, you still drive wrong 200km of it.

Exactly!

And this is why, if the problem is solveable, it must be solved by learning models shepherded by expert engineers. The LLMs can take care of the long boring stretches, freeing skilled engineer time to fine-tune an LLM algorithm hybrid for the tricky bits.

I'm inclined to believe the problem is solveable, but since I'm not selling anything, I'm allowed to say "if". Heh.

 

You might recognize me from such comments as "All AI hucksters are scammers.", and "AI is just an excuse to enshitify while laying off real engineers.", and "I actually use current generation LLMs for a bunch of things and it can be pretty great."

In this article science fiction author and futurist Cory Doctorow is on my favorite AI soap box, and raises some interesting points.

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