Glyph

Sad that the successor project to Vim — a project which loudly encouraged its users to donate to a charity to help AIDS victims in Uganda — has become an advocate for white supremacy and ethnic cleansing. Just including the DHH endorsement could have been a mistake, but this seems quite explicit https://github.com/neovim/neovim.github.io/issues/501

it’s called “human in the loop” because it’s like what happens when a human gets a body part caught in the drive belt, or “loop”, on industrial machinery

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@cR0w/117161837519266091

I have so many feelings about this Unifi security bulletin. I will not emphasize the "it's bad" part, because that's obvious enough.

There are two mitigating factors to keep in mind here:

1. The whole industry is getting a super aggressive massively subsidized security scan from "AI".
2. Unlike basically every other piece of prosumer networking gear I've owned, Unifi auto-updates reliably, when I read one of these, I log in to my controller to find the patches already applied.

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Question: let’s say that, for pressing economic reasons, someone is required to familiarize themselves with “agentic” coding tools. Worse, they do not have employer-provided hardware or AI tokens to try this with.

What is the safest way to try this? A VM, to begin with, I guess? And beyond personal vigilance, how would you recommend managing personal psychological safety? Would a local model be better to deal with energy / “suborning fascism” concerns? If so, which one? What harness?

apparently "I would like to tell my phone to play one song, and then, when it is done playing that song, I don't want it to play anything else" is such a confusing request that YouTube Music's customer service cannot even understand it. they cannot imagine a world in which I do not want my every sensory organ stuffed full of inescapable engagement-maximizing stimuli

RE: https://wandering.shop/@xgranade/117153038416341663

It feels like catastrophizing to say "you can't use Google Docs for anything" but it's just straightforwardly true. Can't use it for fiction because if you have a racy scene (or anything an LLM might misinterpret as a racy scene) it might get deleted. Can't be a political dissident. Can't use it for shopping lists any more because if you ever put "birth control" on a shopping list, surprise, you're a political dissident (if not now, in the future)

I ask Claude and ChatGPT a question every month or so in order to keep my impressions of their performance grounded. In general they've been consistently disappointing. Yesterday I had a question that traditional search completely failed at, and I had this kind of experience https://taggart-tech.com/reckoning/ where Claude knocked it out of the park, which (while my proximal problem is now solved) mostly just gives me a sinking feeling.

I have 3 computers, A, B, and C. These computers serve different purposes but those purposes are sometimes served by different human-interface affordances. Thus, I have 3 USB docks, D, E, and F. Each dock has an ethernet adapter; each adapter has its own MAC address.

This is annoying because sometimes A is docked at F; I want it to be identified as A.home.internal for networking purposes. But if C was recently docked at F, the DHCP lease belongs to F and thus it will be C.home.internal.

here are some tech accessories that you probably need, but do not have, or at least do not use when they would be helpful in a tech context:

• an N95 mask
• safety goggles
• nitrile gloves

somewhere in your home or office, right now, there is a naaasty pile of cables that you didn't manage quite right the first time. they are covered in dust. if you get in there and fix it, you know that you're going to feel sick afterwards, so you put it off.

get your PPE on and dive in there.

Sigh. New fun ethics problem. Apparent unattended AI goes around correcting basic spelling errors. Now we know the words are misspelled, we should correct them. Is this "using AI"? ugh. https://github.com/twisted/towncrier/pull/738

I can't know what is going on in people's hearts, but my read is somewhat more charitable to the people in the video here. It's wild to me that they are people with this much authority who seem helpless, but rather than "callous jerks who don't care what you think" their facial expressions and body language read to me as people who have been ordered to implement a harmful idea and are struggling mightily to do it in the least harmful way they can https://toot.majorshouse.com/@majorlinux/117085014811292459

Let's say I'm teaching someone to code. What's the best option for a place for them to be able to host a website that is:

A) able to run arbitrary code[1] B) self-contained; I don't want to set up 5 different services C) as cheap as humanly possible

[1]: in my case I care the most about being able to run a docker container that can listen on an arbitrary network socket, but for services that hit B and C really hard I would be OK being restricted to Python and/or HTTPS if that were the tradeoff

the most important lesson of evolution is that it's not survival of the best, only survival of the fittest. and fitness is situational, you only get to be fit for a particular environment. which means that "useless" attributes can become fit when the environment changes

one of the horrifying things about watching the software developer community's slow-motion collapse is realizing just how many coders (and managers, for that matter) have been understanding loose metaphors and allusions as literal truth.

if a system provides a "guarantee" you can't actually get your money back. if developers are "accountable" for their changes you can't actually have them arrested and convicted for making a mistake

the gell-mann amnesia effect is when you read a journalist writing about some topic that is close to the heart of your own expertise but far from theirs — usually some specific cutting-edge technical expertise — notice that they are incorrect about some details, and then assume that they are also incorrect about a bunch of stuff that they know much better than you do, like political corruption or investigating the consensus of experts on well-settled science

this product would solve exactly zero problems for me and it would create a whole new category of management headache as well as ongoing costs but I want it so baaad https://amzn.to/4wOWoEj

RE: https://cosocial.ca/@mhoye/117037614521306051

It strikes me as deeply ironic that david gerard absolutely clocked this entire genre of writing with his tagline, "it can't be that stupid, you must be prompting it wrong".

So many esteemed elders of the tech world have absolutely latched on to the idea that because it seems like it does useful stuff in their subjective impression, the only possible conclusion one might draw about the chatbots is that they absolutely must have an economically viable generalized use-case.

RE: https://aus.social/@perkinsy/117006314371109767

“IN THE REAL WORLD, INDIVIDUAL PERFORMANCE IS RARELY THE STRONGEST PREDICTOR OF GROUP OUTCOMES. IN FACT, THE STRONGEST PREDICTORS OF DEVELOPERS' SELF-REPORTED PRODUCTIVITY TEND TO BE SOCIAL”

(emphasis mine)

sure we must imagine Sisyphus happy, but it's a lot easier to imagine him tired

I need an invoicing solution.

I want something that can send emails, schedule reminders, nicely format PDFs, and has a well-documented API for uploading line items from time tracking.

I've used Stripe invoicing for this in the past, but in the situation where one has clients that use other payment mechanisms, IME this creates annoying reconciliation gaps.

Any recommendations?

why do you think those venture capitalists are subsidizing this thing. do you think that they are hoping that you will just increase the collective social value of the commons, and rejoice? https://mastodon.social/@juliank/116974045503028965

RE: https://mastodon.social/@404mediaco/116986805020926545

this is one reason I ascribe more incompetence than malice to most boosters. the boosters were mad about the codeberg ban. a calculatingly evil conspiracy would understand that a brutal model collapse is inevitable for coding models if there is no fresh, nonslop option for modern code.

one day we will have safety regulations written about “AI”, but, like all regulations, they will be written in blood.

when I abstain from “AI” or suggest to you that you do the same, it is in large part because I would rather they not be written in my blood, or yours.

give a man a fish, feed him for a day. teach a man to read the subreddit about aquarium maintenance, bankrupt him for life

It is no longer safe to turn off your computer.

almost every group that we conceptualize as a big evil organization that is ruining our lives is in actuality a patchwork of smaller organizations, at war with itself. there are people trying to do the right thing, and the wrong thing. this is particularly true of corporations, since most people are employed by corporations.

I really want to see an “EDC” video where one of these youtubers actually uses every item in their comically overbuilt personal loadout