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   David Nash (dpnash@c.im)'s status on Tuesday, 21-May-2024 10:21:42 JST David Nash

   After a period of relatively restrained handling of "AI" topics, my division at work decided that all the developers, designers, engineers, whatever, ... need to "use AI more in our everyday work". (Oh, joy.) This included a series of workshops designed to introduce everybody to some representative examples.

   One workshop involved Github Copilot, and the following things happened to one development team, all senior developers:
   - Copilot generated a unit test case that was hard to get to pass.
   - When asked to generate empty test cases, Copilot generated the same (irrelevant) code over and over again.
   - Copilot stopped giving suggestions to one developer after a while.
   - Getting useful information out of Copilot frequently required a lot of fussy or non-obvious prompt editing and tweaking.

   I won't supply direct quotes without the explicit consent of the people involved, but there was a very clear general sense that Copilot was not fit for purpose -- even when it did produce something not totally wrong, it was not a useful timesaver for the types of work this team was doing.

   It wasn't just Copilot that seemed half baked. The workshop's guidelines (which are themselves part of a fairly polished Github repo) were poorly proofread. One example had a prominent typo in some HTML you were supposed to generate: '<button class=""btn" ...>' (note the extra double-quote). A newbie to web development would very likely add the spurious double quote mark to otherwise ok Copilot output to make sure it matched the instructions.

   Finally, our IT department disallows results from Copilot that come from training on "public" code, for what should be fairly obvious legal concerns regarding copyright and similar issues. For one developer, Copilot repeatedly started to generate a result but then stopped, with an alert that the result appears to match known "public" code.

   If it wasn't clear before that Copilot's basic mode (no "private code" option) is a copyright-laundering and license-laundering tool, it's really obvious now.

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   Jean (bohemianchic@infosec.exchange)'s status on Wednesday, 04-Oct-2023 17:55:03 JST Jean

   It's weird being asked what life achievement I am most proud of. Bit silly, I guess, but I said that the accomplishment that holds the significance to me isn't something like a trophy or an impressive title. It's actually the battle I face against depression and eating disorders every day.

   For context, the picture below was me in 2016, peak of my eating disorder. I was 40kg (170cm tall; all bones and skin. Muscle has also atrophied in my legs) yet I still dreamt of losing more. I wanted to be a Victoria's Secret Angel. It was a vile, toxic dream. This single photo evoked so much emotions within me.

   Each day was and still is a challenge that require me to confront my demons. Anorexia is no joke. I didn't seek help for years because I thought I was healthy. I thought I was amazing. And, this was even supported by so many people saying "Wow, you lost weight. I wish I could lose as much weight as you" and "you are so much prettier now that youve lost weight." And hell, I believed it--that being skinny thin meant I was beautiful. My ED evolved into Bulimia, followed by a rollercoaster ride of emotions where my self worth was tied to how small my waist was, how big my thigh gap was, how much I could purge without people noticing. The days I spent in a hospital due to dehydration and not eating were not enough for me to stop what I was doing.

   It was very recently since I started treatment. It is helping, but I have fully accepted that it is a life long battle. At least now, I have days where I feel beautiful even though I am no longer size zero. At least now, I have days where I feel pretty even though I am not as skinny as I used to be. And it is with those small victories I have every day where I found my strength.

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   Philip Mallegol-Hansen (philip@mastodon.mallegolhansen.com)'s status on Wednesday, 13-Sep-2023 05:28:53 JST Philip Mallegol-Hansen

   @thomasfuchs FWIW when I was at Google, Apple Event day was watched in the office as well.

   Everything is a remix, everyone in tech is watching what everyone else is doing.

   It’s only the fanboys that seem to believe that tech employees are mortal enemies.

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   Perry Lorier (isomer@fosstodon.org)'s status on Friday, 18-Aug-2023 21:20:46 JST Perry Lorier

   in reply to

   @lanodan I hacked nss_dns to syslog every resolution, how long it took, and what the result was for some experiments I was doing.

   It's been super useful to keep around.

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   Futurist Jim Carroll (jimcarroll@futurist.info)'s status on Thursday, 23-Feb-2023 07:24:11 JST Futurist Jim Carroll

   I’ve got my image for my Daily Inspiration tomorrow morning.

   It’s kind of funny - and tragic - watching all these hi-tech companies thrashing about letting people go. They aren’t paying attention to the most fundamental lesson learned during every single period of economic uncertainty since, well, forever.

   The winners are the ones who don’t blindly do what they are doing.

   It should be a fun post tomorrow!

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   Yohan Yukiya Seseㆍ사요한・謝雪矢 (youronlyone@c.im)'s status on Tuesday, 27-Dec-2022 08:26:46 JST Yohan Yukiya Seseㆍ사요한・謝雪矢

   in reply to

   @homelessjun Ahh. Yeah, it is not easy. I just happen to notice the politics and all that because I've seen it happen in other people, in my previous companies. So when I became the target in a new company, I noticed what they were doing.

   It's nasty, especially for us autistics who are there to just do our jobs.

   There was even one company wherein I was told to “slow down” because my evaluations are too good, the rest of the team are looking “bad”.

   But, I'm just doing my job. For me, the problem is not on the employee, rather, it's the metrics.

   Since they don't want to update their metrics, and I don't want to look “bad”, I slowed down. When I did, suddenly I'm not doing anything and was slacking.