Notices by Darius Kazemi (darius@friend.camp)

The enemy of my enemy is some kind of super-enemy-squared.

[opens a private browsing window in Firefox, clicks the "Common myths about private browsing" link]

- private browsing goes to the underworld
- private browsing must answer a series of riddles posed by a monster in order to obtain treasure
- private browsing disobeys the gods and incurs their wrath
- private browsing sings the song that creates the heavens

@evan @rigo @blaine sure yes. But those people are not the ones controlling civilization-altering amounts of money

@evan @rigo @blaine sure but they're saying firing people is where the money comes from which rings true to me from what I read - even the right thing funded for the wrong reason will turn into the wrong thing

@jcoglan @blaine @evan agreed. there's a reason I picked "verbal persuasion" as my example of a thing that should be seen as every bit as magical as genAI

"LLMs are like magic"

I agree on the grounds that basically everything is magical if you think about it hard enough.

I'm probably more literal and serious about this statement than the reader imagines

@evan @blaine @evan @blaine the use case you are describing is inside the very narrow band domain that I feel pretty positive about

Although I don't think knowing how to code is any more empowering than knowing how to say, verbally persuade people. The fact that it feels like magic and that verbal persuasion (as one example) doesn't is... a problem imo

@evan @blaine your response is a bit of what I'm railing against here. We all agree we've made a machine that makes excellent pancakes. Where I make a sour face is the claim of empowerment through automated excellent pancakes

I have a very long, possibly book-length take on LLMs that has been brewing since May 2015 but basically: wow humans love to take something that works extremely well in a certain narrow domain and then bend over backwards to insist it will solve every problem in the universe. (That's a nearly banal observation but the book length part would be tracing the technological, financial, historical, and psychological incentives that make it happen.)

A trans couple my sister is friends with is recovering from a house fire in Oklahoma. I know there are a million things to help out with in the world but maybe this is one you feel moved to chip in for. Even small donations help.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/house-fire-relief-for-kade-and-breanna

@anna interesting. we have two of those!!

My home internet is driving me up a wall. Various devices on my network intermittently drop video calls or lose internet connectivity entirely. Of course I can never reproduce this stuff as it's intermittent. Any suggestions for debugging? Is there a utility I can run to collect data over time to assist in figuring out if the problem is at the ISP, router, device, or wifi radio connectivity level? Are there professionals I can call in to take a look at my home network setup?

@chris my 6a is nice and it's old enough that it doesn't get most of the AI features. I am hoping it lasts long enough for this current bubble to die down

@dansinker I think @dansup ?

The curse of the world's oldest person strikes again

https://apnews.com/article/oldest-person-japan-itooka-914ce99c6f90204311251e2274ae56e8

For any given technical standard n there will always be someone who shows up from the n-1 standard and posts the xkcd comic about n+1 standards

Are any events for decentralized social media (or just tech for public good broadly speaking) happening on the US East Coast or in Europe Jan 26-29? I have a few days of itinerary to fill between some time in Boston Jan 21-25 and then Brussels for FOSDEM Jan 30 to Feb 2.

A the B you want to C in the world

We are reading a lot of Chicka Chicka Boom Boom at home these days

@evan thanks for the reminder, submitted something for the observatory just now