Notices by Your weary 'net denizen (cstanhope@social.coop), page 2

@cwebber I'm reminded of letters to the editors I've seen over the years. Different times and different places, but someone will write to the editor of a large city newspaper complaining that when they visited the city (because they don't live there of course) that they saw too many homeless people and it's hurting the city's reputation etc. And can't they do something about these homeless people? Move them or something?

@cwebber These days, I hear talk of "livability", which often seems to be the way of saying "we don't like seeing homeless people" without actually saying it. Like the visibility is the problem. :/

It's just frustrating. Homeless people aren't the problem. What's causing people to become homeless is, but it's not all mental illness and substance abuse or moral failing. But too many people are willing to believe that and the US loves it punitive policies. :(

@resl Sometimes I write little stories about context, and I add "humorous" text around the doodles. But yeah, it feels harder than it should. 😆

"The worst of the internet is continuously attacking the best of the internet. This is a distributed denial of service attack on the good parts of the World Wide Web.

If you’re using the products powered by these attacks, you’re part of the problem. Don’t pretend it’s cute to ask ChatGPT for something. Don’t pretend it’s somehow being technologically open-minded to continuously search for nails to hit with the latest “AI” hammers."

https://adactio.com/journal/21831

@raven You're example is harmless enough (assuming other problematic aspects could be mitigated). I mean, artists having been using various techniques to prompt themselves for quite some time. Decks, random words, games, etc.

It's just... That's not how these are being marketed. That's not the problem they claim they are solving. I hope I'm wrong, but I worry we cannot disentangle the harmless (perhaps even helpful!) aspects from the harmful ones in this case.

I don't directly use these "services", but I think about them from time to time because they're going to impact me whether I want to use them or not. I was thinking about "indirect prompt injection" and other means of controlling the input to these things, and I just realized the whole concept as implemented is basically "garbage in" with a dash of "trust me bro" marketing.

We've set these things up so that we don't control all the direct inputs. We don't control nor curate the training input. We don't control nor inspect the implementation. Yet we're expected to hand over decision making and the power to take action?

I mean, they attempt to do it in a lot of ways (e.g. public school curriculum), but it's wild to watch them edit the transcript of past discussions:

https://github.com/nasa/Transform-to-Open-Science/commit/bb7560bd1c35f6e2e200a1ad78f4c78d28ab282b#diff-90ec3c142ac23b2fc386e0464bcc8f652f2022526488bf66880836a4692b3611

(The speed (and lack of discretion) at which this is happening makes me think LLMs are involved. I'm so glad my... *shudder*... peers built these bullshit machines.)

@clacke Reminds me how I didn't hear glottal stops until a friend of mine from Venezuela pointed out she couldn't pronounce Cotton like I do (the name of a coworker). And I was confused, "I'm pretty sure I've heard you say Cotton's name..." She says, "No I say it with a 't' and you say it with..." and then she gestured to her throat. And my mind was blown a tiny bit when I realized what she meant. 😆

@KasTasMykolas @hisham_hm Oh cool! I didn't know about that. TIL.

@hisham_hm If you use from:hisham_hm on mastodon.social's search box does that help? Or is the search so limited it's still not doing what you need?

(I've had to resort to downloading an archive of my toots and then grepping the .json file. 😆)

Code like other people matter.

@valhalla This is going to be one of those associations that's going to get stuck in my head on first exposure and will pop to mind whenever I see a trackpoint device. 😆

Phrases like "average user"... "normal people"... kind of set me on edge. We should just say "imagine a perfectly spherical person".

Logging off like...

@yrabbit You're right about the boards. I haven't tried to price their parts in any sort of volume, but if there is a similar price difference, then yikes!

@yrabbit I dug up an old invoice. Back in 2015 I was able to get that icestick board for $21.86. Hmm...

Aw, bummer. It looks like makers and hobbyists are not buying enough Lattice FPGAs. Lattice is announcing layoffs:

https://www.hillsboronewstimes.com/business/hillsboro-semiconductor-industry-takes-another-hit-as-lattice-announces-14-workforce-reduction/article_5bc138c6-a089-11ef-b6ed-c36ab7740877.html

#FPGA

Some DIY inspiration and aspiration:

"It's a digital book called Make it Yourself: 1000 Useful Things to Make...

Think of it like those old mail order catalogs that contained everything the average person might use in every day life. The difference here is that instead of products to buy, every item listed represents a DIY project that you can make yourself."

https://n-o-d-e.net/makeityourself.html

https://makeityourself.org/

@theruran Sometimes we write in ancient dialects because we're supporting hardware with ancient compilers. Not that you should see much of that sort of code in the open, but I don't know anything about the cultish types.