Notices by Mark T. Tomczak (mark@mastodon.fixermark.com), page 2

@lauren Turns out AI is more an existential threat to traditional news than I had considered.

Ultimately, if the news professional cannot tell AI editing from an authentic article... What use do we, the audience, have for the professional? Because I can get doctored images of what's going on in Minneapolis from my uncle for free.

@thomasfuchs Interesting. "Preannounced revolutions are not taking place" sounds awfully similar to "The revolution will not be televised."

@thomasfuchs The VR one is my favorite because that's heavily capped by actual limitations in human sensory wetware and the way we bind our senses into a notion of what's going on in the world.

In my lifetime, I've watched some real impressive leaps and bounds to work through the nausea issue.

The nausea issue is still there.

@soatok I've been quietly beating the drum for awhile now that a lot of the anti-AI rhetoric is medium- and long-term moot because the cat. Is. Out. Of. The. Bag.

Yes, OpenAI are fascists and a problem and down with them.

Smaller models already run on a Raspberry Pi, and there's no particular reason to believe at this time that the next iteration of the raw research won't make training or cross-training them better / faster / cheaper. Most of the anti-AI arguments I see don't stay relevant when it becomes "A thing you slap on a shelf PC and have running in your own closet," and I don't think a lot of people are talking about what that world looks like.

@soatok Incidentally, catching up on your blog:

If that doesn’t make you feel all warm and fuzzy, remember that many industries still use FTP to transfer encrypted ZIP files back and forth in 2026.

I worked as liaison between my company and a company they'd acquired for about nine months. The acquiree's entire business niche was something that really reframed my understanding of where I set the bar for technical literacy and competency in general industry; I just flat-out thought we were training more software engineers than we were, and I was wrong.

This company's business model was that they did high-touch data massaging between

• Big online retail search engines like Amazon, Baidu, and Google Shopping

• Manufacturers who (a) made really high-quality products in their niche and (b) had an IT team that would celebrate with a pizza party if they could successfully implement one new data pipeline end-to-end. Per quarter.

The job was literally "You FTP us your inventory in whatever format you were able to conduct enough black-arts rituals to get the internal tracking system that someone else built for you to spit out, and we'll turn it into the right formats for these online retail markets." The mechanics of the job were a lot of "Take this not-actually-compliant CSV file and build heuristics to guess which commas were column separators and which were a place where their system had left out quotation marks."

... the company grossed past $1 million annually.

Those FTP'd files aren't even encrypted ZIPs. Encryption is way outside the problem domain. 😉

@kims There's a wild bit of videogame trivia attached to that movie. In the original Pokémon game and a couple subsequent ones, the TV in the player's house is playing Stand By Me.

Why this movie of all movies?

Apparently, it's a bit of a cultural touchstone for a generation of Japanese people because it was used in a fairly popular "Learn English" module, with the module capstoning at watching Stand By Me in English (I assume because the reproduction rights were reasonably cheap and the protagonists are about the age demographic of the students in the curriculum, but that's just guessing).

Where am I going with this? I think it's interesting that we can't ever really know where the things we put into the world are going to go. Might as well try to predict the path of one gust of wind. Or the eventual resting place of a sunbeam.

In the Starfleet Technical Manual, there is a throwaway detail of the LCARS user interface that when it is upgraded, users can still utilize the previous several versions. This is because their work is mission-critical and it is unacceptable to compromise the mission by forcing unfamiliar changes; eventual retraining is part of their job, but the flexibility allows them to take the retraining at their own pace.

I think about this from time-to-time and how this is still a sci-fi idea that is seen all too rarely in how we do actual computer UIs.

#StarTrek #LCARS #UI

@kims I think my TODO tracker is ready to upload to my sandstorm server tonight.

Feeling pretty good about it; haven't prototyped something just for myself in a while.

TIL: matplotlib supports specifying colors using standard X11/CSS4 names, but also supports the names from the xkcd color survey if you prefix the string with "xkcd:".

(While looking this up, I also learned about the full-on xkcd mode, but different topic!)

#python #matplotlib

@thomasfuchs For those of us not in the know: what's the issue?

Is it microplastics or is it "The print is too porous and lets bacteria hide?"

@mekkaokereke "I'd rather choose the bear," but it's Meulebeke, Belgium.

@thomasfuchs I think this has been a likelihood that has been brewing in the background of the whole "AI slop" argument for awhile: that the public isn't really going to be able to tell the difference and isn't going to care any more than they care about other fad shifts in pop art.

"Will the public accept AI music" should have been no harder to predict than "The public accepted disco."

... and, I suspect, it'll hang out until it gets boring. Unless it doesn't get boring, in which case it'll become a standard tool like auto-tune and equalization: something that can be used overtly and obviously as a stylistic choice but is generally present in every radio-broadcast-quality product.

@thomasfuchs In contrast, mathbros really want you to believe that it's a sentence.

@WarnerCrocker I mean, if they don't matter now isn't it already exactly as too-late? I don't know what your third option is besides "vote" and "blow up the Constitutionally-instituted government for being de-facto irreconcilably corrupt and unrepresentative."

@WarnerCrocker Either they will or they won't. If they don't, we cross that bridge when we come to it but not before.

@thomasfuchs Whoof. There's a lot I don't know about Ruby... isn't there either a process or a person that can just put a thumb on this PR and go "LOL, no?"

The fact that it purports to bless one Discord as the "alt-Ruby" over other, more long-term established alternative channels should itself be disqualifying.

This is naked power politics, an attempt to get a stake-in-the-ground for their nonsense in the (correction) main page for the project.

"Hey, get excited about gem.coop, a new Ruby gem hosting server!"

clicks the link

is blocked by corporate firewall because they used a newfangled TLD

... this does not fill me with hope for this project, but it does remind me that Ruby is an ecosystem where there aren't enough adults in the room.

#ruby #rubygems

@thomasfuchs Oh, but this dustup doesn't necessarily require people to change package managers right because they can work with different repos?

@thomasfuchs Does Ruby have something like the Python virtual environment PEP that says "Here's how a virtual environment works; how you use that for package management is your business?" Or is, like, every package management solution in the Ruby ecosystem a completely special snowflake?

@thomasfuchs I've definitely been guilty of this and I try to develop the instinct to recognize when I'm doing it.

It's a weird and very tribal thing. "If they're that bad, what does it say about me that I'm adjacent to them?"

Well... Sometimes what it says is "You didn't know." And a lot of the time what it says is "That was the most comfortable place to stand and you didn't move because you aren't a pain-seeking creature.... Now that you do know though, are you gonna move?"