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

@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?"

@liferstate @benroyce As a (I guess by modern standards) old techbro, this shit from these weirdos is disappointing.

@sj And then failed to shoot any ICE agents with them. Sounds like he shot several detainees though, tragically.

Didn't we just learn from the Kirk shooting that there's only a loose association predictive capacity between what's on the shell casings and actual motive? That guy wrote "Hey fascist! Catch!" on a shell casing alongside a symbol from a videogame where you play as the fascists.

Real hard to guess what's going on in a stranger's head with this low signal.

@sj I mean... I don't think your probability argument is unsound, but we live in a world where someone once tried to assassinate a President to impress Jodie Foster and where the guy who founded the American Nazi Party got offed by a former colleague who thought he wasn't Nazi enough, so I'm gonna let this investigation play out.

@benroyce @liquor_american @isaackuo This is key. I sit at the polls. We still see big turnouts for general elections and very, very limited turnout for primaries.

Folks... I don't know how to make it clearer. Primaries are where the candidates are chosen. Trump is President because folks showed up to vote for him in the primary due to his face-appeal and the half-dozen other candidates on the ballot split the remaining vote.

@jeffowski I think to be fair to this conspiracy theory (ha!):

The hypothetical Trump who had Epstein assassinated would have no trouble with assassinating some punk 30-something who can't shut his mouth.

... the funny thing is, I know enough about how the search core is built to make an educated guess at how this happened.

Search core farms the query out to (possibly dozens of) completely independent software engines to answer the query. Those engines have their own backing datastores and they don't synchronize to each other; it's necessary they don't to make search fast. So it's entirely possible that the Top Stories core is pulling data that is more recent while the AI Overview core has built its information off of an older search result cache (and possibly hot-cached this answer before the NYT confirmed the death when the news broke locally / on social media). Google, as an institution, leans on the tradeoff "eventual consistency is good enough," so this kind of bug is seen as a predictable side-effect of the chosen tradeoffs.

Does that make us feel better?

No, nor should it. Get your shit together, Google.

#Google #search #AI #fail

sigh Get your shit together, Google.

#google #ai #fail

@tek This is one of those situations where it's real important to get context. Here's the lawyers' call to action (https://www.morningstar.com/news/globe-newswire/9504764/unitedhealth-class-action-alert-bragar-eagel-squire-pc-reminds-investors-that-a-class-action-lawsuit-has-been-filed-against-unitedhealth-group-incorporated-and-encourages-investors-to-contact-the-firm).

Things to remember:

1. This is ambulance-chasing. A law firm decided that this is a good time to kick a piñata full of money. And they probably aren't wrong! But their statements don't directly reflect the beliefs of any class-members; it's court rhetoric.

2. In context, the suit isn't saying UHC's previous tactics were good; it's saying the previous tactics were bad, but the only remedy the law gives this class is against possible unrealistic projections after circumstances changed. As far as the law is concerned: if a bunch of investors signed on to get money from Satan, and then that bet didn't pay off? Fuck 'em. The only recourse this lawyer can try to craft from whole cloth is that strategy should have paid off, and UHG knew it wasn't going to pay off after their CEO was murdered, and they weren't honest about their knowledge that the reality on the ground is different. It's deeply cynical writing to illicit an effect in the courtroom (and a hail-mary of a try at that).

The entire idea that either UHG was executing on anti-consumer practices or that statements after their CEO died were materially false or misleading is just the plaintiff's theory.

(And to be clear: I think UHG is a bunch of assholes. But if we're going to bust out guillotines over the writing of a sociopathic ambulance-chaser we've somewhat lost the thread. This is "first thing we do, kill all the lawyers" rabble-rousing).

@dalias @lauren Yeah, and therein lies the rub... Annihilation would be somewhat disastrous (I don't think anyone would take seriously the proposal "We're going to eliminate Chrome tomorrow", or the same for Gmail, search, etc)... And at least in the US we don't generally have enough faith in the executive to operate any of this as a public utility (experts from Google et. al. had to go to the feds to bail out the implementation of healthcare.gov, not the other way around).

@lauren As much as breaking up Google is probably some kind of good idea... Yeah, this is the issue, isn't it?

We don't trust Google with our data... And we trust everyone else much, much less.

@thomasfuchs Just an anecdote, but: I liked the clips I saw of Murderbot on YouTube but wasn't about to go buy an Apple TV subscription because we are already drowning in subscription services.

... so I picked up the first book. And the next. And the next. This is the most pleasure-reading I've done in years, and it utterly displaced doom-scrolling for awhile. Pretty sure I've now spent more on ebooks than I would have spent on six months of AppleTV.

Martha Wells. "The Murderbot Diaries." A++ would recommend.