Notices by Astatide (astatide@hachyderm.io)

@tokyo_0 @Natanox @veirling @peter_sc @dansup so I heard. I unfortunately don't remember who talked about it; I boosted her posts at the time but it was probably sometime last year : /

Just really shitty (yet typical) software guy crap.

@Natanox @veirling @peter_sc @dansup Eugen going full on Meta apologist was no surprise after hearing stories about how instead of merging PRs from women and minorities, he'd instead *rewrite them himself and merge his own versions* so he's pretty obviously a massive fuck.wad but I really did sort of expect the guy who made "not Instagram!" to do a little better. Well, what're you gonna do. It's not like Meta has *constantly and repeatedly acted predictably like a sociopath* or anything.

@Natanox @veirling @peter_sc @dansup I look forward to the *shocking* articles coming out in 3 to 5 years about how Meta mis-used all the data it's harvested from the fediverse.

@Natanox @veirling @peter_sc @dansup Zuck, at a conference table: "can we do a genocide with activitypub? Is that a thing we can do? Scrap the legs project, do a deep dive."

@Natanox @veirling @peter_sc awww. Didn’t know about pixelfed. Time to get to blocking -_-

like… I kind of felt like pixelfed was supposed to be an alternative to Instagram. Doesn’t make a lot of sense to just federate with Insta’s owner but hey.

@babe dude is way too into bees for it to *not* be sexual

@mattly @dinosaurgerms @mhoye not to out myself as someone who has consumed a lot of whiskey, but based on the bottle shown it's pretty clearly supposed to be Cutty Sark

Seriously, though, the claims of "emergent abilities", even ignoring that claims of intelligence are fundamentally rooted in racism (as has been noted) are deeply, deeply, deeply unscientific and should never have been published. I had nothing to do with any of this research and yet I am already tired of the fact that corporations get to make claims sans proof that *fundamentally* require proof and people paid *way less* have to waste time proving it's a big stack of lies.

"Our non-linear statistical model has intelligence." <-- this is the type of statement that requires proof. You could formulate it into a hypothesis:

"we hypothesize that, as a non-linear statistical model grows, it gains intelligence/sentience."

and you'd then be required to test it and prove it one way or another to publish a respectable paper. You'd need a metric and proper definitions.

But instead, they just get to publish "whiffs of bullshit".

Random question: does anyone know what the enclosure/case is made of for a regular spinning rust hard drive? Most searches about materials bring up a lot of information about the platters, but very little about the material it's enclosed in.

It feels like aluminum based on weight and hardness; up until I took this one apart (it was dead) I guess I just assumed it was plastic, despite having taken many apart before, but it's definitely a metal.

#materials #hardDrives #computers

@zkat I’ve left tech over it. Could not agree more.

Gotta say that reading about Kissinger, Cambodia, Chile and Vietnam has sure as fuck made my rather confusing late-teens-early-twenties "what the *fuck* is going on" w/ regard to Iraq and Afghanistan confusion make a helllll of a lot more sense.

Part of what bugs me about the “cheapness” of text/image generators is the externalised cost not just of labor theft, but of resources. Capital is currently subsidising the generation costs to destroy the labor market for these skills, but the huge chain of resource utilisation (mineral and oil/coal extraction, running the data centre, etc) is just fucking _wasted_ on the most inane horseshit imaginable. What a goddamn joke as we approach extinction.

I’m so angry at the news from my former employer.

Microsoft, the company that infamously finds almost every single discrimination complaint “without merit”, can’t wait to hire the eugenicist, likely abusive, thieving TESCREAList prick. Of course they can’t. Fuck you, Sam Altman, and fuck you, Microsoft.

@jonny @timnitGebru Microsoft is a lot of things; a friend to labor is *not* one of them.

"Microsoft was now *“a friend of the labor movement”*. (A later phone call elaborated that CWA is an affiliate of UNI and helps pay UNI salaries. And that any critique of Microsoft could lead to one or more UNI employees being fired.)"

mmmmm... yeah, so, friends of labor movements don't immediately fire people in retaliation for speaking up.

It’s very interesting that despite the total destruction of the internet infrastructure in Gaza and the use of a ton of technology by Israel, if you look at ArsTechnica you’d have no idea anything was even happening.

Great fucking job, Condé Nast.

This is especially disappointing (and I want to make clear that my disappointment lies on corporate, not on the journalists; even if a journalist has written it...) considering that Ars has defended publishing a lot of things under precisely that angle; that is, if it's newsworthy and involves technology, they typically report on it.

You'd think an entire stateless population losing access to modern information networks would be noteworthy but hey.