Notices by John Breen (jab01701mid@mastodon.social)

@tante I came up with the phrase "AI-guzzling slop-jockeys" which I'm rather proud of.

@w3c By ""increasingly machine-actionable policies", I assume you mean to make the www more friendly to agentic AI and its ilk, not centering people.

To hell with that ! @dalias

WTF is wrong with the internet - is this some kind of defense against AI agents and LLM scraping bots ? Because it also keeps actual people from visiting their website...which seems bad...

@dalias Long ago, I saw the pattern. There's Moore's Law, but then there's "Software Developer Law", which is :
"Software expands to consume twice the available resources, no matter how vast"

And developers always have the latest, fastest platforms.

For a while, it was encouraged because it sold new HW every year or two.

Now we can make a quantum leap forward by deleting the past 15 years of cruft from the stack.

@dalias So I don't want to get dragged into the "what is under the AI umbrella" controversy. If you can't figure it out, I mean that there is software that can generate a video of you at any age. You probably don't need "AI". Just whatever generates deepfake porn videos or whatever.

No, it's not "bonkers"...it's the imprecison of commonly used terms.

But sure, try a mask. Or a deterministic 3D engine. That's the idea.

Brain rot is for people who do not use their brains. I'm exempt.

@dalias If that works, great. I've done some video things in my past. What I'm thinking of is a separate screen showing a generated video of "you" at whatever age you want to show.

But my ideas gain little traction unless I build one, and since I'm not prepared to do that today, nevermind.

@dalias It's a horrible idea, but I bet the GEN AI machines would be really good at that sort of thing.

@dalias If the Maine Democratic Party hopes to harness our movement, and avoid disillusioning the hundreds of thousands of supporters who came into the fray because of our movement’s policies, it must consult the feedback and proposals of the people who built and sustained this.

Your feedback will be sent to the Maine Democratic Party via THIS FORM.  

This is your personal link; it can only be filled out once.

In solidarity, always,

Ben

4/x

@dalias My response was this :

No, that's unacceptable.

Graham has no role going forward, he has violated the trust of all his supporters. 

We will work with the Maine Democratic Party to make sure our voices are heard. You need not be involved. Just stop.

Your best approach is to withdraw immediately, support the process to nominate your replacement, and support that nominee to defeat Collins.

Then begin to make amends to those you have wronged. You have only disappointed me.

Just got this from Platner Campaign @dalias

This is Ben Chin, Graham Platner’s campaign manager.

We’ve said from the very beginning that this campaign was never about Graham but about a movement of working people united to take back power.

(it gets worse)

1/x

@dalias Both the state and national parties cut our team, our volunteers, and our vast networks of supporters out of the conversation completely.

We firmly believe that the supporters and volunteers who built this movement deserve to have a real role in any nomination process.

3/x

@dalias But yesterday, the Maine Democratic Party said that our movement will “have no role in determining our next Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, nor in determining what this process looks like.” Instead, under their watch and direction, they allowed the DC-based Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to send staffers to plan a potential nominating process behind closed doors.

2/x

@dalias re:Platner, this is one of such things I saw.

https://legislature.maine.gov/legis/bills/getTestimonyDoc.asp?id=197685

@dalias I slightly disagree with that level of generalization.

For me, I need to see people I already trust, or am inclined to trust, to filter the good from the bad. Just talking a good game is not enough.

Even your own wife vouching for you is not enough.

Of course a friend's recommendation is suspect, because they could have been fooled by the same things you were.

@dalias Also, my "Bernie endorsed him, he must be OK" benefit-of-the-doubt rule is officially retired.

FWIW I had not heard of Platner until a woman friend asked me to go with her to a Bernie/Platner rally in Portland, ME in Oct 2025. Seemed pretty OK to me, the support he was getting, the "platform", the fight. Oh well...

@jmaris @dalias This is why politicians and business leaders can't be allowed to define technical terms in domains they don't understand, or to write specs/laws then using that flawed language of "deception".

It's not too late. Insist we call things what they are, else we cannot collectively reason about them.

@jmaris @dalias I agree, it's critically important not to allow everyone to have different definitions of things like "AI" and conflating things that are NOT similar except that they run on computers.

There is no world where I can or should be subject to "AI Regulations" by creating a statistical ML model for classification of photos of knives or flowers.

The only danger there is treating the answer as anything more than a great guess, or the basis for automated, unreviewable decisions.

@briankrebs I've been responsible for writing code for life-safety critical systems, and volunteered to be the cybersecurity guy in two orgs. Some would consider me an authority.
I don't feel like I could ever get a fedgov security clearance, and never tried or will.
But the idea that natsec code is being stored in public repos or S3 buckets makes me reconsider my threat model.

@misty @glyph @tokyo_0 @dalias
P1: "I don't take money from criminal enterprises"
P2: "But it's laundered so nobody can tell where it come from"
P1: "OK, that's cool"

@mirabilos @dalias Way back in the day, Quarterdeck made a little utility to summarize your computer's HW, CPU, RAM, display tech, and OS/BIOS, and it was called "Manifest", so I'm influenced by that usage !

One day, I was filling out the HDMI compliance document for BigCorp, and it asked for the manufacturer and part number of the actual physical connector used on the product, which had to be from the approved list. Nobody had noticed until then that our vendor was not on the list...