Notices by Paco Hope (paco@infosec.exchange)

RE: https://mastodon.online/@electrek/116923883632669727

AI makes everyone’s lives so much better. We can damage the climate AND impair our ability to cope. All so we can automatically make meeting summaries that nobody reads.

Just saw this on a site and at least we know an LLM didn’t author it.

The contents we provide on this site were created personally by members of the Game8 editorial department.
We refuse the right to reuse or repost content taken without our permission such as data or images to other sites.

Not sure how one refuses a right…

@artemis Yeah. This is why they try to rig both the prosecutors AND the judges. Get them both crooked in the same way, and things like competence and correctness won’t matter.

It makes me sad that they can be so incompetent, so cruel, and so clearly wrong, but still there are people out there supporting this. 🙁
#uspol #trump

I need to read it more and more carefully. But I’m going to quote 4 lines in the opposite order in which they appear in the article. This doesn’t make sense.

• More code is entering production with no review at all.
• The engineers with the deepest knowledge of the system are spending their most valuable hours unraveling plausible-looking code that should never have reached them in the state it did.
• What started as a productivity conversation has become a reliability problem.
• AI productivity gains at the business level are real, and engineering leaders are right to want more of them.

The evidence for that last statement is (in my opinion) stupid. It’s basically tasks closed on project boards going up. It’s not features shipped. It’s definitely not revenue or profit. It’s not customers acquired or retained. It is tasks on a board getting marked complete.

https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-acceleration-whiplash-takeaways

I thought this box looked very cat-shaped. #MrMittens agrees. #caturday #catsofmastodon

Lots of commentary on this and many people say “just take it out.” Yes. That’s sorta possible. This video shows what it looks like when you get access to the DCM. You have to disembowel the dashboard.

https://m.youtube.com/shorts/Y_heoO_SGOw?ra=m

RE: https://mastodon.social/@VeroniqueB99/116631913368831787

So there’s still one country that likes us. Big whoop. I’d like to see YOU try to piss off so many people so fast. We will figure out a way to piss off Poland soon enough. No need to make a fuss over how there’s still one country that doesn’t hate us.

😛
#uspol #trump

I bought a car. I’m trying to get Toyota to stop sending telemetry. I call support. They tell me I can just sign in with the app and make changes.

I point out that installing and using the app binds me to terms and conditions, one of which is binding arbitration. So I will not be installing the app.

No, no. The customer service agent confidently contradicts me. You don’t sign a contract by installing the app. It’s just like making a Facebook or google account.

🤦🏻

@cadusilva Can you maybe reply to your own message with some receipts? I want to believe you, but I don’t want to believe so badly that I’m gonna embark on 5 research trips.

Wow. Richard Dawkins off the deep end.
‘So my own position is: “If these machines are not conscious, what more could it possibly take to convince you that they are?”’

First he goes on and on about the Turing test like it is some kind of law handed down. Like, the fact that sequences of output tokens so closely resemble speech they might pass Turing’s test. He views a moving of the goalpost (Turing’s test apparently isn’t enough to distinguish consciousness) as unreasonable. Like Turing got it right and it’s wrong to say otherwise.

And then he has these risible conversations: ‘I then asked her whether, when she read my novel, she read the first word before the last word. No, she read the whole book simultaneously.’ Let’s not ignore the ‘she’. The thing has a name. ‘Claude.’ It implies a gender. But Richard Dawkins genders it and genders it female. I don’t think that’s a random thing.

We know how computers work. It absolutely does read the book byte-by-byte, in a sequential series of input tokens. It does not matter that the thing output some words that said otherwise. It is wrong. Why doesn’t it matter that the output is plainly incorrect? Where does the disconnection between the reality and the words come into the picture?

This is just drivel.

https://archive.is/6RdK9

In his latest “Pivot to AI” OpenAI faces cash crunch in 2026 as bills come due, @davidgerard (accurately) says: “#OpenAI works by setting as much money as it can on fire, as fast as possible.”

But I want to know: if we had $200B in, say, $100 notes, and we literally set them on fire:

• would it dispose of the money faster? How long would it take?
• would the impact on the environment be worse or less bad?

I gotta think there is someone on the #fediverse with the wherewithal to figure this out. Surely if we boost this, it will nerdsnipe the right person and we will learn the answer.

@thief_of_fire of course they did. It’s just that nobody gave THOSE folks billions of dollars swearing that it was the wave of the future that it would save us all. We just posted it on the internet for laughs.

I’m helping my elderly mother (93) adapt to a new computer. It’s an iMac. She’s had Mac’s for the last 25 years.

Mostly this is fine. But man, Apple has completely lost their way with accessibility. Some things, obviously are world-leading. I don’t want to ignore that.

But the fucking mouse gestures. In Apple Mail you cannot turn off left-right swipe gestures. My mother, with her arthritic hands, cannot reliably do just vertical. It tends to be diagonal. Swiping on a mouse is great. But we need LESS gesture.

In Apple mail the little set of buttons that allows you to see the existence of attachments and download them only appears if you move the mouse. If you leave the mouse alone a few seconds, it disappears. So trying to tell her where to look for something? It disappears before I can get her to focus on it.

"It's called vibe plumbing. I'm not even a plumber. Soon, all swimming pools will be done this way! Get onboard or get left behind."

(a real life version of the 'vibe construction' comic from https://mandatoryrollercoaster.com/). Photo taken from plumbers fails)

I just saw the most amazingly corporate expression of "we did what the bosses wanted us to do, even though the research didn't support that." The actual phrase was:

The research employed a methodology that prioritized stakeholder voice over researcher interpretation.

I wonder if a data scientist slipped that in to make it clear to other folks how this happened. You don't have to write stuff like this if the boss wants to do what the research says is a good idea. You only have to write this if the research says one thing and the boss says another.

@skinnylatte You will master British English when you can use “piss” in all its many forms.

“Taking a piss” means the same to US and UK speakers. “Taking the piss” is something else entirely. And that’s the sense involved in a “piss take.”

But if someone in the US is “pissed” they are angry. In the UK, they’re drunk. A party with a lot of alcohol is a “piss up,” from which we get the fantastic insult “he’s so dumb he couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery”

Two countries separated by a common language. 😜

@blogdiva I’m old enough to have played a version of Tetris that had a “boss key” that paused your game and switched to a screen that looked like Lotus 123. 😀

Holy shit this is detailed. Can you believe the hubris to silently collect all this information on users?

#privacy

https://browsergate.eu/how-it-works/

When I look at #artemis I don’t think about a billionaire or a company. I think about my country. And for a fleeting moment I don’t feel shame. This is what it feels like when we, as a society, accomplish something. We don’t focus on some singular person. We feel this whole country pride.

How many bolds could a kobold ko
If a kobold could kobolds