Notices by Gabriele Svelto (gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org)

I think we should use the term "machine generated" more and more when referring to the outputs of generative AI. Given how tech companies try to present "AI" as some kind of magic tool, and how they try to humanize the bots, I believe it's important to ground any discussion by pointing out that it's not much different from the output of a perl script. A perl script that needs a nuclear reactor to run and whose output is unreliable, but still just a dumb script.

Oh boy do I have news for you

Today during a meeting it was mentioned that the front-end for Firefox' main source code repository [1] was super slow because of... AI scrapers! Surprise surprise! The team had to go through quite a bit of effort to curb the traffic. Also, can you think of something more stupid than scraping sources hosted in a version control system by scraping the web front-end?

[1] https://hg.mozilla.org/

@eniko and that's in the context of this: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?oldid=509982

Just look at that graph for 2024. We basically got the casualties of a full-scale war and nobody gives a fuck. And that doesn't even account for disability and other side-effects.

@eniko he already had some real shitty opinions on other topics. Being good at assembly in your '20s doesn't make you a good person, or a smart one for the matter

Lists in Mastodon are a really useful feature, I wish I realized it sooner. You can follow accounts, put them in a list then hide them from your timeline. This way each list effectively becomes its own timeline which is super-useful when following news sites or specific topics. This way I can keep mostly mutuals and interesting people in my main timeline and dip into the lists for news on tech, Ukraine, politics, etc...

@Infoseepage yeah, finding this stuff was really refreshing. Also so silly that the people sitting on the franchise's rights didn't think of making the unedited originals available.

Tonight we showed Star Wars to the kids for the first time. I had to track down a despecialized version mixed with the '77 Italian dub, which took a while. It was worth it though, no late '90s CG bullshit, just the real deal. And Han shot first.

French far-right politician Marine Le Pen was just found guilty of embezzling European Union funds.

I know because my timeline is flooded by my French friends posting old videos of her saying how much she hates the EU and that politicians found guilty of such crimes should be banned from running for political office.

😀

@wlach it wasn't a thing which is why we have "famous" CPU bugs such as the Pentium FDIV issue. In the last few years it has become more and more common, with certain CPU families being particulary affected such as AMD's Jaguar and first Zen generation, as well as Intel's early Atom processors and lately Raptor Lake and its derivatives.

But by all means, keep pouring capitals into "artificial intelligence" while the very foundation of computing is falling apart and we can't trust a machine to execute instructions reliably.

I've been filing bugs to improve Mozilla's crash reporting infrastructure so it's easier to see at a glance if a particular crash affects only a specific CPU but also if only some microcode versions are affected.

I said it before but I'll say it again. I would have never thought that CPU bugs would have become an everyday occurrence, but here we are.

I wanted to thank all the people posting their art in here. The painters, the pixel artists, the musicians, the singers, the writers, the poets, the sculptors, the actors, the photographers, the puppeteers, the game developers, the demo coders, those doing crochet or just about anything else. You make this place beautiful at a time where we really can use the warmth and enrichment that comes from art.

Thank you.

@Infoseepage @dangoodin I'm not familiar with CWTCH so I can't comment on that. On Matrix you can encrypt group channels, and while it's cumbersome it guarantees that the host cannot access the group's messages so that's something. It can also be self-hosted which helps with securing it. It's still a mostly centralized solution but for group messaging we don't really have that many good alternatives.

@dangoodin these days we mostly use Matrix and mostly open channels too. Slack is still there but it's usage seems to be rapidly declining. It's a closed platform with no form of encryption or even other basic security measures. Matrix isn't perfect, but as a platform that can be both open and secure, it works pretty well. And I'm told that its federated moderation features really helped in rapidly kicking out bad actors and trolls, and ensuring they stay out of it.

@dangoodin when I started working at Mozilla all group communication was on IRC. It wasn't until 2014 that Slack became a thing inside the org, and initially it was mostly used by people outside of the tech sphere (management, marketing, etc...). Several teams moved there over time, but I didn't like it as I was used to our communication channels that weren't company-only, but also open to contributors and the general public. My teams stayed on IRC first, then moved to Matrix.

I did not expect to see a tech race around a technology that is both useless and that no user wants.

This article gave me something to think about: several undocumented instructions were discovered in modern CPUs, by fuzzing the instruction stream. It would be quite interesting to fuzz old CPUs too. Especially the 68000 family :)

https://www.downtowndougbrown.com/2025/01/the-invalid-68030-instruction-that-accidentally-allowed-the-mac-classic-ii-to-successfully-boot-up/

@bhearsum I haven't read too much on the topic but it seems that the DeepSeek LLMs are roughly as good (or as bad) as the big bad OpenAI LLMs but need a fraction of the computational power... making Nvidia's future prospect look bad

I had not realized just how bad the news of the DeepSeek chatbot had been for Nvidia's stock price. I suppose that placing all your bets on a bullshit technology that nobody wants has its downsides.