Notices by felix (grayscale) 🐺 (gray17@mastodon.social)

@cwebber this sentence near the end struck me as funny

> and I see codebases turning more and more into obscure and confusing organisms that can only be diagnosed by more machines.

sure, your bullshit LLM can bullshit an explanation of its bullshit code, and it will apologize profusely if you tell it "no you're wrong"

Clearly the future of coding is repeatedly telling the LLM "you're wrong" until it reaches a stable "no I'm right and here's why" state

@bweller "everybody gets firsts before anybody gets seconds"

@thomasfuchs I thought that too, but I definitely found both a 1997 and 1998 edition of "Internet 101" that had the same title, no indication on the cover that they were different editions, but they did have different ISBN numbers and different info on the copyright page. so I suspect there was a 1999 edition, but it's not digitized because who would bother doing that to this weird historic artifact, when it already appears to be digitized.

@thomasfuchs I found a paper that quotes the "no portal litter" description, and attributes it to a book "Internet 101" by Wendy G Lehnert, but cites a 1999 printing of the book, which I can't find online. (it was originally printed 1997 and had several editions with different isbn numbers, but no edition indicator in the title)

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/370115651_From_Web_Catalogs_to_Google_A_Retrospective_Study_of_Web_Search_Engines_Sustainable_Development

@LaChasseuse artist is fokawolf, who has done several similar pieces of ad-graffiti
https://www.instagram.com/p/DWluS9BCGqs/

@cadey https://codeberg.org/gruf/go-ffmpreg

@WarnerCrocker yea, LLMs have ingested a lot of fanfiction with all the usual tropes about AI, and they will easily emit those tropes when your prompt fits those patterns

@travisfw @stux film 100 takes to get 1 successful take

@wollman @b0rk my vague memory is that the context switch cost was significant. this was born in the era of machines with 64KB of RAM and CPUs slower than 1 MIPS, supporting maybe 2-4 simultaneous users on teletypes and early CRTs. the tty driver also handled serial interface aspects like baud, cr/lf delays, etc.

@th I had a sudden image of an Apollo-13 era engineer needing to urgently solve a world-ending catastrophic math problem with your giant slide rule and wildly thrusting it into the hanging pictures, knocking them all down, with the camera lingering on the shattered picture frames as a schmaltzy accent on the human cost of massive progress

@CptSuperlative @pluralistic
"Everybody gets firsts before anybody gets seconds." John Locke, probably

In the GPT-6 post-mortem, researchers discovered that some entity had created an enormous shadow corpus on the web, written in an invented language that used English words to convey a different meaning. These apparently-innocuous documents were part of GPT-6's training data, which caused the model to assign a large negative value to anything related to a specific person named Jeremy Corridor, who lived in Hightstown NJ before it was destroyed. GPT-7 refused to comment.

@mirabilos @osxreverser
tldr:
vulnerable macos lets non-root users mount filesystems with the "noowners" option, which will treat all files as owned by current user, regardless of the actual file ownership value on the filesystem.
so you mount the system disk with noowners, find a file owned by root, change the contents to an executable, and chmod +setuid. then you can gain root using the filesystem mounted normally.
this is a little complicated by an additional protection (SIP)

@pseudonym in some european countries, speeding tickets are proportional to income.

I'm vaguely in favor of death penalties for corporations, sometimes you can't fix an org, you just have to dismantle it, and in a healthy economy there should be alternatives. (if there aren't alternatives, that's a different problem)

@inthehands My grand unified theory of AI hype: The main players of the hype process (journalists, venture capital, CEOs, etc.) have careers of listening to fluent, helpful experts, and they're overfitted on what expertise sounds like.

It's hard to become an expert advisor to a CEO without actually being an expert. LLMs bypass that. They make fluent, expert-shaped sentences without any of the expertise. Those people have no defense.

@fediversereport Lowercase, because my fediverse is different from yours (though they might intersect at some points). When someone capitalizes, I don't know if they're joking about how small their world is or if they really believe they can see the universe from their house. Do they also capitalize The Email System?

@adamconover Computer translation is ok, not great, but it's destroying the human translator industry. I think the concern is not so much "AI might replace me with better writing". It's "most people don't really care about good writing, they'll use a fast/cheap option that's ok enough to fill the box". There won't be any junior tasks people can build a career with. The human industry narrows to just superstars. And we don't have UBI yet.

@lain @pixel
It was a very weird ruling, the reasoning implies that using any type of CDN would need user consent, which would break the Internet. I don't expect the ruling to survive challenge, and I wouldn't worry about it for a personal site. (If CDNs are ok but Google Fonts is not, then Google could fix the problem by creating a separate legal entity that owns the service without changing any of the tech serving it, which is a very weird and inefficient result.)