Notices by Jeremy Kahn (trochee@dair-community.social), page 3

@evan

Federating the _list_ of replies from the poster's instance isn't currently done, is it?

Doing that would address (maybe?) one of the (least toxic) causes of the reply-guy phenomenon — that small instances often don't have a complete cache of all the replies to a post on another instance

Apparently I slept for DATETIME TESTING IS HARD last night, how about you?

Y'all, I ain't kidding about LLMs being "word shoggoths"

especially if you read "Elder Things" as "Slow AI" LLCs

Look what it says on Wikipedia:

> Though able to "understand" the Elder Things' language, shoggoths had no real consciousness and were controlled through hypnotic suggestion.

> …exterminating the shoggoths was not an option as the Elder Things were dependent on them for labor and had long lost their capacity to create new life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoggoth

https://dair-community.social/@trochee/112477267079709781

@Adam_Cadmon1 how they gonna fire tear gas at themselves?

@interfluidity

Just this morning I mentioned that I wanted a replacement for my electric car and got three excellent suggestions, each personal recommendations.

(here: https://dair-community.social/@trochee/112423349913988299 )

Googling for a high value purchase is a _nightmare_ of SEO and generated content

Oh no, the #UW #Seattle encampment might get attacked tomorrow.

This is a crappy piece of "guidance" from UW administration, saying basically "we asked the fash nicely not to beat up kids, but they say they're still coming, and we asked the encampment to leave, and they won't either, so I guess both sides, and maybe don't show up on the quad"

#noMurderingChildren #NotInMyName #FreeGaza

@eaton @danhon

I mean, something that could scan three pages of lawyer fine print and translate to eighth grade reading level

Okay, that's useful.

@danhon
It does sort of feel like the techbros are telling on their own functional illiteracy (or their marks') if they think that "turn paragraph of written text into an audio explanation for nine year olds" is a killer app on the road to "superintelligent" machines

Every once in a while I am amazed that one of the contenders for social media dominance right now is literally named "blue sky"

It's a term from project planning, and I'm pretty sure it's intended to mean "what you do if there were no constraints"

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figuratively, "blue sky" is about halfway between "pie in the sky" (unrealistically optimistic) and "fair-weather friend/soldier" (someone who cannot be relied upon in hard times)

That they entirely overlook these rhetorical ankle-breaking potholes (as bad as "Uber", I mean, really) is the best evidence yet that the software engineering industry needs humanities people

2/2

@xgranade yeah,

"blue sky" absolutely feels like a Torment Nexus name

but swapping genre from SFF to whatever genre contains Office Space, Severance, The Office, Microserfs, etc

"fin-du-20⁰-siècle bureaucratic decadent"
"Dunder-Mifflinique"

@danhon

"upgrade to pro to unlock Broca's Area upgrade"

@blogdiva

I'm Jewish (though mom is a Mayflower goy), _and_ a Brown alum; will be calling the alumni office tomorrow to oppose punitive action against students protesting genocide

Have any pointers to a script?

Am feeling like it might be counterproductive to splutter something like "you must be some kind of monster for even CONSIDERING punishing students for opposing genocide"

This article is one enormous [citation needed]

> “I’m more optimistic because we have been using the tool a lot, and some of the insights we’re starting to get from a scientific standpoint are things that none of our scientists were aware of,” he added.

Moderna CEO says AI will help scientists understand ‘most diseases’ in 3 to 5 years | Semafor
https://www.semafor.com/article/04/18/2024/moderna-ceo-says-ai-will-help-understand-most-diseases-in-3-to-5-years

Holy cow, Ed Zitron can write about the careening rolling disaster that is the useful knowledge of the web being rendered useless by the glue-factories of modern search

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-great-looting-of-the-internet/

@inthehands

In my own professional life right now, my less-technical teammates have been given very few tools (1) and had to rely on difficult and tedious manual review (2 - grit and grind).

In my own rush to help them, I've often rushed to offer them tools to not grind so hard — pointing them to @AlSweigart's https://automatetheboringstuff.com/ , writing custom tools, etc — but without doing a very clear job of discerning (3) what _they_ felt was needed

(1 of 3ish)

@inthehands

In the last few months, I realized that some large fraction of my peers have entangled their professional identity with (2) the grit and grind, and were quietly resisting tooling improvements (!), which increased _my_ work frustration substantially ("why won't you let me help you!")

(2/3)

@inthehands

So now I'm revisiting the tool improvement work, but specifically seeking insider "champions" from my less technical peers — people who (3) know the difference and can speak to the good reasons to (1) use tools.

IOW I'm no longer certain that the techies are the repository of (3)-style wisdom, and I'm going back to find my peers who _are_ more informed on that discernment

(3/fin)

@donaldball

Indeed there are plenty of cases where the engineers' solution is _worse_ , because they've added a technical problem — the maintenance and configuration of a tool — to what was previously a business problem

("Now you have two problems")

Many technologies fit in this antipattern. I've seen it peak multiple times
regex 1999
XML 2003
"big data" 2007
"machine learning" 2010
"put a neural net on it" 2012
"Blockchain" 2013
"put a chatbot on it" 2016
GPTs 2022?

@inthehands

@inthehands

I love this thread

And I want to jump off in a tangential direction, that has to do with what just today I dubbed "the Serenity Prayer for tech support"

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