← Feed

Posts

• View post

  It's pretty much been known for generations that US college fraternities are about bonding the ruling class together through rape, torture, and binge drinking.

• View post

  There are good reasons to have moral lines not to cross, and there are good reasons why so many of us are drawing it at LLM usage. You want to avoid a slippery slope? That's how you avoid a slippery slope: with a hard "No".

• View post

  Stickers on a utility pole in San Francisco.

• View post

  Navigator Franny guides us in to dock.

• View post

  I've been playing Space Engineers a lot lately. One thing that's always nagged at me about it is that Marek Rosa, who started Keen Software House, the software company behind it, has some odd beliefs about "AI" and so forth. He doesn't dominate the spotlight but he keeps close to it. Today I was looking at the Space Engineers blog, and, it's got some bigger red flags than usual: a sidebar with Marek Rosa's "biography", with an image of him dressed (I thin...

• View post

  My phone rang. I looked over and, as usual, it was an unknown caller, so I didn't answer it. It crosses my mind that in the 70s and 80s, you always answered the phone if you could. Fraudulent and spam calls were a concern, but a minor one. We usually just assumed if someone was calling, we should answer, because it was a friend, or something important. TV shows would show someone not answering the phone as an indication they were in some sort of crisis. Now, most communication is assumed...

• View post

  It seems like a lot of the fantastic wealth of the super-rich is an illusion, a lot of theoretical valuation of financial instruments whose value would collapse if they actually cashed them in. I wonder how far that really goes. This may be stupid of me, but I'm starting to wonder if the rich have grown poorer along with the rest of us, and they're faking a lot. Someone commented that the rich in the 19th century were always trying to promote themselves with civic monumental architectu...

• View post

  I've toyed with the idea of refreshing my knowledge of Perl. Nearly all the jobs I apply for ask for knowledge of BASH, Python, and occasionally Powershell; I haven't seen a job listing mention Perl in years. Still, it does seem to continue to be under development. A conceptual problem I have with Perl best practices is that there's a lot of emphasis on writing Perl code that's compatible with old versions of the Perl interpreter. But of course, that means not using newer functi...

• View post

  As they say, liberals hate socialists more than liberals hate fascists. And that's even with fascists holding state power and calling for the violent purge of liberals. They love capitalism more than they love their own lives. https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:hf7ezrajxadu7v3tzcyij424/post/3mqz33uinj22y

• View post

  Linus Torvalds declaring for LLM-generated code is, among other things, an example of why the "benevolent dictator for life" model that dominates FOSS will inevitably lead to disaster.

• View post

  Mark Rubio's argument against the ICC is that the US government is routinely committing atrocities.

• View post

  I hope this wretched nation collapses like an 80 year old fascist getting heat stroke.

• View post

  A 125 gram bottle of Marmite, once emptied and cleaned, nicely holds one standard set of 16 millimeter polyhedral dice. #TTRPG #Dice

• View post

  I applied for a job that seemed to fit my skillset. I have an interview tomorrow. I looked at the company website -- and of course it's an "AI" company. I hate this. I've also been unemployed for six months and the unemployment benefits have run out.

• View post

  @anttipeltola@mastodon.world When I've read histories of computers and programming, I was surprised how often Finnish universities were mentioned. This also sounds like what's happened with universities in the US. In the 90s, a lot of significant software was developed and supported by universities and government-funded research organizations. But universities ended up outsourcing their IT.

• View post

  Listening to this song led to my reading Society of the Spectacle, which was definitely worthwhile. Preboreal - The Ocean https://tidal.com/track/273001341/u

• View post

  Reading that thread about Rust adopting an LLM policy, it weighs on me that FOSS institutions are purging anyone with scruples.

• View post

  As some people are starting to point out, it's kind of ridiculous we still take the "Turing Test" seriously. Alan Turing was an extraordinarily clever person, but, the Turing Test was basically a joke, a farcical exercise in pragmatic philosophy in the early days of computing. We have a few millenia of contemplating the nature of humanity at least. At least some people think to point out that as a practical question, ELIZA showed that the Turing Test is completely use...

• View post

  @fasterandworse This is not my strongest objection to LLMs and "generative AI", but it's the one that it puzzles me the most that people, like Doctorow, and like professional software developers, do not see: tools are supposed to be predictable and reliable. The discipline of engineering is supposed to be founded on this principle. But this is a class of software that is, by design, unpredictable and unreliable. (Even random number generators generate numbers in a predictable range...

• View post

  I love getting into arguments with liberals who cannot get their heads around "cult beliefs" like that states are inherently violent.