@movq@www.uninformativ.de by far the weirdest plane: https://movq.de/v/863829c893/IMG_4912.JPG

@prologic@twtxt.net I mean, I get that there are differences of opinion. But death threats? Who the hell is doing that?

@prologic@twtxt.net hahaha definitely not

Sam Altman on Twitter: “a new version of moore’s law that could start soon: the amount of intelligence in the universe doubles every 18 months” / Twitter

The more I read from this guy, the more I come to believe he is a gigantic douchecanoe. What a profoundly stupid thing to say.

GitHub and OpenAI fail to wriggle out of Copilot lawsuit • The Register

Lawsuits alleging GitHub Copilot breached licenses can move forward. Will be interesting to see how these cases are decided.

This is a fucked up detail:

The judge meanwhile rejected the defense argument that the plaintiffs should not be allowed to continue their claim pseudonymously based on death threats sent to the plaintiffs’ counsel.

Who is sending death threats to the lawyers of people trying to sue GitHub/Microsoft/OpenAI, and why? Something’s fishy there.

Asleep at the Keyboard? Assessing the
Security of GitHub Copilot’s Code Contributions

40% of code produced by GitHub Copilot has at least one well-known security vulnerability, in the test reported in this paper.

Crypto collapse? Get in loser, we’re pivoting to AI – Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain

Someone on here gave me a hard time when I suggested that the crypto grifters were pivoting to AI after crypto collapsed. But, they were and they still are.

I found this to be a good thread on the subject of how the media is covering the dam explosion. The author, Timothy Snyder, is a history professor at Yale and has consistently good commentary on the war in Ukraine.

@prologic@twtxt.net I tried to call him but he wouldn’t answer the phone 😞

@stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no I think I understand NATO’s hesitation, but at the same time if this drags on and on for years then it causes massive loss of life and is even more dangerous for everyone. If that nuclear power plant melts down, whether because Russia causes it directly or because of an “accident”, then all of Europe can be blanketed with fallout. The longer this goes on, the more likely that possibility (and worse ones!) becomes.

That is scary to be so close to Russia. I hope you’re doing OK.

@prologic@twtxt.net yeah, it’s a horrible waste.

@prologic@twtxt.net I don’t agree. I think he’s a thug who benefits a lot if everybody thinks he’s a madman.

All through this war, there has been a repeated cycle:

• We can’t give Ukraine weapon X; that will provoke Putin and he’ll drop a nuke!
  
• Russian propagandists threaten they’re about to drop nukes
  
• After lots of hand wringing, some country gives weapon X to Ukraine
  
• No nukes are dropped
  

We’re on like the 5th iteration of this. Now it’s about F-16 fighter jets. In the meantime, a lot of Ukrainians AND Russians are dying en masse.

@prologic@twtxt.net I said nothing about an international violent response. You added that 🤔

If someone punches you in the face over and over again, you don’t stand there and take it to avoid “begetting violence”. You stop them from punching you, and do your best to ensure they never punch you again. That’s not “violence begets violence”. That’s rationality.

This demands a response from Europe, the world, not just Ukraine.

Russia blowing up the Nova Kakhovka dam is an incomprehensible war crime. Among other things, it drains water from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, water that is needed for cooling. They are trying to generate a widespread disaster.

They must be stopped, immediately, without hesitation. This is unacceptable behavior, crossing every red line we have no matter our politics, without any doubt.

Seems to me you could write a script that:

• Parses a StackOverflow question
  
• Runs it through an AI text generator
  
• Posts the output as a post on StackOverflow
  

and basically pollute the entire information ecosystem there in a matter of a few months? How long before some malicious actor does this? Maybe it’s being done already 🤷

What an asinine, short-sighted decision. An astonishing number of companies are actively reducing headcount because their executives believe they can use this newfangled AI stuff to replace people. But, like the dot com boom and subsequent bust, many of the companies going this direction are going to face serious problems when the hypefest dies down and the reality of what this tech can and can’t do sinks in.

We really, really need to stop trusting important stuff to corporations. They are not tooled to last.

Dear Stack Overflow, Inc.

Stack Overflow is being inundated with AI-generated garbage. A group of 480+ human moderators is going on strike, because:

Specifically, moderators are no longer allowed to remove AI-generated answers on the basis of being AI-generated, outside of exceedingly narrow circumstances. This results in effectively permitting nearly all AI-generated answers to be freely posted, regardless of established community consensus on such content.

In turn, this allows incorrect information (colloquially referred to as “hallucinations”) and plagiarism to proliferate unchecked on the platform. This destroys trust in the platform, as Stack Overflow, Inc. has previously noted.

It looks like StackOverflow Inc. is saying one thing to the public, and a very different thing to its moderators.

“Sam Altman’s AI Hype Roadshow”

“The project of Altman and his merry band of doomsayers appears to be to capture power and create obfuscation by making new myths and legends”

“It assumes that no one will pull back the curtain and expose it as a market-expansion strategy”

Yes.

On Understanding Power and Technology

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @movq@www.uninformativ.de I’ve always liked the sound of crows, and I really really hate the sound of motorized vehicles, so I also find it absurd. I’ve come to think that some people are at some level afraid of nature, and nature sounds remind them of it.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de wow. I’d trade crow sounds for car sounds, or jet sounds, or leaf blower sounds, or lawn mower sounds, or…..100% of the time.

As far as fighting the birds goes, maybe they’re right, but probably it’d be better to re-balance the ecosystem so that crows aren’t so dominant? At least there are things to try. When it comes to reducing how much air travel people use, it takes a terrorist attack or a pandemic to affect it.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Is that a jet flying over? People’s priorities are fucked up.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I clone the important stuff on two separate clusters, but both are in my house. One of these days I’m planning to ask my brother to put a server of mine in his house, and then we can cross-clone for offsite backups that don’t require the cloud.

@mckinley@twtxt.net backintime for my desktop and work files. A combination of rsync, zfs snapshots, and redundancy for “at rest” type things.

@Planet_Jabber_XMPP@feeds.twtxt.net No. ChatGPT does not improve your code. Coding is thinking. You offloaded your thought to a machine. You will not be able to reproduce what the machine did for you if you don’t have the machine, so you learned nothing.

I came across the phrase “long fuse, big bang” used to describe large-scale issues with tipping points facing humanity, like climate change, and it feels pretty apt.

@prologic@twtxt.net You more or less need a data center to run one of these adequately (well, train…you can run a trained one with a little less hardware). I think that’s the idea–no one can run them locally, they have to rent them (and we know how much SaaS companies and VCs love the rental model of computing).

There’s a lot of promising research-grade work being done right now to produce models that can be run on a human-scale (not data-center-scale) computing setup. I suspect those will become more commonly deployed in the next few years.

@darch@neotxt.dk I fully agree with this. As the well-worn saying goes, you cannot address social problems with technological solutions.

@prologic@twtxt.net eesh, that’s rough! Hope you get a break soon.