Alice: what is 2 + 2?

LLM: random.random() + random.random()

Alice: 1.2199404515268157 is better than nothing, i guess

yeah it was pretty wild

like we get it, you think your farts smell good, but this is an elevator sir

https://awful.systems/post/5776862/8966942 😭

also this guy is a bit of a doofus, e.g. https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/853934, where he is a dick to someone reporting a bug, and https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/885027, where someone points out that you can execute anything as root because of a security issue, and he argues like a total shithead

You mean that a program designed to let an unprivileged user
mount/unmount/eject anything he wants has a security flaw because it allows
him to mount/unmount/eject anything he wants? I’m shocked.

Implement a system that allows an appilcation to mount/unmount/eject USB
devices connected to the system securely, then make sure that system is
universally adopted on every linux install in the universe. Once you’ve done that, feel free to
re-open this ticket.

i would not invite this person to my birthday

the chair of my cs department at a public university expressed this sentiment

“the cat’s out of the bag, now we must teach students to use it responsibly”

BECAUSE THAT HAS WORKED SO WELL BEFORE

(sorry for shouting)

something i was thinking about yesterday: so many people i respect used to respect have admitted to using llms as a search engine. even after i explain the seven problems with using a chatbot this way:

1. wrong tool for the job
2. bad tool
3. are you fucking serious?
4. environmental impact
5. ethics of how the data was gathered/curated to generate^[1] the model
6. privacy policy of these companies is a nightmare
7. seriously what is wrong with you

they continue to do it. the ease of use, together with the valid syntax output by the llm, seems to short-circuit something in the end-user’s brain.

anyway, in the same way that some vibe-coded bullshit will end up exploding down the line, i wonder whether the use of llms as a search engine is going to have some similar unintended consequences — “oh, yeah, sorry boss, the ai told me that mr. robot was pretty accurate, idk why all of our secrets got leaked. i watched the entire series.”

additionally, i wonder about the timing. will we see sporadic incidents of shit exploding, or will there be a cascade of chickens coming home to roost?

tom sawyer literally rolling in wealth

but he never helps huck finn out financially?

pretty shit story, mark

as someone who identifies greatly with diogenes, i say: do not trust anyone who compares themself to diogenes

Like a complete fucking idiot, I paid for two years of protonmail right before discovering they are fascists. I would like to move to another provider. I have until August. I have been considering Forward Email. Anyone have thoughts on this provider or recommendations?

I just saw this. I sent an email to Framework a few days ago asking if they would delete my account and letting them know this was the reason.

This is a fundamentally flawed argument. If you ask a human who already knows the algorithm for solving the Tower-of-Hanoi problem to solve a Tower-of-Hanoi problem with twenty discs, for instance, he or she would almost certainly fail to do so. By that logic, we must conclude that humans cannot think either.

“I don’t understand recursion” energy

from the folks who brought you

we’ve trained a model to regurgitate 19th century pseudoscience

the field of computer science presents: How to destroy a public good by skipping all the required reading in your liberal arts courses

my face to your foot style

Glad to see.

Baldur Bjarnason has a piece from July 2023 called The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con^[1] that you might appreciate, if you haven’t read it yet. :)

yeah the trick is to already know you’re an idiot

after fedora announced that ai contributions are cool, this is really refreshing

The lost art of testing your websites.

i run with javascript disabled by default, and it’s actually refreshing when a website at least displays “this shit requires javascript lol” instead of just not working

the modern web sucks, let’s all train ravens like asoiaf

it’s democratic if i couldn’t do it yesterday but i can do it today, even though it’s not the same in any meaningful way

edit: in all seriousness, it’s disgusting the way they are pretending there is some noble intention behind any of this.

i skimmed and it caused psychic damage

would not encourage

thank you for the suggestion, this is good stuff.