V0ldek

joined 1 year ago
[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 1 points 5 hours ago

I never thought I'd say this but... don't slander category theory like that, compared to LLMs it's downright useful

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 12 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

This is true, but also importantly this only works if you carefully redefine productivity to mean something else than a craftsman would consider productivity. You need a simple metric that's easily cheated.

For example, a software engineer who cares about what he does would define productivity fuzzily, as general growth of functionality for the consumer of the application, with the implied "actual working well-crafted functionality". If you're an idiot who wants to hack productivity, you define it as something straightforward and stupid, e.g. lines of code added. Suddenly you can claim that an "AI software engineer" is more productive than a human.

This exists even in something seemingly all about quality, such as research. One of the many problems with the current state of academia is the obsession with "number of papers published" to the disregard of rigor, and so you'll get people who are more interested in hacking the metric than actual research. Hence the seemingly annual scandal where someone is caught completely fabricating data, or the even more frequent sham experiments in psychology that never replicate. The replication crisis falls into the same category -- it's good science to replicate, but journals are not interested so it doesn't grow the sacred metric by which every academician is judged.

Unfortunately we're in an age of hacked productivity. The productivity metric for our markets is line going up, which has long been disconnected from actual productivity, as in providing a product to customers that willingly buy it. It's hard to keep focus on actual productivity when seemingly everyone around you, and especially everyone hierarchichally above you, cares only about the hacked metrics. Art is one of the few mainstays where you alone can be the judge of your own productivity and whether you're happy with your output, since at the core the only metric that matters in art is "does it feel right to me". This must be untenable to promptfondlers because they never experienced actual artistic fulfillment, so instead they need a hacked metric to feel good about improving -- how many images can we churn? how long of a video can Sora output before killing itself? how many seconds of "music" can our box generate?

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 5 points 3 days ago

xD oh what a delight, the one thing missing from the complete gobshite of a "database" that Mongo is was an AI to mangle your queries

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 6 points 3 days ago

Cargo cult business meeting

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 3 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Since their output is, in the technical sense of the term, bullshit [1],

== References

[1] Frankfurt H. On Bullshit. Raritan Quarterly Review 1986; 6:81-100.

Let's start collecting a bibliography

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I love the leaves and gold meme and I use it constantly even though quite literally no one ever understands it, so, thank you, now I know there's two of us.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 8 points 6 days ago (3 children)

Sir, this is a Wendy's, also

There will be no reactionary restoration of the pre-internet past.

did you get sucked up your ass so deep you forgot who's on the reactionary side?

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 6 points 6 days ago (6 children)

The FDA thing gave me whiplash what the fuck, what did I miss

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 5 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (5 children)

It still has to go through peer review, so I fully expect one (1) accepted paper with the title "Large Generative AI Models in Telecommunications - What? No. Why? No!"

Hit me up if you want to collaborate on one lol

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

Dunno, I disagree. It's quite impossible for me to put myself in the shoes of a person who wouldn't see a difference between shouting at an INANIMATE FUCKIN' OBJECT vs at an actual person. As if saying "fuck off" to ChatGPT made me somehow more likely to then say "fuck off" to a waiter in a restaurant? That's sociopath shit. If you need to "built the habit of being respectful" you have some deeper issues that should be solved by therapy, not by being nice to autocomplete.

I'm a programmer since forever, I spend roughly 4h every day verbally abusing the C++ compiler because it's godawful and can suck my balls. Doesn't make me any more likely to then go to my colleague and verbally abuse them since, you know, they're an actual person and I have empathy for them. If anything it's therapeutic for me since I can vent some of my anger at a thing that doesn't care. It's like an equivalent of shouting into a pillow.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 12 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (5 children)

Don’t y’all get tired of being wrong sometimes? Maybe try to learn from the past.

Fondly remembering all the times we were wrong. Ah, remember that one time we were totally wrong about the metaverse not being the future? Oh, oh, or the classic "cryptocurrencies are just a scam" talk we had to walk back so many times. Damn, good thing we didn't call out WeWork for being a money sink or we'd be looking pretty fucking stupid now!

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submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by V0ldek@awful.systems to c/freeasm@awful.systems
 

I'm looking for recommendations of good blogs for programmers. I've been asked about what I would recommend by younger folks a few times these past few months and I realised I don't really have a good list that I could just share with them.

What I'm interested in are blogs that don't focus specifically on any particular tech but more things like Coding Horror that are just for devs in general. They don't have to be for beginners. It'd also be interesting to see which of those are most popular in our little circle, so please upvote comments that contain recommendations you agree with.

I'm implicitly assuming stuff shared by folks here is going to be sensible, well-written blogs, and not some AI shill nonsense or other tech grift.

Note that I'm specifically interested in the text medium, podcasts or YT not so much.

 

An excellent post by Ludicity as per usual, but I need to vent two things.

First of all, I only ever worked in a Scrum team once and it was really nice. I liked having a Product Owner that was invested in the process and did customer communications, I loved having a Scrum Master that kept the meetings tight and followed up on Retrospective points, it worked like a well-oiled machine. Turns out it was a one-of-a-kind experience. I can't imagine having a stand-up for one hour without casualties involved.

A few months back a colleague (we're both PhD students at TU Munich) was taking a piss about how you can enroll in a Scrum course as an elective for our doctor school. He was in general making fun of the methodology but using words I've never heard before in my life. "Agile Testing". "Backlog Grooming". "Scrum of Scrums". I was like "dude, none of those words are in the bible", went to the Scrum Guide (which as far as I understood was the only document that actually defined what "Scrum" meant) and Ctrl+F-ed my point of literally none of that shit being there. Really, where the fuck does any of that come from? Is there a DLC to Scrum that I was never shown before? Was the person who first uttered "Scrumban" already drawn and quartered or is justice yet to be served?

Aside: the funniest part of that discussion was that our doctor school has an exemption that carves out "credits for Scrum and Agile methodology courses" as being worthless towards your PhD, so at least someone sane is managing that.

Second point I wanted to make was that I was having a perfectly happy holiday and then I read the phrase "Agile 2" and now I am crying into an ice-cream bucket. God help us all. Why. Ludicity you fucking monster, there was a non-zero chance I would've gone through my entire life without knowing that existed, I hate you now.

 

Turns out software engineering cannot be easily solved with a ~~small shell script~~ large language model.

The author of the article appears to be a genuine ML engineer, although some of his takes aged like fine milk. He seems to be shilling Google a bit too much for my taste. However, the sneer content is good nonetheless.

First off, the "Devin solves a task on Upwork" demo is 1. cherry picked, 2. not even correctly solved.

Second, and this is the absolutely fantastic golden nugget here, to show off its "bug solving capability" it creates its own nonsensical bugs and then reverses them. It's the ideal corporate worker, able to appear busy by creating useless work for itself out of thin air.

It also takes over 6 hours to perform this task, which would be reasonable for an experienced software engineer, but an experienced software engineer's workflow doesn't include burning a small nuclear explosion worth of energy while coding and then not actually solving the task. We don't drink that much coffee.

The next demo is a bait-and-switch again. In this case I think the author of the article fails to sneer quite as much as it's worthy -- the task the AI solves is writing test cases for finding the Least Common Multiple modulo a number. Come on, that task is fucking trivial, all those tests are oneliners! It's famously much easier to verify modulo arithmetic than it is to actually compute it. And it takes the AI an hour to do it!

It is a bit refreshing though that it didn't turn out DEVIN is just Dinesh, Eesha, Vikram, Ishani, and Niranjan working for $2/h from a slum in India.

 

I'm not sure if this fully fits into TechTakes mission statement, but "CEO thinks it's a-okay to abuse certificate trust to sell data to advertisers" is, in my opinion, a great snapshot of what brain worms live inside those people's heads.

In short, Facebook wiretapped Snapchat by sending data through their VPN company, Onavo. Installing it on your machine would add their certificates as trusted. Onavo would then intercept all communication to Snapchat and pretend the connection is TLS-secure by forging a Snapchat certificate and signing it with its own.

"Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted, we have no analytics about them," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a 2016 email to Javier Olivan.

"Given how quickly they're growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them," Zuckerberg continued. "Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this."

Zuckerberg ordered his engineers to "think outside the box" to break TLS encryption in a way that would allow them to quietly sell data to advertisers.

I'm sure the brave programmers that came up with and implemented this nonsense were very proud of their service. Jesus fucking cinammon crunch Christ.

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