mii

joined 6 months ago
[–] mii@awful.systems 7 points 21 hours ago (3 children)

Oh, I wonder if they are referring to this shit, where somone came to r/lgbt fishing for compliments for the picture they'd asked Clippy for, and were completely clowned on by the entire community, which then led to another subreddit full of promptfans claiming that artists are transphobic because they didn't like a generated image which had a trans flag in it.

[–] mii@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I honestly just use browser bookmarks. That’s always been enough for me. Firefox can sync them too, so that takes care of backups as well.

For anything that needs special attention, I create a todo item with the link in org-mode.

[–] mii@awful.systems 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I actually flagged this with our DSO, still waiting for the results.

(Somehow MS Teams itself did go through years ago, which also surprised me.)

[–] mii@awful.systems 13 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

Well, our company is trying really hard to make my whole department redundant at the moment.

Some months ago our CEO went to Silicon Valley to "talk to some people", although I have no idea what he really did there. We're also from Europe and don't even sell anything in the Americas, so that trip was really unusual. And ever since he came back, he's been completely AI-brained, and here's some things that happened since then:

  • an executive order to "integrate AI into all layers of our business"
  • replacing all our laptops with new Thinkpads because they are apparently better for AI and have a Copilot button
  • activating Copilot for MS Teams even though it's 100% not GDPR-compliant
  • dumping tens of thousands of euros into MS Fabrics in the hopes that it will somehow vomit out useful data for marketing; it hasn't vomited out ANYTHING so far

Worst of all, though, our development department consists of two people including me, and the other guy mostly does organizational stuff so I am more or less alone responsible for the entirety of our production-critical code. We are understaffed and I am working on a project for which I was promised two juniors early next year ... now however, I was being asked to evaluate whether we can do that with AI instead, and the hires have been shelved.

And I don't think I'm allowed to submit "lol no".

[–] mii@awful.systems 4 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

Posteo is from Germany and they’re reasonably popular here. Their offer is quite different from Proton, though. If you want full E2E encryption you need to use GPG or S/MIME and handle that yourself (and obviously so does your recipient), so it’s not as batteries included as what Proton offered.

I like their focus on green energy and sustainability though.

Another option like that is mailbox.org. They’re presenting themselves as a bit more business-like.

[–] mii@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I remember getting my first real computer (I had seen and occasionally played around with my aunt's old Macintosh before and a neighbor's kid had a C64) at some point in the early 90s. I think my father got it for work or something, can't remember, but me, having had a Nintendo at home, was more interested in playing games. I asked my aunt if it's the same as a Nintendo, meaning whether it also had Mario and stuff on it, and she told me, no, it's better, because you can make your own games with it.

So yeah, that was the moment I was hooked and I wanted to learn how to do that, which really wasn't as easy as I thought it'd be because that machine, coming with some ancient version of MS DOS (or maybe IBM DOS, I really can't remember) didn't have any straightforward ways of guiding me through, nor did I have a good tutorial book or anything.

It wasn't until a while later that we got internet access at home (the computer had since been upgraded from DOS to Windows) and me discovering Usenet and online discussion groups that I really found useful information and discovered my love for programming (and other stuff, too, like comics and manga, and fan-fiction, lol). I never actually got around to making that game, though, because I was just toying around with doing basic math and getting stuff to print to the console, obviously. As you did, back in the day.

I think another pivotal moment was when I first got my hands on an early version of Linux. That must've been the mid-to-late 90s, I think, and it was an image of SUSE Linux (now OpenSUSE) and I tried installing that on my computer -- and holy shit, that was an experience, but I was hooked. Compared to DOS and Windows it was so much more fun because of all the stuff you could do with it. I tried all the stuff, went from SUSE to RedHat to Debian to Sorcerer (which I really liked), and finally to Gentoo just for the nerd cred. I've basically been running Linux ever since, with a brief Mac OS phase in-between when my grandma got me a used computer when I went to university which was one of the colorful Apple iBooks. I actually quite liked Mac OS for a while, especially early OS X, which seemed like a polished and very user-friendly UNIX with batteries included, but went back to Linux a few years later.

These days I'm running Debian Stable though. Because even though I have nothing bad to say about Gentoo and learned a lot using it over the years, I just want my shit to work without getting my hands dirty too much (and my tinkering time goes into Emacs anyway).

[–] mii@awful.systems 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Am I understanding this right: this app takes a picture of your ID card or passport and the feeds it to some ML algorithm to figure out whether the document is real plus some additional stuff like address verification?

Depending on where you’re located, you might try and file a GDPR complaint against this. I’m not a lawyer but I work with the DSO for our company and routinely piss off people by raising concerns about whatever stupid tool marketing or BI tried to implement without asking anyone, and I think unless you work somewhere that falls under one of the exceptions for GDPR art. 5 §1 you have a pretty good case there because that request seems definitely excessive and not strictly necessary.

[–] mii@awful.systems 12 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (4 children)

A while back one of their reps did say somewhere on Reddit that they have no intention of adding any LLM features to Scrivener. Granted, they said that in the context of moving towards a subscription model and talking about features that don't work with their current business model, but still. Unless something has changed recently, they seem to want to stick to being a one-time purchase without any cloud-based services whatsoever, including AI, for their next major version too.

[–] mii@awful.systems 63 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (4 children)

I swear if I hear "being against AI is ableist" one more time I'm gonna lose my shit. Disabled artists have existed for as long as art itself, and the only ableism here is AI-brained fuckwits using disabled people as an escape goat by suggesting they are unable to create things from their own effort and need spicy autocomplete to do so.

Edit: fuck it, I’m keeping the escape goat!

[–] mii@awful.systems 15 points 2 weeks ago

Our c-suite has announced an “AI workshop” for next Wednesday where we all work towards “increasing productivity in the age of AI”. The email was full of terribad Midjourney too which should’ve flagged it as spam.

Totes looking forward to discussing why I don’t let ChatGPT vomit out production-critical code and instead write it myself like some fucking Luddite with the marketing team next week.

[–] mii@awful.systems 15 points 3 weeks ago

These are not "Python community guidelines". These are the guidelines of a tyrannical clique who have grabbed power and control the access to the infrastructure.

Lmao, fucking armchair revolutionaries at it again with interpreting a list of rules which essentially boils down to "don't be an asshole" as the literal end of civilization because it's attacking their ~~assumed right to use slurs and insults~~ free speech.

Makes you think that it's always the same kind of people who seem to have a problem with not being a racist twat in a public space. Feels like I've seen similar discussions a dozen times in the Rust community too whenever the term inclusivity comes up.

[–] mii@awful.systems 17 points 3 weeks ago (14 children)

I love it when I randomly get a DM from some dude on Reddit because of a post I made six months ago mansplaining to me why I'm wrong about clowning on AI doomsters.

 

Wake up honey, new Zitron just dropped.

Looks like Sammy boy has a crush on Scarlett Johansson and wanted to model his sexy chatbot after her role in the movie Her. The damage control is actually hilarious.

Altman subsequently claimed that the actress for Sky was cast before the company reached out to Johansson.

“Yeah, I don’t want to go out with you anyway. Also, I already have a girlfriend but she goes to a different school, so you wouldn’t know her. And no, I won’t tell you who it is!”

I mean, we all knew that OpenAI is a fucking clown show of a company run by wannabe nerd frat boys with way too much money, but I didn’t think we’d get high school level relationship drama this season.

 

It was honestly only a matter of time before someone thought we could try that thing where they identify a license plate from a reflection in some dude’s pupil for realsies.

Puloka’s lawyers reportedly used an “expert” in creative video production who’d never worked on a criminal case before to “enhance” the video. The AI tool this unnamed expert used was developed by Texas-based Topaz Labs, which is available to anyone with an internet connection.

You wouldn’t know this expert though. He goes to a different school.

Large language models like ChatGPT have convinced otherwise intelligent people that these chatbots are capable of complex reasoning when that’s simply not what’s happening under the hood.

And at least the judge here had more than five brain cells and shut that circus down. Let’s hope this sets a precedent.

 

It seems like in the proceeds of building their alleged Star Trek utopia with robots and holodecks, tech bros have discovered that they’d rather be the Borg than Starfleet and have begun shilling the pros of getting yourself assimilated at SXSW of all places.

“I actually think that AI fundamentally makes us more human.”

I think it makes us more brain damaged, with this guy being exhibit A, but I guess you could argue that’s a fundamental human property (unless you count hallucinating LLMs).

Those folks sure seem bullish on artificial intelligence, and the audiences at the Paramount — many of whom are likely writers and actors who just spent much of 2023 on the picket line trying to reign in the potentially destructive power of AI — decided to boo the video. Loudly. And frequently.

Stop resisting the tech utopia they’re trying to build for you, or you’re literally doomers. Never mind that the people building said tech utopia are also doomers, but that’s different, because they worry about the real dangers like acausal robot basilisks torturing them for all eternity and not about petty shit like unemployment and poverty.

Speaking of stopping resisting, another, more critical article about this conference has some real bangers they left out in the other one -- I wonder why. It has some sneers, too.

[…] tech journo Kara Swisher—saying stuff like “you need to stop resisting and starting learning” about AI […].

Yep, that's an actual quote. I'm filing that one under examples of being completely tone-deaf alongside "Do you guys not have phones?".

[…] every company will use AI to “figure out how” to become “more efficient.”

I’m sure the toxic productivity community on YouTube will gobble that shit up. It reminds me of that clown who made a video on how to consume media more efficiently by watching anime on 2x speed and skipping the "boring parts". I guess when we eliminate all human value from entertainment products, that might become a valid strategy.

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