taladar

@taladar@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘An Overwhelmingly Negative And Demoralizing Force’: What It’s Like Working For A Company That’s Forcing AI On Its Developers.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I am not scared, well, except scared that I will have to listen to AI scam BS for the next decade the same way I had to listen to blockchain/cryptocurrency scam BS for the last decade.

  It is not that I haven’t tried the tools either. They just produce extremely horrible results every single time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘An Overwhelmingly Negative And Demoralizing Force’: What It’s Like Working For A Company That’s Forcing AI On Its Developers.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  “Why are we paying a human being a six figure salary when an AI is 90% as good and we pay once for the entire company?”

  And if it actually was 90% as good that would be a valid question, in reality however it is more like 9% as good with occasional downwards spikes towards 0.9%.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke tells employees to prove AI can’t do the job before asking for resources.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  If you spend 75% of your time writing code you are in a highly unusual coding position. Most programmers spend a very high percentage of their time understanding the problem domain and on other parts of figuring out requirements and translating them into something resembling some sort of semi-formal understanding of what the program actually needs to do. The low level detailed code writing is very rarely a bottleneck.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke tells employees to prove AI can’t do the job before asking for resources.⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  The error rate for human employees for the kind of errors AI makes is much, much lower. Humans make mistakes that are close to the intended task and have very little chance of being completely different. AI does the latter all the time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke tells employees to prove AI can’t do the job before asking for resources.⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Can you prove that he makes any important decisions?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke tells employees to prove AI can’t do the job before asking for resources.⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Cooking meals seems like a good first step towards teaching AI programming. After all the recipe analogy is ubiquitous in programming intro courses. /s

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke tells employees to prove AI can’t do the job before asking for resources.⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  AI is pretty good at spouting bullshit but it doesn’t have the same giant ego that human CEOs have so resources previously spent on coddling the CEO can be spent on something more productive. Not to mention it is a lot less effort to ignore everything an AI CEO says.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke tells employees to prove AI can’t do the job before asking for resources.⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly, AI coding assistants (as in the ones working like auto-complete in the code editor) are very close to useless unless maybe you work in one of those languages like Java that are extremely verbose and lack expressiveness. I tried using a few of them for a while but it got to the point where I forgot to turn them on a few times (they do take up too much VRAM to keep running when not in use) and I didn’t even notice any productivity problems from not having them available.

  That said, conversational AI can sometimes be quite useful to figure out which library to look at for a given task or how to approach a problem.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft fires employee protestor who called AI boss a ‘war profiteer’⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  prevents it from retaliatory actions against human rights violations

  They can’t retaliate if someone violates human rights?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What Will Remain for People to Do? The future of labor in a world with increasingly productive AI.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Labor is a human putting in work. Fully automated production of goods and services is already a thing for some goods and services today and some others have a much, much larger automation component than they had historically.

  Don’t confuse the wealth distribution mechanism (getting paid for labor) with the actual work itself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What Will Remain for People to Do? The future of labor in a world with increasingly productive AI.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  The real question isn’t how we structure our society if some extremely far-fetched scenario happens. The real question is how we structure our society right now that is already failing most of society the way it is structured right now.

  Labor is not a necessity for people to survive, in fact most people would consider a place where their job wasn’t required a utopia in terms of the enjoyment they get out of the actual labor. The real question is about wealth distribution, not labor.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You can add self-driving to non-Teslas via comma.ai's "openpilot": an open-source, LiDAR-based dashcam module⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  It skirts around governmental add’l requirements for driverless cars by being open-source and saying the users choose to install their own software, so it can avoid legal issues

  This would never work here in Germany where we have actual safety requirements for allowing cars on the roads.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gunkroad: The creator-economy service Gumroad decided to open-source its platform at a suspiciously convenient time. (And even “open source” might be stretching it.)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  FOSS die-hards may not agree, but this kind of threading-the-needle can be done well, and honestly, IMHO. A good example is the content-management framework Directus, which essentially makes it free to use in most cases, unless you make more than $5 million in finances per year, at which point you need to start paying for it. Not purely open source, but it throws FOSS folks a bone by making it so that versions of the software that are more than three years old revert to the General Public License.

  This has nothing to do with being a FOSS die-hard. Three year old versions are basically completely useless if you plan to run anything resembling a secure website.

  Meanwhile a license that is attached to the amount of income of the legal entity (company, organization,…) instead of the project is never going to be popular because those values can easily change by reorganizations that have very little to do with the actual project.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Mostly RSS feeds of either the upstream projects directly (e.g. Rust Blog about Rust news, OpenSSL releases about OpenSSL,…), blogs by people I have noticed write interesting things (e.g. Cory Doctorow) or collections of news like This Week in Rust.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon wants to buy TikTok⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It was massively unpopular among the relevant demographic, the Tiktok user. Those are the ones you would want to reach obviously.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon wants to buy TikTok⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  But that would be a very unpopular move that might even be counter-productive while selling them Tiktok would just be handing them everything they want on a silver platter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon wants to buy TikTok⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  And you think nobody outside of the US is interested in preventing the US from having a total propaganda stranglehold on their own population?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon wants to buy TikTok⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  If anything large US companies signaling a desire to buy would make it less likely that a sale actually happens. The awareness that social media has the ability to influence users politically is very much there now and nobody wants that all in the hands of one country, especially one as adversarial as the US.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨European police say KidFlix, "one of the largest pedophile platforms in the world," busted in joint operation.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  If most are reuploads anyway that kills the whole argument that deleting things works though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon is testing a Buy for Me button powered by agentic AI that will let users purchase products from third-party websites without leaving Amazon's app.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Way ahead of them. I just buy stuff from other websites now without Amazon or AI involvement.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨European police say KidFlix, "one of the largest pedophile platforms in the world," busted in joint operation.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Who said anything about punishing the people hosting the sites. I was talking about punishing the people uploading and producing the content. The ones doing the part that is orders of magnitude worse than anything else about this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨European police say KidFlix, "one of the largest pedophile platforms in the world," busted in joint operation.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I am not talking about CSA, I am talking about video material of CSA. Most countries with marriage ages that low have much more wide-spread bans on videos including sex of any kind.

  As for prosecution, yes, it is still illegal if it is not prosecuted. There are many reasons not to prosecute something ranging all the way from resource and other means related concerns to intentionally turning a blind eye and only a small minority of them would lead that country to actively sabotage a major international investigation, especially after the trade-offs are considered (such as loss of international reputation by refusing to cooperate).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Europe’s GDPR privacy law is headed for red tape bonfire within ‘weeks’⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Cookie banners are completely unnecessary as long as websites only use cookies for technically necessary purposes (e.g. login). The problem is that a lot of websites want to sell your data to hundreds or thousands of other companies. So yeah, we could cut back a lot of red tape there if we just outright banned that sale of data completely.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨European police say KidFlix, "one of the largest pedophile platforms in the world," busted in joint operation.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  So you are saying it is too creative for the average person in marketing?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨WordPress maker Automattic lays off 16% of staff.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Might be time for a rewrite in something more modern anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are the key features of AI-powered shopping assistants?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That dialog sounds like the AI version of the typical unhelpful FAQ page that answers the questions the company wants to answer instead of the ones that are actually frequently asked. In that situation I mentally tend to pronounce it as Fa-Q (fuck you) page.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨European police say KidFlix, "one of the largest pedophile platforms in the world," busted in joint operation.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly, if the existing victims have to deal with a few more people masturbating to the existing video material and in exchange it leads to fewer future victims it might be worth the trade-off but it is certainly not an easy choice to make.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨European police say KidFlix, "one of the largest pedophile platforms in the world," busted in joint operation.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Which countries do you have in mind where videos of sexual child abuse are legal?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨European police say KidFlix, "one of the largest pedophile platforms in the world," busted in joint operation.⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Does it feel odd to anyone else that a platform for something this universally condemned in any jurisdiction can operate for 4 years, with a catchy name clearly thought up by a marketing person, its own payment system and nearly six figure number of videos? I mean even if we assume that some of those 4 years were intentional to allow law enforcement to catch as many perpetrators as possible this feels too similar to fully legal operations in scope.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI crawlers cause Wikimedia Commons bandwidth demands to surge 50%.⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Rate limiting in itself requires resources that are not always available. For one thing you can only rate limit individuals you can identify so you need to keep data about past requests in memory and attach counters to them and even then that won’t help if the requests come from IPs that are easily changed.