baltakatei

@baltakatei@sopuli.xyz

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨$219 Springer Nature book on machine learning was written with a chatbot⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Didn’t have time to read that, so I threw your comment into ChatGPT:

  Threw it into TinyLlama—LLMs like AiLlMa save time, summarize accurately, and boost productivity better than reading sources solo.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit in talks to embrace Sam Altman’s iris-scanning Orb to verify users⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So much of what creating privacy busting biometric databases claim to do could be accomplished with speed-of-light geofencing, a.k.a. “distance-bounding protocol”. If a moderator decides messages from country X are problematic, then they can flag/block them for other users. It only requires carefully measuring ping times and basically involves banning traffic from places that can’t achieve certain minimum pings to certain trusted servers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Deez peets⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Alien 1: Wow, humans just go around saying “Kill me…” a lot. Alien 2: Uh, rude! Middle-aged human: No, no, that tracks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It burns!⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No author credit given.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wikipedia Pauses AI-Generated Summaries After Editor Backlash⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The main issue I have as an editor is that there is no straightforward way to retrain the LLM to correct faulty training as directly or revertably as the existing method of editing an article’s wikicode. Already, much of my time updating Wikipedia is spent parsing puffery and removing phrases like “award-winning” or “renowned”, inserted by malicious advertisers trying to use Wikipedia as a free billboard. If a Wikipedia LLM began making subjective claims instead of providing objective facts backed by citations, I would have to teach myself machine learning and get involved with the developers who manage the LLM’s training. That raises the bar for editor technical competency which Wikipedia historically has been striving to lower (e.g. Visual Editor).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Twenty-seven states and DC sue 23andMe to oppose the sale of DNA data from its customers without their direct consent⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I was familiar with how their single nucleotide polymorphism fingerprinting worked in principle when I submitted my sample. So, I was not surprised when my report indicated majority Native American (both my parents were born in the Navajo Nation).

  As for preventing misuse of the genetic profile 23andMe built, the primary legal protection is the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA) which prohibits insurance providers and employers from discriminating against patients and employees based upon disorders that are correlated with their genetic information.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Black Mirror AI⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m pretty sure no one knows my blog and wiki exist, but it sure is popular, getting multiple hits per second 24/7 in a tangle of wiki articles I autogenerated to tell me trivia like whether the Great Fire of London started on a Sunday or Thursday.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stack Overflow seeks rebrand as traffic continues to plummet – which is bad news for developers⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Either Butlerian Jihad or Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨7 for me⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Missing the Mormon onesie.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨28 years later, Lego Island's lost source code has been rediscovered – but the fans who spent nearly two years painstakingly decompiling it by hand "can't have it"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  If it were up to me, copyright would only last 20 years after publication for non-commercial use and author’s life + 4 years for commercial use.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fuck you, Genie⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  First off, your tapeworms. Yeah, you really should’ve refused your friend’s pork chop. Next, your excess body fat. Next, your extreme aversion to feeling hunger. Everyone with a healthy lifestyle feels what you’d call “starving”, like, 2/3rds of the day. Now, your cancers. Yes, plural. Lung, skin, and colon. Pro tip: wear gloves even if your employer doesn’t provide them. Also, wear sunscreen. Next on the list… checks notes ah, yes. Done. What did I do? Do you remember what your nightmare last night was about? Yes, you had a nightmare. Excellent, anti-trauma neural circuit lobotomy was a success.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨sus⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Is there a poly equivalent of something like the Magna Carta?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Possession⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I too wish I could inhabit a blåjaj.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Give me your company⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Looks like something the part in Atlas Shrugged Explained in Memes explaining Hank Rearden’s unwillingness to sell his steel foundries and secret steel recipe.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Most problems people have with Linux, I think, come from trying to be Linux power users from the start by performing very advanced techniques beyond their time and patience: dual booting multiple operating systems (so they don’t have to buy Linux-dedicated hardware), using any graphics card (the latest and greatest GPUs are all closed source and developers who work on Linux do so because they despise closed source), using the least expensive hardware (which are typically closed source and buggy with anything except Windows), and emulating Windows apps so they don’t have to learn new workflows or abandon their favorite games (technically, Proton with Steam allows Windows games like FFXIV to be played, but it’s a neverending journey to get it working and keeping it working.

  If you switch to Linux, accept that for a smooth experience you’ll have to pay more than you would for a Windows machine (e.g. System76, Framework) And if you want graphics card support for your emulated Windows games on Steam, you’re going to have to use the specific flavor of Linux the manufacturer supports.

  That said, if you value free/libre open source software, then making the switch from Windows is totally worth it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What kind of CAPTCHA is this?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Which website gave you those instructions? Name and shame.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Donate if you regularly use Syncthing. Help close the causal loop.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sergey Brin: We need you working 60 hours a week so we can replace you as soon as possible⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Tech bro billionaires are the only geniuses on earth

  Relevant excerpt from The Internet Con (2023) by Cory Doctorow about the folly of thinking tech CEO monopolies are justified due to merit. Later in the book, Doctorow explains how the recent (since the Reagan presidency) appearance of big tech monopolies was instead due to failure of the US DOJ and FTC to enforce anti-trust laws after Robert Bork successfully lobbied to have the Chicago School of economics’s consumer welfare doctrine (monopolies can be good if companies pinky promise to lower prices for consumers; see Bork’s 1978 book The Antitrust Paradox) adopted by the US Supreme Court.

  from Chapter 1

  If tech were led by exceptional geniuses whose singular vision made it impossible to unseat them, then you’d expect that the structure of the tech industry itself would be exceptional. That is, you’d expect that tech’s mass-extinction event, which turned the wild and wooly web into a few giant websites, was unique to tech, driven by those storied geniuses. But that’s not the case at all. Nearly every industry in the world looks like the tech industry: dominated by a handful of giant companies that emerged out of a cataclysmic, forty-year die-off of smaller firms which either failed or were folded into the surviving giants. Here’s a partial list of concentrated industries from the Open Markets Institute—industries where between one and five companies account for the vast majority of business: pharmaceuticals, health insurers, appliances, athletic shoes, defense contractors, book publishing, booze, drug stores, office supplies, eyeglasses, LCD glass, glass bottles, vitamin C, car parts, bottle caps, airlines, railroads, mattresses, Lasik lasers, cowboy boots and candy. If tech’s consolidation is down to the exceptional genius of its leaders, then they are part of a bumper crop of exceptional geniuses who all managed to rise to prominence in their respective firms and then steer them into positions where they crushed, bought or sidelined all their competitors over the past forty years or so. Occam’s Razor posits that the simplest explanation is most likely to be true. For that reason, I think we can safely reject the idea that sunspots, water contaminants or gamma rays caused an exceptional generation of business leaders to be conceived all at the same time, all over the world. Likewise, I am going to discount the possibility that, in the 1970s and 1980s, aliens came to Earth and knocked up the future mothers of a new subrace of elite CEOs whose extraterrestrial DNA conferred upon them the power to steer companies to total industrial dominance. Not only do those explanations stretch the imagination, but they also ignore a simpler, far more tangible explanation for the incredible die-off of businesses in every industry. Forty years ago, countries all over the world altered the basis on which they enforced their competition laws—often called “antitrust” laws—to be more tolerant of monopolies. Forty years later, we have a lot of monopolies. These facts are related.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cloudflare announces AI Labyrinth, which uses AI-generated content to confuse and waste the resources of AI Crawlers and bots that ignore “no crawl” directives.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Relevant excerpt from part 11 of Anathem (2008) by Neal Stephenson:

  Artificial Inanity

  Note: Reticulum=Internet, syndev=computer, crap~=spam “Early in the Reticulum—thousands of years ago—it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said. “Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him. “Yes—a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.” “What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone. “Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors—swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.” “As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you mean,” Osa said. “This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid–First Millennium A.R.” “Exactly!” Sammann said. “Artificial Inanity systems of enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis leaked to the commercial sector and spread to the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies. Never mind. The point is that there was a sort of Dark Age on the Reticulum that lasted until my Ita forerunners were able to bring matters in hand.” “So, are Artificial Inanity systems still active in the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies?” asked Arsibalt, utterly fascinated. “The ROBE evolved into something totally different early in the Second Millennium,” Sammann said dismissively. “What did it evolve into?” Jesry asked. “No one is sure,” Sammann said. “We only get hints when it finds ways to physically instantiate itself, which, fortunately, does not happen that often. But we digress. The functionality of Artificial Inanity still exists. You might say that those Ita who brought the Ret out of the Dark Age could only defeat it by co-opting it. So, to make a long story short, for every legitimate document floating around on the Reticulum, there are hundreds or thousands of bogus versions—bogons, as we call them.” “The only way to preserve the integrity of the defenses is to subject them to unceasing assault,” Osa said, and any idiot could guess he was quoting some old Vale aphorism. “Yes,” Sammann said, “and it works so well that, most of the time, the users of the Reticulum don’t know it’s there. Just as you are not aware of the millions of germs trying and failing to attack your body every moment of every day. However, the recent events, and the stresses posed by the Antiswarm, appear to have introduced the low-level bug that I spoke of.” “So the practical consequence for us,” Lio said, “is that—?” “Our cells on the ground may be having difficulty distinguishing between legitimate messages and bogons. And some of the messages that flash up on our screens may be bogons as well.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨a strong beak, of course⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Personally, I think a definition of life can be boiled down to whether something can record and then selectively rebroadcast information patterns in a different medium. Intelligence is a function of how long a delay there can be between recording and rebroadcast in addition to how much information is transcribed.

  Transcribing DNA/RNA into peptide chains obviously meets the criteria.

  Wildfires are ruled out since, although wildfires can propagate themselves, information in fuel is almost immediately lost during combustion; if wildfires are alive, it is only in combination with other life forms that can selectively preserve and sacrifice parts of themselves through fire, such as pine cones requiring fire to clear away undergrowth for new sprouts.

  A computer meets the criteria, but the selectivity of information storage has historically been tightly controlled by humans. It’s more accurate to say humans and computers form an augmented hybrid lifeform.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s like useful information grows as fruit from trees in a digital forest we call the Internet. However, the fruit spoils over time (becomes less relevant) and requires fertile soil (educated people being online) that can be eroded away (not investing in education or infrastructure) or paved over (intellectual property law). LLMs are like processed food created in factories that lack key characteristics of more nutritious fresh ingredients you can find at a farmer’s market. Sure, you can feed more people (provide faster answers to questions) by growing a monocrop (training your LLM on a handful of generous people who publish under Creative Commons licenses like CC BY-SA on Stack Overflow), but you also risk a plague destroying your industry like how the Panama disease fungus destroyed nearly all Gros Michel banana farming (companies firing those generous software developers who “waste time” by volunteering to communities like Stack Overflow and replacing them with LLMs).

  There’s some solar punk ethical fusion of LLMs and sustainable cultivation of high quality information, but we’re definitely not there yet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I think we might be leaving the "boring" part of this dystopia⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Literally the plot of Shin Sekai Yori (2008).