jaschop

joined 6 months ago
sorted by: new top controversial old
your Bayesian yacht is an outlier adn should not be counted in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 days ago (4 children)

His Wikipedia article is quite a ride. Apparently he and a Stephen Chamberlain were recently found innocent for a bunch of fraud charges. They boil down to inflating the value of a SW company he sold to Hewlett-Packart. They died within a day of each other in unrelated accidents. Must be rough.

How to Become an Intellectual in Silicon Valley (2021) in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

Dear god, my ribs are hurting after 2 paragraphs already.

The Cult of AI (including some fan favourites) in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Paywall just slammed shut. archive link

Does Open Source AI really exist? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

Hi @[email protected] 👋

Nice writeup. Been reading some of your stuff for a few years. Seems like the gravitational attraction of awful.systems got us both.

US Copyright Office "frees the McFlurry" - Right to Repair Win in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

sees McDonald branded product → neuron activation

Yeah sure, but this was supposed to my one positive post of the day. This doesn't strengthen franchise owners, but benefits local businesses who have to work with shitty locked-down equipment.

79
US Copyright Office "frees the McFlurry" - Right to Repair Win (arstechnica.com)
 

archive

40
Get your Torment Nexus news from reputable journalistic outlet Know Your Meme (Character.AI Suicide Lawsuit) (knowyourmeme.com)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
18 comments fedilink
 

archive of the mentioned NYT article

the wild tale of OpenAI vs. Open AI in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

The countersuit went so far as to ask the court to force Altman to “change its deceptive and misleading name to ClosedAI or a different more appropriate name.”

top kek

The guy (pun not intended) seems honestly as decent as you might hope for in a serial entrepreneur. Maybe a bit naive for expecting better from the players involved, but to me he comes off as endearingly earnest.

2
AI-Generated Code is Causing Outages and Security Issues in Businesses (www.techrepublic.com)
 

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/25239919

Bostrom's advice for the ethical treatment of LLMs: remind them to be happy in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago

I just woke up and some nerd is staring into my soul, asking why I was rude to the spicy autocomplete. What is this? Go home world, you're drunk.

Disapproving of automated plagiarism is classist ableism, actually: Nanowrimo in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Doesn't even mention the one use case I have a moderate amount of respect for, automatically generating image descriptions for blind people.

And even those should always be labeled, since AI is categorically inferior to intentional communication.

They seem focused on the use case "I don't have the ability to communicate with intention, but I want to pretend I do."

1
Federated vs Distributed Rant (awful.systems)
 

So I recently got an excuse rant about my opinions on federated tech. I think it's pretty much the best we can hope for in terms of liberating tech, with very few niches where fully distributed tech is preferable.

Needing a server places users under the power of the server administrator. Why do we bother? "No gods, no masters, no admins!' I hear you shout. Well, there's a couple reasons...

Maybe using software is just an intrinsically centralized activity. One or a few people design and code it, and an unlimited number of people can digitally replicate and use it. Sure, it may be free software that everyone can inspect and modify... but how many people will really bother? (Nevermind that most people don't even have the skills necessary.)

Okay, so we always kind of rely on a central-ish dev team when we use tech. Why rely on admins on top of that? I believe the vast vast majority of people doesn't have the skills and time to operate a truly independent node of a fully distributed tech. Let's take Jami as an example:

"With the default name server (ns.jami.net), the usernames are registered on an Ethereum blockchain."

So a feature of Jami is (for most users) implemented as a centralized service. Yikes. You could build and run your own name server (with less embarrassing tech choices hopefully), but who will really bother?

But say you bothered, wouldn't it be nice if your friends could use that name server too, and gain a little independence? That sounds a lot like decentralized/federated tech.

Keeping a decent service online is a pain in the butt. Installing SW updates, managing backups, paying for hardware and name services... nevermind just the general bothering to understand all that mess. And moderation, don't forget moderation. I'm saying it's not for everyone (and we should appreciate the fuck out of [local admin]).

I believe that servers and admins are our best bet for actual non-centralized tech. A tech-literate person tending a service for a small- to medium-size community is much more feasible than every person running their independent node (which will probably still depend on something centralized).

And maybe that's just the way we bring good ol' division of labour to the Internet. You have your shoemaker, your baker, your social media admin. A respectable and useful position in society. And they lived happily ever after.

German MP Joana Cotar holds BTC and says the government should stop selling in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

It's a thing unfortunately. Here's an event by the minister of justice this month: https://crm.fdpbt.de/termin/4-blockchain-roundtable-code-law-wie-sich-unser-recht-smart-contracts-und-legal-tech

German MP Joana Cotar holds BTC and says the government should stop selling in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago (2 children)

As a german, kind of a relief that the mouthpiece of Bitcoin in parliament is some used-to-be-AfD nobody. (AfD = far right, pretty politically isolated). This shit could have come from the FDP (pro-business liberals) just as well, and they control the ministry of finance!

I expect some crypto sympathizers in the FDP, but if weirdos like this are the loudest advocates they will probably want to avoid the association.

1
Enforced positivity policy at Humane (arstechnica.com)
 

Apparently a senior SW engineer got fired for questioning readiness of the product, dude must still be chuckling to himself.

Found the story here https://hachyderm.io/@wesley83/112572728237770554