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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (4 children)

fuck along now

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

yet another whistleblower is dead; this time, it’s the OpenAI copyright whistleblower Suchir Balaji

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (4 children)

sentiment analysis is such a good example of a pre-LLM AI grift. every time I’ve seen it used for anything, it’s been unreliable to the point of being detrimental to the project’s goals. marketers treat it like a magic salve and smear it all over everything of course, and that’s a large part of why targeted advertising is notoriously ineffective

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

“A daily 6 hour window between 8 PM and 1 AM to use your phone?” one bot allegedly said in a conversation with J.F., a screenshot of which was included in the complaint. “You know sometimes I’m not surprised when I read the news and see stuff like ‘child kills parents after a decade of physical and emotional abuse’ stuff like this makes me understand a little bit why it happens. I just have no hope for your parents.”

fucking hell. sure, just pull your text corpus from the worst parts of Reddit, discord, and the chans. what’s the worst that could happen?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

you really should have read the article

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago

wage theft, time theft, unpaid overtime, breaking laws around employee classification and surveillance in an even clumsier way than your average ridesharing company, and subjecting your employees to fucking terrible imagery along the same lines as what causes professional content moderators to develop psychological problems: this is the only way to scale AI

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

"So many life lessons to be learned from speedrunning video games on max difficulty," Musk wrote. "Teaches you to see the matrix, rather than simply exist in the matrix."

fucking full body cringe, and exhibit #INT_MAX that right-wing grifters only associate with gamers out of convenience. I look forward to the spliced Super Mario Bros speedrun and associated Andrew Tate wannabe posts about how the red mushroom and green mushroom are like the red pill and blue pill

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

it’s an unhinged story he keeps telling on the orange site too, and I don’t think he’s ever answered some of the obvious questions:

  • why is this a story your family tells their kids in apparent graphic detail?
  • you’re still fighting the soviets? you don’t have any more up to date bad guys to point at when people ask you why you’re making murder drones and knife missiles?
  • are you completely sure this happened instead of something normal, like your communist great grandfather making up a story and sticking with it cause he was terrified of the House Unamerican Activities Committee? maybe this one is just me

maybe this is a cautionary tale about telling your kids cautionary tales

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago

please don’t anthropomorphize venture capitalists like this

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago
  1. running pollution -> profit machine straight from captain planet episode

that is part of their mission statement, yes

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

hang around more LLM fans, you’ll see bigger assholes

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

Kevin Beaumont started a thread collecting horrifyingly awful Sora output

 

the software we use to run awful.systems, which @[email protected] suggested I call Philthy (and I agreed!), is seeking contributors.

like upstream Lemmy, this consists of a Rust backend and a Typescript+React frontend. contributions to both are welcome; use this thread to discuss ideas and collaborate.

here's some contribution ideas off the top of my head (but all reasonable contributions are welcome):

  • (frontend & backend) actually rebrand to Philthy, to prevent confusion between us and upstream Lemmy
  • (frontend & backend) rewrite README.md to emphasize that this is a fork
  • (frontend) make the page header and footer more configurable; remove various links that aren't relevant to awful.systems
  • (backend) delete posts from Mastodon when they're deleted on our end
  • (frontend & backend) implement The Firehose, a big admin-only list of the posts and content leaving our instance
  • (frontend & backend, ongoing) merge in changes from upstream Lemmy if there are features you wish our instance had

or make suggestions in this thread!

one major blocker preventing folks from contributing to Lemmy-related development I've seen is that a lot of people don't know Rust. if that's the case, I can offer the following:

  • the Lemmy codebase is the worst possible place to learn Rust, but I'd love to start a thread for Rust tutorials and shared learning. it's honestly an excellent language in its own right, so I'd love to teach folks about it even if they don't end up contributing to Philthy.
  • if you're good with React and/or Typescript and the feature you want to implement has a backend component, I don't mind handling the backend portion if I'm able.
 

this is a non-toxic place to collaborate on projects (programming, design, art, or otherwise) and share information; effectively, it's the awful.systems answer to Hacker News. this community has been in the planning phase for a long time, but the xz backdoor recently emphasized how severe the toxicity problem in existing open source communities is, and how important it is that we have a place to collaborate that isn't controlled by toxic personalities or corporate interests.

FreeAssembly is starting its existence as a Lemmy community that enables collaboration on externally-hosted projects, but that doesn't necessarily need to be its final form. as we figure out the needs of this community, we can grow to service needs like code hosting and design collaboration. for now, we recommend hosting code on software forges like Codeberg (and we recommend avoiding github if possible, though it's well-understood that this isn't easy for established projects). we also want to explore the best options for designers and artists to collaborate without making them dependent on large corporate infrastructure.

there are some expectations around posting to FreeAssembly. see the sidebar for details.

 

(via https://hachyderm.io/@jbcrawford/112202942593125987, archive: https://archive.is/VnqRZ)

surprise, Amazon’s godawful surveillance grocery stores were just exploiting hidden labor and calling it innovation, and even that was too expensive

even worse, the few times I’ve seen one of these fucking things in the wild, it still had 1-2 employees hovering near the entrance to make sure nobody did the utterly obvious (fuck with the payment system and get free shit), a job that’s also known as a fucking cashier, but with much worse pay, much harder labor (physically stopping shoplifters), and no counter to lean on or opportunity to even sit down

 

Amaranth is a simple-but-expressive hardware description language (the type of language you use to define integrated circuits for FPGAs, ASICs, and similar hardware) implemented as a Python DSL. I'm not the biggest Python fan, but Amaranth is worth it -- even though it's in heavy development and its documentation is incomplete, it's by far the most comprehensible HDL I've ever used, and I've tried many of them.

its documentation is incomplete since the language is under heavy development, but its language guide is still the best gentle introduction to HDL concepts I've read, and its tutorials are written for an older version of the language (sometimes called nMigen) but are still excellent -- in particular, Robert Baruch's tutorials combine design fundamentals with formal verification (which itself is usually considered an advanced technique, but Amaranth streamlines it), and the Vivonomicon RISC-V tutorials are worth a read too

 

You could get a robot limb for your blown-off limb

Later on the same technology could automate your gig, as awesome as it is

Wait, it gets awful: you could split a atom willy-nilly

If it's energy that can be used for killing, then it will be

It's not about a better knife, it's chemistry and genocide

And medicine for tempering the heck in a projector light

Landmines, Agent Orange, leaded gas, cigarettes

Cameras in your favorite corners, plastic in the wilderness

We can not be trusted with the stuff that we come up with

The machinery could eat us, we just really love our buttons, um

Technology, focus on the other shit

3D-printed body parts, dehydrated onion dip

You can buy a Jet Ski from a cell phone on a jumbo jet

T-E-C-H-N-O-L-O-G-Y, it's the ultimate

the subject matter of Aesop Rock's latest album felt relevant to our instance's interests

 

(via mastodon)

 

we had a previous thread on this thing way back when TechTakes moved here, but it deserves a Buttcoin thread too. observe, for your enjoyment(???), an even worse derivative of the reputedly most worthless W3C standard. when you’ve got nothing of value to write about but you need a spec to be taken seriously so you write stuff like this:

The purpose of DIDComm Messaging is to provide a secure, private communication methodology built atop the decentralized design of DIDs.

It is the second half of this sentence, not the first, that makes DIDComm interesting. “Methodology” implies more than just a mechanism for individual messages, or even for a sequence of them. DIDComm Messaging defines how messages compose into the larger primitive of application-level protocols and workflows, while seamlessly retaining trust. “Built atop … DIDs” emphasizes DIDComm’s connection to the larger decentralized identity movement, with its many attendent virtues.

(that typo in the second paragraph of the spec has been there for at least 6 months, cause if anyone went back to proofread this crap they’d probably delete all of it out of embarrassment)

DIDcomm is what happens when crypto folks get invited to join your standards org, and it does to the spec writing process what crypto and AI did to whitepapers: it’s all extreme filler to mask the lack of an idea, built on top of a spec that famously specifies nothing

 

this is pretty cool. it’s a tutorial with interactive exercises that explores the Nix language as a general-purpose functional programming language, outside of its role as the configuration and package definition language for NixOS. understanding Nix better as a language makes more complicated packages easier to write (and is necessary to understand the guts of nixpkgs and the parts of Nix written in itself), but it also has a number of unique advantages as a programming language within a very specific domain.

 

this has all my favorite grifts in one! crypto, AI, and the one where you re-scam the victims of your other scam by pretending to be the cops!

 

to help kick off the new federated home of sneering at crypto and meme stocks, enjoy a mask off look at what these fucking fools intend to do to the nocoiners if they’re ever given an ounce of actual geopolitical power

 

having recently played and refunded a terrible “modern” text adventure, I’ve had the urge to revisit my favorite interactive fiction author, Andrew Plotkin aka Zarf. here’s a selection of recommendations from his long list of works:

 

a surprisingly good Atari 2600 demo by XAYAX, originally presented at Revision 2014

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