• 6 Posts
  • 45 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 16th, 2023
  • wet_lettuce@beehaw.orgtoTechnology@beehaw.org•Stop talking about tomorrow’s AI doomsday when AI poses risks todayEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    undefined> Both are concerning, but as a former academic to me neither of them are as insidious as the harm that LLMs are already doing to training data. A lot of corpora depend on collecting public online data to construct data sets for research, and the assumption is that it’s largely human-generated. This balance is about to shift, and it’s going to cause significant damage to future research. Even if everyone agreed to make a change right now, the well is already poisoned. We’re talking the equivalent of the burning of Alexandria for linguistics research.

    It reminds me of the situation with steel where post atomic weapons its tainted. It can’t be used for scientific tools or equipment. You have to find and use it from pre-atomic bombs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

    There is going to be “low background data” in the future.

  • wet_lettuce@beehaw.orgtoWorld News@beehaw.org•We're Now Finding Out The Damaging Results of The Mandated Return to Office — And It's Worse Than We Thought
    3·
    1 year ago

    Most companies that are going back to the office are STILL HAVING VIRTUAL MEETINGS. The hybrid environments ABSOLUTELY are. So you are getting all of the shitty aspects of going into the office and all of the downsides of not-in-person collaboration. It’s the worst of both worlds.

    When you ask an employee to wake up an hour earlier, spend an hour in traffic, to pay for parking, to sit in a ‘hotel cube’, to get on a virtual meeting that they could have done at home…you are absolutely going to have people leave your company.

    The data on people equating lack of flexibility with a 2-3% paycut seems incredible low to me.

    I think its a much more significant impact than that. I know people who have basically taken a 20% paycut (lost their cost-of-living adjustment) to move to a different state–doing the same job remotely. That’s basically a way of saying flexibility/remote work is work 20% to them.

  • wet_lettuce@beehaw.orgtoTechnology@beehaw.org•Discord is opening the monetization floodgates: get ready for microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes'English
    1·
    1 year ago

    You cherry picked one line of my post and didn’t address the entire context or intent of it. Im not defending companies or businesses using discord as a drop in replacement for forums or support pages. Imo that’s a mis use of the tech.

    I think that’s stupid.

    But discord isn’t designed for that. It’s a chat app (voice and text). I don’t want my chats with friends publicly searchable on the internet. That’s dumb. Having my emails publically searchable on the internet is dumb too.

    If a company started using Signal or Whatsapp for support, would you be clamoring for all signal and Whatsapp messages to be searchable on the internet?

    That doesn’t make any sense. You seem more upset that companies are misusing Discord than mad at Discord.

  • wet_lettuce@beehaw.orgOPtoTechnology@beehaw.org•Google has a hidden browser inside the settings
    5·
    1 year ago

    100% but I believe these are typically locked down to one domain, and in this case its not.

    At least thats how I understand it. So I guess the article is a little misleading in that sense, but the net effect is the same. You have carte blanche access to the web, via android system webview, thats acting as a de-facto out-of-band browser. So its misconfigured or not locked down, which means you can use it effectively as a “hidden” browser.

  • wet_lettuce@beehaw.orgtoFree and Open Source Software@beehaw.org•Politics of libre softwareEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Are you saying, when you talk to people who use Linux, they can’t explain what they use it for? Or are you doing some weird gate-keeping because you’ve complied a kernel before?

    To your last point, yea sure, you get lots of experience building software from scratch, configuring everything manually, etc etc. But doing things manually for no other reason than to do it that way is a huge waste of time (eg Gentoo and your BSD oses–although don’t port and pgk sorta do it for you now?)

    There are plenty of opinionated Linux gurus out there with experience and skills. The more experienced ones would probably get a chuckle at compiling software from source or debating make config options…when they can just use a package manager or a flatpak and get their job done in 20 seconds.

  • wet_lettuce@beehaw.orgtoFree and Open Source Software@beehaw.org•Politics of libre softwareEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    if I start talking about OpenBSD and FreeBSD, they shutdown or are put off by it, have nothing to say about Linux vs BSD.

    Maybe they shutdown because they dont know enough about OpenBSD or FreeBSD to have an opinion?

    I used FreeBSD a while ago just to try it out. That little devil guy was too hard to resist. Besides the fact that the community is tiny what would you be discussing? That its like using linux but harder :) ?

  • wet_lettuce@beehaw.orgtoFree and Open Source Software@beehaw.org•Politics of libre software
    6·
    1 year ago

    I read this on Daring Fireball the other day:

    Mastodon is at risk of falling into the trap that a lot of free/open source software does, where the idea of the software being “free as in speech” is expected to outweigh or explain away deficiencies in its usefulness. However, this ignores three salient facts:

      -Most people don’t give a thruppenny fuck about their freedom to view and edit the source code of the software they use, which they would not know how to do even if they cared;

     -Most people are not ideologically opposed to the notion of proprietary software, and cannot be convinced to be because it is simply not important to them and cannot be explained in terms that are important to them; and

     -When given the choice between a tool which is immediately useful for achieving some sort of goal but conflicts with some kind of ideological standpoint, and a tool which is not as useful but they agree with ideologically, they will probably choose the former

    A lot of the hardcore advocates of free software get, understandably, upset when they see masses of people spout FREE software! or opensource software…then not give a flying fuck about what that actually means. The quote above is pretty accurate imo.

    I think half of the people using free(as in libre, not gratis) software are doing it because its free (as in cost). Not because they care about the “four essential freedoms”: (0) to run the program, (1) to study and change the program in source code form, (2) to redistribute exact copies, and (3) to distribute modified versions. Because, well, see the quote above. Most wouldn’t even know where to start. They just want to use the software…and not pay for it. They aren’t opposed to closed, non-free software.

    So if you truly believe in the philosophy behind free software, you’ll start getting pretty opinionated as you see people co-opt, distort, and disregard key tenants of your philosophy. Even looking at some of the responses to this post, you can see people misusing the definition of free and/or not being precise with their language (which for something like this, can completely change the meaning).

    This is a fantastic article: https://ploum.net/2023-06-19-more-rms.html

    It gives a good short history of how we got here.

  • wet_lettuce@beehaw.orgtoTechnology@beehaw.org•Google Perspectives SearchEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    As crappy as googles results seem to have gotten over the last year, anytime I try to set my browser default search to anything else, I end up irritated and going back to Google for 50% of my searches(maybe even more ). Bing is fairly decent, but if the goal is privacy…

    The alternative search engines just always lack the context–ehich presumably google has from me by pilfering my information for the last 2 decades.