rook

Hey, did you know of you own an old forum full of interesting posts from back in the day when humans wrote stuff, you can just attach ai bots to dead accounts and have them post backdated slop for, uh, reasons?

https://hallofdreams.org/posts/physicsforums/

Corporations institute barebones, born yesterday AI models that don’t know their ass from their elbow because they can’t be bothered to pay the devs to actually train them but when shit goes south they turn around and blame the devs for a bad product instead of admitting they cut corners

Sounds like all it would take is one company to do it right, and they’d clean up. Except somehow, with all of the billions being poured into it, every product with ai sprinkled on it is worse than the non-ai-sprinkled alternatives.

Now, maybe this is finally the sign that everyone will accept that The Market is completely fucking stupid and useless, and that literally every company involved in ai is holding it wrong.

Or, and I know it’s a bit of a stretch here, but consider the possibility that ai just isn’t very useful except for fooling humans and maybe you can fool people into paying for it but it’s a lot harder to fool them into thinking it makes stuff better.

Maybe I’m missing something, but has anyone actually justified this sort of “reasoning” by LLMs? Like, is there actually anything meaningfully different going on? Because it doesn’t seem to be distinguishable from asking a regular LLM to generate 20 paragraphs of ai fanfic pretending to reason about the original question, and the final result seems about as useful.

Possibly I’m the last to hear about this one, but seeing as proton mail has come up here a few times before: the founder and ceo Andy Yen is apparently a Trump fan.

Great pick by @realDonaldTrump. 10 years ago, Republicans were the party of big business and Dems stood for the little guys, but today the tables have completely turned. People forget that the current antitrust actions against Big Tech were started under the first Trump admin.

(from the beginning of december, on the nomination of trump staffer Gail Slater to antitrust post at the doj)

https://xcancel.com/andyyen/status/1864436449942110660

Apparently, the OpenMandriva folk (the inheritors of the venerable mandrake/mandriva Linux distro) are now best buddies with Bryan Lunduke (right wing tech grifter and q-anon fan) are decrying the left wing bias of Linux projects with a hilarious “wokeOS shell”

Archive of openmandriva forum post: https://archive.is/2025.01.11-001057/https://forum.openmandriva.org/t/came-here-from-lunduke/5516/1

Lovely juxtaposition of “let’s stick it to the gay fags” and “we’re accepting of everyone and there’s no hate here”. Seems like a classy community all round. It’s a little sad to see how mandrake ended up, but there you go.

WokeOS here: https://web.archive.org/web/20250110234818/https://lindev.ch/wokeos.cpp

It’s pretty tedious and unimaginative. No idea who lindev are.

(eta: wasn’t me who originally found this, but I’m never quite sure whether it’s ok to include sources for this sort of thing given the subject. on the other hand, the op has it as public post that’s been boosted a bunch of times, so here it is: https://tech.lgbt/@GeopJr/113807022917800887)

A real ceo does everything. Delegation is for losers who can’t cope. Can’t move fast enough and break enough things if you’re constantly waiting for your lackeys to catch up.

If those numbers people were cleverer than the ceo, they’d be the ones in charge, and they aren’t. Checkmate. Do you even read Ayn Rand, bro?

Remember that actual physicists can fall into the same trap, and believe themselves to be very smart too. Plenty suffer an irresistible urge to fix every other field that’s doing it wrong.

As an alternative to the various xkcds on the subject, have an smbc instead.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21

If it were merely a search engine, it risks not being ai enough. We already have search engines, and no one is gonna invest in that old garbage. So instead, it finds something that you might want that’s been predigested for ease of ai consumption (Retrieval), dumps it into the context window alongside your original question (Augmentation) and then bullshits about it (Generation).

Think of it as exactly the same stuff that the LLM folk have already tried to sell you, trying to work around limitations of training and data availability by providing “cut and paste as a service” to generate ever more complex prompts for you, in the hopes that this time you’ll pay more for it than it costs to run.

What’s a hard quality of life indicator?

Interesting post and corresponding mastodon thread on the non-decentralised-ness of bluesky by cwebber.

https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

https://social.coop/@cwebber/113527462572885698

The author is keen about this particular “vision statement”:

Preparing for the organization as a future adversary.

The assumption being, stuff gets enshittified and how might you guard your product against the future stupid and awful whims of management and investors?

Of course, they don’t consider that it cuts both ways, and Jack Dorsey’s personal grumbles about Twitter. The risk from his point of view was the company he founded doing evil unthinkable things like, uh, banning nazis. He’s keen for that sort of thing to never happen again on his platforms.

It’s a long read, but a good one (though not a nice one).

• learn about how all the people who actually make decisions in c++ world are complete assholes!
• liking go (the programming language) correlated with brain damage!
• in c++ world, it is ok to throw an arbitrary number of highly competent non-bros out of the window in order to keep a bro on board, even if said bro drugged and raped a minor!
• the c++ module system is like a gunshot wound to the ass!
• c++ leadership is delusional about memory safety!
• even more assholes!

Someone on mastodon (can’t remember who right now) joked that they were expecting the c++ committee to publicly support trump, in the hopes he would retract the usg memory safety requirements. I can now believe that they might have considered that, and are probably hoping he’ll come down in their favour now that he’s coming in.

is this creating a potential surplus of computing power in all devices

Haha, no. Flat UI was done for reasons of fashion, not efficiency. UI will always expand to consume the available memory and compute, regardless of how boring it looks. Exhibit A: Electron!