Joshua

Happy Vasili Arkhipov Day everybody

When a chatbot gets something wrong, it’s not because it made an error. It’s because on that roll of the dice, it happened to string together a group of words that, when read by a human, represents something false. But it was working entirely as designed. It was supposed to make a sentence & it did.

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

It’s a tiny country. Most folks are 20-60 minutes from all their family, work colleagues, and high school friends, so their social calendars are jam packed. It’s hard to make in-roads, but it’s more being busy than closed. I made more & closer friends in my first weeks here than I had in years in MN

All generalizations are inaccurate, including this one 😜

Not in our experience. Warm weather seems to make open, outgoing people, which you’d expect would make for good politics, but we found it often make for churlish, selfish politicians unable or unwilling to make long-term plans. Cold seems to be a uniting external threat, gets folks thinking ahead.

Worldwide, or just the US? we moved to the Netherlands because it checked a lot of these (not *super* welcoming, but enough), but the housing situation is quite bad now. ”not too cold” takes out a lot, esp. in US & CA (Ottawa was lovely but so cold) fbfw, bad weather seems to make for good politics.

Nederlandse diensten delen minder informatie met de VS: ‘Soms vertellen we dingen niet meer’ Het aantal dreigingen dat op Nederland afkomt is groot, zien de hoofden van de AIVD en de MIVD elke dag: niet alleen Russische agressie, maar ook de opmars van China als digitale macht en binnenlands ...

Dutch intelligence suspends sharing arrangements with the US after concluding that high level intel was routinely being shared by the White House with their friends in the Kremlin. www.volkskrant.nl/binnenland/n...

Student media rules. They are lapping a lot of the spineless media orgs this year and showing how solidarity is the way.

My boss: so how's our fourth quarter looking?

Me, the sales manager at the company that makes inflatable frog suits: well, you're never going to believe this, but

notice the general mood of the timeline? how everyone is in a good mood and there’s a lot less misery and dooming? how there’s a lot of “we’re going to beat these assholes”?

anyway that’s why these events are important

Why would anyone do open source with Ruby anymore? Fuck this.

So this was nothing to do with operator agreements. The original RubyGems maintainer team would have been the right group to decide upon and figure out this transition.

I genuinely can't believe people are boosting the "ruby core has taken ownership of bundler" thing like it's supposed to smooth everything over. all it does it reinforce the fact the bundler team had their project stolen with ruby central acting as a fence

SHAPIRO: OK, so you've spent your career creating television without Al, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems... SIMON: What? SHAPIRO: ...Or saying... SIMON: You imagine that? SHAPIRO: ...Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over. SIMON: I don't think Al can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level. SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an Al and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this. SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.

David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)

Mall exterior with Dayton's department store sign in script.

Interior of the Mall 1956. Woolworth's with neon sign on the left with other shops surround a central indoor plaza. Wood finishes, skylights, balconies, plants created a wholly new indoor shopping experience. Color transparency by Grey Villet, Life Magazine archives

#OnThisDay Oct 8, 1956: Southdale, the first fully enclosed shopping mall in the world, opens in Edina, Minnesota. Architect Victor Gruen, later realizing his invention had not lived up to his utopian vision of a car-free public square, became the biggest critic of malls until his death in 1980.

Welcome to the capitalist innovation museum we got

- scam machine
- psychosis inducing machine
- weapons of mass destruction
- button you push that makes the planet hotter
- markets that intentionally starve people
- clothes that fall apart after washing them 1 time
- medicine you can’t afford

the most delightful version of logging on to see what news you've missed

I do think it's terribly funny in a post-ironic sense that the viewer managed to, accidentally, self-insert themselves into the work and experience the themes firsthand. you couldn't pay for that level of metatextual immersion in a semiotics course

zeldawilliams 20m From Create Mode •• Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad. Stop believing I wanna see it or that I'll understand, I don't and I won't. If you're just trying to troll me, I've seen way worse, i'll restrict and move on. But please, if you've got any decency, just stop doing this to him and to me, to everyone even, full stop. It's dumb, it's a waste of time and energy, and believe me, it's NOT what he'd want. To watch the legacies of real people be condensed down to 'this vaguely looks and sounds like them so that's enough, , just so other people can churn out horrible TikTok slop puppeteering them is maddening. You're not making art, you're making disgusting, over-processed hotdogs out of the lives of human beings, out of the history of art and music, and then shoving them down someone else's throat hoping they'll give you a little thumbs up and like it. Gross.

And for the love of EVERYTHING, stop calling it 'the future. Al is just badly recycling and regurgitating the past to be reconsumed. You are taking in the Human Centipede of content, and from the very very end of the line, all while the folks at the front laugh and laugh, consume and consume.

Daughter of Robin Williams, Zelda Williams 💔

Post from Threads user rodneyowl: "Ireland has declared the Basic Income for Artists scheme permanent. This will be officially announced in tomorrow’s budget. Details to follow. Congratulations to all who fought for it and the present and future artists of all sorts in Ireland. That includes me 👌We’re just comin to the end of a 3 year pilot scheme. It’s been a roaring success. For every €1 paid out to the 2000 participants, the government got €1.46 back. Can’t argue with that. Other countries are already taking note."

Damn. This is amazing. £325 per week, paid monthly, for 3 years - and the result was a profit for the Irish economy:
www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employmen...

Lot of blatant and very funny pareidolia in the AI space. I no longer wonder why early humans thought every tree that had cankers in the shape of a smily face must be a god

YouTube video by National Academy of Engineering William LeMessurier-The Fifty-Nine-Story Crisis: A Lesson in Professional Behavior

"[If you] hold yourself out as a professional, you have a responsibility beyond yourself. If you see something that is a social risk -- 'good heavens, this thing will kill thousands' -- you must do something, you must do something." --William LeMessurier

youtu.be/um-7IlAdAtg?...

Back in the heyday of Usenet and mailing lists, I remember a form letter someone had created for “why your solution to spam will not work” or something similar. One of the checkboxes was to the effect of “you have proposed a technical solution to a social problem”

They invented a version of ELIZA that converts stolen books into psychotic episodes and every Fortune 500 executive suddenly experienced the most intense FOMO of their lives.

I found a flowchart which helps you navigate the IT landscape

Me: DHH is saying some kinda racist stuff, and he’s outright bullying people in PRs.

Them: But look over here! André had a gap in his commit history! And he once got paid $150 / hour to do *open source*!!! Outrageous! 😲😲😲

One year there was an issue with the Chromebook licenses at our kid’s school, so the teachers had to start the school year NOT having the kids work on laptops, and—shocking, I know—the students learned a ton, said they preferred “hands on”/analog teaching, and asked for more laptop-free lessons.

It was a real bad idea to let this guy be president again

They’ve done it. They’ve found the only way to make Electronic Arts worse.