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jarfil

@ jarfil @beehaw.org

Posts
5
Comments
734
Joined
3 yr. ago

Programmer and sysadmin (DevOps?), wannabe polymath in tech, science and the mind. Neurodivergent, disabled, burned out, and close to throwing in the towel, but still liking ponies 🦄 and sometimes willing to discuss stuff.

  • Artists are losing work, wages, and hope as bosses and clients embrace AI

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  • There is a long history of artists "pushing the envelope... by self-deprecating and making "statements" about how ridiculous the market for art is.

    You don't get to shove Dada, a Campbell's soup can, canned "artist's shit", a black square on a canvas, a pile of trash, a shirt on a coat hanger, a self-shredding copy of a graffiti, and thousands of similar examples, all under the same label as the Louvre, illustrators, writers, etc... then magically have people value all artistic work.

    There has been continuous, serious, self-damage done to the concept of "art", and now come the consequences: the general public, thinks the value of art is close to $0, and that's what they're willing to pay.

    Coincidentally, AI companies allow anyone to get "better than literal shit" art done for $0... so... 🤷

  • Artists are losing work, wages, and hope as bosses and clients embrace AI

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  • Customer perception of the value of art in general. You don't get to call it all art, without muddying the perception.

  • I Was Scammed Out of $130,000 — And Google Helped It Happen

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  • Rule 1 of crypto: "Not your keys, not your money"

    There is a reason why cold wallets are a thing.

  • Artists are losing work, wages, and hope as bosses and clients embrace AI

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  • "artists don't deserve a living wage" or "they don't do real art"

    Blame the "Modern Art" movement, where a black square, or canned literal shit, can be worth millions.

    At some point, people realized that they don't need real art, just to decorate an office or house space with "artsy looking" stuff, so they went on a chase to the bottom. That used to be random people from third world countries working for peanuts... now it's LLMs and GenAI working for fractions of peanuts.

    Same thing has been going in all areas. Who needs a slab of real ice (from a mountain) for their fridge, when they can get fake ice much easier, for a fraction of the cost.

  • Four arrested after images of Trump and Epstein projected on to Windsor Castle ahead of president’s visit

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  • Silence protest, yes. "Involuntary lethal injection"... not yet.

  • I Hate My Friend: The chatbot-enabled Friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that’s snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy.

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  • Appearances, preconceptions, stereotypes... are shortcuts used to deal with complex issues. Since VCs don't really care about 90% of the startups, they only need to weed out the worst ideas, in the quickest way possible.

    Story time: When I was 20, I had some job interviews lined up, so a family friend helped me pick a decent looking suit and robe that weren't too expensive. Got offered 3 different jobs in a single week 🤷

  • The search for the correct amount of split-lock misery [Linux]

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  • As long as you can re-disable it after playing the game...

    I know, all background processes get impacted during gameplay, but that was the case already. The popup can explain the tradeoff, and who's to blame (game dev).

  • The search for the correct amount of split-lock misery [Linux]

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  • The new kernel.split_lock_mitigate knob, if set to zero, will disable the penalization of processes using split locking (while retaining the warning sent to the system log)

    Sounds to me like it's fixed. WINE could follow dmesg, and show a popup with recommendations when it detects one of its processes is getting throttled.

  • The Job Market Is Hell: Young people are using ChatGPT to write their applications; HR is using AI to read them; no one is getting hired.

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  • There are two sides to that story.

    There is not enough gold to match the increases in both population and productivity of the last 70 years, and you don't want just a handful of people holding gold that spikes in value through the roof.

    Smart people invest in companies that pay dividends. Speculators invest in... whatever, tulip bulbs.

  • The Job Market Is Hell: Young people are using ChatGPT to write their applications; HR is using AI to read them; no one is getting hired.

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  • Q: What do you call a business that destroys itself?A: Failed business model.

    Sometimes, the only way to learn that, is through pain.

  • I Hate My Friend: The chatbot-enabled Friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that’s snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy.

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  • Get VC funding... like this:

    Schiffmann posits himself as older now, wiser, more experienced than he was when he first debuted the Friend necklace. (He is 22.) He has grown out his hair and cultivated a beard

    A wise 22 year old with a beard... 😮‍💨

    The VCs are clueless, they jump on a bunch of "feels good" and "disruptive young blood" stuff, hoping that maybe 1 in 10 will not fall and burn.

  • I Hate My Friend: The chatbot-enabled Friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that’s snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy.

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  • OK. I'm at wit's end attempting to convince Google's LLM to pronounce an English name correctly.

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  • There is a reason why people keep asking "How do you spell it?" when being told a name in English. The counterpart is, "How do you pronounce it?".

    Even with "long a", I still can't tell how would you want to pronounce "Rach". I can come up with 4 different pronounciations right now: "Ra-ah-ch", "Ra-ah", "Ra-sh", "Ra-kh".

  • An AI Social Coach Is Teaching Empathy to People with Autism

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  • Try an RP chatbot.

    They are far from perfect, but also far from the "helpful assistant" sycophants.

  • An AI Social Coach Is Teaching Empathy to People with Autism

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  • It's not about capitalism:

    • 1 human can talk to 1 human
    • 1 chatbot can talk to 8 billion humans

    Human therapy will be more expensive, for as long as we value human time more than machine time.

  • f-droid certificate seems expired

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  • At this point, why not just root it? There are public exploits for Android 6 vulnerabilities, it's not like you'd lose any security.

  • Vaping may be causing irreversible harm to children’s health, doctors say

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  • Since 2023, Europe has banned all flavored nicotine vapes.

    The article makes it sound like one could still buy them, when in reality, nicotine is a heavily regulated substance. People who want to vape some, need to purchase it separately, then add it on their own.

  • Unfortunately, the ICEBlock app is activism theater

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  • The complaint is: Narcissistic incompetent dev spreads FUD while putting vulnerable people at risk.

  • Doubting Your Favorite Web Search Engine

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  • There is an experimental distributed open source search engine: https://dawnsearch.org/

    It has a series of issues of its own, though.

    Per-user weighting was out of the reach of hardware 20 years ago... and is still out of the reach of anything other than very large distributed systems. No single machine is currently capable of holding even the index for the ~200 million active websites, much less the ~800 billion webpages in the Wayback Machine. Multiple page attributes... yes, that would be great, but again things escalate quickly. The closest "hope", would be some sort of LLM on the scale of hundreds of trillions of parameters... and even that might fall short.

    Distributed indexes, with queries getting shared among peers, mean that privacy goes out the window. Homomorphic encryption could potentially help with that, but that requires even more hardware.

    TL;DR: it's being researched, but it's hard.

  • Doubting Your Favorite Web Search Engine

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  • The basic algorithm is quite straightforward, it's the scale and edge cases that make it hard to compete.

    "Ideally", from a pure data perspective, everybody would have all the data and all the processing power to search through it on their own with whatever algorithm they prefer, like a massive P2P network of per-person datacenters.

    Back to reality, that's pretty much insanely impossible. So we get a few search engines, with huge entry costs, offering more value the larger they get... which leads to lock-in, trying to game their algorithms, filtering, monetization, and all the other issues.