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thesmokingman

@ thesmokingman @programming.dev

Posts
1
Comments
369
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Push to eliminate sales tax on food and groceries in Missouri runs into heavy resistance

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  • Yeah fuck the bill’s sponsor and her desire to reduce costs for a family of four by $50 every month

    State Sen. Mary Elizabeth Coleman, an Arnold Republican, said the bill is an attempt to increase affordability for Missourians as prices rise.

    “Missourians are paying more and more for necessities,” Coleman said. “Most of us agree fundamentally that essential services should not be funded on the backs of the poor.”

    Coleman said a family of four would save $54 per month with the removal of grocery sales tax.

  • NBC Interview abruptly ends after New Yorker blames private equity and landlords for the city's issues

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  • Why does that preclude it from being in the zeitgeist?

  • TOML

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  • TOML

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  • Phoebe Gates wants her $185 million AI startup to succeed with 'no ties to my privilege or my last name': 'I have a chip on my shoulder' | Fortune

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  • Ohhhhhh yeah this is just 100% LLM garbage. No machine learning. Forgive me; I don’t often talk to people that understand the difference so my default is human vs LLM not LLM vs <insert something AI that isn’t LLM>. Trying to explain machine learning vs LLM summaries to data company business executives wears you down.

    Edit: also my frame of mind was on the more recent Waymo “our AI just goes to a human when it’s hard” news that followed the Amazon “it was always a Mechanical Turk” news which is why I jumped to human.

  • Phoebe Gates wants her $185 million AI startup to succeed with 'no ties to my privilege or my last name': 'I have a chip on my shoulder' | Fortune

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  • I’d be surprised if a human were behind it. This is exactly the kind of thing that can be vibe coded pretty fast and is mostly just reselling fancy Google searches through an LLM. I did a quick skim of the website and it’s just a bunch of items scraped from big brands with lots of similar looking images of other products. There’s too many sites for me to really believe they’ve made integrations with all of them.

    The insane valuation is because of her name not because the tech is good. The only way to make money on this is the customer data. The margin on that is going to be fucking minuscule especially once LLM costs start going up so they can make money. This adds nothing of value on top so it will go away almost immediately.

  • Phoebe Gates wants her $185 million AI startup to succeed with 'no ties to my privilege or my last name': 'I have a chip on my shoulder' | Fortune

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  • The shopping assistant plugs into browsers like Chrome and Safari to compare prices and surface deals across tens of thousands of retail and resale sites in real time. It essentially serves as your own personal deal finder: Say you’re looking at a $200 dress from Anthropologie, Phia can find and compare prices at secondhand sellers to help customers find a better price.

    Gates and Kianni first brainstormed startup ideas in their Stanford dorm room, cycling through concepts before landing on a consumer tool that included Gates’ interest in women’s empowerment (likely modeled after her own mother) and Kianni’s sustainability focus.

    I don’t think a coupon tool that wastes excessive resources is either empowering or sustainable.

  • Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today, starts removing 695,000 archive links

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  • I don’t think the issue is paywalls. I think the issue is the personal actions of the owner. I also really don’t think Russia plays into this. Again, the personal actions of the owner of achive[.]today were the reason it was removed. The site was used by the owner to personally attack someone.

  • The OpenClaw bot that defamed an OSS maintainer is a human crypto bro [video]

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  • @dgerard@awful.systems wrote the piece. Perhaps he’s got some evidence he didn’t publish? I hope he didn’t make some shit up without fact-checking.

  • Morge continvoucly

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  • (Ars) Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations

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  • We agree on that 100%. No matter what, the owner of the agent did some dumbass shit. I fall in the camp that believes they proactively did dumb shit instead of the camp that believes through their inaction they did dumb shit. The whole situation to me feels like someone got their hand slapped and reacted poorly. I’ve seen this play out on forums for 30 years. Either the egotistical idiot burning resources on this chicanery actively did it or the fucking tools who built this destructive Rube Goldberg machine made it so the same fucking flame wars that add zero value keep happening in their new, perfect society. Everyone involved on the agent side needs to be removed from the internet permanently because they clearly have nothing to add to humanity.

  • (Ars) Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations

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  • Apologies, I meant something more along the lines of “this agent’s runner saw code got rejected and decided to actively go harass the repo maintainers” instead of the line the repo maintainers have taken where they assume “this bot attacked us autonomously after being rejected.”

  • (Ars) Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations

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  • I think there’s still reasonable debate over whether or not a human actively triggered the agent to generate the hit piece.

  • ICE Masks Up in More Ways Than One (Feds could be in your group chat)

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  • More importantly, with this permission now ICE can make you do terrorism then charge you for their idea. There’s a long pattern of this.

    I’m not saying you have to agree with the ideology of everyone on this list. You just gotta understand that entrapment isn’t really a defense so you have to be super fucking careful about any hothead in your circle that might talk about illegal shit. Now that the real domestic terrorists that were mostly law enforcement for the past three decades are in law enforcement you can 100% expect the same treatment for people just trying to organize a food bank or get basic worker protections.

    And before I have to defend it, yes, Randy Weaver was a fucking shithead but the federal government actively coerced him into breaking the law. Yes the Whitmer kidnappers planned to do some idiotic stuff but it turns out they were unorganized potheads with big mouths who got arrested because an ex-military informant railroaded the plot for them. Yes Flaviu sounds sketchy but the Glomar response exists. I don’t think I have to defend my distaste for Mickey here.

  • Removed

    ive learned alot past year :D

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  • Lumo isn’t really private. If you’re not local, you’re not private. AFAIK it sends to the model in cleartext (zero access) which isn’t E2EE. Signal, for example, is E2EE. Based on internet reviews, you’re better off running the models they offer locally for performance reasons on the cost anyway. I’d say you’re better off without AI in almost every situation you’d want to use an LLM of such such limited capability too so unless you really really want to set resources on fire it’s better to just drop it period.

    Netflix cannot be replaced by Jellyfin. That is very disingenuous. To “replace” Netflix with Jellyfin requires a bit more infrastructure and while it might be cheaper there’s risk involved that isn’t present with your other changes.

  • Discord walks back age verification fears for most users

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  • If Discord cared about this, they’d use the same identity platforms governments use. For example, in the US

    I don’t think there is a one-size solution which is why I said Discord should use the same platforms plural that govts use. A solution for France isn’t going to be the same solution for the US. Because Discord is not actively attempting to use solutions (again plural) that have repercussions and reparations attached, like the ones governments use that require healthy standards, it’s very clear Discord does not actually care about this problem.

  • Discord walks back age verification fears for most users

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  • Oh absolutely. More importantly Discord needs to also follow the standard, not just require it of their vendors. Granted this source is the only place I can find they’re requiring that so that might not actually be true. It kinda reads like an AI summary.

  • Discord walks back age verification fears for most users

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  • Yeah that’s a totally fair response. Lithuania did it.

  • Discord walks back age verification fears for most users

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  • I thought the requirements came from the Biden admin but I’m not able to find evidence of this.

    What you’re describing is the prisoner’s dilemma. In theory, none of us should interact with the current admin because if that happened they’d shut down. Of course if we did that, many federal employees and all of the contractors wouldn’t be able to feed their kids in a week or so, so it only works if we can guarantee a universal strike without scabs. But wait, we know people are actively joining ICE, so everyone with half a brain dropping government work doesn’t guarantee those without a brain won’t scab. If we have scabs, then future admin is left with a poisoned well and that existing possibly okay workforce is now on the breadline with an admin that’s not only hostile to breadlines but anyone who fights back. Don’t forget costs are currently skyrocketing for everything and electricity is about to be through the roof everywhere. In other words, many people have the choice of morals or food for their kids. Or healthcare if that resonates more.

    Assuming you’re in the US, will you file your taxes this year? Since you’re not willing to give anyone contracting with the Trump admin your personal information, you’ll have to do them by hand. Even a CPA is technically doing work for the IRS who is part of the Trump admin even if he’s suing them. Are you allowing your employer to keep social security and Medicare taxes? If so, I think you might have discovered a reason why a rational person who is just trying to get by might intentionally support the Trump admin. If not, by god, you have stronger morals than I do and good luck with that jail sentence. Unfortunately, some of us have to participate in society even though we want to improve it.

    Edit: I want to make it clear that my annoyance with your response is the Trump admin bit. If you had said “why trust a private company with my govt” I would have said yeah digital ID is hard that’s a really good point we needed trusted govt actors not capitalists to handle this stuff. My point about repercussions and reparations is something the Trump admin is ostensibly on board with so it doesn’t really matter what the greedy fucking billionaires do so long as they fuck each other up for breaking their own rules. That’s actually another great counter and something I’ve said elsewhere; the Trump admin is pretty anti consumer so you’d think here they’d fuck the little guy. A breach in this instance costs them face and money so they care a small amount, even more so if it’s cronyism. Either the world is going to end with Trump or there will be a world after Trump and I for one have to plan for a world after Trump where the US is dealing with all the other problems we’ve made.

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    thesmokingman @programming.dev

    Hiring a technical archivist to be a technical architect really sets everyone up for success