Rowley @Rowley@qoto.org

@malwaretech

Wow I hope #democrats keep calling #republicans #weird.

It's true and it feels effective. It's about time everyone eye-rolled at them instead of taking them seriously. They don't argue or act in good faith. They make up things to be mad about and get obsessed for a little while. Then they find some new weird thing that upsets them.

They're #weird. Not in a cool artsy way. In a creepy malicious obsessive way. Very very weird people, those #conservatives.

"Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy but by sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structures, a complex of security services — military, paramilitary, police — and experts in surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation.”
https://on.ft.com/3WRLWfT

here i got you a copy of tomorrow's nyt

I hate that librarians have to be this brave but I'm not surprised at all that they are. https://prospect.org/education/2024-06-24-small-town-texas-librarian-book-bans/

One for Astonishingly Apt Timeline Lineups. Also in the running for Most Horrifying.

Great news everyone! I finally talk about AI hype. Someone finally mentioned LLMs one time too many, and the reckoning is upon us:

https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/

Everyone makes a big deal about the people who designed and built Voyager 1 because it was supposed to last 4 years and it’s lasted for 47, but all that means is they spent money on reliability that could have been returned to shareholders in a stock buyback.

I understand why Clarence Thomas makes a technical distinction between a bump stock and a machine gun, even though they have the same result.

I mean, it’s how he sees vacations and bribes.

It's always some kids need public schools to escape abusive parents, and never some kids need homeschooling to escape abusive schools, even though in reality both are true.

#ai

"Embrace AI or be left behind" is a condescending and heartless ultimatum. A false dichotomy that reeks of debunked social darwinist horse-fuckery.

Tech should adapt to people's needs.

Not the reverse.

I went to the aquarium today and there was a guy in a wetsuit pushing a penguin around on a box, back and forth through the water

someone asked why and he says, "yeah, she kinda just really likes riding on the box"

I'm still not over it y'all

A year and a half on #Mastodon & I still really like this algorithm-free experience in the #fediverse.

Thanks @Gargron.

If you haven't seen it yet, go check out @ernie's new search engine ...

... which automatically appends "&udm=14" to the end of your search query ...

... thereby triggering Google to give you your results with no AI answer at the top, and (for me, anyway) no ads

It's like google from 2004 or something

https://udm14.com

The horror twist of course is that it turns out the skeleton is also me

I’m just gonna say it — this “Genocide Joe” thing is the dumbest fucking liberal shit I have seen in years.

Joe Biden can do more to *try* to rein in Israel, but Biden doesn’t run Israel. He isn’t CIC for IDF. He isn’t deciding what hospital to bomb. He isn’t deciding what border crossings to close.

You know who is pushing the Genocide Joe narrative? The fucking Russians and the Israelis. Why is that? Well, it’s an election year, and Trump is a hard right, pro-Israel puppet.

What I love about being Gen X is we get a great balance of microplastics and lead.

Like many other technologists, I gave my time and expertise for free to #StackOverflow because the content was licensed CC-BY-SA - meaning that it was a public good. It brought me joy to help people figure out why their #ASR code wasn't working, or assist with a #CUDA bug.

Now that a deal has been struck with #OpenAI to scrape all the questions and answers in Stack Overflow, to train #GenerativeAI models, like #LLMs, without attribution to authors (as required under the CC-BY-SA license under which Stack Overflow content is licensed), to be sold back to us (the SA clause requires derivative works to be shared under the same license), I have issued a Data Deletion request to Stack Overflow to disassociate my username from my Stack Overflow username, and am closing my account, just like I did with Reddit, Inc.

https://policies.stackoverflow.co/data-request/

The data I helped create is going to be bundled in an #LLM and sold back to me.

In a single move, Stack Overflow has alienated its community - which is also its main source of competitive advantage, in exchange for token lucre.

Stack Exchange, Stack Overflow's former instantiation, used to fulfill a psychological contract - help others out when you can, for the expectation that others may in turn assist you in the future. Now it's not an exchange, it's #enshittification.

Programmers now join artists and copywriters, whose works have been snaffled up to create #GenAI solutions.

The silver lining I see is that once OpenAI creates LLMs that generate code - like Microsoft has done with Copilot on GitHub - where will they go to get help with the bugs that the generative AI models introduce, particularly, given the recent GitClear report, of the "downward pressure on code quality" caused by these tools?

While this is just one more example of #enshittification, it's also a salient lesson for #DevRel folks - if your community is your source of advantage, don't upset them.

Let me tell you a little story.

Japan is mostly mountainous. There is very little flat land. The whole country is basically a mountain range sticking up out of the sea floor, and the parts of the mountain range that are above the water is called "Japan." Only 10% of the land is flat enough to put buildings on.

Japanese farmers had to be very good at what farmers call "farm management." That is just the reality given their circumstances.

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