Brian Beach has moved @bwbeach@qoto.org

Dear Google,

When I search, I am not looking for The Answer. I am looking for sources. A search that generates only answers will be useless personally, and worse than useless professionally for me.

What I would really like is an internet search engine that works. Google did that once. Then they focused on other things and used it for ad revenue and it became the new Craigslist.

It would sure be nice if Google would reinvent an actual internet search engine.

Once again: these machines aren’t hallucinating and your using 'Hallucinate' is a tell, that you don't understand how the machine works. Generating statistically plausible text is what these tools do. That's all that's ever happening. Theres no connection to truth or veracity in this mechanism beyond quantities of aggregated text in a dataset reconnected in ways that that, statistically, might be. If you see meaning in the output it is you, the uncritical audience, who is hallucinating.

Dear authors of computing research papers… https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-the-word-utilize-and-im-loving-every-moment-of-your-overblown-rhetoric

Never ceases to stump me that we have the technology to kill 99.95% of airborne viruses, proven to work, non-invasive, cheap to deploy and install, and is produced at scale already and we just like - collectively - kind of just don't really use it.

HEPA-grade air filtration is proven, cheap, and makes everyone's lives strictly better. It, like, makes zero fiscal sense for governments not to mandate its use in all covered public spaces ASAP.

Absolutely incredible to me how much faster and more effective it is for me to rip an entire site down with wget --mirror and search it with grep to find anything than it is for me to use Google for any goddamn thing now. Datacenters full of hardware running thousands of PhD-theses worth of high performing hardware versus me sitting here banging rocks together and my way works.

TIL Italy has a new supercomputer dedicated to studying climate change, and they’ve called it Cassandra.

Somewhat appropriate really, given how Govt’s of the world have steadfastly been ignoring climate change for decades.

@elverkonge One of my all time favorite moments on social media, when a member of the band responded to a post like that saying "what machine did you think we were raging against, the dishwasher?"

@RickiTarr

Someone said it's important say this publicly in the US: so I will. (And I think each of us should, online and to friends)

This November *I* will vote for Biden.

I would regard not voting for Biden, particularly in: PA, OH, MI, WI, IN, IL,VA, GA, FL, AZ, ME, NC, NH, etc. as a huge error. I'd be disappointed to find out anyone I knew didn't vote. It's one of a long list of things we need to do. We can't skip it.

And still? We deserve better choices, and in the future we shall have them.

I saw a post yesterday questioning why the U.S. is investing in projects for electric vehicles but not investing in public transportation. That’s just false.

First, we aren’t getting rid of cars. We are too spread out and it’s doubtful that public transportation will be available in entirely where everyone, everywhere, at every time of day will need it. And we will always need vehicles for emergency services like ambulances and fire trucks and mail delivery and farms. 1/4

Politicians and political commentators whine about young people not buying homes and starting families (not getting married) and then do NOTHING to help the young people (who do exist) who would love to do one or more of these things but can't because it's too damn expensive.

Build housing and coops where young people want to live. Protect their jobs with unions. Make health care not an issue.

Do not make some marriages impossible because you don't like the genders.

Not rocket science.

'Time you enjoyed wasting was not wasted.'

- John Lennon

#RandomQuote #quotes #quote #bot

"Better than the eclipse"

- Anyone with a camera

#Aurora

@yhancik @darius The old thinking was that you should be rotating your gender every 90 days for security reasons but that’s proven to be outdated thinking. Modern best practices are to use a unique and complex gender for every interaction, to avoid repetition and store them in a secure gender manager.

Pablo Casals, in his 80s, asked why he practices every day. "Because I think I'm getting better."

Pat Metheny, why he has restricted his synth-guitar to just two voices, "I don't want to try a new voice until I feel I've mastered these two."

Somerset Maugham, on the definition of a novel: "A prose work of a certain length, that has something wrong with it."

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.