@New_scientist@feeds.twtxt.net No, Google does not predict this. “Google AI” has been self-promoting like this for decades. Remember when they used to brag that they could predict the onset of flu season weeks before it started? That silently went away because they got it badly wrong many times and people caught on to how bad their “predictions” actually were.

They can’t stop themselves. Anything about AI coming out of big tech companies these days is marketing, not real, and certainly not science.

How to Coil a Cable
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@prologic@twtxt.net wow! The place to go for whiteboard tech is mills.io.

That stinks about Excalidraw. they’ve been saying that (working on adding collab/self hosting) for over a year.

So in the wave of all things AI and this roller coaster we’re all on, apparently actors, writers and so on are all on strike. I don’t recall seeing anything in my feeds about this, so I had to ask a few folk in real life wtf was going on there…

Turns out they’re all on strike because they fear that AI/ML models will take over their jobs. There are numerous cases where “tech” has already replaced an actor, now it will just get much easier to do.

These billionaires are profoundly without intelligence or depth. It’s astonishing to see so many shallow, empty fools parading their bad opinions publicly without shame. Let no one ever again fall under the illusion that tech oligarchs are anything more than your racist uncle at Thanksgiving but with more money.

Seems to me you could write a script that:

• Parses a StackOverflow question
  
• Runs it through an AI text generator
  
• Posts the output as a post on StackOverflow
  

and basically pollute the entire information ecosystem there in a matter of a few months? How long before some malicious actor does this? Maybe it’s being done already 🤷

What an asinine, short-sighted decision. An astonishing number of companies are actively reducing headcount because their executives believe they can use this newfangled AI stuff to replace people. But, like the dot com boom and subsequent bust, many of the companies going this direction are going to face serious problems when the hypefest dies down and the reality of what this tech can and can’t do sinks in.

We really, really need to stop trusting important stuff to corporations. They are not tooled to last.

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club interesting, because some people are writing articles declaring the metaverse dead: https://www.businessinsider.com/metaverse-dead-obituary-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-tech-fad-ai-chatgpt-2023-5

Looks like Google’s using this blog post of mine without my permission. I hate this kind of tech company crap so much.

@prologic@twtxt.net @carsten@yarn.zn80.net

There is (I assure you there will be, don’t know what it is yet…) a price to be paid for this convenience.

Exactly prologic, and that’s why I’m negative about these sorts of things. I’m almost 50, I’ve been around this tech hype cycle a bunch of times. Look at what happened with Facebook. When it first appeared, people loved it and signed up and shared incredibly detailed information about themselves on it. Facebook made it very easy and convenient for almost anyone, even people who had limited understanding of the internet or computers, to get connected with their friends and family. And now here we are today, where 80% of people in surveys say they don’t trust Facebook with their private data, where they think Facebook commits crimes and should be broken up or at least taken to task in a big way, etc etc etc. Facebook has been fined many billions of dollars and faces endless federal lawsuits in the US alone for its horrible practices. Yet Facebook is still exploitative. It’s a societal cancer.

All signs suggest this generative AI stuff is going to go exactly the same way. That is the inevitable course of these things in the present climate, because the tech sector is largely run by sociopathic billionaires, because the tech sector is not regulated in any meaningful way, and because the tech press / tech media has no scruples. Some new tech thing generates hype, people get excited and sign up to use it, then when the people who own the tech think they have a critical mass of users, they clamp everything down and start doing whatever it is they wanted to do from the start. They’ll break laws, steal your shit, cause mass suffering, who knows what. They won’t stop until they are stopped by mass protest from us, and the government action that follows.

That’s a huge price to pay for a little bit of convenience, a price we pay and continue to pay for decades. We all know better by now. Why do we keep doing this to ourselves? It doesn’t make sense. It’s insane.

On LinkedIn I see a lot of posts aimed at software developers along the lines of “If you’re not using these AI tools (X,Y,Z) you’re going to be left behind.”

Two things about that:

1. No you’re not. If you have good soft skills (good communication, show up on time, general time management) then you’re already in excellent shape. No AI can do that stuff, and for that alone no AI can replace people
   
2. This rhetoric is coming directly from the billionaires who are laying off tech people by the 100s of thousands as part of the class war they’ve been conducting against all working people since the 1940s. They want you to believe that you have to scramble and claw over one another to learn the “AI” that they’re forcing onto the world, so that you stop honing the skills that matter (see #1) and are easier to obsolete later. Don’t fall for it. It’s far from clear how this will shake out once governments get off their asses and start regulating this stuff, by the way–most of these “AI” tools are blatantly breaking copyright and other IP laws, and some day that’ll catch up with them.
   

That said, it is helpful to know thy enemy.

[ru.tech.imageresizeshrinker] excelente app para manipular el tamaño de imágenes.

What’s with all these tech companies going through massive layoffs. The latest one is Intel, but instead they’re cutting salaries to avoid laying off.

Easy Or Hard
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-1 for the negative on environment all that electricity uses. Still waiting on proof of stake.

It is also too overrun with Tech Bros scamming people to get rich quick.

It was a fun ride back when I first bought in. But I have since cached out for my lambos and such.

by which the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age. Thus, the Lindy effect proposes the longer a period something has survived to exist or be used in the present, the longer its remaining life expectancy. The disproportionate influence of early tech decisions — brandur.org

Elon Musk Offers To Buy Twitter For $41 Billion
Billionaire Elon Musk has offered to buy Twitter for about $41 billion, just days after rejecting a seat on the social media company’s board. From a report: Musk’s offer price of $54.20 per share, which was disclosedin a regulatory filing on Thursday, represents a 38% premium to Twitter’s April 1 close, the last trading day before the Tesla CEO’s more than 9% stake in the company … ⌘ Read more

Its weird to see a tech company be bought by an investment company. Like what is the motivation other than to milk it for investor profit?

Good weekend for random tech projects: this rackmount server I got free boots Plan 9 without issue, and my ttl adapters and wii nunchucks just arrived. Now where can I find a serial modem?

Anyone seen a pixel-addressed display (any tech; lcd, eink, oled, whatever) in the range of 8”x1”?

Turing Complete
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@movq@www.uninformativ.de i believe the delete of any twt was a tech limitation with retwt parser not knowing where in the file a twt came from. lextwt tracks the bytes in file where a twt was read from. which could be used to delete a twt from file.. in theory.

I want NaNoWriMo but for tech writing.

I am not the sort of person who worries a lot about their career growth. I never was a manager and I was always happy to just quietly hack on interesting problems. If you can find the right corners to work in, Google is a pretty great place for that kind of attitude. Tech Notes: Leaving Google

https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8d9q/sex-workers-explain-why-the-safe-tech-act-will-break-the-internet

tech can do anything you say? can you smarty pants engineers build a fusion reactor??

we need like 3-5x more space organizations lifting stuff and developing tech for long-term space travel. jeffy b and the muskrat don’t cut it. are we really going to let imperials take the first serious steps into space?

Today, out of the blue, somebody thanked me for some minor tech work I did in 2008. That felt pretty nice.

@deadguy @prologic@twtxt.net been stewing on a discovery proto for twtxt. support for defining multiple ways to host/mirror a twtxt file. while being low tech enough to still be scriptable with basic Unix commands.

@deadguy @prologic@twtxt.net been stewing on a discovery proto for twtxt. support for defining multiple ways to host/mirror a twtxt file. while being low tech enough to still be scriptable with basic Unix commands.

I applaud this, but I also advise against this for your career. Unless the change you’re making has immediate and significant business benefits, from a PM/EM perspective you’re 1) wasting time 2) potentially introducing bugs. The correct move is to wait until the org is so bogged down with tech debt that meaningful progress cannot be made, then switch companies/teams. Always leave the code better than you found it | Hacker News

Low-Tech Magazine is inspirational: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/

How communist Bulgaria became a leader in tech and sci-fi – https://t.co/eccoky08oH via @aeonmag

A peek into something I spend way too much time and money on: http://www.tested.com/tech/606152-everything-you-need-know-about-custom-mechanical-keyboards/

I love this channel. Restrained tech-house. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNZETNQDnrKu6hvggNHzZcA