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.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de wow. I’d trade crow sounds for car sounds, or jet sounds, or leaf blower sounds, or lawn mower sounds, or…..100% of the time.

As far as fighting the birds goes, maybe they’re right, but probably it’d be better to re-balance the ecosystem so that crows aren’t so dominant? At least there are things to try. When it comes to reducing how much air travel people use, it takes a terrorist attack or a pandemic to affect it.

“if you can find a way to solve a real problem effectively enough so that a billion people or more would want to use it twice a day you are bound to make a lot of money. much more money than if you were to build the next photo sharing app.” - mo gawdat

@prologic@twtxt.net that would work if it was using shamir’s secret sharing .. although i think its typically 3 of 5 so you get 3, one to the company, and one to the “third party”. so you can recover all you want.. but if the company or 3rd wants to they need one of your 3 to recover.

but still .. if they are providing them then whats the point of trusting they don’t have copies.

I don’t really like the term “gatekeeping”, especially when it’s used to describe the general concept of a barrier to entry. The term “gatekeeping” implies to me a “gatekeeper”–a person A who is trying to control if person B can interact with person C. It implies active discrimination, perhaps even bigotry, when in reality the barrier might be a passive issue such as scarcity or inherent complexity. “Gatekeeping” seems an intentionally- and needlessly-charged term.

I came across the phrase “long fuse, big bang” used to describe large-scale issues with tipping points facing humanity, like climate change, and it feels pretty apt.

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci buuuuut it show when winter!

In the time scale viewed from the planets perspective, the climate has changed many many times.. The issue is whether that change that will inevitability come is hospitable to us meat bags. Or if we are doomed to take part in the next mass extinction event.

I played with nlpodyssey/verbaflow: Neural Language Model for Go today a little bit today…. First I had to download a ~2GB file (the model), then convert that to a format the program verbaflow understands which came out to roughly ~5GB. Then I tried some of the samples in the README. My god, this this is so goddamn awfully slow its like watching paint dry 😱 All just to predict the next few tokens?! 😳 I had a look at the resource utilisation as well as it was trying to do this “work”, using 100% of 1.5 Cores and ~10GB of Memory 😳 Who da fuq actually thinks any of this large language model (LLM) and neural network crap is actually any good or useful? 🤔 Its just garbage 🤣

Are you using lynx?

New talk: “Using computers freely and safely” http://akkartik.name/freewheeling

Debt Collectors Want To Use AI Chatbots To Hustle People For Money

Starting to get ugly already.

👋 Hello @ocakuvoe@anthony.buc.ci, welcome to Buccipod, a Yarn.social Pod! To get started you may want to check out the pod’s Discover feed to find users to follow and interact with. To follow new users, use the ⨁ Follow button on their profile page or use the Follow form and enter a Twtxt URL. You may also find other feeds of interest via Feeds. Welcome! 🤗

Crystal Ball
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🌠 PDF improvements & More AI Options
Check out some great guides on how to create folder and tag systems, and how to use the Strange New Worlds & bookmarks plugin! ⌘ Read more

Bought a used 2020 Leaf EV for the wife.

@stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no @prologic@twtxt.net @eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club I love VR too, and I wonder a lot whether it can help people with accessibility challenges, like low vision.

But Meta’s approach from the beginning almost seemed like a joke? My first thought was “are they trolling us?” There’s open source metaverse software like Vircadia that looks better than Meta’s demos (avatars have legs in Vircadia, ffs) and can already do virtual co-working. Vircadia developers hold their meetings within Vircadia, and there are virtual whiteboards and walls where you can run video feeds, calendars and web browsers. What is Meta spending all that money doing, if their visuals look so weak, and their co-working affordances aren’t there?

On top of that, Meta didn’t seem to put any kind of effort into moderating the content. There are already stories of bad things happening in Horizon Worlds, like gangs forming and harassing people off of it. Imagine what that’d look like if 1 billion people were using it the way Meta says they want.

Then, there are plenty of technical challenges left, like people feeling motion sickness or disoriented after using a headset for a long period of time. I haven’t heard announcements from Meta that they’re working on these or have made any advances in these.

All around, it never sounded serious to me, despite how much money Meta seems to be throwing at it. For something with so much promise, and so many obvious challenges to attack first that Meta seems to be ignoring, what are they even doing?

Metaverse Could Contribute Up To 2.4% of US GDP By 2035, Study Shows
A study commissioned by Meta has found that the metaverse could contribute around 2.4% to U.S. annual GDP by 2035, equating to as much as $760 billion. Reuters reports: The concept of the metaverse includes augmented and virtual reality technologies that allow users to immerse themselves in a virtual world or overlay information digitally on … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net

Let’s assume for a moment that an answer to a question would be met with so many words you don’t know what the answer was at all. Why? Why do this? Is this a stereotype of academics and philosophers? If so, it’s not a very straight-forward way of thinking, let alone answering a simple question.

Well, I can’t know what’s in these peoples’ minds and hearts. Personally I think it’s a way of dissembling, of sowing doubt, and of maintaining plausible deniability. The strategy is to persuade as many people as possible to change their minds, and then force the remaining people to accept the idea because they think too many other people believe it.

Let’s say you want, for whatever reason, to get a lot of people to accept an idea that you know most people find horrible. The last thing you should do is express the idea clearly and concisely and repeat it over and over again. All you’d accomplish is to cement people’s resistance to you, and label yourself as a person who harbors horrible ideas that they don’t like. So you can’t do that.

What do you do instead? The entire field of “rhetoric”, dating back at least to Plato and Aristotle (400 years BC), is all about this. How to persuade people to accept your idea, even when they resist it. There are way too many techniques to summarize in a twt, but it seems almost obvious that you have to use more words and to use misleading or at least embellished or warped descriptions of things, because that’s the opposite of clearly and concisely expressing yourself, which would directly lead to people rejecting your idea.

That’s how I think of it anyway.

@prologic@twtxt.net hmm, dunno about the recency of that line of thought. I suspect though that given his (recent or not) history, if someone directly asked him “do you support rape” he would not say “no”, he’d go on one of these rambling answers about property crime like he did in the video. Maybe I’m mind poisoned by being around academics my whole career, but that way of talking is how an academic gives you an answer they know will be unpopular. PhD = Piled Higher And Deeper, after all right? In other words, if he doesn’t say “no” right away, he’s saying “yes”, except with so many words there’s some uncertainty about whether he actually meant yes. And he damn well knows that, and that’s why I give him no slack.

There are people in academia who believe adult men should be able to have sex with children, legally, too. They use the same manner of talking about it that Peterson uses. We need to stop tolerating this, and draw hard red lines. No, that’s bad, no matter how many words you use to say it. No, don’t express doubts about it, because that provides justification and talking points to the people who actually carry out the acts.

@xuu@txt.sour.is LOL omfg.

This is the absurd logical endpoint of free market fundamentalism. “The market will fix everything!” Including, apparently, encroaching floodwater.

I do have to say though, after spending awhile looking at houses, that there are a crapton of homes for sale for very high prices (>$1 million) in coastal areas NASA is more or less telling us will be underwater in the next few decades. I don’t get how a house that’s going to be underwater soon is worth $1 million, but then I’m never been a free market fundamentalist either so 🤷 Maybe they’re all watertight.

Commemorative Plaque
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@prologic@twtxt.net When you unpack what he’s saying in that video (which I’ve watched, and just now re-watched), and strip away all his attempts to wrap this idea in fancy-sound language, he is saying: it would be better if women were viewed as property of men, because then if they were raped, the men who owned them would get mad and do something about it. Because rape would be a property crime then, like trespassing or theft. Left unspoken by him, but very much known to him, is that the man/men who “own” a woman can then have their way with her, just like they can freely walk around their yard or use their own stuff. In his envisioned better world, it’d be impossible for a husband to rape his wife, for instance, because she is his property and he can do almost anything he wants (that’s literally what “property” is in Western countries).

It’s so fucked up it’s hard to put into words how fucked up it is. And this isn’t the only bad idea who bangs on about!

@prologic@twtxt.net

Taking Jordan Peterson asn an example, the only thing he “preaches” (if you want to call it that) is to be honest with yourself and to take responsibility.

This is simply untrue. Read the articles I posted, seriously.

In a tweet in one of the articles I posted, Peterson states there is no white supremacy in Canada. This is blatantly false. It is disinformation. Peterson has made statements that rape is OK (he uses “fancy” language like “women should be naturally converted into mothers” but unpack that a bit–what he means is legalized rape followed by forced conception). He is openly anti-LGBTQ and refuses to use peoples’ preferred pronouns. He seems to believe that women who wear makeup at work are asking to be sexually harassed.

He’s using his platform in academia to pretend that straight, white men are somehow the most aggrieved group in the world and everyone else is just whining and can get fucked. The patron saint of Men’s Rights Activists and incels. I find him odious.

The Internet Isn’t Meant To Be So Small | Defector

It’s annoying to see millions of dollars thrown at making more-or-less literal dupes of internet
companies that everyone is already using begrudgingly and with diminishing emotional returns. It’s maybe more frustrating to realize that the goals of these companies is the same as their predecessors, which is to
make the internet smaller.

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

❤️ 🎶: The Moments Of Us by MRCH

@Phys_org@feeds.twtxt.net using the phrase “machine learning” in this article is misleading and bandwagoning. They used a neural model, which neuroscientists were doing long before “machine learning” became a popular term.

Tapetum Lucidum
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@prologic@twtxt.net yes, I agree. It’s bizarre to me that people use the thing at all let alone pay for it.

BlueSky is cosplaying decentralization

I say “ostensibly decentralized”, because BlueSky’s (henceforth referred to as “BS” here) decentralization is a similar kind of decentralization as with cryptocurrencies: sure, you can run your own node (in BS case: “personal data servers”), but that does not give you basically any meaningful agency in the system.

I don’t know why anyone would want to use this crap. It’s the same old same old and it’ll end up the same old way.

I was listening to an O’Reilly hosted event where they had the CEO of GitHub, Thomas Dohmke, talking about CoPilot. I asked about biased systems and copyright problems. He, Thomas Dohmke, said, that in the next iteration they will show name, repo and licence information next to the code snippets you see in CoPilot. This should give a bit more transparency. The developer still has to decide to adhere to the licence. On the other hand, I have to say he is right about the fact, that probably every one of us has used a code snippet from stack overflow (where 99% no licence or copyright is mentioned) or GitHub repos or some tutorial website without mentioning where the code came from. Of course, CoPilot has trained with a lot of code from public repos. It is a more or less a much faster and better search engine that the existing tools have been because how much code has been used from public GitHub repos without adding the source to code you pasted it into?

@thecanine@twtxt.net wow this is horrifying. What happened to Opera? It used to be my favorite browser but now they’re like that one cousin who started getting into drugs, and then got in trouble with the law, and then before you know it they’re scamming old ladies out of their pension money.

Definition of e
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@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.

@carsten@yarn.zn80.net

I have to write so many emails to so many idiots who have no idea what they are doing

So it sounds to me like the pressure is to reduce how much time you waste on idiots, which to my mind is a very good reason to use a text generator! I guess in that case you don’t mind too much whether the company making the AI owns your prompt text?

I’d really like to see tools like this that you can run on your desktop or phone, so they don’t send your hard work off to someone else and give a company a chance to take it from you.

Love the check-ins. Good to see people all over the world using gopherspace.

@carsten@yarn.zn80.net Who says you need to use anything like that? Where’s the pressure coming from?

👋 Q: How do we feel about forking the Twtxt spec into what we love and use today in Yarn.social in yarnd, tt, jenny, twtr and other clients? 🤔 Thinking about (and talking with @xuu@txt.sour.is on IRC) about the possibility of rewriting a completely new spec (no extensions). Proposed name yarn.txt or “Yarn”. Compatibility would remain with Twtxt in the sense that we wouldn’t break anything per se, but we’d divorce ourselves from Twtxt and be free to improve based on the needs of the community and not the ideals of those that don’t use, contribute in the first place or fixate on nostalgia (which doesn’t really help anyone).

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.

We could ask them? But on the counter would bukket or jan6 follow the pure twtxt feeds? Probably not either way… We could use content negotiation as well. text/plain for basic and text/yarn for enhanced.

I’m not super a fan of using json. I feel we could still use text as the medium. Maybe a modified version to fix any weakness.

What if instead of signing each twt individually we generated a merkle tree using the twt hashes? Then a signature of the root hash. This would ensure the full stream of twts are intact with a minimal overhead. With the added bonus of helping clients identify missing twts when syncing/gossiping.

Have two endpoints. One as the webfinger to link profile details and avatar like you posted. And the signature for the merkleroot twt. And the other a pageable stream of twts. Or individual twts/merkle branch to incrementally access twt feeds.

💡 Quick ‘n Dirty prototype Yarn.social protocol/spec:

If we were to decide to write a new spec/protocol, what would it look like?

Here’s my rough draft (back of paper napkin idea):

• Feeds are JSON file(s) fetchable by standard HTTP clients over TLS
  
• WebFinger is used at the root of a user’s domain (or multi-user) lookup. e.g: prologic@mills.io -> https://yarn.mills.io/~prologic.json
  
• Feeds contain similar metadata that we’re familiar with: Nick, Avatar, Description, etc
  
• Feed items are signed with a ED25519 private key. That is all “posts” are cryptographically signed.
  
• Feed items continue to use content-addressing, but use the full Blake2b Base64 encoded hash.
  
• Edited feed items produce an “Edited” item so that clients can easily follow Edits.
  
• Deleted feed items produced a “Deleted” item so that clients can easily delete cached items.
  

#Yarn.social #Protocol #Ideas

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci that is an ironic example. Since the inventor of the seatbelt gave rights to use the technology freely.

Linguistics Gossip
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I played around with parsers. This time I experimented with parser combinators for twt message text tokenization. Basically, extract mentions, subjects, URLs, media and regular text. It’s kinda nice, although my solution is not completely elegant, I have to say. Especially my communication protocol between different steps for intermediate results is really ugly. Not sure about performance, I reckon a hand-written state machine parser would be quite a bit faster. I need to write a second parser and then benchmark them.

lexer.go and newparser.go resemble the parser combinators: https://git.isobeef.org/lyse/tt2/-/commit/4d481acad0213771fe5804917576388f51c340c0 It’s far from finished yet.

The first attempt in parser.go doesn’t work as my backtracking is not accounted for, I noticed only later, that I have to do that. With twt message texts there is no real error in parsing. Just regular text as a “fallback”. So it works a bit differently than parsing a real language. No error reporting required, except maybe for debugging. My goal was to port my Python code as closely as possible. But then the runes in the string gave me a bit of a headache, so I thought I just build myself a nice reader abstraction. When I noticed the missing backtracking, I then decided to give parser combinators a try instead of improving on my look ahead reader. It only later occurred to me, that I could have just used a rune slice instead of a string. With that, porting the Python code should have been straightforward.

Yeah, all this doesn’t probably make sense, unless you look at the code. And even then, you have to learn the ropes a bit. Sorry for the noise. :-)

So. Some bits.

i := fIndex(xs, 5.6)

Can also be

i := Index(xs, 5.6)

The compiler can infer the type automatically. Looks like you mention that later.

Also the infer is super smart.. You can define functions that take functions with generic types in the arguments. This can be useful for a generic value mapper for a repository

func Map[U,V any](rows []U, fn func(U) V) []V {
  out := make([]V, len(rows))
  for i := range rows { out = fn(rows[i]) }
  return out
}


rows := []int{1,2,3}
out := Map(rows, func(v int) uint64 { return uint64(v) })

I am pretty sure the type parameters goes the other way with the type name first and constraint second.

func Foo[comparable T](xs T, s T) int

Should be

func Foo[T comparable](xs T, s T) int

julien040/gut: An easy-to-use git client for Windows, macOS, and Linux

❤️ 🎶: Us two by Lee Eun Mi

Salt Dome
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https://themarkup.org/blacklight?url=welcome.us un minador de datos por excelencia.