TechTakes

The whole Linux userbase loves x11libre, an initiative to preserve X11 alive as an alternative to Wayland! 5 seconds later We regret to inform you x11libre guy is a Nazi apologist

Ok, maybe someone can help me here figure something out.

I've wondered for a long time about a strange adjacency which I sometimes observe between what I call (due to lack of a better term) "unix conservativism" and fascism. It's the strange phenomenon where ideas about "classic" and "pure" unix systems coincide with the worst politics. For example the "suckless" stuff. Or the ramblings of people like ESR. Criticism of systemd is sometimes infused with it (yes, there is plenty of valid criticism as well. But there's this other kind of criticism I've often seen, which is icky and weirdly personal). And I've also seen traces of this in discussions of programming languages newer than C, especially when topics like memory safety come up.

This is distinguished from retro computing and nostalgia and such, those are unrelated. If someone e.g. just likes old unix stuff, that's not what I mean.

You may already notice, I struggle a bit to come up with a clear definition and whether there really is a connection or just a loose set of examples that are not part of a definable set. So, is there really something there or am I seeing a connection that doesn't exist?

I've also so far not figured out what might create the connection. Ideas I have come up with are: appeal to times that are gone (going back to an idealized computing past that never existed), elitism (computers must not become user friendly), ideas of purity (an imaginary pure "unix philosophy").

Anyway, now with this new xlibre project, there's another one that fits into it...

(this probably deserves its own post because it seems destined to be a shitshow full of the worst people, but I know nothing about the project or the people currently involved)

Got curious and wanted to see if I could beat the Atari 2600. Found an online emulator here.

"Easiest" difficulty appears to be 8, followed by 1, then increasing in difficulty up to 7. I can beat 8, and the controls and visuals are too painful for me to try anything more than this.

Being paid to reddit has to be the most pathetic thing you can do, and I say that as someone who once reddited unpaid.

The only reason teal named the company Palantir is because HitlerPhone would've been too on the nose

From the appendix:

TOTAL, COMPLETE, AND ABSOLUTE QUANTUM TOTAL ULTIMATE BEYOND INFINITY QUANTUM SUPREME LEGAL AND FINANCIAL NUCLEAR ACCOUNTABILITY

Yeah, its the BAP crew. Last few years saw an inrush of far right lolicon fans into that space.

My T-shirt: there's 0 good uses for self-driving taxis
Protesters: call self-driving taxis to block streets on the way of the police, then set the damn things on fire
My T-shirt: there's 1 good uses for self-driving taxis

Barricades-as-a-Service

Coupe d'etat

Sans Parking-lottes

This is a good example of something that I feel like I need to drill at a bit more. I'm pretty sure that this isn't an unexpected behavior or an overfitting of the training data. Rather, given the niche question of "what time zone does this tiny community use?" one relatively successful article in a satirical paper should have an outsized impact on the statistical patterns surrounding those words, and since as far as the model is concerned there is no referent to check against this kind of thing should be expected to keep coming up when specific topics or phrases come up near each other in relatively novel ways. The smaller number of examples gives each one a larger impact on the overall pattern, so it should be entirely unsurprising that one satirical example "poisons" the output this cleanly.

Assuming this is the case, I wonder if it's possible to weaponize it by identifying tokens with low overall reference counts that could be expanded with minimal investment of time. Sort of like Google bombing.

What does the “better” version of ChatGPT look like, exactly? What’s cool about ChatGPT? [...] Because the actual answer is “a ChatGPT that actually works.” [...] A better ChatGPT would quite literally be a different product.

This is the heart of recognizing so much of the bullshit in the tech field. I also want to make sure that our friends in the Ratsphere get theirs for their role in enabling everyone to pretend there's a coherent path between the current state of LLMs and that hypothetical future where they can actually do things.

• You will understand how to use AI tools for real-time employee engagement analysis
• You will create personalized employee development plans using AI-driven analytics
• You will learn to enhance employee well-being programs with AI-driven insights and recommendations

You will learn to create the torment nexus

• You will prepare your career for your future work in a world with robots and AI

You will learn to live in the torment nexus

• You will gain expertise in ethical considerations when implementing AI in HR practices

I assume it's a single slide that says "LOL who cares"

A comparison springs to mind: inviting the most pedantic nerds on Earth to critique your chatbot slop is a level of begging to be pwned that's on par with claiming the female orgasm is a myth.

The thing that galls me here even more than other slop is that there isn't even some kind of horrible capitalist logic underneath it. Like, what value is this supposed to create? Replacing the leads written by actual editors, who work for free? You already have free labor doing a better job than this, why would you compromise the product for the opportunity to spend money on compute for these LLM not-even-actually-summaries? Pure brainrot.

but the WMF hasn't gotten the message, saying that the project has been "paused". It sounds like they plan to push it through regardless.

Classic “Yes” / “ask me later”. You hate to see it.

Example #"I've lost count" of LLMs ignoring instructions and operating like the bullshit spewing machines they are.

Yes, thank you, I'm also annoyed about this. Even classic "AI" approaches for simple pattern detection (what used to be called "ML" a few hype waves ago, although it's much older than that even) are now conflated with capabilities of LLMs. People are led to believe that ChatGPT is the latest and best and greatest evolution of "AI" in general, with all capabilities that have ever been in anything. And it's difficult to explain how wrong this is without getting too technical.

Related, this fun article: ChatGPT "Absolutely Wrecked" at Chess by Atari 2600 Console From 1977

Relatedly, the gathering of (useful, actually works in real life, can be used to make products that turn a profit or that people actually want, and sometimes even all of the above at the same time) computer vision and machine learning and LLMs under the umbrella of “AI” is something I find particularly galling.

The eventual collapse of the AI bubble and the subsequent second AI winter is going to take a lot of useful technology with it that had the misfortune to be standing a bit too close to LLMs.