TechTakes

reposting here for better visibility (let me know if there’s a better way to do this now that we’re federated): the owners of hachyderm.io just started a generative AI for gaming project, and it looks like donations to them will likely end up going to that

Started following @techtakes and there sure are some Opinions in the replies

I talk a lot about how "empathy" in commercial UX is mostly a posture because in reality capitalism doesn't care, but it's important to consider the additional problem of people in charge who are too shallow to be capable of understanding "why" some people prefer, or need, to do things differently than they do.

This one time I was telling the ceo/founder of a startup I worked for that our react app was making my new macbook pro crawl and we need to fix that because it was a b2b product that would be used by people in finance offices decked out with dell opticrap machines. He responded with surprise "wow, steve. you really care about people don't you?"

I was kinda floored. Anyway, here we are...

https://web.archive.org/web/20230727121010/https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1684491212219359232

"The sad thing is that if the officer had not made a few key missteps … he might have covered his bases well enough to avoid consequences." Yeah, so sad.

For bonus sneer, check out their profile.

It's because there is a vast concerted effort by the political left to destroy Musk now that he is no longer regarded as being strictly on their side. It's at Trumpian scale these days, in terms of the venom being directed at him.

Reddit is overflowing with non-stop Musk hatred. They spout lie after lie about him in every single thread where he's a topic. The most popular lie being that his business efforts - ie his success - were funded by an emerald mine that his father owned (neither thing is true).

I say this as an emotionally independent, objective observer of the craziness, I have no stake in it, and don't feel one way or another about it. The seeming mental illness the topic of Musk seems to draw out of people is astounding however, the herd promptly acts like deranged lunatics when he comes up as a topic.

Until Trump I had never seen anything like it before, in person or online. There must be a name for such a massive scale of crowd insanity, to describe the frothing-at-the-mouth irrationality.

my deranged lunatic hivemind venomous mentally ill frothing-at-the-mouth leftist brain can’t handle how rational this fucking asshole’s take on musk and trump is

there’s also this at the top of the thread:

I've been mostly ambivalent about the Musk-era at Twitter—mostly because I just don't care enough to have an opinion.

This, though. This one makes me angry and disappointed.

Twitter has had such a solid brand for so long. It's accomplished things most marketers only dream of: getting a verb like "Tweet" into the standard lexicon is like the pinnacle of branding.

turning one of the most popular sites on the internet into a cesspit of transphobia and nazis: ambivalent

musk fails to appreciate the Twitter brand: angry and disappointed

remember, hacker news is a bastion of high-quality discussion. fucking shitheads

the API is called Web Environment Integrity, and it’s a way to kill ad blockers first and a Google ecosystem lock-in mechanism second, with no other practical use case I can find

Winter is coming and Collapse OS aims to soften the blow. It is a Forth (why Forth?) operating system and a collection of tools and documentation with a single purpose: preserve the ability to program microcontrollers through civilizational collapse.

imagine noticing that civilization is collapsing around you and not immediately opening an emacs lisp buffer so you can painstakingly recreate the entire compiler toolchain and runtime environment for the microcontrollers around you as janky code running in your editor. fucking amateurs

Wolfram’s post is fucking interminable and consists of about 20% semi-interesting math and 80% goofy shit like deciding that the creepy (to Wolfram) images in the AI model’s probability space must represent how aliens perceive the world. to my memory, this is about par for the course for Wolfram

the orange site decides that the reason why the output isn’t very interesting is because the AI isn’t a robot:

What we see from AI is what you get when you remove the "muscle module", and directly apply the representations onto the paper. There's no considering of how to fill in a pixel; there's just a filling of the pixel directly from the latent space.

It's intriguing. Also makes me wonder if we need to add a module in between the representational output and the pixel output. Something that mimics how we actually use a brush.

this lack of muscle memory is, of course, why we have never done digital art once in the history of humanity. all claims to the contrary are paid conspirators in the pocket of Big Dick Blick

Of course, the AIs can't wake up if we use that analogy. They are not capable of anything more than this state right now.

But to me, lucid dreaming is already a step above the total unconsciousness of just dreaming, or just nothing at all. And wakefulness always follows shortly after I lucid dream.

only 10x lucid dreamers wake up after falling asleep

we can progressively increase the numerical values of the weights—eventually in some sense “blowing the mind” of the network (and going a bit “psychedelic” in the process)

I wonder if there's a more exact analog of the action of psychedelics on the brain that could be performed on generative models?

I always find it interesting how a hero dose of LSD gives similar visuals to what these image AI's do to achieve a coherent image.

[more nonsense]

I feel like the more we get AI to act like humans, and the more those engineers and others use LSD, the more convergence we are going to have with curiosity and breakthroughs about how we function.

the next time you’re in an altered state, I want you to close your eyes and just imagine how annoyed you’d be if one of these shitheads was there with you, trying to get you to “form a BCI” or whatever by typing free association words into ChatGPT

you know it’s a fucking banger when you try to collapse the top comment in the thread to skip all the folks litigating over the value of an ebike and more than 2/3rds of the comments in an 884 comment long thread disappear

also featuring many takes from understanders of statistics:

I'm wary about using public roads to test these, but I think the way the data is presented is misleading. I'm not sure how it's misleading, but separating "incidents" into categories (safety, traffic, accident, etc) might be a good start.

For example, I could start coning cruise cars, and cause these numbers to skyrocket. While that's an inconvenience to other drivers, it's not a safety issue at all.

By the way, as a motorcyclist (and thus hyper annoyed at bad driving), I find Uber/Lyft/Food drivers to be both much more dangerous and inconveniencing than these self driving cars.

Look, I know that you all stopped using Thunderbird in about 2003. I know this. You know this. But I still like it.

no, really, that's what the guy asked.

archive

see also the github thread linked in the mastodon post, where the couple of gormless AI hypemen responsible for MDN’s AI features pick a fight with like 30 web developers

from that thread I’ve also found out that most MDN content is written by a collective that exists outside of Mozilla (probably explaining why it took them this long to fuck it up), so my hopes that somebody forks MDN are much higher

Here's Brian Chesky at the Config 2023 conference for Figma, the current designated software for drawing pictures, talking about design at his "design-led company" airbnb.

Brian Chesky went to design school, studied industrial design, and worked as an industrial designer before founding airbnb. They talk to him here as some kind of hero as the only designer ceo in the fortune 500. It's truly sad that this guy is held up as a model for "design" when airbnb does all the things it does.

This cult is based on a reductionist view of design being form alone. Relegating function to being a business and engineering concern.

A room full of UX designers should be grilling the shit out of brian.

From my blog:

In November 2022, Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, began a tweet thread with “I’ve heard you loud and clear” in response to a customer backlash over the way they hid additional costs till the checkout page. “You feel like prices aren’t transparent…starting next month, you’ll be able to see the total price you’re paying up front” he said about a change that could be made urgently in a day, or carefully over a few.

When he said I’ve heard you loud and clear he was also telling his User Experience (UX) researchers and designers they were ignored, if they were heard at all. The dark pattern was no mistake. Intentionally designed to deceive and benefit from excited holiday planners and their potential to give in to the sunk cost fallacy. Instead of addressing the ridiculous additional fees the company chose to trick customers into paying them. That’s not empathy, at best it’s apathy, at worst it’s hate. The decision to fix it only came after the balance of business value and public relations started to tip the wrong way. Chesky presented himself as a model CEO doing right by his customers as if he wasn’t responsible for wronging them in the first place. People bought it too. He demonstrated how bright a performative aura of care can shine to hide questions about the business activity or even questions about the business’s legitimacy to exist.

consider this 👆 at the 12:20 mark when the audience applauds him for talking about how design helped them recover from a break-even to a 4bill free cash flow last year - saying they did it by designing the company with "fewer parts, fewer projects" - which probably refers to the ~1900 people they laid off mid-pandemic?

and you need to watch all of it

the only paragraph you need:

Bryan Johnson — who also has said he uses a machine to count his nighttime erections and has taken steps to make his rectum perform like a teenager’s — made his fortune in his 30s when he sold his payment processing company Braintree Payment Solutions to EBay for $800 million in cash.

this is the guy who also uses his son as his personal blood boy

NY Post, so have the archive link: https://archive.is/ExtBO

PayPal has a lot to fucking answer for

Disclaimer, I am no engineer but why wouldn't you build in a check position of accelerator pedal to the condition handling logic? What possible reason could there be other than incompetence, expedience or negligence?

today Mozilla published a blog post about the AI Help and AI Explain features it deployed to its famously accurate MDN web documentation reference a few days ago. here’s how it’s going according to that post:

We’re only a handful of days into the journey, but the data so far seems to indicate a sense of skepticism towards AI and LLMs in general, while those who have tried the features to find answers tend to be happy with the results.

got that? cool. now let’s check out the developer response on github soon after the AI features were deployed:

it seems like this feature was conceived, developed, and deployed without even considering that an LLM might generate convincing gibberish, even though that's precisely what they're designed to do.

oh dear

That is demonstrably wrong. There is no demo of that code showing it in action. A developer who uses this code and expects the outcome the AI said to expect would be disappointed (at best).

That was from the very first page I hit that had an accessibility note. Which means I am wary of what genuine user-harming advice this tool will offer on more complex concepts than simple stricken text.

So the "solution" is adding a disclaimer and a survey instead of removing the false information? 🙃 🙃 🙃

This response is clearly wrong in its statement that there is no closing tag, but also incorrect in its statement that all HTML must have a closing tag; while this is correct for XHTML, HTML5 allows for void elements that do not require a closing tag

that doesn’t sound very good! but at least someone vetted the LLM’s answers, right?

MDN core reviewer/maintainer here.

Until @stevefaulkner pinged me about this (thanks, Steve), I myself wasn’t aware that this “AI Explain” thing was added. Nor, as far as I know, were any of the other core reviewers/maintainers aware it’d been added. Nor, as far as I know, did anybody get an OK for this from the MDN Steering Committee (the group of people responsible for governance of MDN) — nor even just inform the Steering Committee about it at all.

The change seems to have landed in the sources two days ago, in e342081 — without any associated issue, instead only a PR at #9188 that includes absolutely not discussion or background info of any kind.

At this point, it looks to me to be something that Mozilla decided to do on their own without giving any heads-up of any kind to any other MDN stakeholders. (I could be wrong; I've been away a bit — a lot of my time over the last month has been spent elsewhere, unfortunately, and that’s prevented me from being able to be doing MDN work I’d have otherwise normally been doing.)

Anyway, this “AI Explain” thing is a monumentally bad idea, clearly — for obvious reasons (but also for the specific reasons that others have taken time to add comments to this issue to help make clear).

(note: the above reply was hidden in the GitHub thread by Mozilla, usually something you only do for off topic replies)

so this thing was pushed into MDN behind the backs of Mozilla’s experts and given only 15 minutes of review (ie, none)? who could have done such a thing?

…so anyway, some kind of space alien comes in and locks the thread:

Hi there, 👋

Thank you all for taking the time to provide feedback about our AI features, AI Explain and AI Help, and to participate in this discussion, which has probably been the most active one in some time. Congratulations to be a part of it! 👏

congratulations to be a part of it indeed

there’s just so much to sneer at in this thread and I’ve got choice paralysis. fuck it, let’s go for this one

everyone thinking Prompt Engineering will go away dont understand how close Prompt Engineering is to management or executive communications. until BCI is perfect, we'll never be done trying to serialize our intent into text for others to consume, whether AI or human.

boy fuck do I hate when my boss wants to know how long a feature will take, so he jacks straight into my cerebral cortex to send me email instead of using zoom like a normal person