V0ldek

joined 2 years ago
[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 6 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Banning him just before the funny number too, oof

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 3 points 7 hours ago

Nice, I petittion for this to be the new description of SneerClub just like that magnificent Yud quote was on Reddit

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 2 points 6 days ago

So I was thinking about this recently with a colleague and there are two things that I think would be useful:

  • I would actually like a HUD? Like a minimap when walking through the city. Or the ability to popup a small YT video in the corner of my eye. I have no idea if it would actually work with how human vision works, but that's a cool idea for me.
  • Universally good idea: smart glasses that detect advertising billboards and other shit like that and automatically replace them with something. Could be just with white space, or with pleasant landscapes, or giant dicks if you're into that. The possibilities are quite endless. Would be universally beloved by everyone.
[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 2 points 6 days ago

Not, it turns out, for the Meta Raybans, cos they don’t even have screens or projectors!

Wait what? So what are those glasses? I thought they were AR glasses? What do they do then.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

This is a bundle which originated out of anti-Calvinist polemics written by Catholic and royalist Anglican writers during the early modern period, was picked up by 19th century romantic reactionaries to build the foundation of the emerging Counter-Enlightenment, got carried into the 20th century by various counter-modern literary movements seeking a third way against both capitalism and socialism which could justify the continuing relevance of the traditional humanistic disciplines against the new challenge of the social and psychological sciences, transitioned from being primarily of the political right to the political left because of the ideological aftermaths of WW2 and 1968, and took on its modern form in environmental and anti-globalization activism in the 90s

Parkour! So nazis weren't left-wing but they switched after the war, brilliant.

It is the actual source of the post-60s ideological transformation against the ideas of rationality, science, objectivity, and progress on the left

Pfffffff, lol, what? xD Ye, the left, famously anti-science, unlike the rational thinkers that reside in the White House right now

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 3 points 1 week ago

Relational

As in a database? What?

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Autodidact, Polymath

Why did you skip the funniest part?

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (6 children)

Can anyone explain to me why tf do promptfondlers hate GPT5 in non-crazy terms? Actually I have a whole list of questions related to this, I feel like I completely lost any connection to this discourse at this point:

  1. Is GPT5 "worse" in any sensible definition of the word? I've long complained that there is no good scientific metric to grade those on but like, it can count 'r's in "strawberry" so I thought it's supposed to be nominally better?
  2. Why doesn't OpenAI simply allow users to use the old model (4o I think?) It sounds like the simplest thing to do.
  3. Do we know if OpenAI actually changed something? Is the model different in any interesting way?
  4. Bonus question: what the fuck is wrong with OpenAI's naming scheme? 4, then 4o? And there's also o4 that's something else??
[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 15 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I hate the fact that now someone might look at me and surmise that I do something related to blockchain or AI, I feel almost like I need a sticker, like those "I bought it before we knew Elon was crazy" they put on Teslas

"I learnt to code before this stupid bubble"

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The worst are slop-generated recipes that you only realise are fake halfway through reading when they tell you to add half a cup of table salt to your cake batter

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 12 points 2 weeks ago

today I learnt that there are actual people irl who get genuinely upset if they catch you shoveling hot shit into your mouth. like they view it as a serious moral failing in certain circles

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

No it doesn't though. Like it literally doesn't. Who says it does? Proton isn't even publicly listed so there's literally no reason for that.

This is just a con by Big Growth to sell more charts with lines going up.

 

This is a nice post, but it has such an annoying sentence right in the intro:

At the time I saw the press coverage, I didn’t bother to click on the actual preprint and read the work. The results seemed unsurprising: when researchers were given access to AI tools, they became more productive. That sounds reasonable and expected.

What? What about it sounds reasonable? What about it sounds expected given all we know about AI??

I see this all the time. Why do otherwise skeptical voices always have the need to put in a weakening statement like this. "For sure, there are some legitimate uses of AI" or "Of course, I'm not claiming AI is useless" like why are you not claiming that. You probably should be claiming that. All of this garbage is useless until proven otherwise! "AI does not increase productivity" is the null hypothesis! It's the only correct skeptical position! Why do you seem to need to extend benefit of the doubt here, like seriously, I cannot explain this in any way.

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submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by V0ldek@awful.systems to c/freeasm@awful.systems
 

I'm looking for recommendations of good blogs for programmers. I've been asked about what I would recommend by younger folks a few times these past few months and I realised I don't really have a good list that I could just share with them.

What I'm interested in are blogs that don't focus specifically on any particular tech but more things like Coding Horror that are just for devs in general. They don't have to be for beginners. It'd also be interesting to see which of those are most popular in our little circle, so please upvote comments that contain recommendations you agree with.

I'm implicitly assuming stuff shared by folks here is going to be sensible, well-written blogs, and not some AI shill nonsense or other tech grift.

Note that I'm specifically interested in the text medium, podcasts or YT not so much.

 

An excellent post by Ludicity as per usual, but I need to vent two things.

First of all, I only ever worked in a Scrum team once and it was really nice. I liked having a Product Owner that was invested in the process and did customer communications, I loved having a Scrum Master that kept the meetings tight and followed up on Retrospective points, it worked like a well-oiled machine. Turns out it was a one-of-a-kind experience. I can't imagine having a stand-up for one hour without casualties involved.

A few months back a colleague (we're both PhD students at TU Munich) was taking a piss about how you can enroll in a Scrum course as an elective for our doctor school. He was in general making fun of the methodology but using words I've never heard before in my life. "Agile Testing". "Backlog Grooming". "Scrum of Scrums". I was like "dude, none of those words are in the bible", went to the Scrum Guide (which as far as I understood was the only document that actually defined what "Scrum" meant) and Ctrl+F-ed my point of literally none of that shit being there. Really, where the fuck does any of that come from? Is there a DLC to Scrum that I was never shown before? Was the person who first uttered "Scrumban" already drawn and quartered or is justice yet to be served?

Aside: the funniest part of that discussion was that our doctor school has an exemption that carves out "credits for Scrum and Agile methodology courses" as being worthless towards your PhD, so at least someone sane is managing that.

Second point I wanted to make was that I was having a perfectly happy holiday and then I read the phrase "Agile 2" and now I am crying into an ice-cream bucket. God help us all. Why. Ludicity you fucking monster, there was a non-zero chance I would've gone through my entire life without knowing that existed, I hate you now.

 

Turns out software engineering cannot be easily solved with a ~~small shell script~~ large language model.

The author of the article appears to be a genuine ML engineer, although some of his takes aged like fine milk. He seems to be shilling Google a bit too much for my taste. However, the sneer content is good nonetheless.

First off, the "Devin solves a task on Upwork" demo is 1. cherry picked, 2. not even correctly solved.

Second, and this is the absolutely fantastic golden nugget here, to show off its "bug solving capability" it creates its own nonsensical bugs and then reverses them. It's the ideal corporate worker, able to appear busy by creating useless work for itself out of thin air.

It also takes over 6 hours to perform this task, which would be reasonable for an experienced software engineer, but an experienced software engineer's workflow doesn't include burning a small nuclear explosion worth of energy while coding and then not actually solving the task. We don't drink that much coffee.

The next demo is a bait-and-switch again. In this case I think the author of the article fails to sneer quite as much as it's worthy -- the task the AI solves is writing test cases for finding the Least Common Multiple modulo a number. Come on, that task is fucking trivial, all those tests are oneliners! It's famously much easier to verify modulo arithmetic than it is to actually compute it. And it takes the AI an hour to do it!

It is a bit refreshing though that it didn't turn out DEVIN is just Dinesh, Eesha, Vikram, Ishani, and Niranjan working for $2/h from a slum in India.

 

I'm not sure if this fully fits into TechTakes mission statement, but "CEO thinks it's a-okay to abuse certificate trust to sell data to advertisers" is, in my opinion, a great snapshot of what brain worms live inside those people's heads.

In short, Facebook wiretapped Snapchat by sending data through their VPN company, Onavo. Installing it on your machine would add their certificates as trusted. Onavo would then intercept all communication to Snapchat and pretend the connection is TLS-secure by forging a Snapchat certificate and signing it with its own.

"Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted, we have no analytics about them," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a 2016 email to Javier Olivan.

"Given how quickly they're growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them," Zuckerberg continued. "Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this."

Zuckerberg ordered his engineers to "think outside the box" to break TLS encryption in a way that would allow them to quietly sell data to advertisers.

I'm sure the brave programmers that came up with and implemented this nonsense were very proud of their service. Jesus fucking cinammon crunch Christ.

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