froztbyte

joined 2 years ago
[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 5 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

from when I last looked into this: twitter 100% has[0] (unstated) web API ratelimits for various subservices[1], but getting direct API creds became a "give us your actual phone number" thing even before felon took it over...

so I just decided to tombstone my account by making it private, updating bio, and never logging in again

not willing to give them what they want for API access. might at some point go write some web automation to recurringly click a delete button? idunno

[0] - ....well, 4 years ago, "had". probably maybe still does, on whatever parts of the haproxy or whatever config didn't get absolutely fucking destroyed in felon's mania to rebrand it to "x" overnight (a process which failed hilariously badly for weeks and I still think fondly of to laugh at)

[1] - when going through the "your interests" list (hidden deep in settings), if you unticked too many boxes too quickly you'd hit a webserver-enforced ratelimit on request limits and then half the webapp would get a bit fucky for an hour. ratelimit was something like 30/min with a 1/m type token-bucket refresh. quite the shitshow

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 8 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

ruby's had this problem for ~2 decades now. like, the "rockstar dev" archetype literally became big directly because of ruby's popularity and perception at the time

I haven't been active in/near the ruby space for a number of years now so I can't speak to the modern details well at all, but I wouldn't be too surprised to learn that the various branches of it haven't really learned how to deal. I will say that I have seen some improvement over that period, but... yeah

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 8 points 2 weeks ago

just yesterday I saw this toot and now I know why

(I mean, they probably should’ve bounced the guy a decade ago, but definitely even more time for it now)

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The protocol is built for a future in which AI agents routinely shop for products on customers’ behalf

as I was ranting in dm earlier elsewhere, the part about this that especially fucks me off is how much of this is not just simply unnecessary but also strictly worse than what we already used to have!

~15yo ago the entire bloody internet was awash in APIs and accessible interactions! hell, it's the whole reason shit like Yahoo Pipes and IFTTT became a thing!

(and then after that ~everyone made fucking fences to wall their gardens because they want to Capture Users! to this day I still don't know if it could've gone any other way under how capitalism operates, but fuck it sucks.)

meanwhile so many people (both those who've come up Touching Computers, as well as casual users, in the last 10~15y or so (who I typically refer to as the Cloud Generation) typically don't even have a conception of doing it any other way but The Billable Platform Way. I have long suspected that this won't hold out (it's a truism that at some threshold people will start asking "wait why am I paying for this?") and I am heartened by seeing some indicators of this starting to happen, but...... fuck. there's been so much damage from years of this shit

I still stay hopeful for change (esp. because this current way can't hold), but I also grimace about what's coming in the near future (because I know that a fair number of these platforms will be cognizant of the same problem)

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

this is one of those things that's, in a narrative sense, a great way to tell a story, while being completely untethered from fact/reality. and that's fine! stories have no obligation to be based in fact!

to put a very mild armchair analysis about it forward: it's playing on the definition of the conceptual "smart" computer, as it relates to human experience. there's been a couple of other things in recent history that I can think of that hit similar or related notes (M3GAN, the whole "omg the AI tricked us (and then the different species with a different neurotype and capability noticed it!)" arc in ST:DIS, the last few Mission Impossible films, etc). it's one of those ways in which art and stories tend to express "grappling with $x to make sense of it"

The idea that a smart computer will be worse at math (which makes sense from a storytelling perspective as a writer, because smart AI who also can do math super well is gonna be hard to write)

personally speaking, one of the ways about it that I find most jarring is when the fantastical vastly outweighs anything else purely for narrative reasons - so much so that it's a 4th-wallbreak for me ito what the story means to convey. I reflect on this somewhat regularly, as it's a rather cursed rabbithole that instances repeatedly: "is it my knowledge of this domain that's spoiling my enjoyment of this thing, or is the story simply badly written?" is the question that comes up, and it's surprisingly varied and complicated in its answering

on the whole I think it's often good/best to keep in mind that scifi is often an exploration and a pressure valve, but that it's also worth keeping an eye on how much it's a pressure valve. too much of the latter, and something(tm) is up

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 5 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

hot off the heels of months of “agentic! it can do things for you!” llm hype, they have to make special APIs for the chatbots, I guess because otherwise they make too many whoopsies?

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 5 points 2 weeks ago

guess that’s got tonight’s watching sorted :)

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

this post extremely quickly goes many places I didn't come close to expecting

impressive.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 8 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

clueless and enthusiastic (often overly so), getting real into something but often at the lower end rungs

aiui the term it started its life as a description of people who’d get real into weapons, but only at the grade you can buy in mall mass retail. never dug into the history tho

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 5 points 2 weeks ago

linkedin thotleedir posts directly into your mailbox? gonna have to pour one out for you

AI’s Biggest Security Threat May Be Quantum Decryption

an absolutely wild grab-bag of words. the more you know about each piece, the more surreal the sentence becomes. unintentional art!

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 2 weeks ago

that's why you should keep your at-risk data on quantum ai blockchain!!~

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 4 points 3 weeks ago

"and if we're making a ton of money tomorrow, just imagine 3 months from now!"

 

Too tired to sneer at the book myself right now but the article doesn’t pull punches either

Figured it’s worth posting since the book author has featured here more than once recently and has definitely been an enabler to The Shit

 

found via someone running a server at revision

retro fun. quite slick, too!

52
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by froztbyte@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
 

Not entirely the usual fare, but i figured some here would appreciate it

I often rag on the js/node/npm ecosystem for being utter garbage, and this post is a quite a full demonstration of many of the shortcomings and outright total design failures present in that space

 

Invite up at https://2024.revision-party.net/blog/04-invitation/

~2 weekends away (who cares about the week)

Prepare for watching mathematical black magic!

 

starting out[0] with "I was surprised by the following results" and it just goes further down almost-but-not-quite Getting It Avenue

close, but certainly no cigar

choice quotes:

Why is it impressive that a model trained on internet text full of random facts happens to have a lot of random facts memorized? … why does that in any way indicate intelligence or creativity?

That’s a good point.

you don't fucking say

I have a website (TrackingAI.org) that already administers a political survey to AIs every day. So I could easily give the AIs a real intelligence test, and track that over time, too.

really, how?

As I started manually giving AIs IQ tests

oh.

Then it proceeds to mis-identify every single one of the 6 answer options, leading it to pick the wrong answer. There seems to be little rhyme or reason to its misidentifications

if this fuckwit had even the slightest fucking understanding of how these things work, it would be glaringly obvious

there's plenty more, so remember to practice stretching before you start your eyerolls

 

One for the sidebar, in the spirit of incident-day-free counters[0], tracking how many days since the last time there was a dipshitted thing from the tescrealtors

Could do it with flap-counter or nixie-clock numbers for a bit of feel?

[0] - is this an insensitive idea? I know the counters tend to form part of safety culture and their reset indicates harm, but those clowns are exactly dangerous, so..

 

[open scene]

background: a brightly lit airy Social Gathering space with multicoloured furniture (meeting rooms are so 2010). people have been arriving in clumps of 2~5 for over 30 minutes, and the presentation can start soon

sundar: I want to thank you all for coming. this one should be quick today.

* sundar briefly sweeps his eyes across the room before continuing *

sundar: guys! GUYS! we made the prompt VIDEO CAPABLE! it can follow A STREAMING SEQUENCE OF IMAGES!! you can immediately start testing this from your corporate account (whispers if you're in the right orgs). for the public scoff, we'll start with Ask Us pricing in a few months, and we'll force it on the usual product avenues. the office and mail suites stand ready to roll out the integration updates before anyone can ask. you know how the riffraff gets....

* some motion and noise in the back *

sundar: ... sorry melanie, what's that? speak up melanie I can't hear your question. you know how much that mask muffles your voice...

* a game of broken telephone for moving a handheld microphone to the back of the room ensues *

melanie: hi sundar, congratulations to the team for their achievement. I wanted to ask: how does gemini pro solve the issues other models have faced? what new innovations have been accomplished? how is it dealing with the usual issues of correctness, energy consumption, cultural contexts? how is it trained on areas where no datasets exist? were any results sourced from cooperation with the AI ethics and responsibility workgroups that have found so many holes in our previous models?

sundar: * smiles brightly, stares directly into middle of crowd. moves hand to the electronic shutter control, and starts pressing the increase button multiple times until shutter is entirely opaque *

[sundar walks off into the fake sunset, breaks open the boardroom whiskey]

[inside the private exec room]

sundar: FUCK! that was too close. didn't we fire those types already in the last layoffs...? someone get me HR, we need to do something

[end scene]

16
better tools thread (awful.systems)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by froztbyte@awful.systems to c/notawfultech@awful.systems
 

this is in part because it's for (yet another) post I'm working on, but I figured I'd pop some things here and see if others have contributions too. the post will be completed (and include examples, usecases, etc), but, yeah.

I've always taken a fairly strong interest in the tooling I use, for QoL and dtrt reasons usually (but also sometimes tool capability). conversely, I also have things I absolutely loathe using

  1. wireguard. a far better vpn software and protocol than most others (and I have slung tunnels with many a vpn protocol). been using this a few years already, even before the ios app beta came around. good shit, take a look if you haven't before
  2. smallstep cli. it's one of two pieces of Go software I actually like. smallstep is trying to build its own ecosystem of CA tools and solutions (and that's usable in its own right, albeit by default focused to containershit), but the cli is great for what you typically want with certificate handling. compare step certificate inspect file and step certificate inspect --insecure https://totallyreal.froztbyte.net/ to the bullshit you need with openssl. check it out
  3. restic. the other of the two Go-softwares I like. I posted about it here previously
  4. rust cli things! oh damn there's so many, I'm going to put them on their own list below
  5. zsh, extremely lazily configured, with my own little module and scoping system and no oh-my-zsh. fish has been a thing I've seen people be happy about but I'm just an extremely lazy computerer so zsh it stays. zsh's complexity is extremely nonzero and it definitely has sharp edges, but it does work well. sunk cost, I guess. bonus round: race your zsh, check your times:
% hyperfine -m 50 'zsh -i -c echo'
Benchmark 1: zsh -i -c echo
  Time (mean ± σ):      69.1 ms ±   2.8 ms    [User: 35.1 ms, System: 28.6 ms]
  Range (min … max):    67.0 ms …  86.2 ms    50 runs
  1. magic-wormhole. this is a really, really neat little bit of software for just fucking sending files to someone. wormhole send filename one side, wormhole receive the-code-it-gives the other side, bam! it uses SPAKE2 (disclaimer: I did help review that post, it's still good) for session-tied keying, and it's just generally good software
  2. [macos specifically] alfred. I gotta say, I barely use this to its full potential, and even so it is a great bit of assistive stuff. more capable than spotlight, has a variety of extensibility, and generally snappy as hell.
  3. [macos specifically] choosy. I use this to control link-routing and link-opening on my workstation to a fairly wide degree (because a lot of other software irks me, and does the wrong thing by default). this will be a fuller post on its own, too
  4. [macos specifically] little snitch. application-level per-connection highly granular-capable firewalling. with profiles. their site does a decent explanation of it. the first few days of setup tends to be Quite Involved with how many rules you need to add (and you'll probably be surprised at just how many things try to make various kinds of metrics etc connections), but well worth it. one of the ways to make modern software less intolerable. (honorary extra mention: obdev makes a number of handy pieces of mac software, check their site out)
  5. [macos specifically] soundsource. highly capable per-application per-sink audio control software. with the ability to pop in VSTs and AUs at multiple points. extremely helpful for a lot of things (such as perma-muting discord, which never shuts up, even in system dnd mode)

rust tools:

  1. b3sum. file checksum thing, but using blake3. fast!. worth checking out. probably still niche, might catch on eventually
  2. hyperfine. does what it says on the tin. see example use above.
  3. dust. like du, but better, and way faster. oh dear god it is so much faster. I deal with a lot of pets, and this thing is one of the invaluables in dealing with those.
  4. ripgrep. the one on this list that people are most likely to know. grep, but better, and faster.
  5. fd. again, find but better and faster.
  6. tokei. sloccount but not shit. handy for if you quickly want to assess a codebase/repo.
  7. bottom. down the evolutionary chain from top and htop, has more feature modes and a number of neat interactive view functions/helpers

honorary mentions (things I know of but don't use that much):

  1. mrh. not doing as much consulting as I used to, using it less. quickly checks all git(?) repos in a path for uncommitted changes
  2. fzf. still haven't really gotten to integrating it into my usage
  3. just. need to get to using it more.
  4. jql. I ... tend to avoid jq? my "this should be in a program. with safety rails." reflex often kicks in when I see jq things. haven't really explored this
  5. rtx. their tagline is "a better asdf". I like the idea of it because asdf is a miserable little pile of shell scripts and fuck that, but I still haven't really gotten to using it in anger myself. I have my own wrapper methods for keeping pyenv/nvm/etc out of my shell unless needed
  6. pomsky. previously rulex. regex creation tool and language. been using it a little bit. not enough to comment in detail yet
 

archive

"There's absolutely no probability that you're going to see this so-called AGI, where computers are more powerful than people, in the next 12 months. It's going to take years, if not many decades, but I still think the time to focus on safety is now," he said.

just days after poor lil sammyboi and co went out and ran their mouths! the horror!

Sources told Reuters that the warning to OpenAI's board was one factor among a longer list of grievances that led to Altman's firing, as well as concerns over commercializing advances before assessing their risks.

Asked if such a discovery contributed..., but it wasn't fundamentally about a concern like that.

god I want to see the boardroom leaks so bad. STOP TEASING!

“What we really need are safety brakes. Just like you have a safety break in an elevator, a circuit breaker for electricity, an emergency brake for a bus – there ought to be safety breaks in AI systems that control critical infrastructure, so that they always remain under human control,” Smith added.

this appears to be a vaguely good statement, but I'm gonna (cynically) guess that it's more steered by the fact that MS now repeatedly burned their fingers on human-interaction AI shit, and is reaaaaal reticent about the impending exposure

wonder if they'll release a business policy update about usage suitability for *GPT and friends

 

archive (e: twitter [archive] too, archive for nitter seems a bit funky)

it'd be nice if these dipshits, like, came off a factory line somewhere. then you could bin them right at the QC failure

 

Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process [by the board]

"god, he's really cost us... how much can we get back?"

which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board

not only with the board, kids

hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities

you and me both, brother

2
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by froztbyte@awful.systems to c/notawfultech@awful.systems
 

I don't really know enough about the C64 to say anything one way or the other, but this comment on youtube did okay:

@eightbitguru
1 year ago
2021: We have definitely seen everything the C64 can do now.
2022: My beer. Hold it.

and I'm posting this without even having seen the whole thing yet

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