mii

I actually flagged this with our DSO, still waiting for the results.

(Somehow MS Teams itself did go through years ago, which also surprised me.)

Well, our company is trying really hard to make my whole department redundant at the moment.

Some months ago our CEO went to Silicon Valley to "talk to some people", although I have no idea what he really did there. We're also from Europe and don't even sell anything in the Americas, so that trip was really unusual. And ever since he came back, he's been completely AI-brained, and here's some things that happened since then:

• an executive order to "integrate AI into all layers of our business"
• replacing all our laptops with new Thinkpads because they are apparently better for AI and have a Copilot button
• activating Copilot for MS Teams even though it's 100% not GDPR-compliant
• dumping tens of thousands of euros into MS Fabrics in the hopes that it will somehow vomit out useful data for marketing; it hasn't vomited out ANYTHING so far

Worst of all, though, our development department consists of two people including me, and the other guy mostly does organizational stuff so I am more or less alone responsible for the entirety of our production-critical code. We are understaffed and I am working on a project for which I was promised two juniors early next year ... now however, I was being asked to evaluate whether we can do that with AI instead, and the hires have been shelved.

And I don't think I'm allowed to submit "lol no".

Posteo is from Germany and they’re reasonably popular here. Their offer is quite different from Proton, though. If you want full E2E encryption you need to use GPG or S/MIME and handle that yourself (and obviously so does your recipient), so it’s not as batteries included as what Proton offered.

I like their focus on green energy and sustainability though.

Another option like that is mailbox.org. They’re presenting themselves as a bit more business-like.

I remember getting my first real computer (I had seen and occasionally played around with my aunt's old Macintosh before and a neighbor's kid had a C64) at some point in the early 90s. I think my father got it for work or something, can't remember, but me, having had a Nintendo at home, was more interested in playing games. I asked my aunt if it's the same as a Nintendo, meaning whether it also had Mario and stuff on it, and she told me, no, it's better, because you can make your own games with it.

So yeah, that was the moment I was hooked and I wanted to learn how to do that, which really wasn't as easy as I thought it'd be because that machine, coming with some ancient version of MS DOS (or maybe IBM DOS, I really can't remember) didn't have any straightforward ways of guiding me through, nor did I have a good tutorial book or anything.

It wasn't until a while later that we got internet access at home (the computer had since been upgraded from DOS to Windows) and me discovering Usenet and online discussion groups that I really found useful information and discovered my love for programming (and other stuff, too, like comics and manga, and fan-fiction, lol). I never actually got around to making that game, though, because I was just toying around with doing basic math and getting stuff to print to the console, obviously. As you did, back in the day.

I think another pivotal moment was when I first got my hands on an early version of Linux. That must've been the mid-to-late 90s, I think, and it was an image of SUSE Linux (now OpenSUSE) and I tried installing that on my computer -- and holy shit, that was an experience, but I was hooked. Compared to DOS and Windows it was so much more fun because of all the stuff you could do with it. I tried all the stuff, went from SUSE to RedHat to Debian to Sorcerer (which I really liked), and finally to Gentoo just for the nerd cred. I've basically been running Linux ever since, with a brief Mac OS phase in-between when my grandma got me a used computer when I went to university which was one of the colorful Apple iBooks. I actually quite liked Mac OS for a while, especially early OS X, which seemed like a polished and very user-friendly UNIX with batteries included, but went back to Linux a few years later.

These days I'm running Debian Stable though. Because even though I have nothing bad to say about Gentoo and learned a lot using it over the years, I just want my shit to work without getting my hands dirty too much (and my tinkering time goes into Emacs anyway).

Am I understanding this right: this app takes a picture of your ID card or passport and the feeds it to some ML algorithm to figure out whether the document is real plus some additional stuff like address verification?

Depending on where you’re located, you might try and file a GDPR complaint against this. I’m not a lawyer but I work with the DSO for our company and routinely piss off people by raising concerns about whatever stupid tool marketing or BI tried to implement without asking anyone, and I think unless you work somewhere that falls under one of the exceptions for GDPR art. 5 §1 you have a pretty good case there because that request seems definitely excessive and not strictly necessary.

A while back one of their reps did say somewhere on Reddit that they have no intention of adding any LLM features to Scrivener. Granted, they said that in the context of moving towards a subscription model and talking about features that don't work with their current business model, but still. Unless something has changed recently, they seem to want to stick to being a one-time purchase without any cloud-based services whatsoever, including AI, for their next major version too.

I swear if I hear "being against AI is ableist" one more time I'm gonna lose my shit. Disabled artists have existed for as long as art itself, and the only ableism here is AI-brained fuckwits using disabled people as an escape goat by suggesting they are unable to create things from their own effort and need spicy autocomplete to do so.

Edit: fuck it, I’m keeping the escape goat!

Our c-suite has announced an “AI workshop” for next Wednesday where we all work towards “increasing productivity in the age of AI”. The email was full of terribad Midjourney too which should’ve flagged it as spam.

Totes looking forward to discussing why I don’t let ChatGPT vomit out production-critical code and instead write it myself like some fucking Luddite with the marketing team next week.

These are not "Python community guidelines". These are the guidelines of a tyrannical clique who have grabbed power and control the access to the infrastructure.

Lmao, fucking armchair revolutionaries at it again with interpreting a list of rules which essentially boils down to "don't be an asshole" as the literal end of civilization because it's attacking their ~~assumed right to use slurs and insults~~ free speech.

Makes you think that it's always the same kind of people who seem to have a problem with not being a racist twat in a public space. Feels like I've seen similar discussions a dozen times in the Rust community too whenever the term inclusivity comes up.

I love it when I randomly get a DM from some dude on Reddit because of a post I made six months ago mansplaining to me why I'm wrong about clowning on AI doomsters.

Thanks for this series. I really enjoyed reading it (even though it reminded me that Yud's Dust-Spec-vs.-Torture bullshit exists which I had successfully banished from my mind).

I remember watching Devs a few years back and I think you put everything I felt about that show into words much better than I ever could have.

I’m still waiting for even one argument for the usefulness of AI image generation that isn’t fucked up. Just one.

Grok seems so support nudity and deepfakes too according to some news articles I’ve seen because of course nothing screams more free speech than plastering the face of your favorite actor or political opponent into a porn scene, so now let’s see how long it takes the first bluecheck fucker to try and create CSAM with it, because I suppose that’ll be the point when it gets too hot even for Elon.