nightsky

joined 7 months ago
[–] nightsky@awful.systems 12 points 3 weeks ago (6 children)

On the other hand, your book gains value by being published in 2021, i.e. before ChatGPT. Is there already a nice term for "this was published before the slop flood gates opened"? There should be.

(I was recently looking for a cookbook, and intentionally avoided books published in the last few years because of this. I figured that the genre is a too easy target for AI slop. But that not even Springer is safe anymore is indeed very disappointing.)

[–] nightsky@awful.systems 4 points 4 weeks ago

A day later and I'm still in disbelief about that windsurf prompt. To make a point about AI, I think in the future you could just show them that prompt (maybe have it ready on a laminated card) and ask for a general comment.

Although... depending on how true the true belief is, it might not have the intended effect.

[–] nightsky@awful.systems 14 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Trying to imagine the person writing that prompt. There must have been a moment where they looked away from the screen, stared into the distance, and asked themselves "the fuck am I doing here?"... right?

And I thought Apple's prompt with "do no hallucinate" was peak ridiculous... but now this, beating it by a wide margin. How can anyone claim that this is even a remotely serious technology. How deeply in tunnel vision mode must they be to continue down this path. I just cannot comprehend.

[–] nightsky@awful.systems 17 points 1 month ago

Whatever has happened there, I hope it will resolve in positive ways for her. Her amazing work on the GPU driver was actually the reason I got into Rust. In 2022 I stumbled across this twitter thread from her and it inspired me to learn Rust -- and then it ended up becoming my favourite language, my refuge from C++. Of course I already knew about Rust beforehand, but I had dismissed it, I (wrongly) thought that it's too similar to C++, and I wanted away from that... That twitter thread made me reconsider and take a closer look. So thankful for that.

[–] nightsky@awful.systems 10 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Reuters: Quantum computing, AI stocks rise as Nvidia kicks off annual conference.

Some nice quotes in there.

Investors will focus on CEO Jensen Huang's keynote on Tuesday to assess the latest developments in the AI and chip sectors,

Yes, that is sensible, Huang is very impartial on this topic.

"They call this the 'Woodstock' of AI,"

Meaning, they're all on drugs?

"To get the AI space excited again, they have to go a little off script from what we're expecting,"

Oh! Interesting how this implies the space is not "excited" anymore... I thought it's all constant breakthroughs at exponentially increasing rates! Oh, it isn't? Too bad, but I'm sure nVidia will just pull an endless amounts of bunnies out of a hat!

[–] nightsky@awful.systems 17 points 1 month ago (7 children)

drowning in signal-shaped noise

Ooh, I love that phrasing, wonderful :D

But yeah, it's an interesting point... It's weird to think that "good search" may just be permanently gone. Somehow I thought that it would come back eventually... but maybe it won't? Wouldn't be the first time a good thing just disappears from the internet...

[–] nightsky@awful.systems 3 points 1 month ago

Lol. Well, still better than using Copilot I guess.

[–] nightsky@awful.systems 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (5 children)

and its usage will result in your immediate death

This all-or-nothing approach, where compromises are never allowed, is my biggest annoyance with some privacy/security advocates, and also it unfortunately influences many software design choices. Since this is a nice thread for ranting, here's a few examples:

  • LibreWolf enables by default "resist fingerprinting". That's nice. However, that setting also hard-enables "smooth scrolling", because apparently having non-smooth scrolling can be fingerprinted (that being possible is IMO reason alone to burn down the modern web altogether). Too bad that smooth scrolling sometimes makes me feel dizzy, and then I have to disable it. So I don't get to have "resist fingerprinting". Cool.
  • Some of the modern Linux software distribution formats like Snap or Flatpak, which are so super secure that some things just don't work. After all, the safest software is the one you can't even run.
  • Locking down permissions on desktop operating systems, because I, the sole user and owner of the machine, should not simply be allowed to do things. Things like using a scanner or a serial port. Which is of course only for my own protection. Also, I should constantly have to prove my identity to the machine by entering credentials, because what if someone broke into my home and was able to type "dmesg" without sudo to view my machine's kernel log without proving that they are me, that would be horrible. Every desktop machine must be locked down to the highest extent as if it was a high security server.
  • Enforcement of strong password complexity rules in local only devices or services which will never be exposed to potential attackers unless they gain physical access to my home
  • Possibly controversial, but I'll say it: web browsers being so annoying about self-signed certificates. Please at least give me a checkbox to allow it for hosts with rfc1918 addresses. Doesn't have to be on by default, but why can't that be a setting.
  • The entire reality of secure boot on most platforms. The idea is of course great, I want it. But implementations are typically very user-hostile. If you want to have some fun, figure out how to set up a PC with a Linux where you use your own certificate for signing. (I haven't done it yet, I looked at the documentation and decided there are nicer things in this world.)

This has gotten pretty long already, I will stop now. To be clear, this is not a rant against security... I treat security of my devices seriously. But I'm annoyed that I am forced to have protections in place against threat models that are irrelevant, or at least sufficiently negligible, for my personal use cases. (IMO one root cause is that too much software these days is written for the needs of enterprise IT environments, because that's where the real money is, but that's a different rant altogether.)

[–] nightsky@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

On the left side within the text box there's a sparkle emoji... so I guess that means AI slop machine confirmed

More seriously though, Google Translate had odd and weird translation hiccups for a long time, even before the LLM hype. Very possible though that these days they have verschlimmbessert^1^ it with LLMs.

^1^ Just tried it, google translate doesn't have a useful translation for the word, neither does DeepL. Disappointing. Luckily, there are always good old human-created dictionaries.

[–] nightsky@awful.systems 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

This is a good text, although I don't understand "coded by dildo"... is that a reference to some incident?

or the forthcoming Internet of Things

Aah, the good old days :') I miss it when the hypes were so relatively harmless.

which i can assure you is a term meaning “unfixable Heartbleed everywhere forever”

...accurately predicted!

[–] nightsky@awful.systems 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I also really don't enjoy AI boom.

GPT-3 is a large language model that was released in 2020 by OpenAI and is capable of generating high-quality human-like text. [...] An upgraded version called GPT-3.5 was used in ChatGPT, which later garnered attention for its detailed responses and articulate answers across many domains of knowledge.

Who wrote this? OpenAI marketing?

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