Reminder: de-skilling as a trend in software engineering was already in progress well before LLMs.

Toxic productivity culture, people meeting badly-designed internal reward metrics, hopping jobs and never seeing the consequences of bad choices, plummeting quality, short-termism.

Sure LLMs add fuel to this fire, but I’m not at all convinced they’re causal.

If anything, their popularity seems more a consequence of the culture than cause.

A Fediverse experiment! an "Exquisite Corpse" collab with artist @prahou (left), and me (right). Fun fun!

Full original thread: https://fe.disroot.org/notice/B5c8qmENlmX1kjRXMm

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left side of exquisite corpse three brothers present: triapul.cz it's tony computers make war on angelkind AI GENERATED WATERMARK Eye needle to eye needle the baby is next. memories of maude/funhole. mister mobilek smiles at the end. cum collector watches the missile fly past a tongue. spawn through a tube of a snake with boats. first words you hear com put ers just dancing and listening to music Right side: featuring Pepper&Carrot, sea, tentacles and a bird.

"Cool Cat" by Queen off of Hot Space is a criminally unappreciated song.

Which lucky iPod gets to come to the pool today…

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A drawer of iPods

The year is 2026, and my 8x2GHz 8Gb RAM pocket device ("phone") can't play a 128 kbps mp3 (pre-downloaded) over Bluetooth without sound glitches every minute

Richard Dawkins out there reminding everyone that there is nobody quite so dumb as a smart person

Happy Caturday! it's time for a Cat themed poll! (yes I know I did a freeform one earlier, this week it's 2 cat polls!)

Which of the following cat names is your favorite ?

#cats #caturday #catsofmastodon #cat

how much longer do you think the google groups usenet archives will be around, and is there a suitable and stable alternate?

the llms can't talk about goblins anymore cause the goblins won their class action suit. it happened a few weeks ago, but human media doesn't usually report on stuff from goblin court

I like how “for Reasons” is a fixed phrase in Japanese

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Bunpro screenshot: 訳あり is a phrase that is often used before nouns to express that there is a reason for something being a certain way. The reason is normally complicated or something that the speaker does not want to or cannot explain. 訳あり is literally made up of 訳, 'reason' or 'cause', and the continuative form (連用形) of ある.

Brokecore is back in business for #BandcampFriday 🤘

I managed to dig through the archives and contributed the only outtake from M.A.S.R.'s debut LP, Videomiracles 📼✨

Check out Track #7 - "Desperation Unknown"

https://brokecore.bandcamp.com/album/valuables-and-malleables

#experimentalmusic #breakcore #noise

“Simple” as in…

A cozy cat in these trying times 🌿☕️

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Watercolor drawing of a cat snug on a couch with a mug and little snacks

▓▓▓▓▓░░░░░░░░░░ 33%

Once again, my professional recommendation in response to the latest Linux kernel vulnerability in the news is that you should gather up all your electronic devices, cast them into the sea, and retreat to the woods.

Each night, gather your children and tell them tales of the Before Times when the hubris of humanity grew so large that we made idols of sand and spoke to them as equals. Remind them that the sand, of course, did not speak or think, but we imagined it could, and let it guide us to folly.

Should a stranger ever come to your village with a glowing rectangle, encourage the youth to beat them with sticks.

#infosec

I think, for migraine reasons, I need to switch my main display to either an OLED or a CRT

Guess which one is more likely to happen

“In his 1946 essay ‘Why I Write,’ Orwell explained that his storytelling was never meant to drift into abstraction or polite ambiguity, but to instead confront oppression with intent. He noted then, ‘The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.’

But in an essay sent to critics, director Serkis describes his version as having ‘no ideology,’ instead promoting a parable with mass appeal that he said was meant to apply in any context. It’s a well-intentioned idea in terms of universality, but also the film’s fatal flaw.”

https://www.indiewire.com/criticism/movies/animal-farm-review-andy-serkis-1235190927

A friend was doing a crossword and asked me what URL stands for so I said Unicorn Rotisserie Label and I think we're just gonna have to go with that from now on.

Also they're both 22 letters and I didn't even do that on purpose.

Listening to cybersecurity people freak out over Mythos is so tiring. Like, bro, your local water treatment plant runs Windows XP, your mobile provider's hardware is older than you are, and the protocol that routes internet traffic is secured by everyone just agreeing that hijacking it would be uncool.

A friendly reminder that the pseudorationalist stance of "let's be centrist about literally everything no matter how objectively harmful" has resulted in plenty horrendous decisions in history of humanity, and manipulating people into not caring or being quiet about their dissent by accusing them of being emotional about an issue should really be reconsidered.

/sigh I need this on a t-shirt lest I forget or have to repeat this the hundredth time.

#genai #technology

At some point the corporations realized that Clarke's logic works in reverse, and any sufficiently advanced sleight of hand is indistinguishable from technology

If I were to make a tour of multimedia and artistic software that runs on a Pentium 2, which part you'd love to see the most?

From 1903 to 1907 Augustus Jansson produced more than 30 striking adverts for the Queen City Printing Ink Company, including the wonderful Ink Beasts Parade series, with its "Magenta Ponies" and "Orange-Yellow Ibexiaticus". More here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/augustus-janssons-queen-city-ink-adverts-1903-1907

Quick poll - you don't have to have used MartyPC or have MartyPC to answer, if you've used an emulator before and have an opinion. This is a somewhat Windows-centric question, I suppose.

I prefer my emulators to:

Guess the wikipedia article for this rare sentence: "The pair are thus an example of heteropaternal superfecundation."

@thomasfuchs I gave up on the "native" client for discord on linux years ago and just it in a browser. It has(had?) horrible update problems on linux even with a reliable connection. I also figured that there was no real reason to run an electron instance when I'm already running a web browser 100% of the time anyway.

the 555 timer is 55 years old, so if we celebrate on the 5th of May it can be the 555's 55th on 5/5.

#fossangel's favorite brand

#unix_surrealism #perl

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Softpack of 20 FOSS cigarettes PERL FILTERS PROGRAMMING BLEND

Do you bring your phone to the shower?

I translated a Chinese comic that I thought certain factions of Mastodon would enjoy. Original art and text by user hands2 on wechat

#furry #webcomic #chinese

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"Demoness in Disguise" page 1: A pretty girl with fox-like traits smugly on a man's arm; she narrates: "I'm a fox demon. I survive by bewitching human men." page 2: photos of a variety of normal-looking attractive people of different genders mixed in with anime kink stereotypes. She narrates: "Doesn't matter what kind of guy - I can become whatever they want to see."

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page 3: She is looking upon a normal young man, who seems surprised. She narrates: "But THIS guy... when confronted with him... my powers that I'm so proud of..." page 4: "got stuck halfway!" She has become a fox furry,

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page 5: "This guy must be here to exorcise me!" She bows to him. "I'm so sorry! I know it was wrong! Sir, please let me make it up to you somehow!" The guy smiles evilly. "Oh~?" page six: they are at a furry convention together; the boy is in costume. The fox demon sighs: "Seriously?"

It's common for network services to squash 404 (not found) and 403 (permission denied) responses into the same response, so as to avoid giving away whether a thing exists at all that you're not allowed to see.

You can see why they do it, but it is annoying, especially if you're not alert to the possibility. You might start trying to debug the wrong problem: checking and double-checking the URL spelling when you should have checked your credentials. Or vice versa, depending on whether the site is pretending everything is 404, or pretending everything is 403.

(Worse, the confusion spreads to sites which _do_ separate the two errors. Once you've started mentally conflating the two, you waste time checking the wrong things even when the error message truthfully told you which thing to check.)

But which is _more_ annoying, of the two?

So, something that's been bugging the shit out of me?

These fucking assholes who let LLMs run rampant and delete prod?

They query the LLM for "why" it did that.

This is delusional behavior.

LLMs do not have a concept of 'why': they assemble a response based on a statistical sampling of likely continuations of the original prompt in their database.

LLMs do not have the ability to have motivation. It is a machine.

LLMs, further, function by instantiating a new runtime -for each query- that reads the prompt and any cache, if they exist, from prior sessions:

which means, fundamentally, "asking" the LLM to explain "why" "it" did a thing is thrice-divorced from reality:

It cannot have a why;
It cannot have a self to have motivations;
And the LLM you ask is not the one that did it, but is a new instance reading from its predecessors notes.

Treating it as tho it is an entity with continuity of existence is fucking delusional and I am fucking sick of pandering to this horseshit.

Touch some grass and get a fucking therapist.

Intelligent

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2 Blue Jays conversing in a spruce. First Jay asks "What if we aren't the only intelligent species in the universe? What would they be like?" The second replies "Let's see... they'd need to be good at problem solving, and to have advanced communication skills, a social structure, self-awareness..." "... the ability to fly?" continues the first Jay. "That goes without saying!" exclaims the second. The first states confidently "And a strong beak, of course". To which the second responds rhetorically "How could you do anything intelligent without a strong beak?"

Will you be buying the new Steam Controller from Valve?