@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

thomasapowell

@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org

Mostly sharing thoughts on #webdev, #softwareengineering, #retrogames and humanistic aspects of tech. Old tech guy, UCSD CSE Lecturer, Author, pint.com founder, and person behind ZingChart and ZingGrid. 🤓

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

thomasapowell, to ai
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

Always a fun listen on Saturday to check in with Jason and Brian aka The Grumpy Old Geeks. This week lots of blow back news and typical big tech antics https://overcast.fm/+OYxG4zdKc

thomasapowell, to apple
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

That is making an opt in choice continues to show me that out of the BigTech players they continue to be the most thoughtful of the bunch. Indeed they are also very imperfect around the web, right to repair, the App Store, and many other things, but they don’t default to user data abuse, pull products on a whim, change terms all the time, jump on every hype train, etc. it’s like their leaders actually think a little bit about consequences before doing things. 🤔

thomasapowell, to webdev
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

Last lecture of the quarter tonight and I’m beat. Being a Prof is my second job and an Intro classes done well are hard, but also so rewarding.

CSE 110 students this quarter learned local first platform focused with appropriate agile team practices, wrote ADRs, practiced UCD, deployed CI/CD, and much much more. I think I broke many of them of code primacy and a wait for the ticket or spec accountability.

Tl;dr - go hire these folks you’ve got lots to work with!

danilo, to random
@danilo@hachyderm.io avatar

BeefstickAI, which wants to build generative AI for dogs and doggy daycare providers, raised a $14M series A led by Gullible Ventures and LPSwindler (TechCrunch)

thomasapowell,
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

@danilo also don’t forget

curbstomp.social the best platform for the alt-right. rugpullsr.us the leading alt coin marketplace and metaverseREmax.com the largest digital real estate play.

“These are double black diamond tech unicorns. Innovation from teams who saw Truth Social, Web3, and the Metaverse and knew they could do better.

Not since The Apathetic Ape Motorboat Party have we seen this kind of innovative excitement said Tech Meme Ride Home who full disclosure are also investors.

thomasapowell, to ai
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

Recast anything hype style=absurd

Our sushi isn’t always bad just sometimes. Next week we get distributor 2.0 with more & better fish so it will be amazing. It will be so good you can’t imagine eating other food. But…we need special rules to help us make the most perfect sushi & we totally shouldn’t get in trouble for food poisoning if it happens. Also we may take fish we didn’t pay for, but that’s ok because our sushi will be amazing! You will eat our sushi. All food is soon sushi.

shawnhooper, to random
@shawnhooper@fosstodon.org avatar

Starting the Fallout TV show.

thomasapowell,
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

@shawnhooper wasn’t a game fan really though my son was and I really quite enjoyed the show esp the retro futurism stylings. Enjoy!

campuscodi, to random
@campuscodi@mastodon.social avatar

From this report: https://mastodon.social/@ravirockks@infosec.exchange/112555805013166419

"Including any given PHP library has a greater than 50% chance of bringing a security flaw along with it."

kek 😆

thomasapowell,
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

@campuscodi now that I think fo r a second I note this has a log scale! It’s absurd on a linear one so they changed it but it’s pretty dishonest with a log scale

thomasapowell, to ai
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

I guess the doomers
were right after all. AI is super powerful and can destroy things, I mean just look what it is doing to the reputations of many powerful tech companies.

thomasapowell, to ai
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

Up next Zoom CEO says hold my beer because we can make work dystopia even more dystopian with digital clones using AI in your Zoom meeting!

Yeah let’s guess how well the humans on the receiving end of an AI clone attendee feel about this.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/3/24168733/zoom-ceo-ai-clones-digital-twins-videoconferencing-decoder-interview

thomasapowell,
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

@vicash absolutely! Then AI can forward the meeting notes to us & we can use AI to summarize it. Next up AI will convert those notes into issues. Then we will have AI read the issues & write the code & schedule the next meeting - the SWE AI circle of life! 🤪

Seriously tho pointless meetings being attended & summarized misses the bigger point of why we have such meetings? If we have such problems it is a symptom of much bigger problems AI can’t solve though it can “check the corporate boxes”!😎

thomasapowell, to MemeryAlpha
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

Numerology wise a new entry in the very exclusive two digit number special meaning clan joining the likes of 13, 21, 42, 88, and 99 please give a warm welcome to a freshly minted orange colored 34!

thomasapowell, to ChatGPT
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

Isn't weird how I can take a paragraph from a book like The Hobbit (page 173 was my test) with no attribution or mention of that work. I can say I wrote this and literally a single word detail like Bilbo or Sting & #ChatGPT can magically spit out the names of things unmentioned like the dwarves, write very close to perfect before and after paragraphs, and more. It's almost as if the entire contents of that copyrighted work is in there? “fair use" really is stretched a lot in #AI

thomasapowell, to random
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

I love the minor shout out to Space 1999 in Netflix movie Atlas. In a scene early on a clearly Eagle inspired type truck drives on a road in futuristic LA. I just hope Alan Carter was driving !

It was a decent movie and my boys enjoyed the enjoyed it but both said it was Titan Fall + Matrix over and over. I encourage Hollywood that they don’t need to be so obviously copying existing properties to succeed. We viewers like new things too!

thomasapowell, to ai
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

it is interesting the assumption #AI has that availability == permission. So Sony has to inform them. Even for web content many T&Cs don’t say do whatever you want instead they say for consumption by the individual accessing the content only.

But fair use for training! Maybe, but there is no case law & frankly training to remove need for future use doesn’t seem to be the spirit of fair use any more than a review that tells you everything about the reviewed thing

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/05/sony-music-opts-out-of-ai-training-for-its-entire-catalog/

thomasapowell, to ai
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

I asked ChatGPT another #AI BS engine to calculate Google’s BS engine’s failure cost and it came up with about $10.4 billion. Is that accurate who knows? Hilarious ? 💯

Cost calc below from ChatGPT

“Total Estimated Financial Impact:

• Ad Revenue Loss: $2 billion
• Increased Operational Costs: $300 million
• Legal and Regulatory Costs: $600 million
• Brand Damage: $7.5 billion

Total Estimated Loss: $2 billion + $300 million + $600 million + $7.5 billion = $10.4 billion”

#shitpost

thomasapowell,
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

@schizanon apparently zero per ChatGPT unless we can go viral with this! Let’s goooo 😝

overholt, to random
@overholt@glammr.us avatar

These fake William Morris prints for sale on Etsy are such an aggressive attack on historical reality. Not content with mutating his work to better fit a 21st century market, they come with fictitious provenance as well. https://maggieappleton.com/generative-forgery

A print of an orange tree. Text at bottom: COTTON PRINTS EXHIBITION WILLIAM MORRIS TEXTILES HISTORY OF BRITISH DESIGN LONDON THE ART OF XIX CENTURY

thomasapowell,
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

@overholt I think this would be an interesting story for @404mediaco to dig into. I’d make a sad prediction that there is a rapidly expanding amount of this kind of thing across many types of objects on Etsy.

Cmastication, to random
@Cmastication@mastodon.social avatar

Google: unsafe at any speed

thomasapowell,
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

@Cmastication this just sucks. AI is absolutely gonna take my job of being mostly wrong about things I don’t know much about.

thomasapowell,
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

@Cmastication plot twist the source it gets its fail info from here https://uwalumni.com/news/presidential-badgers/ has the first listing of John Adams as top with 24 degrees and he just got cut out of the answer. It can’t even do the wrong stuff right ! 🤪

thomasapowell, to MemeryAlpha
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

Tired: Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO)

Wired: Large amounts of content mixed with garbage in, averaged content sprinkled with garbage and sometimes brand new super garbage out (AI)

#shitpost #ai

thomasapowell, to ai
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

If I want to get the American right all wild about #AI accuracy I'll point out that giving Chat GPT 4o the task to estimate #Trump Bronx Rally crowd size (they claim 25k) but the AI has a different thought (< 5k)

#USPol

thomasapowell, to ai
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

New #AI research paper released today

“Training on Reddit posts considered harmful to model accuracy.”

Peer reviewers gave glowing comments like “No shit Sherlock!”

Asked for a comment the ground breaking paper’s author Captain Obvious simply stated “have you ever even been on Reddit?’ He also encouraged Google to instead train on 4chan content instead as that will totally “fix” everything.

#shitpost

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

Unless you have experience teaching or training a variety of web tech (HTML, JS, CSS, SVG, etc), you likely don't fully understand their relative learning difficulty

Basing your assessment of which is harder on your attempts to teach yourself is esp unreliable

It's hard for you to know if a tech is hard or if you were just unlucky in stumbling into a bad entry point. Getting into something with the wrong mental model means you have to first unlearn a bunch of crap before you can actually learn

thomasapowell,
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

@baldur I’ve taught web dev at uni level for > 25yrs and I don’t know where to start here. This thread just hits me to my core. I’ll say a big challenge is pre existing beliefs, learner mindset, and frankly impatience. The influence of hustle style Web pundits has been a big challenge but now LLM ease is pure gas poured on a platform basics learning failures. Amazing passionate student bright spots always exist and that keeps me very motivated, but it is much harder now than ever.

atomicpoet, to random
@atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org avatar

The thing about physical media formats is that it doesn’t have to be “superior” for you to want it.

For example, I have a VHS and VCD collection. I know these are inferior formats compared to DVD or Blu-Ray.

But have you ever seen Blade Runner on VHS through a CRT? Have you ever seen Ghost in the Shell on VCD through a projector?

I have, and they’re amazing experiences I would not trade for anything.

thomasapowell,
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

@atomicpoet same idea as why playing a Atari 2600 or original NES works better on a CRT. Interestingly that is the only way you can play Duck Hunt so you simply can’t even experience that game if you insist on modern. 😎

thomasapowell, to random
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

Apparently even ScarJo can’t stop the fever dream of a techbro with billions he will just do it anyway !

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/scarlett-johansson-shocked-angered-openai-voice-rcna153180

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • JUstTest
  • mdbf
  • ngwrru68w68
  • InstantRegret
  • magazineikmin
  • thenastyranch
  • rosin
  • khanakhh
  • tacticalgear
  • Youngstown
  • slotface
  • Durango
  • kavyap
  • DreamBathrooms
  • anitta
  • ethstaker
  • GTA5RPClips
  • modclub
  • tester
  • provamag3
  • osvaldo12
  • cisconetworking
  • everett
  • cubers
  • normalnudes
  • megavids
  • Leos
  • lostlight
  • All magazines
    •