baldur

baldur, 10 months ago to random

Apropos of nothing, one observation I’ve heard people who used to be involved in labour negotiations here in Iceland is “people with American brain worms don’t know how to negotiate with unions”

(Paraphrasing, since the original is always in Icelandic.)

This is noticable in that you can guess with reasonable certainty, which company is run by an executive trained in the US just by how badly they are handling union contract negotiations

baldur, 8 months ago to random

“Elegant and powerful new result that seriously undermines large language models”

Like I’ve been saying for a while now: LLMs do not think or reason. They are not on the path to AGI. They are extremely limited correlation and text synthesis machines. https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/elegant-and-powerful-new-result-that

baldur, 2 months ago to random

JFC, people in tech are really out there saying that language models will be better at therapy, financial advice, and career advice than trained people.

WTF is wrong with you people? Do you really have no clue about what other people’s jobs actually involve?

Language models can’t even do maths how are they supposed to get good at financial advice?

And therapy? Just… 😑

What’s wrong with people in tech?

baldur, 9 months ago to random

“Tech experts are starting to doubt that ChatGPT and A.I. ‘hallucinations’ will ever go away: ‘This isn’t fixable’”

More accurately, AI researchers have always said that this isn’t fixable but y’all were too obsessed with listening to con artists to pay attention but now the con is wearing thin. https://fortune.com/2023/08/01/can-ai-chatgpt-hallucinations-be-fixed-experts-doubt-altman-openai/

baldur, 1 month ago to random

Post-hoc explanations based on personal interactions with processes that are substantially random will generally be incorrect. The observed patterns will be random, not systemic

IOW, everything written about LLMs from the perspective of a single practitioner can be dismissed out of hand. The nature of LLMs makes it impossible to distinguish signal from noise in your own practice

I suggest not even reading these posts. Our brains are unfortunately wired to mistake confident writing for evidence

baldur, 7 months ago to random

“Scrollbars are becoming a problem”

The current state of scrollbars is, on the face of it, objective evidence that the people who run tech do not give a single solitary fuck about usability or UX https://artemis.sh/2023/10/12/scrollbars.html

baldur, 2 months ago to random

I’ll let you in on a secret: I love sporadically updated weblogs. I subscribe to over 1200 feeds and most of them are sporadic or even technically “inactive”. Months often pass between updates

It means that every post published was important to the writer

Back in the days of snail mail, letters that began with “It’s been a while since I last wrote to you” were the ones people cherished the most

You don’t need to post every day or even every week to have a blog that matters

baldur, 7 months ago to random

“AI’s Electricity Use Is Spiking So Fast It’ll Soon Use as Much Power as an Entire Country”

Side-eyeing every single one of you who is enabling this. https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-electricity-use-spiking-power-entire-country

baldur, 21 days ago to random

React, Electron, and LLMs have a common purpose: the labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/react-electron-llms-labour-arbitrage/

baldur, 1 year ago to random

“Google Bard hits over 180 countries and territories—none are in the EU - Ars Technica”

"there’s suspicion that the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is at the center of the omission."

Not following privacy regulation limits your market reach. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/google-bard-hits-over-180-countries-and-territories-none-are-in-the-eu/

baldur, 9 months ago to random

“Google says AI systems should be able to mine publishers’ work unless companies opt out | Artificial intelligence (AI) | The Guardian”

I say this with all the sincerity I can muster: fuck Google. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/09/google-says-ai-systems-should-be-able-to-mine-publishers-work-unless-companies-opt-out

baldur, 7 months ago to random

“The Techno-Optimist Manifesto | Andreessen Horowitz”

This manifesto is one of the more horrific documents I’ve read lately, largely because of how normalised its rhetoric has become

It’s fascism. Like falangism with the catholicism swapped out for the prosperity doctrine https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/

baldur, 7 months ago to random

Occasionally I stop to think about how much of the modern software development infrastructure and community is run at a massive loss: Stack Overflow, npm, Github Copilot (probably Github itself), VS Code.

Also how much of it is owned and run by Microsoft.

So much of it could disappear at a short notice if just one CEO changes his mind about his company’s marketing strategy.

baldur, 4 months ago to random

If you’re curious about how Icelandic politics are going:

• The parliament ombudsman has come to the conclusion that freedom of enterprise always take precedence over animal welfare laws and that attempting to enforce those laws against a company is actually illegal.
• This means that banning whaling is essentially impossible in Iceland
• So the fisheries minister who attempted to enforce animal welfare law is likely to lose her job
• Also might mean that the gov might collapse entirely

baldur, 7 months ago to random

It's been interesting to observe the shift away from hosted cloud-based feed readers to native apps after those started to ship their own subscription syncing solutions (iCloud-based for both NNW and Reeder, I think).

The numbers are probably way off from reality but the shift in clients seems to be real.

baldur, 11 months ago to random

It’s kind of weird to see frequent “the camera didn’t destroy painting; AI art won’t destroy art” takes on social media.

Because if you know your art history, photography very much did destroy portrait painting as a business and turned it into a vocation

baldur, 24 days ago to random

Please stop using generated art for thumbnails and illustrations for videos and blog posts that aren’t generated themselves. It gives people the impression that the post is spammy bullshit. Starting to see people dismiss links out of hand just because of the preview thumbnail on social media

baldur, 1 year ago to random

Turns out that Adobe is collecting all of its customers' pictures into a machine learning training set.

This is opt-out, not opt-in so if you use Lightroom, for example, it defaults to adding all of your photos to the set.

If these are unpublished pictures, work-in-progress, etc. they'll still be analysed as soon as they're synced.

I've been using Lightroom to sync photos from my Windows desktop to my iPad. Now I need to reconsider that.

baldur, 6 months ago to random

Had to open twitter for the first time in a while to handle a DM (wish I could set up an auto-reply telling people to just email me instead) and one of the first things I see, other than the endless AI hype, is a thread where a bunch of web devs with decades of experience are all agreeing with each other that all HTTP verbs other than GET and POST are useless.

And I'm just🤦‍♂️

How did we get to this point? These are the people who are supposed to be senior developers in the industry.

baldur, 3 months ago to random

Every attempt (even my own) to fix EPUB or replace PDFs with something like EPUB to date either underestimates the problem or misunderstands it entirely.

First EPUB only supported fixed versions of XHTML and CSS. Stability and portability, right? But then development gets harder and harder the more HTML5 evolves and diverges from the original snapshot.

Update to a living spec? But then you lose that stability and predictability.

baldur, 3 months ago to random

“Literacy crisis in college students: Essay from a professor on students who don’t read.”

If you’re like me and your livelihood consists of either selling textual objects or using textual objects to sell services to a youth-obsessed sector (tech) then this is seriously bad news https://slate.com/human-interest/2024/02/literacy-crisis-reading-comprehension-college.html

baldur, 6 months ago to random

It's absolutely irresponsible of Google to continue to promote Chromium-only APIs such as the File System Access API as if they were standard APIs you can use with the expectation that cross-browser support will come eventually

Glossing over the difference between APIs that have genuine cross-browser implementation interest and Chrome-only APIs that are unlikely to ever get implemented in Firefox or Safari is tantamount to tricking devs into making their projects Chrome-only.

baldur, 1 month ago to random

“Society of Authors survey reveals a third of translators and quarter of illustrators losing work to AI”

We all know how crap generative images are but machine translation seems to be outright declining. Google Translate now thinks “skógarþröstur” in Icelandic means “woodpecker” https://downthetubes.net/society-of-authors-survey-reveals-a-third-of-translators-and-quarter-of-illustrators-losing-work-to-ai/

baldur, 9 months ago to random

So, a little bit of warning for folks following me: I have no patience for any talk about "AI" being close to, on the verge of, or displaying sparks of Artificial General Intelligence.

The AI researchers making these claims are severely underestimating what even animal-level reasoning and problem-solving involves, and seem to be utterly clueless about what human level capabilities involve

It's bullshit sci-fi that's designed to sell you stuff.

baldur, 7 months ago to random

My go-to litmus test for where somebody lies on the sensible/insensible spectrum when it comes to work has usually been something along the lines of "do they think DHH and Jason Fried are great managers?"

I might have to start using "do they think the Techno-Optimist Manifesto is exciting or excellent?" as well.

In related news: https://ma.tt/2023/10/cost-of-spam/