baldur

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, 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, 27 days ago to random

“How do you accidentally run for President of Iceland? | by Anna Andersen”

Glad somebody wrote about this because it’s an objectively hilarious UX case study

(And they just announced that eleven people managed to get the requisite number of endorsements in time) https://uxdesign.cc/how-do-you-accidentally-run-for-president-of-iceland-0d71a4785a1e

baldur, 14 days ago to random

One of the things that the Stack Overflow brouhaha demonstrates is that it doesn’t matter if a service was founded by people trusted by the community (Atwood and Spolsky) and was broadly community-led. If it’s a VC-funded startup, they will sell out their users at some point.

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, 9 months ago to random

> You see, if somebody robs a store, it's a crime and the state is all set and ready to nab the criminal. But if somebody steals from the commons and from the future, it's seen as an entrepreneurial activity and the state cheers and gives them tax concessions rather than arresting them. We badly need an expanded concept of justice and fairness that takes mortgaging the future into account.

• Ursula M. Franklin, The Real World of Technology

baldur, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to random

“Critics keep talking as if it’s useless, but it isn’t. It’s cheap and, even though it has some flaws, is extraordinarily effective at some of its use cases.”

“So, what? Are we supposed to accept all the downsides of LLMs just because it’s occasionally useful?”

“LLMs? No I’m talking about asbestos.”

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, 4 months ago to random

“Google confirms it just laid off around a thousand employees - The Verge”

I’d like to remind you that lay offs don’t work. The org is generally less functional, less reliable, and less profitable after a mass lay off. Lay offs are also always a symptom of exec incompetence https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/11/24034124/google-layoffs-engineering-assistant-hardware

baldur, 1 year ago to random

Your reminder that I've written a book on the business risks of generative AI. "The Intelligence Illusion"

https://illusion.baldurbjarnason.com/

Stuff I cover (not exhaustive):

• AGI is not happening any time soon.
• AGI and anthropomorphism will cripple your ability to think clearly about AI
• The AI industry has a long history of snake oil and fraud
• These models copy more than you think
• Hallucinations are still a thing and aren't going away.
• AI "reasoning" is quite broken
• Security is a shit show

baldur, 5 months ago to random

“The surprising connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity | Slack”

Surprising? This is literally literally what almost every post-WW2 productivity study has told us and has been the consensus in work and organisational psychology since the seventies https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/blog/news/the-surprising-connection-between-after-hours-work-and-decreased-productivity

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, 22 days ago to random

The flip side to “Europeans are lazy and don’t work hard” is that we’re able to maintain a modern society with a high standard of living while still being able to spend time with our families. And why kill yourself through overwork when most of the rewards go to somebody else, anyway?

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, 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, 3 months ago to random

“Serious New Warning As Google AI Targets Billions Of Private Messages”

The AI Bubble is anti-privacy, anti-labour, anti-quality, and in an all-out war against anything resembling a creative practice. This is who you’re siding with when you’re using these tools. https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2024/01/28/new-details-free-ai-upgrade-for-google-and-samsung-android-users-leaks/?sh=3396b4317a94

baldur, 27 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, 7 months ago to random

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

Between this and crypto, the tech industry’s innovations seem to be doing a good job of nullifying whatever progress we make on the climate crisis. https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-electricity-use-spiking-power-entire-country?utm_source=social&utm_medium=bluesky&utm_campaign=manual

baldur, 4 months ago to random

“Where have all the websites gone?”

"So here’s the bad news— we are the ones who vanished" https://www.fromjason.xyz/p/notebook/where-have-all-the-websites-gone/

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, 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, 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, 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, 24 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/