baldur

baldur, 2 months 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, 11 months ago to random

It’s kind of weird how many people can read a book that outlines how every single proposed use case for generative AI is full of risk an doesn’t work as well as proposed, how it’s an industry dominated by cranks and pseudoscience, pushed by companies with a track record of anti-competitive anti-user behaviour, and come away enthusiastic about using LLMs at work.

I even end the book outlining how I think ChatGPT is, for the world today, quite possibly the worst app ever.

I just… 😑

baldur, 4 months ago to random

“Air Canada found liable for chatbot’s bad advice on plane tickets | CBC News”

Now that we’re in a bubble, regular companies are diving into the chatbot hype and they’re discovering that non-US countries have actual consumer protection laws. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/air-canada-chatbot-lawsuit-1.7116416

baldur, 4 months ago to random

“Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI: Read the memo | TechCrunch”

"Going forward, the company said in an internal memo, Mozilla will focus on bringing “trustworthy AI into Firefox.”"

Well fuck. That’s my preferred browser going down the toilet. https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/13/mozilla-downsizes-as-it-refocuses-on-firefox-and-ai-read-the-memo/?guccounter=1

baldur, 1 month ago to random

One of the worst things that can happen to a new idea for reforming software development is to have DHH swoop in with a half-assed shitty implementation of it, poisoning the idea for a generation of devs

baldur, 7 months ago to random

“AI pivots” at software companies usually mean that they’ve lost interest in fixing existing issues with their products and they are now instead all-in on completely new products that come with a fresh batch of unknown problems and issues

baldur, 2 months ago to random

”the biggest threat facing your team, whether you’re a game developer or a tech founder or a CEO, is not what you think | by Doc Burford | Mar, 2024 | Medium”

This essay is well worth your time. https://docseuss.medium.com/the-biggest-threat-facing-your-team-whether-youre-a-game-developer-or-a-tech-founder-or-a-ceo-is-8cd1ad359508

baldur, 10 days ago to random

Here's a small project I've been working on:

"Basic, Beautiful & Buildless"

https://buildless.baldurbjarnason.com/

It's a small tool for taking a list of npm package names, generating a pinned esm.sh url for them, parsing through their import graph, and generating an import map, module preloads with integrity attributes and a script loading the import map polyfill (with integrity attribute) in a neat little copy-pasteable HTML textarea chunk

And it also calculates the bandwidth/payload of each package.

baldur, 3 months ago to random

“Research Suggests A Large Proportion Of Web Material In Languages Other Than English Is Machine Translations Of Poor Quality Texts”

"In other words, however bad the problems are that AI is creating for English-language material, they are probably worse in languages found less commonly online" https://www.techdirt.com/2024/01/29/research-suggests-a-large-proportion-of-web-material-in-languages-other-than-english-is-machine-translations-of-poor-quality-texts/

baldur, 5 months ago to random

‘Questionable Advice: “My boss says we don’t need any engineering managers. Is he right?” – charity.wtf’

Most tech cos are founded by guys who don’t understand what management is for and when they’re forced to implement a management structure they reach for authoritarianism https://charity.wtf/2024/01/05/questionable-advice-my-boss-says-we-dont-need-any-engineering-managers-is-he-right/

baldur, 5 months ago to random

“The I in LLM stands for intelligence | daniel.haxx.se”

Yet more evidence that the AI Bubble overwhelmingly causing more harms than benefits to society. https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/01/02/the-i-in-llm-stands-for-intelligence/

baldur, 4 months ago to random

“The Value of Open Source Software by Manuel Hoffmann, Frank Nagle, Yanuo Zhou :: SSRN”

"We find that firms would need to spend 3.5 times more on software than they currently do if OSS did not exist."

As I’ve said before, most of the software industry’s value is created by F/OSS https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4693148

baldur, 4 months ago to random

“The EU is just protectionism!”

Yes. THAT’S WHAT IT’S FOR. The entire goddamn point of the EU is to protect domestic European production. That’s the reason it was invented in the first place. It’s not there to beat European consumers into submission for US tech companies. Why would they even do that? What’s wrong with you people?

baldur, 2 months ago to random

So far, AI hasn’t been profitable for Big Tech | Ars Technica

"the cost to Microsoft exceeds $20 a month per user on average, according to a person familiar with the matter. In some cases, individual power users have cost the company as much as $80 a month." https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/10/so-far-ai-hasnt-been-profitable-for-big-tech/

baldur, 1 month ago to random

Some context for those reading my essays: Iceland is union country. Union membership in the workforce is around 90% and is north of 95% for many industries. Even writers have a union in Iceland

Unions have been a major driving force for progress here so I’m biased in their favour

baldur, 19 days ago to random

“Google won’t comment on a potentially massive leak of its search algorithm documentation - The Verge”

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/28/24166177/google-search-ranking-algorithm-leak-documents-link-seo

> suggests that Google hasn’t been entirely truthful about it for years

So this is what the SEO types have been shouting about

baldur, 1 month ago to random

Making a note of all the “expert” commentators who seem genuinely surprised at the resistance “AI” is getting from the public and regulators. You don’t have to agree with the reasons, but they’re generally obvious with a basic analysis. Anybody surprised probably isn’t worth much as an analyst

baldur, 6 months ago to random

“Just Stop Oil activist jailed for six months for taking part in slow march | Environmental activism | The Guardian”

If these laws had been in place back in the 2000s, I’d almost certainly have a criminal record, after having been arrested at an anti-war or pro-refugee protest https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/15/just-stop-oil-activist-is-first-to-be-jailed-under-new-uk-protest-law

baldur, 3 months ago to random

“How Google is killing independent sites like ours - HouseFresh”

Sites that do genuine research and actual testing are getting crushed between big media sites that get a pass from Google for spammy rewrites and incoherent generated crap that scores incredibly high in the results https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

baldur, 2 months ago to random

As if I needed more reasons to hate Shopify.

(Trying out Ubuntu and hadn’t updated Firefox. There is no reason on earth why an ecommerce system wouldn’t work with a five month old version of Firefox.)

baldur, 3 months ago to random

That feeling when you have a look at Linkedin and see a former boss write about how LLMs mean the end of coding and programming as a job. That now the only thing needed to get working software is to describe clearly what you want, something they were always manifestly incapable of doing

😑

baldur, 2 months ago to random

'I'm not a cynic, I'm disappointed' – the Software Crisis Easter Sale: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/the-software-crisis-easter-sale/

baldur, 6 months ago to random

“Google’s New Gmail Tool Is Hallucinating Emails That Don’t Exist”

This tech is just so incredibly broken. https://futurism.com/the-byte/google-gmail-tool-hallucinating-emails

baldur, 3 months ago to random

Putting together the blog post collection has meant trying to find old links in the Wayback Machine

One was this one by the legendary Kathy Sierra in 2004. It’s both inspiring and depressing, because we all know what happened in the intervening two decades

“A Computer Book Author’s Manifesto” https://web.archive.org/web/20120118171954/http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/news/ksmanifesto.html

baldur, 2 months ago to random

I used to call myself an Apple fan, but I’m clearly not unhinged enough to qualify these days.

Apparently their latest thing is to claim that nobody has ever in the history of governance tried to regulate access to market-making private infrastructure

🤦🏻‍♂️