@bigiain@aus.social avatar

bigiain

@bigiain@aus.social

Coffee, motorcycles, music, microcontrollers, and Oxford commas. I like to pretend I’m a geek, not a nerd.

Turns out I don't seem to talk much coffee or motorcycles here. (Not entirely sure why? I do motorcycles pretty comprehensively on web forums, but I guess I'm not geeking about coffee much online these days.) And I talk a bit more (Australian) politics than I realised (looking back through my account).

So mostly non-gaming geek stuff, infosec, privacy, music.

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

mhoye, (edited ) to random
@mhoye@mastodon.social avatar

A slide from a presentation I just finished.

bigiain,
@bigiain@aus.social avatar

@michelin @jcutting @mhoye Personally, I prefer to browse right down at Web(ring) -1. I am the Hypervisor!

bigiain,
@bigiain@aus.social avatar

@realhackhistory @bloody_albatross @michelin @jcutting @mhoye We all should have stopped just before <blink>

thomasfuchs, to random
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

Cool, Amazon's customer support chat couldn't fix my issue and gave me an email address to contact, and emails sent to that just bounce.

Do I know anyone at Amazon? I got an ice maker which broke, it's just out of return period and the links to the support website of the manufacturer on Amazon go to servers which don't exist.

bigiain,
@bigiain@aus.social avatar

@thomasfuchs You have totally missed the hint @rotopenguin was offering there…

futurebird, to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

Tom Tuberville is not a very bright man.

"I heard some things ... about race & things that he wanted to mix into the military ...Our military is not an equal-opportunity employer ... We're not looking for different groups .. We don't want to single-handedly destroy our military from within..."

  1. The military literally is an equal-opportunity employer. Literally.
  2. If "not looking for diverse groups" you're looking based on race, so not merit.
  3. Clear he has no clue how racist this sounds.
bigiain,
@bigiain@aus.social avatar

@futurebird @zzzeek @jrconlin @alper
Reminds me of the observation:

Men are afraid women will laugh at them.
Women are afraid men will kill them.

Men can’t admit they might have been wrong, someone might laugh at them. Worst. Thing. Ever.

:sigh:

KathyReid, to LLMs
@KathyReid@aus.social avatar

All the non-dev-background managers in my feed:

"Generative AI will be great for coding! It will reduce our development time for products so much!"

All the dev-background folx in my feed:

"Sure, #CoPilot will generate plausible code for you really quickly, but who's going to write your unit tests and make sure there aren't any insidious errors at a #systems level that you can't identify in a single block of code in isolation?"

Also,

"Is my job now #RLHF for code-focused #LLMs?"

bigiain,
@bigiain@aus.social avatar

@purserj @KathyReid @LapTop006 @glent sometimes the job is also to say “No, we are not going to write that code at all” (for reasons which may include “the best known algorithm is O(n^4) so it’ll take til the heat death of the universe to run in production sized data” or “Microsoft tried that, and it started spouting Nazi hate crimes within days of being opened to the public”)

timbray, to random
@timbray@cosocial.ca avatar

Are there any Fedi clients that have something like the Twitter Web client thread constructor, where you can compose a bunch of posts and then post them all at once? I used to use that a lot.

bigiain,
@bigiain@aus.social avatar

@timbray @jwz Because huge Toot threads are annoying? (I'm soooo close to unfollowing Cory because he's polluting my home timeline with "Toot 73/271" lately...)

decryption, to random
@decryption@aus.social avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @decryption Probably because I'd booked the 2:30 slot. I always try and get a dentist appointment for tooth hurty.

    c0dec0dec0de, to random
    @c0dec0dec0de@hachyderm.io avatar

    Ah, Monday. The remote machine I use at work is undiscoverable - and I don’t even know its physical location to tell someone to kick it.

    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @c0dec0dec0de No problem, gimme a sec, I'll just power cycle ap-southeast-2a

    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @c0dec0dec0de There's only a few hundred AZ's globally - we'll find it eventually.

    malwaretech, to random

    Outsourcing US defense capabilities to any corporation has always been a national security trade-off, but SpaceX specifically is a private company where a single extremely unhinged pro-Russia troll controls more voting shares than the entire rest of the shareholders combined. Anyone who doesn't see the national security issue with putting a nation's defense capabilities in the hands of a Wish.com Lex Luthor knock-off has actual soup for a brain.

    https://infosec.exchange/@briannawu@mstdn.social/111024207167342302

    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @malwaretech Hmmmm...

    That's kinda nearby enough I could go fly a drone over it. Perhaps with some noisy 1.25 and 2.5GHz transmitters on it.

    Or maybe grab a bunch of friends and fly kites over it - all of which happen to have tinsel tails made of thousands of 30mm metalised mylar quarter-wave-at-2.5GHz strips.

    cliffwade, (edited ) to fediverse
    @cliffwade@allthingstech.social avatar

    What season of the year do you prefer the most?

    Please BOOST for maximum exposure to the #Fediverse

    COMMENT below and tell me why you like the season you voted for!

    Polls are limited to only 4 options, or else there would be others to choose from.

    #Poll #Polls #POTD #Summer #Fall #Winter #Spring #AllThingsTech

    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @cliffwade Autumn...

    gregeganSF, to random
    @gregeganSF@mathstodon.xyz avatar

    I liked it when the object recognition system at the checkout shrank the default fruit & veg menu to a set of close matches … but the latest iteration wastes time calling staff to confirm that badly-lit snaps of barcoded items really are the same things whose barcode I scanned.

    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @gregeganSF How much would you be against some AI computer vision grifter consultancy already having billed Coleworths about 10,000 person years worth of checkout operator wages to deliver that shitty broken implementation?

    reginasbread, to random
    @reginasbread@homo.promo avatar

    "I love your account and the stuff you post, but why do you swear so much?"
    well, shit

    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @reginasbread Some days the timeline just works:

    bigiain, to random
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    So apparently my Youtube Premium paid account can no longer see the YouTube homepage unless I switch watch history on.

    Now wondering how much I really want to be paying them $12 per month.

    futurebird, (edited ) to random
    @futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

    When someone you met only one other time remembers your name how do you feel about it?

    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @futurebird Excluding sales-weasels, I always think it’s nice.

    thomasfuchs, to random
    @thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

    Me: This coffee isn't strong enough, I'm still sleepy.

    Also me: discovers I forgot to drink the coffee

    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @thomasfuchs
    Me: I have enough beans to last to the weekend.

    Also me: Goddamn it’s Tuesday, how the hell have I run out of coffee already?

    seldo, to random

    It is very important when driving long distance to acknowledge cows, sheep and other domestic herds by saying "cows" etc when you see them. I don't make the rules.

    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @seldo @gwendolenau I say “moo” to the cows, I say “bah” to all the sheep, I make stupid horse noises to the horses. (I also say “woof” to every dog I pass, and “meow” to every cat, usually ignoring their humans while I do so.)

    MostlyHarmless, to random
    @MostlyHarmless@thecanadian.social avatar
    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @alfora @futurebird @MostlyHarmless My favourite Excel “feature” is that biologists ended up having to rename some genes because Excel “autocorrects” them, leading to detectable errors in over 30% of a sample of published journal papers:

    “What is not funny though is having genomics spreadsheets suffer from auto-conversion of gene names like SEPT8, DEC1 and MARCH3 into dates, a problem first characterised in 2004. A 2016 article on this topic led the Human Gene Name Consortium to change many of these gene names to be less susceptible to autocorrect. Despite this, our work here shows that gene name autocorrect errors continue to accumulate in supplementary genomics spreadsheet files at a rapid pace.” — https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008984

    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @carbontwelve @alfora @futurebird @MostlyHarmless Because when the only tool you have is a nailgun, every problem looks like a messiah.

    (They need to collate a table of data, and everybody has Excel on their work computer, and most people couldn’t even install a better tool even if they knew of one.)

    mjg59, to random
    @mjg59@nondeterministic.computer avatar

    Ha shockingly enough it turns out that a lot of python3 packages conflict with old python2 packages, but also even in F28 I can just uninstall python2 and not lose anything of value?

    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @mjg59 I am now reminiscing about "the good old days" where you couldn't remove Perl4 "because the operating system relies on it and mysterious things will randomly stop working". So you have toi install Perl5 in a non-system location. (And things still occasionally broke when something ran as your used with your $PATH that was expecting Perl4 instead of Perl5)

    jonoabroad, to random
    @jonoabroad@mastodon.nz avatar

    Why are cloud offerings so fucking awful?

    you can have this thing that kind of runs you applicattion but doesn't do X, if you want X, use why Y.

    Y does various other things, but not Z.

    If you want Z you need to create a vnet, and a subnet and define a gateway IP and make sure you get all the masks correct.

    JUST DO IT FOR ME.

    ALL THESE THINGS COULD HAVE SENSIBLE DEFAULTS YOU FUCK MUPPETS

    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @jonoabroad Part of me wants to say "Ah ha! I see you've been having 'fun' with AWS Lambda!" An even more cynical part of me realises "Yeah, that's everything and everywhere. All software sucks, all hardware sucks."

    KathyReid, to random
    @KathyReid@aus.social avatar

    Oh my sweet delicious coffee, I cannot Monday without you.

    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @KathyReid I have all the delicious coffee, and I’m still pretty sure I cannot Monday.

    nickwedig, to random
    @nickwedig@dice.camp avatar

    Everyone: Let's use this worldwide communication network to download all the movies and TV show we could ever want.
    Hollywood Execs: But that would be piracy!
    Everyone: So what?
    Hollywood: If you pirate these movies, the people that make them won't get paid for doing so.
    Everyone: So if we get the movies through you, they will get paid?
    Hollywood:
    Hollywood: I never said that.

    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @nickwedig Also Hollywood: Let's use this worldwide communication network to download all the words everybody else has ever created, and feed them into our tools to make movies and TV shows without needing writers.
    Everyone: Hang on, wasn't it you guys that made sure all those words you're using are covered by that same copyright rules you tall us makes downloading your movies illegal?
    Hollywood:
    Hollywood: Copyright laws are for us, not for you!

    ajsadauskas, to startup
    @ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

    Hi, we're a tech startup run by libertarian Silicon Valley tech bros.

    We're not a newspaper, we're a content portal.
    We're not a taxi service, we're a ride sharing app.
    We're not a pay TV service, we're a streaming platform.
    We're not a department store, we're an e-commerce marketplace.
    We're not a financial services firm, we're crypto.
    We're not a space agency, we're a group of visionaries who are totally going to Mars next year.
    We're not a copywriting and graphic design agency, we're a large language model generative AI platform.

    Oh sure, we compete against those established businesses. We basically provide the same goods and services.

    But we're totally not those things. At least from a legal and PR standpoint.

    And that means all the laws and regulations that have built up over the decades around those industries don't apply to us.

    Things like consumer protections, privacy protections, minimum wage laws, local content requirements, safety regulations, environmental protections... They totally don't apply to us.

    Even copyright laws — as long as we're talking about everyone else's intellectual property.

    We're going to move fast and break things — and then externalise the costs of the things we break.

    We've also raised several billion in VC funding, and we'll sell our products below cost — even give them away for free for a time — until we run our competition out of the market.

    Once we have a near monopoly, we'll enshitify the hell out of our service and jack up prices.

    You won't believe what you agreed to in our terms of service agreement.

    We may also be secretly hoarding your personal information. We know who you are, we know where you work, we know where you live. But you can trust us.

    By the time the regulators and the general public catch on to what we're doing, we will have well and truly moved on to our next grift.

    By the way, don't forget to check out our latest innovation. It's the Uber of toothpaste!

    @technology

    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @ajsadauskas @technology "By the way, don't forget to check out our latest innovation. It's the Uber of toothpaste!"

    From: noreply@tøøther.com
    Subject: Account closure

    Dear User,

    You have been rated 3 stars or lower by our toothbrushing partners in the last 14 days. For this reason we are closing your Tøøther account and revoking your toothpaste access. This decision is final and there is no appeal process.

    Best regards,

    Tøøther Trust And Safety Team.

    MissingThePt, to random
    @MissingThePt@mastodon.social avatar

    Get to know a Gen Xer.

    Sit beside them and learn their stories, of wall-mounted phones with long extension cords and going to the airport gate unticketed without passing through security.

    Listen with them as they delight in the music of their youth, the songs that only they now keep alive — the songs of Cyndi, and both Eddies, and Dave.

    Very soon the last Gen Xer will be passing from this realm to the next, and then they will belong to the ages. Get to know one now — before it’s too late.

    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @MissingThePt I feel seen.

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