@datarama@hachyderm.io
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

datarama

@datarama@hachyderm.io

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lisyarus, to random
@lisyarus@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Putting up fences around my trees so that they don't run away :3

video/mp4

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@lisyarus This looks so great.

I'd love to read more about the graphics and rendering you're using and how you've made that. Do you have a writeup somewhere?

foone, (edited ) to random
@foone@digipres.club avatar

Excited to learn that Microsoft is requiring all new laptops to have a Bonzi Buddy button

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@gabrielesvelto @foone On the one hand, taking that abomination with us to our graves will be a great service to every generation that comes after.

On the other hand, I'm beginning to fear that those who do not remember Bonzi Buddy are doomed to resurrect it.

neurovagrant, to random
@neurovagrant@masto.deoan.org avatar

the copilot key

THE COPILOT KEY

i hate everything.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/ai-comes-for-your-pcs-keyboard-as-microsoft-adds-dedicated-copilot-key/

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@neurovagrant I've said it before...

The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the Year of the Linux Desktop.

fraying, to random
@fraying@xoxo.zone avatar

There would be no SEO assholes if not for Google. Google invented the SEO asshole.
https://www.theverge.com/features/23931789/seo-search-engine-optimization-experts-google-results

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@fraying If we ever are to hope getting anything out of the open web again, the next "Google" is not going to be a better search engine, it's going to be a working filter engine.

(Unfortunately, I doubt that can even be done at this point.)

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@fraying The problem here - at least for any "obvious" automated tech company solution - is that we now have fully automated SEO garbage generators. If you manage to build a working garbage recognizer, that can then be used to build a better garbage generator (that's literally how LLMs are trained).

I personally think our best shot at a working "internet filter" is probably a large community effort with human curation.

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@fraying ...and the moment I wrote that, I realized that there's probably some asshole in Silicon Valley, right now, who's planning to build a startup around that idea, except with all the human curation done by poor people somewhere in the Global South, or perhaps gamified to lure people with addiction problems into being free labour.

The 2020s are fucking bleak.

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@fraying To me, there is an even worse implication of the generative AI wave for the open web: I like writing, and I love coding, but I really don't feel like sharing anything of substance publicly anymore. I know that it's going to be hoovered into a machine that is designed to pass off my work as its own and prevent people from seeing mine in its intended context.

(And which are currently mostly functioning like how a child might imagine the bad guy in a story has a "pollution factory".)

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@fraying Before I started here on fedi a few months ago, I'd reverted back to the social internet habits I had in the 90s: A few internet penpals, and a few closed chatrooms with people I already know. To me at least, the Big Social Media age was one huge mental health disaster I still haven't properly recovered from.

I can't help but think that the better future is going to have to be a lot more offline, too. But perhaps that's good. The offline world sorely needs some love and maintenance.

thomasfuchs, to random
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

If you’re looking for a resolution for 2024, learn about something that’s absolutely not related to anything you already know.

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@thomasfuchs Argh! Everything is related to everything else!

(I want to finally learn to ride a bike. And even more, I want to re-learn how to sleep properly at night.)

jwz, to random
@jwz@mastodon.social avatar

uBlacklist.

This seems promising.

It lets you block sites from showing up in your search results so you can shitcan Pinterest, w3schools, etc. The first time you do a search, you have to bonk the extension icon and give it permissions. There are also...
https://jwz.org/b/ykIC

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@jwz Google Search is going just great.

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@jwz I sometimes wonder if we're ripe for a renaissance of human-curated directories, webrings and the like.

The big search engines seem either unwilling or incapable of dealing with SEO garbage - and now that we've automated garbage production, that's not going to get better.

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

This may be excessively Icelandic* of me, but I strongly prefer the term “platform decay” over “enshittification” because it’s much more descriptive.

  • Our words for “breakfast”, “lunch”, and “dinner” are “morning meal”, “noon meal”, and “evening meal” respectively.
datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@baldur Same as in Danish (except Danish has more inconsistencies). You'd almost think the languages had a common root! :P

A vacuum cleaner is a dust-sucker and a refrigerator is a cooling-cupboard.

mhoye, to random
@mhoye@mastodon.social avatar

As someone coming off a decade of working there, I can tell you with some confidence that “you should use Firefox despite Mozilla’s leadership” is far more true and has been true far longer than you realize.

But you should also understand that original market-share vs ceo salary meme is a creation of Brendan Eich, presumably born of a grudge, and notably elided his tenure as CTO, during which the worst of that decline happened.

You should still use Firefox though.

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@mhoye I've used Firefox since back when it was named Phoenix, and I'll continue to do so for as long as I can.

My own frustration with the Mozilla leadership is about specifically this: I want to keep using Firefox (and I don't want to use Chrome!), but they seem to keep making decisions that make me worry they're going to destroy it.

dsalo, to random
@dsalo@digipres.club avatar

In its new leader, Creative Commons needs someone who understands why creatives don't want AI bros plundering their work.

This means a no-AI license variant (NC wouldn't have stopped the horrible LAION creeps) and the guts and money and lawyers to help creators sue AI bros over lack of attribution in use of CC-licensed works.

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@dsalo I'm not sure licensing can even help here (though you might know more than I do, I'm naught but a humble programmer). At least as I understand it, in the EU data mining and ML are explicitly not required to respect copyright when done for research purposes. Commercial data miners must respect a "machine-readable opt-out".

So what they do is they fund a "non-profit research lab" that does all the data hoovering, and then have a for-profit company turn that data set into a product.

thomasfuchs, to random
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

No, AI isn’t helpful to get started into creative work such as writing or visual arts.

To become good at either you have to do the hard work and you will suck at first and it will take a whole lot of effort and time to become good at it.

But that’s not optional, it’s how your brain learns.

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@thomasfuchs I agree - but the whole point of these technologies is to render obsolete the concept of people "being good" at things. What's the point of developing skill if you can press a button and have a machine extrude product for you, no skill required?

That's not where these systems actually are, but it's explicitly the goal the people promoting them are setting.

drahardja, to generativeAI
@drahardja@sfba.social avatar

Here’s an illustration of a rudimentary mental model that I use when thinking about advances in computing tools. Computers are already (essentially) Turing-complete, so anything that can be done can in theory already be done using any existing technology. But what these leaps do is that they bring down the SKILL and RESOURCES needed to accomplish a certain task. The red arrow in the image is what such a leap does.

is such a leap. The red dot represents not only something genuinely useful that people used to have to learn a skill or pay someone to do, but can now do with ease (removing a distracting object from a photograph), but also vectors of abuse that similarly gain the same level of ease (crafting misinformation, generating fake revenge porn). With every leap, thousands of these red dots move toward the origin, some good for humanity, and others bad.

Cont’d…

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@drahardja My go-to example:

Back in the 1920s, when Stalin wanted to disappear Trotsky from a bunch of photos, he had to get a very skilled artist with an airbrush to put in weeks or months of painstaking labour to do it. With Photoshop, a decent artist could do a job like that in an afternoon. And now, a 10-year-old can do it, in a few seconds.

grumpygamer, to random
@grumpygamer@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Look what I got in the mail.

@sayomgwtf

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@grumpygamer @sayomgwtf By god, I played Maniac Mansion. So, so many times. Because this was long before the internet, us C64 kids had all sorts of myths about special hidden content in the game (some of it made up, and some of it mutated over the kind of telephone-game effect you get when schoolkids share computer game lore). The same happened with Monkey Island and Zak McKracken.

Thank you for SCUMM. Those games made the indoor part of my childhood a lot funnier.

datarama, to random
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

Move carefully and fix things.

Impossible_PhD, to random
@Impossible_PhD@hachyderm.io avatar

I haven't been very worried about AI, even though I'm a writer.

Why?

Because it takes a while for the law teams employed by the titans of old media to rumble to action, but it was always clear they were coming. These are the teams that don't sue other companies unless they're certain of winning.

And today, the New York Times sued OpenAI for several billion dollars.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/business/media/new-york-times-open-ai-microsoft-lawsuit.html

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@Impossible_PhD This is an oddly glass-half-{full/empty} for me. I don't like litigious big media corporations, and I also don't like plagiaristic big tech corporations.

So no matter how it goes, I can either smirk contentedly that an awful company lost, or groan dejectedly that an awful company won.

(OK, at this particular moment, I probably despise big tech most.)

thomasfuchs, to random
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

Really putting the “free” in free speech

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@thomasfuchs free as in speech as in beer.

thomasfuchs, to random
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

If everyone would risk their careers and Youtube subscribers and piss off their relatives by saying “Nazis bad” we wouldn’t have Nazis

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@thomasfuchs I'm probably just lucky, but if I were to say "Nazis bad" at a family event my relatives would worry I'd had a brain aneurysm that made me compulsively state the fucking obvious.

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Due to the extremely large number of basic functions "systemd" has usurped from other parts of the OS, a natural and interesting project would be to see if systemd can now exist independently apart from Linux, or rather, to ascertain what is the most minimal alternate kernel that could serve as a life support system for successfully running systemd. Since calling this "System System" would be absurd, the most logical name for such a project would be "d OS", or "DOS". In this Mastodon post I will

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@mcc I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linuxn't is, in fact, GNU/systemd, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus systemd.

datarama, to random
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

What do people use for self-hosting git repos these days?

Is Gitea the only game in town?

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

“Google Search Overwhelmed By Massive Spam Attack”

They say “days” here because this is in addition to the ongoing spam problem that has been escalating in search all year

Also, non-English local search has been utter garbage filled with spam for a few years now https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-search-overwhelmed-by-massive-spam-attack/504527/?utm_source=labnotes.org

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@baldur In Danish, bad output of translation systems is often called "dåsedansk" ("canned Danish"). This is because early automatic translation systems would consistently translate the English word "can" (eg. "be able to") into "dåse" (eg. the metal container), no matter the context. This was sometimes hilarious.

ChatGPT doesn't do this, but its Danish grammar is very bad. It screws up grammatical gender all the time, and invents its own words (and I'm guessing it's even worse in Icelandic).

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@baldur
The most funny example I've personally seen of dåsedansk was in a DVD player's OSD, many years ago. It'd write "mute" as "fugleskarn" (bird shit), "invalid entry" as "svagelig indtræden" (weak entrance) etc. I don't think there was a single thing it got right.

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