If there’s one thing I’ve learned as a computer programmer, it is that you always, always test every assumption and prepare for it to be wrong. Do not assume that the cell network will always continue as is. Or that the alphabet is always in a certain order. Or that two people can’t have the same everything. Or the concept of time exists.
I've had occasion to ask an AI about a thing twice lately (a recent online phenomenon, and a book recommendation). Both times I asked both Gemini and ChatGPT, and both times one gave a reasonable if bland answer, and the other (a different one each time) gave a plausible but completely fictional ("hallucinated") answer.
When do we acknowledge that LLMs, and "AI" in general, aren't quite ready to revolutionize the world?
If I was on the #gemini#AI team at Google, I’d be going out to lunch every day with someone from the Gmail team and saying things like, “Gosh you gotta lot of good words in those computers there don’t you”
This little jewel of a story about a little AM radio station in Jasper, Alabama, whose 190-foot-tall tower has gone missing, has that feel of a national-looks-at-local story that would totally fall apart if it was examined more closely. :)
@nyquildotorg "I'm a level 4 merchant surrounded by 40 other NPC merchants! Would you like to replenish your food for your next exciting adventure, Mr. Barbarian?"
Say what you will about AI, but it recommended that I stay at this lovely RV spot between Nashville and Memphis, which I would not have found on my own.
I haven't seen a detailed enough writeup about Apple's botched MAC address hiding scheme to know whether they just plain didn't do what they said, or if they did do what they said, but in a way that makes it possible for someone who knows what they're doing to get the real MAC address.
@nyquildotorg It did a decent job of hiding the MAC address from devices that weren't actively trying to sniff out an individual, but a bad job of hiding from people determined to sniff out the real MAC. Probably did help improve privacy and counteract data collection in many cases, but didn't accomplish what it said it would.
Suppose you’re generally progressive/left-ish (like me) and are a hyperoverprivileged white male techbro boomer (like me). Your social-media stream is going to be full of angry people attacking various aspects of what you are. So I wrote a piece about owning your privilege and sucking it up: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2023/10/07/Suck-it-up
@timbray I agree with so much of this, and a fair amount resonates as well. But I will also say that there is a strange split In The actual technologists I have known… many are tremendously proactive and progressive and choose to fight for equity, while some others are some of the most regressive and toxic folks I’ve met, and have the opportunity and education and youth to be otherwise… they use “logic” to defend the indefensible, and it’s always so shocking to me.
Alan Turing was a mathematician & cryptographer who was a leading code-breaker in the team that decrypted Nazi Germany’s Enigma machine during WWII. He inspired modern computing & what became AI.
Instead of being hailed as a genius & hero, Turing was convicted as a homosexual & forced to endure chemical castration. He died by suicide at 41 in 1954.
The British government didn’t apologize until 2009 & Queen Elizabeth II finally pardoned him in 2013. #history#science
My biggest Mastodon sadness is that it can’t fulfill my impulse to create and share dumb videos, because the 40mb file size limit is just way, way too low for an iPhone era.
I think I get the limit — due to federation every server has to make a copy of your video file? That’s a real space burden — but sadly that means Mastodon can’t fully replace the other services for me. 😩
I gave up trying to explain to normal people why, when we interchange documents, the names of the files I send back to them never have any spaces in them.
Attending a fantastic presentation by @evan about "Federated Social Media for Canada" being put on by CoSocial Community Co-operative. Broad, deep and yet succinct. I hope they share the recording, as I'd point people to it in an instant.
More than 20 million Americans are ministers of the Universal Life Church – but the first was Kirby J. Hensley, who founded the church in California in 1959.
Hensley kept getting kicked out of churches he had founded, so he started a ministry where anyone could believe, teach and practice whatever they wanted.
This is your periodic reminder that, unless you buy and download the music you love, it will absolutely disappear out from under you at some point.
I failed to heed my own advice! This album is pretty obscure, sure, but now it's grayed out on Apple Music, and totally gone from the iTunes Store, so too late there. Bummer.
@arstechnica I spent 4 hours dealing with two different Hop Studios printer boondoggles this week. I will not buy another HP printer until their reputation improves i.e. never.
