drahardja

mekkaokereke, 1 year ago to random

Happy #BlackHistoryMonth !

You know the drill by now. I don't like talking about Black history. Americans know Black history. I want to talk about white American history. In other words, racism, and the erasure of both positive achievements of, and injustices suffered by, non-white people. That's what people don't know.

Try this: Ask your white US friends what the statue of liberty celebrates.

Now ask your Black friends. Or French folk of any color.

#BlackMastodon

drahardja, 6 months ago to transit

If you complain that public #transit isn’t making money, I hope you’re also complaining that #roads aren’t making money.

Public transit should be a cost center, paid by taxes, for the traveling convenience of everyone.

You know, just like roads.

#cars #publicTransit

drahardja, 1 year ago to humanrights

The correct term is “forced-birth extremists”.

Not “pro-life”, not “anti-choice”, not “pro-birth”.

FORCED-BIRTH EXTREMISTS.

#abortion #humanRights #fundamentalism

drahardja, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to ai

#AI #LLM is gunking up the web, especially for lesser-represented languages. Spammers are creating garbage English language content using LLMs, then translating it into multiple languages at the same time, using Machine Translation, presumably to generate clickbait ad revenue in several languages at once.

In English, such gunk accounts for some 9% of total sampled web content. But in languages with less representation on the Internet, the figures could be much higher. In Malay, it’s something like 26%, and in Swahili it’s nearly HALF of everything found on the web.

Paper [pdf]: “A Shocking Amount of the Web is Machine Translated: Insights from Multi-Way Parallelism”

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.05749.pdf

drahardja, 16 days ago to ai

So a German magazine decided to run an “interview” with Michael Schumacher, in which Schumacher’s “responses” were fabulations generated entirely by #AI.

The real Michael Schumacher sustained a brain injury in 2013 and has not recovered.

The Schumacher family sued the magazine and won a settlement. But the fact that this story ran at all is beyond dumbfounding.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/michael-schumachers-family-gets-settlement-after-fake-ai-interview

drahardja, 7 months ago to ai

The hero we need.

#ai #nightshade

“Meet Nightshade, the new tool allowing artists to ‘poison’ AI models with corrupted training data”

https://venturebeat.com/ai/meet-nightshade-the-new-tool-allowing-artists-to-poison-ai-models-with-corrupted-training-data/

drahardja, 9 months ago to austin

Had a conversation with my friends today about why #Austin is failing to be the next #SiliconValley, despite the “progressive” nature of the city, the lower cost of living, the zero state income tax, and all the incentives they’re pushing to tech companies, and I’m wondering if it’s because it’s LITERALLY SURROUNDED BY #TEXAS.

If you’re not a conservative cis-het white able Christian man (or his cis-het child-bearing wife), Texas literally wants to exterminate you. If you have a uterus, they want to control it. If you want to teach your kid about black history, they want to prevent you. Austin may be an oasis, but it’s very much part of the state.

Maybe that’s why tech people don’t want to move to Austin. Have you seen who does tech every day? The same people they want to kill and control. Maybe that’s why they’re not attracted there. Just spitballin’ here.

“'Where ambition goes to die': These tech workers flocked to Austin during the pandemic. Now they're desperate to get out.”

https://archive.ph/fnXL2

drahardja, 7 days ago to ai

#ai

drahardja, 5 months ago to random

Hey so remember how Walgreens and Target straight-up LIED about organized retail theft in the Bay Area so they can shut down their underperforming stores?

Well Pizza Hut is LYING to you again. This time, they’re claiming that the coming minimum wage hike is the reason they’re laying off their delivery drivers. It’s not true, of course. They’re laying them all off because they want to create an army of non-employee “gig economy” drivers that they can pay a pittance.

The minimum wage hike is a red herring. They were looking to do this with or without the wage hike anyway, to take advantage of Prop 22. That’s right, the real reason these drivers are looking forward to a layoff is because we, the voters, approved Prop 22, a blatant corporate giveaway. The wage hike is just a smokescreen. We are the reason for their layoffs.

Anyway, fool me once, etc. Don’t buy the corporate bullshit. And don’t throw your fellow workers under the bus for trying to make a livable wage.

#sfba #capitalism https://mstdn.social/@rebeccawatson/111659923427650404

drahardja, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to random

Today I learned that “sundown towns” with their daily siren blasts that remind non-white people to leave town STILL EXIST.

This Nevada town stopped their daily sirens only LAST YEAR, and only because Nevada had passed a law that prohibits their use. Their Town Board Chairman even entertained both-siding the issue during a session. How many more of these towns still exist that carry on this explicitly racist practice?

https://www.rgj.com/story/news/2023/10/09/minden-sun-down-siren-to-remain-silenced/71083858007/

Unpaywalled link: https://archive.ph/TYXkU

drahardja, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago) to random

Here’s a thought experiment: If you had a small group of skilled mobile, desktop, server, and web front-end engineers who have access to time and money, and are eager to MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE USING THEIR SKILLS (and not just spin up yet another exploitive startup) what would YOU have them do?

Be specific.

Assume cost is no object.

It’s time to stop bellyaching about how bad tech is, and start brainstorming about what good it can do.

Please repost for exposure.

EDIT: Let’s add hardware, industrial design, and UX engineers in the mix as well, to round things out.

#TechForGood #humaneInnovation #empathy #solidarity #humanity #FridayDevAdvice

drahardja, 3 months ago to random

Good stuff.

#nerds #nerdsRule

drahardja, 3 months ago to ai

Cisco doing a #layoff to “shift its focus to “key priority areas,” such as artificial intelligence”.

Getting the feeling that “shifting focus to #AI” is becoming a bullshit term used to rationalize literally everything.

“Cisco to lay off thousands of employees”

https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/14/business/cisco-to-lay-off-thousands/index.html

drahardja, 2 months ago to TodayILearned

#TodayILearned that the scam known as “trickle-down economics” was formerly known as the “horse-and-sparrow theory”:

“If you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows.” (quote attributed to John Kenneth Galbraith)

In other words, “let the poors eat shit”.

drahardja, 23 days ago to ai

I had no idea how bad things are at #DeviantArt.

#ai #artists

“The Tragic Downfall of the Internet’s Art Gallery”

https://slate.com/technology/2024/05/deviantart-what-happened-ai-decline-lawsuit-stability.html

drahardja, 7 months ago to random

“Let’s just agree to meet each other halfway”

drahardja, 1 year ago to fediverse

I am overjoyed that not one, but TWO #Mastodon clients are now available on the #Mac, running on #MacCatalyst.

I worked a TON on Mac Catalyst for over five years until I left #Apple last year, in the sincere hope that it would make it easier for authors to write great iOS apps that can also be polished into excellent apps for the Mac. It pleases me to no end that both @ivory and @MonaApp used Catalyst to port their fantastic #Mastodon clients to the Mac, allowing the Mac to become first-class peers of their iOS products.

Congratulations to both apps for achieving this! As an ex-Catalyst plumber, I’m grinning from ear to ear.

drahardja, 4 months ago to random

If you use a Philips #CPAP machine, you might want to return it right now. 561 deaths have been linked to a failure where pieces of foam break off and are sent down the breathing mask where they can get inhaled.

#sleepApnea #productRecall #productSafety

“FDA says 561 deaths tied to recalled Philips sleep apnea machines”

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fda-sleep-apnea-philips-recall-cpap/

drahardja, 5 months ago to random

It really bothers me that we had an attempted coup d’état in this very country three years ago, more than a thousand people have been charged, convicted, and pled guilty of various crimes related to it, but there is STILL a strong base of support for the traitors who perpetrated it? That is insane.

White supremacy is WILD, y’all.

drahardja, 3 months ago to github

#GitHub is under attack.

“The flow of the campaign is simple:

1. Cloning existing repos (for example: TwitterFollowBot, WhatsappBOT, discord-boost-tool, Twitch-Follow-Bot, and hundreds more)
2. Infecting them with malware loaders
3. Uploading them back to GitHub with identical names
4. Automatically forking each thousands of times
5. Covertly promoting them across the web via forums, Discord, etc.
   ”

“GitHub besieged by millions of malicious repositories in ongoing attack”

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/02/github-besieged-by-millions-of-malicious-repositories-in-ongoing-attack/

drahardja, 10 months ago to apple

Tomorrow, Apple will shut down My Photo Stream, after 12 years of service.

I wrote the code that ran the service on iOS devices back in 2010, and it has been faithfully syncing hundreds of millions of photos between iPhones and iPads and their respective macOS Photo libraries for more than a decade. It survived the introduction to iCloud’s Shared Photo Streams (I also wrote its client software), the shutdown of Aperture, and the introduction of iCloud Photo Library. And today, we finally bid it goodbye.

It’s been a good 12 years. 1000 photos, hosted for 30 days, for free, so you can save them on your Mac—those were the days, eh?

https://www.macrumors.com/2023/07/25/apple-my-photo-stream-shutdown-what-to-do/

#Apple #iPhone #iOS #iPhoneOS #macOS #photography #softwareDevelopment

drahardja, 6 months ago to Medicine

The good news: We have a breakthrough cure for sickle-cell disease, using CRISPR and gene-editing technology.

The bad news: It’s owned by a private company that will charge $2.2M for a course of treatment.

Pharmaceutical research should be publicly-funded, and its results should go directly into public domain, where private providers can compete on price for manufacture and distribution. For a fraction of the money we spend on missiles and remote military bases, we can save so many lives instead.

“FDA approves cure for sickle cell disease, the first treatment to use gene-editing tool CRISPR”

#healthcare #medicine #capitalism

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/fda-approves-cure-sickle-cell-disease-first-treatment-use-gene-editing-rcna127979

drahardja, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to ai

How the mighty have fallen.

I remember c|net as a standard-bearer of tech journalism back in the 1990s. Theirs was one of the few bookmarks I opened regularly to read about tech news.

Red Ventures has destroyed its reputation, along with all their other properties’ like ZDNet (the other fantastic tech news site). RV’s decisive pivot to AI is likely fatal; they will accelerate the descent of all their outlets into a content swill mill fit only for your blocklist.

#AI is an #enshittification accelerator.

“Wikipedia No Longer Considers CNET a "Generally Reliable" Source After AI Scandal”

https://futurism.com/wikipedia-cnet-unreliable-ai

drahardja, 1 month ago to technology

Nice response by #mkbhd to the self-entitled techbros who think they should be given slack for bad products.

“Do Bad Reviews Kill Companies?”

#technology #reviews #cars #fisker #humane

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QztFpzKsdeA

drahardja, 1 month ago to random

Sometimes I wonder