#NetBSD joins the ranks of software projects that ban #AI generated code.
How they are going to enforce such ban is an obvious question lingering in the air.
Does it include only cases like “hey #ChatGPT write a suite of unit tests for this class”? Or also cases where #Copilot simply autocompletes a for loop while I’m typing it?
In the latter case, how would a hypothetical reviewer enforce the ban? How would the for loop autocompleted by Copilot, or the boilerplate population of hashmap values, look any different than one I would write myself?
And if the issue is with any code that isn’t directly written by a human, then why stop at modern AI generation? Why not include LINTers and traditional IDE autocomplete features?
I have no doubt that the projects that are announcing these no-AI policies have good intentions, but it’s probably time for all of us to have an honest talk.
Code completion isn’t a clear cut binary feature. It’s a big spectrum that goes from the old exuberant ctags to ChatGPT writing whole classes.
And code completion shouldn’t be banned. If it makes a developer more productive, and if the developer understands the code that is being completed, then such bans are akin to a “drivers should only use cars with manual transmission because we feel that it’s more manly”. It’s a conservative and elitist act of shunning out new productive tools because we can’t understand them and regulate them properly.
And more people need to call out the bluff: in cases where the AI only completes a few lines of code, its basically impossible to tell if that snippet was written by a human or an AI assistant.
Positioning your project as an alternative implementation of something is a losing proposition.
It doesn’t matter how smart you are. It doesn’t matter how hard you work. The problem is, when you build an alternative implementation, you’ve made yourself subject to the whims of the canonical implementation.
They have control over the direction of the project, and all you can do is try to keep up.
Is anyone aware of ways to control #ffplay programmatically in any form, without having to focus the window and having to emulate keyboard/mouse bindings in it?
ffplay is amazing, light, fast, and it’s a player that comes with any #ffmpeg installation.
#Platypush supports media players such as VLC, mpv, mplayer, omxplayer and gstreamer, but they all come with their bags of issues - the VLC libraries seem to break too often on Wayland, mpv has too many API breaking changes across versions and controlling it only works if the version of the library and the player are carefully aligned, mplayer is an unmaintained dumpster fire with a messy control API, working with gstreamer in Python requires the user to install the whole fat GLib luggage and MBs of plugins, and omxplayer is basically dead.
ffplay would be my favourite pick for a portable and lightweight default media player. But the fact that it apparently can’t be controlled in non-interactive ways really puzzles me.
A study that confirms what I’ve been suspecting for a while: fine-tuning a #LLM with new knowledge increases its tendency to hallucinate.
If the new knowledge wasn’t provided in the original training set, then the model has to shift its weights from their previous optimal state to a new state that has to accommodate both the previous and new knowledge - and it may not necessarily be optimal.
Without a new validation round against the whole previous cross-validation and test sets, that’s just likely to increase the chances for the model to go off the tangent.
#Apple challenges the courts again on payments processing.
You can now show users an external link to process the payment outside of Apple’s platform.
But that comes with a new “external link fee” of 27% - to be paid on top of the fee you pay for users who still make their purchases through the App store.
I’ve said it several times, I’ll repeat it: companies like Apple can get away with such parasitic rent-seeking behavior with no added value, and with challenging courts all over the world, because they are practically above the law.
They can afford to create their own taxation system as if they were an independent country, but without being accountable to voters, and without losing a single percentage point of market share if they behave like jerks.
And any fine thrown on them by courts around the world is likely to be only a tiny part of their revenue - unless we get the balls of fining them for hundreds of billions and use that money to support more competition in the market, which would be an act of redistribution long overdue IMHO.
Apple can treat fines as small operating costs because their monopolistic behaviour is still profitable enough to pay those one-off fines many times over.
And if they are above the law, it’s because too many people bought their crap and gave them power that they didn’t deserve. And they’ll keep buying their products even if Tim Cook starts wearing a Darth Vader mask during interviews.
If you use anything made by Apple, you are part of the problem.
@fabio I am not a fan of #apple, however the issue here seems not to be that their behavior is illegal, but that their customer base have chosen to voluntarily self-jeopardise their bargaining power. 🙄
On my little corner, I shall continue my personal apple-free life.
Selling credits for carbon capture initiatives that never happened: how the green economy became a marketing tool for parasitic fossil companies that reap profit without contributing any value.
When the executives of Exxon and Shell repeat that no green initiatives can happen without them (because they have the expertise, the capital, the competencies etc.), keep in mind that they’re shamelessly lying in order to extend their ride and inflate their retirement profits while burning the planet for everybody else.
Funding needs to be moved from them to new businesses that don’t have incentives in burning T-Rex juice, and these companies must be left to rot and die without anybody mourning them.
They’ve had plenty of occasions to do things right, they’ve managed to squander each single one of them, and they aren’t worth of a single inch of our trust.
@adiz lol my bad - my tut client mixed up the threads.
The only alternative I see to Matrix right now is XMPP. I still run my own server. But it doesn’t come even close to compete with the number of available bridges (that’s actually the main thing I use Matrix for).
The only thing that can still compete with Matrix when it comes to bridges/integrations is still IRC+bitlbee. But that ecosystem is literally falling apart, it’s largely based on libpurple extensions that often haven’t been touched in years, and of course you can forget decent mobile-native clients.
Or maybe just run alternative servers to Synapse, but so far I’ve had a mixed experience with them - Conduit is definitely snappier, but I’ve had trouble to set up many of my bridges, which seem to be primarily designed for Synapse.
@Goffi integrations like Instagram, Telegram and WhatsApp mostly rely on libpurple plugins (like purple-gowhatsapp or purple-instagram) that are either poorly documented, more unstable or lack many features that are available on Matrix bridges.
By own admission of some of these developers, they usually don’t test their plugins against Spectrum2, and mileage may vary a lot. And usually when one of these plugins dies it takes the whole service down with it.
I’m in general a bit unimpressed with the state of libpurple - I feel like it’s becoming a very aged ecosystem maintained by a very limited number of developers that have to make those plugins work for a very wide range of clients. That’s also the reason why I left bitlbee.
Slidge seems to be promising, but I feel like it’s still at an immature stage.
@fabio I don't think that libpurple integration is great indeed, I've just mentioned it because you were talking of bitlbee, and spectrum2 is the XMPP equivalent.
Slidge is working on tight integration and is the way to go. And Telegram and Whatsapp are supported (I don't see Instagram though).
My point is that gateway ares part of XMPP ecosystem since the early days, and there are many. You say that you use Matrix mainly for its bridges, and I think that XMPP offer is similar.
Like with all the commodities with increasingly scarce supply and high demand, the time has come for #IPv4 addresses to also become a speculative asset.
Not the kind of thing that you'd buy to run your little server, but the kind of thing to hoard on and use as the aluminum foil to wrap and back your corporate bonds.
Just when you think that the enshittification of our industry can't get any worse, here you go with news of somebody creating money out of thin air backed by IP addresses.
My solidarity goes to those #Jewish / #Israeli students who genuinely feel unsafe, threatened or subject to prejudice. Nobody deserves it.
But I couldn't care less about those who just feel uncomfortable because the protests are about something bad that their country is doing.
When Putin started his unforgivable war in Ukraine, and protests sprawled around the world, there wasn't much talk about shutting down the protests because they would make Russians abroad feel uncomfortable. So why do we have to treat Israelis and Jewish as exceptional snowflakes? Just because they keep stubbornly playing the antisemitism card whenever you criticize them?
#Safety and #comfort aren't the same thing. People have an inalienable right to feel safe and not subject to prejudice. But their ideas and dogmas don't have the same rights. They aren't people. I shouldn't refrain from protesting against ideas and acts that I perceive as wrong just because my protest may make somebody else feel uncomfortable. Pulling people out of their comfort zone and creating awareness is the whole point of a protest, after all.
And universities are exactly meant to be those factories of ideas where different sensibilities meet and come up with a better view of the world, without fear of retaliation.
If you don't feel comfortable about it, if you feel like criticism against your ideology is criticism against you as a person, then probably you just don't belong to a university in the first place.
And if you keep calling out as an antisemitic anyone who criticizes the acts of #Netanyahu's government, thus advancing the fascist theory that the ideology of a government is part of the identity of the nation, and thus political criticism is personal criticism against all of its the citizens, then you're just an idiot, or someone who benefits from this simplification.
I often get criticized for ideological inconsistency by mixing #liberal and socialist values in my posts.
I often cite #Voltaire, #Hayek, #Popper and other fathers of the liberal movement when it comes to civic rights, freedom of speech and expression, and defense against conservatism, totalitarism and dogma.
And I often use the language of #Marx, #Gramsci and Rosa Luxemburg when I talk about inequality and class struggle, capitalism, common resources, common access to the means of production and workers alienation.
But the more I think about it, the more I start to actually see them as complementary sides of the same coin.
It actually makes perfectly sense to me to be strongly liberal when it comes to individual freedoms, and strongly socialist when it comes to regulating the market.
You can’t have individual freedoms and universal rights in an economic system that is prone to unregulated exploitation and formation of oligopolies that no longer obey to the rules of an open and competitive market.
And you can’t have a fair and sustainable economic system without freedom of expression, freedom of growth and enterprise and equal opportunities.
Liberalism without a socialist core is the post-1970s neoliberal degeneration advocated by Friedman, Reagan and Thatcher. It’s cynical capitalism on steroids/cocaine, it’s assured enshittification and establishment of rent-seeking behaviour perpetrated by an unaccountable handful of oligopolies who only respond to their shareholders.
And socialism without a liberal core is the Soviet-like degeneration that the world has experienced throughout the 20th century.
And I wish that such a liberal/socialist doctrine had more political representation out there, instead of being embodied by political forces that are often in mutual exclusion with one another.
Same API, same features, same UI, and support for other DBs than MSSQL.
One single stand-alone application vs. Bitwarden’s 10 Docker containers. 70MB of RAM vs. 2GB. 3MB of db storage vs. 300MB.
Why was a password manager supposed to take so many resources in the first place? Just because it runs on a Microsoft-only stack and on .NET’s inefficient VM? Just because somebody thought that it was a good idea to separate everything into different containers (even icons and 2fa are modeled as separate services in Bitwarden)?
It reminds me of my recent migration from Mastodon to Akkoma. I got more features, 5GB of RAM freed up and 300GB of storage freed up almost overnight.
Writing and running inefficient software that pointlessly consumes all the resources available on a machine should be a crime in a world with limited resources.
It makes me think of how much shitty bloated software like @bitwarden, probably based on awfully inefficient languages and frameworks like Java, Ruby on Rails and .NET, is running out there, pointlessly sucking up resources for doing simple jobs that could easily be done with 99% less resources.
Today’s developers, spoiled by IDEs, powerful machines, docker-compose and shortsighted “just throw more RAM at the problem” approaches, have forgotten how to write efficient software. Time for them to learn how to write good efficient software again. Software doesn’t eat the world. Only shitty software built on shitty framework does.
@davidculley my experience with Ruby on Rails application mostly involves running both Mastodon and Gitlab on my servers.
In both the cases, what I’ve noticed is that it’s not the language itself that is slow and heavy (Ruby’s weight is comparable to that of e.g. Python), but Sidekiq.
Sidekiq is the standard framework used by Ruby on Rails application to schedule and run asynchronous jobs (processes, threads…), kind of akin to what php-fpm does for PHP.
In my experience, it’s hard to configure properly, and when not configured properly it ends up with endless pools of active jobs doing all kind of things and sucking up all resources you give to them.
> The mayors argue that while criticism of the Israeli government is not anti-Semitism in itself, holding Jewish people responsible for the actions of that government just because they are Jewish is.
I have absolutely nothing against the Jews who openly condemn their fascist government.
But I have a lot against the Jews who don't. And I have a lot against the Jews who kicked Palestinian families out of their houses and still occupy them.
And that's not anti-semitism.
Just like criticizing the Palestinians who support Hamas isn't an attack against all Muslims.
Just like criticizing the Americans who support Trump isn't an attack against all Americans.
Just like criticizing the Germans who supported Hitler wasn't a hate crime against all Germans.
Just like shooting at the Italians who supported Mussolini's social republic and plunged the country into civil war wasn't a crime against all Italians.
We need to call people accountable for the governments that they elect and support just like we call those governments accountable for their actions.
How can you call yourself a civilized country when you can’t even keep guns outside of schools, and your solution to gun violence in schools is either to have armed guards at the entrance or give teachers guns as well?
Is it a civilized Western country or is it the fucking far west?
How come most of the other countries around the world have figured out long ago how to send kids to school without fears of them being shot, and the richest country in the world can’t figure out how to solve such a simple problem yet?
@fabio@Bernard For the record, the right of self-defense (and free expression and property ownership) are inherent to every human on the planet. It's just that some people seem to have grown lazy and comfortable being farmed for taxes by people with fancy titles.
Defense from crime and abuse is a task undertaken by governments in basically all civilized countries.
You have laws that set clear boundaries on what’s allowed, courts whose job is to enforce those laws, and a police force that is trained to use weapons if needed in order to protect other citizens from law abusers.
Civilized societies are shaped around such separations of concerns and accountability - something that you don’t have if every citizen feels that they have the right to pull the trigger whenever they like.
This is how things have been working at least since the times of the Greek polis and the Roman empire.
If you mistrust institutions, elected governments and police forces to the point that you feel that you have the right to take care of yourself however you please, then either you have a problem with rotten institutions, or a mindset problem. Either way, your idea of advanced civilization was already outdated 2500 years ago.
And you can’t see that if you’re the only country following these principles, and you’re the only country with a major gun violence problem, then probably the problem is with your country, not with everyone else.
Annual recurring revenue, rent-seeking behaviour and everything-as-a-subscription will one day permeate so much of our economic system that even drinking water from a public tap will require you to download an app and activate a subscription.
That day is today.
This degeneration of capitalism with zero added value for the customer must be ended at all costs.