kellogh

KathyReid, 1 day ago to stackoverflow

Like many other technologists, I gave my time and expertise for free to #StackOverflow because the content was licensed CC-BY-SA - meaning that it was a public good. It brought me joy to help people figure out why their #ASR code wasn't working, or assist with a #CUDA bug.

Now that a deal has been struck with #OpenAI to scrape all the questions and answers in Stack Overflow, to train #GenerativeAI models, like #LLMs, without attribution to authors (as required under the CC-BY-SA license under which Stack Overflow content is licensed), to be sold back to us (the SA clause requires derivative works to be shared under the same license), I have issued a Data Deletion request to Stack Overflow to disassociate my username from my Stack Overflow username, and am closing my account, just like I did with Reddit, Inc.

https://policies.stackoverflow.co/data-request/

The data I helped create is going to be bundled in an #LLM and sold back to me.

In a single move, Stack Overflow has alienated its community - which is also its main source of competitive advantage, in exchange for token lucre.

Stack Exchange, Stack Overflow's former instantiation, used to fulfill a psychological contract - help others out when you can, for the expectation that others may in turn assist you in the future. Now it's not an exchange, it's #enshittification.

Programmers now join artists and copywriters, whose works have been snaffled up to create #GenAI solutions.

The silver lining I see is that once OpenAI creates LLMs that generate code - like Microsoft has done with Copilot on GitHub - where will they go to get help with the bugs that the generative AI models introduce, particularly, given the recent GitClear report, of the "downward pressure on code quality" caused by these tools?

While this is just one more example of #enshittification, it's also a salient lesson for #DevRel folks - if your community is your source of advantage, don't upset them.

kellogh, 1 month ago to random

i don’t understand how people see the xz incident and conclude that open source is insecure. That level of social engineering could easily have worked on a company as well, but it was detected because it was open source. All other mechanisms failed, and it was just some random guy poking around that discovered it. That kind of scrutiny doesn’t happen on closed source systems

kellogh, 1 month ago to LLMs

Let’s be honest, if you’re a software engineer, you know where all this compute and power consumption is going. While it’s popular to blame #LLMs, y’all know how much is wasted on #docker, microservices, overscaled #kubernetes, spark/databricks and other unnecessary big data tech. It’s long past time we’re honest with the public about how much our practices are hurting the climate, and stop looking for scapegoats https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-staggering-ecological-impacts-of-computation-and-the-cloud/

mekkaokereke, 2 months ago to random

Happy #BlackHistoryMonth !

Day 26: Bama football

Q: OK fine! There's a lot of racism! But we can't do anything about it! You can't change hearts and minds! I've flipped from denial to helplessness! Talking about racism depressed me and makes me feel bad, because we can't do anything about it! So, can you stop talking about it?

A: No, we won't stop talking about it. Yes, we can do something about it. Let's look at one specific example of a reduction in racism, driven by racists themselves! 🙂🙃

kellogh, 1 year ago to science

this is incredible. Hanging solar panels a few meters above crops of tomatoes and jalapeños multiplied their yield 2-3x, used substantially less water, controlled temperatures, and increased the output of the solar panels https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2301355120 #science #solar #environment #agriculture

kellogh, 10 months ago to Ukraine

I love all of @timkmak articles and this is of no exception. His style is to show you what it looks like from a typical Ukrainian’s point of view. Here he talks about the impact to the #Ukraine war (good), but also mentions that even the most optimistic Ukrainians don’t think #Wagner will succeed. I highly recommend reading and subscribing https://open.substack.com/pub/counteroffensive/p/newsflash-russia-wracked-by-rebellion?r=2cpkgh&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

kellogh, 4 months ago to opensource

a sad trend i’ve noticed is old school #opensource people sell out to their extremely high paying big tech jobs and their dialog around open source becomes legalistic and focused more on things like software licensing and they completely lose the zeal of building in public, for no other reason than to gift others with an interesting idea

kellogh, 7 months ago to random

the 3yo informs me that she doesn’t have any meetings because she’s “not tall enough”

i’m 6’3” and i have a schedule that confirms her theory

kellogh, 20 days ago to random

What a great reminder that simply being “data driven” isn’t enough. If the model is wrong, your results are going to be bad. In other words, there’s no substitute for critical thinking, not even data

https://www.history.com/news/why-coca-cola-new-coke-flopped

kellogh, 27 days ago to iran

in the first hour of this #iran attack, i saw the word “unprecedented” probably 12 times, and i can’t figure out for the life of me what’s unprecedented about this situation

kellogh, 5 months ago to environment

oh neat, scientists found a process for breaking down PE plastic into chemicals that are quite useful for things like feeding livestock and anti-bacterials. PE is the most common kind of plastic, so maybe this is finally a way to make use of all that waste! https://phys.org/news/2023-12-polyethylene.html #environment #EnvironmentalScience #recycling #Science

kellogh, 1 month ago to random

The Attack Turkey

this morning on the run i got to the top of the hill and was resting, bc i'm out of shape, and off in the distance i see a bird trotting my way

as it gets closer i realize it's a turkey. it had a big red gobbler and its neck was iridescent. It was actually really pretty, so i just watched as it approached

kellogh, 5 months ago to ChatGPT

this isn’t rocket science. if you put information in, it will come out. an exploit might not exist today, but it’s only a matter of time before it’s common. training data, prompts, RAG-injected info…all of it needs to follow basic security principles. https://not-just-memorization.github.io/extracting-training-data-from-chatgpt.html #chatgpt #ai #llms #llm #genai #GenerativeAI

kellogh, 7 months ago to random

y'all are wrong, the hardest problem in computer science is not accidentally building a compiler

bentomn, 4 months ago to random

A huge battery has replaced Hawaii's last coal plant

“when renewables growth and fossil-plant retirements pass a certain threshold, as they have in Hawaii, simply adding more wind, solar or batteries isn’t sufficient. The clean technologies […] have to start maintaining the grid, not just feeding it.

this is the only large-scale battery that we’ve seen capable of combining the basic peak capacity, frequency response, synthetic inertia and grid-rebooting tasks.” https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-storage/a-huge-battery-has-replaced-hawaiis-last-coal-plant

kellogh, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago) to random

How many first-name@company email addresses have you had? Over your whole career

kellogh, 7 months ago to random

oh this is interesting. javascript’s warts are due to not pushing back hard enough on user requests & upper management. not really due to the short dev time https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/did-brendan-eich-really-make-javascript-in-10-days/

kellogh, 8 months ago to random

Don’t change your avatar pic. Ya I get it’s 20 years old, but it’s the only way I recognize any of you

kellogh, 4 months ago to opensource

I just found out about birb, and it makes me extremely excited for the future of #opensource, the #fediverse and #rsstech. With the combination of deeper RSS integration and fossil, my mastodon client optimized for reading, 2024 is looking pretty good rn https://timkellogg.me/blog/2024/01/03/birb #rss

kellogh, 1 month ago to llm

Automatic refutation of misinformation.

A new paper offers a system to correct misinformation using an #LLM. The approach seems solid, and the results seem strong. I haven’t dug in deep yet, but I’m hopeful about this one

https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.11169 #LLMs #AI

kellogh, 7 months ago to random

whelp, someone thought "web root" is a good name for a security product, and someone else thought it would be a good idea to force install it on all their employees machines. wtf is wrong with people....

kellogh, 3 days ago to random

are there mastodon clients that are scriptable?

i keep wishing for something good, like @ivory, but extremely customizable that lets me display toots differently, or filter in non-standard ways, or include links to resources that others might not find useful

kellogh, 4 months ago to python

update on #fossil: last night i pushed changes to make algorithms pluggable. it uses #python entry points for discovery, so you can develop your own plugin without cloning fossil. it gives you a few hooks:

• train: e.g. if you need to train an ML model, or just calculate aggregate statistics

• render: format toots into an object that’s passed to a jinja template. you can make the jinja template or just use one that already exists

• HTML forms: e.g. to capture hyper-parameters