@stevenaleach@sigmoid.social
@stevenaleach@sigmoid.social avatar

stevenaleach

@stevenaleach@sigmoid.social

CS Hobbyist. In #MadisonWI since 2019, working mostly as a restaurant dishwasher and more recently a part-time pizza dough maker. #AI, #Aquaponics, #BariSax, #Bikes, #Brains, #C, #Carfree, #CargoBike, #CleanEnergy, #Coffee, #Cycling, #Debian, #Decarbonization, #Ebike, #Gardening, #Houseplants, #IPFS, #Jazz, #Jupyter, #Jupyterlab, #Linux, #ML, #Madison, #Neuro, #OpenSource, #P2P, #Piano, #PublicRadio, #PyTorch, #Python, #Recycling, #Science, #ScienceFiction, #Space, #Sustainability, #Unix

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Hcobb, to random
@Hcobb@spacey.space avatar

@nyrath What's the proper size for the hero ship in a movie, TV series or RPG?
99% of the crew of the Enterprise seem to do nothing ever, not even react to the half-human.
In the three Star Wars movies the Millennium Falcon seems more a setting for interludes rather than part of the plot. As soon as the rookie gets the keys to an X-wing he's outta there. (In diapers?)
Traveller has two types of ships, depending on the types of missions the gamers are in to. With few if any NPC crewmembers.

stevenaleach,
@stevenaleach@sigmoid.social avatar

@Hcobb @nyrath Ever since I was a little kid who was first clued into Moore's Law, it has bugged me that ships in Star Trek had or needed crews. Why are humans issuing orders to the ship's computer? They're in the 24th century (for TNG that I watched as a kid), given projected progress plus bandwidth and data compression used by transporters the ship itself should be a super-intelligence that doesn't ask it's pet hominids for advice nor pay any attention to their suggestions.

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

If I had more energy I'd be tempted to write a snarky, satirical, 21st century Jetson's style short story set in a future where all the dot-com 1.0-3.0 hype turned out to be true and faithful predictions of our lives in 2025. Just so I could explore the unanticipated drawbacks ("oops, the Amazon drone delivering your neighbour's new dishwasher just fell through your roof; meanwhile trades.com only shows you roofers who live in Boston, England, not Boston, MA").
https://aus.social/@ajsadauskas/112317411058906212

stevenaleach,
@stevenaleach@sigmoid.social avatar

@cstross A ramping cycle of increasing computing power and resources as AI's race to generate ads, ad-blockers, click-fakers, click-faker-detectors, etc. Tell the story of the end collapse by tracing the history of the last advertisement (which, like most ads, no human ever views), the long pipeline of data and events through which it was generated, the enormous hardware and software stacks involved from 'start' to finish, and total disconnect from social and physical conditions of the world. .

harriorrihar, to ai Spanish
@harriorrihar@mas.to avatar

Imagine a movie from the future, scripted by an AI, with VFX made by AI, with replicas of AI actors, on a paid streaming channel with advertising:

1 - Tell me a reason why I want to see it.

2 - If you convince me to watch it, tell me a reason why I shouldn't pirate it.

stevenaleach,
@stevenaleach@sigmoid.social avatar

@harriorrihar Why replicas of actors? Generated people should be the character as imagined by the writers and creators. I'm looking forward to stories standing on their own with no actors involved. I've always been bugged by film marketing that consists mostly of a list of celebrity names in the cast.

Not looking forward to watching any such films (I don't watch film or television much), just looking forward to hearing less about actors.

stevenaleach, to jazz
@stevenaleach@sigmoid.social avatar

Artist Charles Mingus
Date NY, , 1959
Label_Record Columbia CL1370
Matrix CO63337-3
Performers Willie Dennis (tb) John Handy (as) Booker Ervin (ts) Curtis Porter aka Shafi Hadi (as,ts) Horace Parlan (p) Charles Mingus (b) Dannie Richmond (d)
Title Open Letter To Duke
URL http://www.jazz-on-line.com/a/mp3t/TS481487.mp3
Year 1959

stevenaleach, to ipfs
@stevenaleach@sigmoid.social avatar

My local network doesn't let me do much in the way of hosting anything via , but I plan to use ipfs identifiers as filenames so that users of the can run ipfs locally, fetch tracks as needed from .org that aren't already available on the network through connected peers. 1/3 century of , over forty-thousand with . https://www.tapeheads.net/threads/has-jazz-on-linecom-died.106559/#post-775733672

shoq, to random
@shoq@mastodon.social avatar

Good morning. A moment of Zen, a day late ⏵

stevenaleach,
@stevenaleach@sigmoid.social avatar

@shoq Funny, except it was Biden who won - There was no "left wing" candidate.

LeftistLawyer, to random
@LeftistLawyer@kolektiva.social avatar

Does anyone else find it odd that we call technology designed for no other reason than to manufacture the desire to buy shit we don't need, "entertainment."

Seems like we should call it brainwashing.

See the program. Be the program.

stevenaleach,
@stevenaleach@sigmoid.social avatar

@LeftistLawyer I find it odd that media awareness with a goal of instilling resistance to marketing isn't a standard and required part of basic childhood education in a world so swamped with marketing in so many forms. Yet we don't even seem to have a language for such a concept, try googling such phrases as "education resistance to marketing" and you get 100% pages by the ad industry on how to overcome resistance - not strategies to instill and encourage it.

drahardja, (edited ) to ai
@drahardja@sfba.social avatar

“Prompt engineering” is such a bizarre line of work. You’re trying to convince a machine trained on a huge pile of (hopefully) human-generated text to produce some useful output by guessing what sequence of human-like words you must put in to make it likely that the model will produce coherent, human-like output that is good enough to pass downstream.

You really have no idea how your prompt caused the model to produce its output (yes, you understand its process, but not the actual factors that contribute to its decisions). If the output happens to be good, you still have no idea how far you can push your input before the model returns bad output.

Prompt engineers talk to the model like a human, because that’s the only mental model they have for predicting how it will respond to their inputs. It’s a very poor metaphor for programming, but there is nothing better to reach for.

stevenaleach,
@stevenaleach@sigmoid.social avatar

@drahardja No. Because LLMs aren't yet "technologies", so much as phenomenon. They are things we've learned to make that we can coax interesting responses from - and sometimes they can even be useful, though frustrating and require a lot of coaxing to get the responses we're hoping for. They're things we can experiment with and play with, but they aren't tools yet - because we don't have simple straight forward ways to get them to do what we want or understand what it is that we want.. yet.

NewsDesk, (edited ) to news
@NewsDesk@flipboard.social avatar

In a troubled world, could "news sobriety" protect your mental health?

Inside Hook explains the seductive (if perhaps unethical) notion: https://flip.it/idCtxo

How do you protect yourself from being overwhelmed by negative news?

stevenaleach,
@stevenaleach@sigmoid.social avatar

@NewsDesk My primary (offline) news sources is - A rather more sober and far less hyperbolic delivery and discourse than most other options. In fact I don't listen to or watch any commercial media, I listen to NPR during most waking hours and occasionally stream the in the evening. The funny part is always hearing references to celebrities and stuff on commercial media on NPR with no context or explanation because it's assumed everyone consumes commercial media.

lilithsaintcrow, to random
@lilithsaintcrow@raggedfeathers.com avatar

“YouTube does not ALLOW adblockers!”

…oh my dear sweet summer corporation, you seem to have forgotten just who is actually in charge here.

stevenaleach,
@stevenaleach@sigmoid.social avatar

@lilithsaintcrow Where are people encountering this message? The site seems to work as always with Adblock Plus.

ct_bergstrom, to random
@ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org avatar

I wanted to consolidate a few thoughts on google, misinformation, large language models, enshittification, and the fate of the web as we know it.

It started when Carl Zimmer shared this remarkable example of Google being fooled by machine-generated bullshit online.

stevenaleach,
@stevenaleach@sigmoid.social avatar

@ct_bergstrom I blame this on the rapid introduction of LLMs which are not so much a technology (yet) as phenomena that can sometimes be useful. This model of "conversational computing" (my words until something catchier emerges) I've just discovered and it's very useful - but hit or miss, requires a lot of coaxing and retrying, etc. Currently micro-managing GPT to finish a one-man project faster than ever would have been possible - but incremental testable building of code is low hanging fruit.

georgetakei, to random

Deplorable. https://www.comicsands.com/trump-robbers-should-be-shot-2665779749.html?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=infeed&utm_campaign=linkprogram

stevenaleach,
@stevenaleach@sigmoid.social avatar

@georgetakei I think the extent to which Trump is really an entertainer with a fan-base and not a politician with a political base should be seriously considered. He's fun for people to watch who are into this kind of rage and shock comedy - they don't really care about politics, they voted for their favorite reality TV star, not a political philosopher. Trump is an ongoing stunt that entertains and that's most all of what he really is when you boil him down. Reality TV Archie Bunker Remake.

jerry, to random

I wonder how long it will be until we start seeing targeted/personalized ads that use deepfakes of people in your social network…

stevenaleach,
@stevenaleach@sigmoid.social avatar

@jerry I have never once looked at Instagram. The reason I haven't (and never will) ever visited the site is because there were months and months some years back when Facebook ran an un-closable, un-blockable, un-reportable banner ad telling me that two of my deceased friends were on and loved it, that I should connect with them there. Though honestly I tend to boycott any product and/or service who's ads I've encountered because they've committed advertisement.

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