@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org
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thomasapowell

@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org

Mostly sharing thoughts on #webdev, #softwareengineering, #retrogames and humanistic aspects of tech. Old tech guy, UCSD CSE Lecturer, Author, pint.com founder, and person behind ZingChart and ZingGrid. 🤓

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thomasapowell, to ai
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

I asked ChatGPT another BS engine to calculate Google’s BS engine’s failure cost and it came up with about $10.4 billion. Is that accurate who knows? Hilarious ? 💯

Cost calc below from ChatGPT

“Total Estimated Financial Impact:

• Ad Revenue Loss: $2 billion
• Increased Operational Costs: $300 million
• Legal and Regulatory Costs: $600 million
• Brand Damage: $7.5 billion

Total Estimated Loss: $2 billion + $300 million + $600 million + $7.5 billion = $10.4 billion”

thomasapowell,
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

@schizanon apparently zero per ChatGPT unless we can go viral with this! Let’s goooo 😝

overholt, to random
@overholt@glammr.us avatar

These fake William Morris prints for sale on Etsy are such an aggressive attack on historical reality. Not content with mutating his work to better fit a 21st century market, they come with fictitious provenance as well. https://maggieappleton.com/generative-forgery

A print of an orange tree. Text at bottom: COTTON PRINTS EXHIBITION WILLIAM MORRIS TEXTILES HISTORY OF BRITISH DESIGN LONDON THE ART OF XIX CENTURY

thomasapowell,
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

@overholt I think this would be an interesting story for @404mediaco to dig into. I’d make a sad prediction that there is a rapidly expanding amount of this kind of thing across many types of objects on Etsy.

Cmastication, to random
@Cmastication@mastodon.social avatar

Google: unsafe at any speed

thomasapowell,
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

@Cmastication this just sucks. AI is absolutely gonna take my job of being mostly wrong about things I don’t know much about.

thomasapowell, to MemeryAlpha
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

Tired: Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO)

Wired: Large amounts of content mixed with garbage in, averaged content sprinkled with garbage and sometimes brand new super garbage out (AI)

thomasapowell, to ai
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

If I want to get the American right all wild about accuracy I'll point out that giving Chat GPT 4o the task to estimate Bronx Rally crowd size (they claim 25k) but the AI has a different thought (< 5k)

thomasapowell, to ai
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

New research paper released today

“Training on Reddit posts considered harmful to model accuracy.”

Peer reviewers gave glowing comments like “No shit Sherlock!”

Asked for a comment the ground breaking paper’s author Captain Obvious simply stated “have you ever even been on Reddit?’ He also encouraged Google to instead train on 4chan content instead as that will totally “fix” everything.

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

Unless you have experience teaching or training a variety of web tech (HTML, JS, CSS, SVG, etc), you likely don't fully understand their relative learning difficulty

Basing your assessment of which is harder on your attempts to teach yourself is esp unreliable

It's hard for you to know if a tech is hard or if you were just unlucky in stumbling into a bad entry point. Getting into something with the wrong mental model means you have to first unlearn a bunch of crap before you can actually learn

thomasapowell,
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

@baldur I’ve taught web dev at uni level for > 25yrs and I don’t know where to start here. This thread just hits me to my core. I’ll say a big challenge is pre existing beliefs, learner mindset, and frankly impatience. The influence of hustle style Web pundits has been a big challenge but now LLM ease is pure gas poured on a platform basics learning failures. Amazing passionate student bright spots always exist and that keeps me very motivated, but it is much harder now than ever.

atomicpoet, to random
@atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org avatar

The thing about physical media formats is that it doesn’t have to be “superior” for you to want it.

For example, I have a VHS and VCD collection. I know these are inferior formats compared to DVD or Blu-Ray.

But have you ever seen Blade Runner on VHS through a CRT? Have you ever seen Ghost in the Shell on VCD through a projector?

I have, and they’re amazing experiences I would not trade for anything.

thomasapowell,
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

@atomicpoet same idea as why playing a Atari 2600 or original NES works better on a CRT. Interestingly that is the only way you can play Duck Hunt so you simply can’t even experience that game if you insist on modern. 😎

thomasapowell, to random
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

Apparently even ScarJo can’t stop the fever dream of a techbro with billions he will just do it anyway !

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/scarlett-johansson-shocked-angered-openai-voice-rcna153180

atomicpoet, to random
@atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org avatar

Chinese fried chicken served with shrimp crackers.

I like this a lot more than KFC.

thomasapowell,
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

@atomicpoet are you by chance in Richmond having an amazing 10 course Cantonese meal. It sure looks that way and I am jealous my friend. My version via my wife is in Rowland Heights LA which while good has nothing on BC. We visited a summer back and it was second only to Hong Kong. Enjoy every bite!

thomasapowell, to LEGO
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

Not exactly a clean build of a Space 1999 Eagle. That’s what you get I guess for knock off Chinese still an icon of 1970s

thomasapowell, to ai
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

Last year I told my team we have to get off #Slack because this #AI train wreck would likely happen and I wasn’t ok with info leakage like that of our private and customer chat. Sadly as we are finding out it happened. We had picked #Mattermost and found it was fine as a replacement but the migration has been a slow effort. At least now it will accelerate.

thomasapowell,
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

@StOnSoftware yep unfortunately that’s quite true but not a reason to keep with them going forward I’ll dub staying the sunk privacy fallacy 🤪 anyway Mattermost is good enough. We’d used Hipchat before Slack and MS Communicator before Hipchat so this is just another move for a long running firm.

ricmac, to random
@ricmac@mastodon.social avatar

A media podcast I listened to today said that “the web is old-fashioned”, as part of their analysis of the OpenAI and Google news this week. As if the web will turn into The Well, or something. But I am seeing the fediverse, standards-based web builders like Eleventy, and open newsletter platforms like Ghost and Buttondown (that both support the web), and I just don’t agree that the web is old-fashioned. Quite the opposite, it’s only just getting started (again)!

thomasapowell,
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

@ricmac the web is always dead or dying per people who both post and read this hot take on …. the web. 🧐

thomasapowell, to random
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

Dystopian SciFi books need to be reclassified as Non-Fiction these days.

hbuchel, to random
@hbuchel@hachyderm.io avatar

Is this a real thing people using Tailwind do because this made me actually lol at work
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/72826605/how-to-style-nested-elements-based-on-parent-class-using-tailwind-css

thomasapowell,
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

@hbuchel @cferdinandi makes perfect sense according to “Argumentum I got lots
of followerum”

Same bullshit different millennia 😛

thomasapowell, (edited ) to LEGO
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

So having #Covid does have the upside of free time at home to get to this #Atari 2600 #Lego build. The cartridges can go in, the joystick has movement as do the switches, and a fun seen flips up from the console if you slide it forward.

#retrogaming

thomasapowell, to ai
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

A few things about #AI in the cloud we probably should acknowledge. First spinning up a cell phone’s radio constantly is gonna kill battery life. Add to this the network latency and variability making the UX painfully inconsistent or even unworkable. Also privacy but whatevs right?

Hasn’t Humane, R1, Echo, Siri… taught us anything or we just gonna wave this off as easily solvable?

On device really is required here but AI gold rush time so let’s gooooo! 🤷

thomasapowell, to ai
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

Worth a watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDUC-LqVrPU

#Ai

jasongorman, to random
@jasongorman@mastodon.cloud avatar

Search for "Certified Scrum Master" on YouTube. "When I found out there was something called 'project management' and then I found out about 'Scrum' "

thomasapowell,
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

@jasongorman were the videos like “Hey guys! Today I am gonna tell you how you too can get certified in just one day and land your six figure dream job leading teams of rockstar ninja devs building world changing hyper scale AI powered software for the block chained powered metaverse. But first remember to like and subscribe so I can put out more killer content for y’all and turbo charge your tech leadership!”

thomasapowell, to random
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

Pithy #SoftwareEngineering thought

Full Team Devs >>> Full Stack Devs

thomasapowell, to random
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

Well I finally broke my long term luck and am positive with #COVID

I did most of the right things over the years with masks and vaxxing but we are so loose now it was bound to happen esp being on campus and having massive lectures.

Sadly it isn’t some simple cold or flu I feel weird as hell. 😬 so shifting down to a lower gear in my life for a bit.

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

those devs and tech “influencers” who pioneered the technical work of putting “AI” shit in everything everywhere, and are—for the most part—the assholes who enabled our brave new “AI” world by actually figuring out how to make it run, are also going to be the people who get credit for criticising it after the bubble pops, aren’t they?

Everybody will latch onto their vague concerns and ignore the fact that they literally implemented the shit that got smeared everywhere, aren’t they?

thomasapowell,
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

@baldur you are probably right and without a doubt that should be dubbed the Kara Swisher effect.

@parismarx

thomasapowell, to TeslaMotors
@thomasapowell@fosstodon.org avatar

I am well over ten and maybe even 20+ #CyberTruck sightings now and it still makes me look, shake my head and wonder what type of person buys and drives this thing? When the tinting isn’t illegal level I always make sure to look. The trend is unbroken so far. Any guesses ?

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