trochee

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

The boom in LLMs is going to hollow out a number of knowledge-worker industries — for example, writing boilerplate code or technical documentation

Not because it does it well but because the flacks can sell upper management on the idea that it can do it at all, as @pluralistic recently pointed out

This sale is a pig-in-a-poke, and the winning move is to not be holding the bag when the actual code or documentation is found to be terrible

1/

trochee, 5 months ago to random

I propose that 2024 be the year of no more "sprints".

organize your work into "strolls", and connect up those strolls into "rambles".

aw dammit now I want a book pitch for the "randonneur's guide to software development".

trochee, 24 days ago to random

Every once in a while I am amazed that one of the contenders for social media dominance right now is literally named "blue sky"

It's a term from project planning, and I'm pretty sure it's intended to mean "what you do if there were no constraints"

1/2

trochee, 8 months ago to random

I'm actually kinda mad that LLMs and art generating AIs aren't the domain of goofball computational creativity projects any more

Get those b-school squares out of my arthouse indie scene man, they're spoiling the vibe

https://mastodon.social/@CrustaceanSingles/111123832263160914

See also my old project using early generation tensorflow to do bonkers text rewriting cut and paste poetry, Dada-style https://trochee.net/samyro

trochee, 1 month ago to random

This article is one enormous [citation needed]

> “I’m more optimistic because we have been using the tool a lot, and some of the insights we’re starting to get from a scientific standpoint are things that none of our scientists were aware of,” he added.

Moderna CEO says AI will help scientists understand ‘most diseases’ in 3 to 5 years | Semafor
https://www.semafor.com/article/04/18/2024/moderna-ceo-says-ai-will-help-understand-most-diseases-in-3-to-5-years

trochee, 9 months ago to random

My wife (herself French) today told me about this insane 1978 Canadian/French cyberpunk rock opera/musical STARMANIA

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starmania_(musical)

Plot reads like a mashup of Dirty Computer and Jesus Christ Superstar, with a Musk-/Trump-esque millionaire villain named Zéro Janvier, a trans(?) shit-stirring student activist, a Spirit of Starf--kery, and a robot waitress who "alone survives to tell the tale"

Seems extremely timely again, and I've been fantasy-casting a 2024 remake in my head ALL DAY

trochee, 1 month ago to random

You know what the current hits for "let's let an LLM do it!" really reminds me of? I just saw it!

1950s Tom Swift stories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swift_Jr.

I read the hell out of these during 1980s (no Internet!) summer visits to a small town where the best entertainment was the one-room public library and you could check out a book by telling the librarian which cottage you were staying in.

1/n

trochee, 1 month ago to random

May I never ever ever be the kind of guy who Ed Zitron gets a hate on for

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Just a devastating career-long rundown of the dude who drove Google search into the ground, and some of the people on whose necks he stepped along the way

Via @mhoye

trochee, 5 months ago to random

Hey look, it's the trailer for "Butlerian Jihad: Year Minus One"

Against pseudanthropy | TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/21/against-pseudanthropy/

Via @SpeakerToManagers (tx!)

trochee, 9 months ago to random

Y'all my host instance did a scheduled maintenance today and I missed the announcement

I was out for six hours and I felt the jonesing almost the whole time

Otoh, i hear from @alex that now we're running Hometown! Yay!

trochee, 3 months ago to random

A week or two ago I posted about how we need to get basic voice assistant functionality right (timers, weather) before we consider sticking an LLM on it

The Hype Machine: I got you
https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/111846743237255256

trochee, 11 months ago to random

I'm seeing an unfortunate parallel between the HOA behaviors on Mastodon and cyclist advocacy by (mostly white, male) tech nerds

• I am one of you
• what we've fought for and built is a huge improvement over the death machines we're replacing

But now that it works for you

• stop trying to pull the ladder up behind you
• scolding people for driving to their underpaid warehouse job is way less useful than helping them unionize, fixing public transit, or dealing with the housing crisis

trochee, 9 months ago to random

I've been very lucky at work

Even as the org as a whole plunges into chatbot hype, my team has
—had group trainings on what LLMs do
—listened when I pointed out downsides
—established rule-driven guardrails

Even more fun, from my POV, is that they've let me work on curating those guardrail grammars

So for a couple hours each day this week, I've gotten to write computational linguistics code in the parallel universe where neural nets DIDN'T take off in 2010

trochee, 5 months ago to random

OK, last night at a local pizza joint I saw the creepiest TV ad during the Mariners game

appeared to be an online learning college-esque program for "teaching our great American history"

was giving Prager U vibes but wasn't Prager.

It had a hyper anglo name like "edgewood" and used an .org TLD not .edu, & I witnessed exactly 1 non-white person in the 2m ad (in a 2s b&w clip of a civil rights protestor pushed around by Bull Connor)

Anybody know who it was, & should I be worried?

#lazydon

trochee, 8 months ago to random

Had a disturbing SFnal dream

modern computing had evolved from whaling, not power looms

Computing jargon was full of terms like scrimshaw and corsetry and blubber and pequods, none of which meant what they originally did

trochee, 9 months ago to random

These jokers claim to have received a Mac OS cyber security threat tip from ChatGPT

I can't decide what is worse for an infosec firm

• they threw AI baffle-talk in there so they could seem smart to their perceived customer base

• they took the word of a bullshit engine as meaningful direction

• they got a useful tip because ChatGPT training data has meaningfully indexed the dark web

"The Massive macOS Threats Trending in the Web."
https://guardz.com/blog/the-massive-macos-threats-trending-in-the-dark-web/

trochee, 3 months ago to random

Riffing on, but not directly in line with @emilymbender's question below

Is there any research/writing/publication out there on the use of "democratization" rhetoric to slough off responsibility for systems behavior?

I feel like I've seen this in

• social media moderation
• software teams that want to move on from maintaining (eg) open source projects
• "populist" politics

In general, it feels like socializing maintenance costs while privatizing innovation benefits

https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/111857989704620783

trochee, 3 months ago to random

The play COPENHAGEN, the movie RASHOMON, and the novel THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE are all post-war wave-collapse multiple-interpretation superpositions of destroyed-yet-somehow-still-extant imperial ambition, in this essay I will

trochee, 2 months ago to random

This thread of trains driving on grassy tracks is pure solarpunk competency porn in the vein of @annaleen 's THE TERRAFORMERS

(via @blogdiva ; thx!)
https://urbanists.social/@straphanger/112168979067387415

trochee, 11 months ago to random

well dang, Reddit mods on a sitdown strike in the unpaid knowledge factory floor.

I am indeed inconvenienced. Well played.

I ain't crossing that picket line; the mysteries of C++ will remain unplumbed today.

trochee, 11 months ago to random

The Reddit situation appears to be a squatters' sit-down strike against the knowledge factory they work in unpaid

And the fact that this doesn't make sense to the 1930s labor concepts that the NLRB has to work with

well, that's symptomatic of the wholesale abandonment of the idea of collective labor organizing, which i would say got undermined by the California Ideology

Nerds should never have let technolibertarian capital get away with inflating the "garage hero" startup myth so much

trochee, 2 months ago to Seattle

I've lived in #Seattle for twenty-plus years and I'd never come down to see the Hat and Boots in #Georgetown before today.

Beautiful day for it.

A two story tall pair of cowboy boots, and a forty foot wide hat, in a small green park. The sky is deep blue overhead. This picture focuses more on the hat — brick red almost pink, with a wide brim — and less on the boots.

trochee, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to random

Hah, catch this small world moment where my uncle @dangillmor cites my brother Dan in (correctly) calling out my employer as "ahead of their skis"

Thanks for the pointer, Uncle Dan !
https://mastodon.social/@dangillmor/112255639551683319

trochee, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago) to fediverse

#LazyFedi #Bookwyrm #Fediverse does anybody know if it's easy to extract a book-list from #Goodreads?

I'm not a heavy user of Goodreads but occasionally somebody will suggest a reading list and I'd love to import it into Bookwyrm or something similar

[ETA: I am looking at how to export someone else's reading list, e.g. the list outlined here: https://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/2580-the-big-fantasy-science-fiction-and-horror-books-of-summer ]

trochee, 26 days ago to random

> ooooh what if, like, at the beginning Murderbot and other bots/constructs are the only ones who sing, harmonizing with SecSystem MedSystem etc, while humans sort of talk at the margins...and only humans who treat Murderbot as a person get to sing?

— @older , describing the central conceit of a MURDERBOT opera that I now feel like I have to see before I die

https://bsky.app/profile/older.bsky.social/post/3klhvd3zcho2f