Need to make a primal scream without gathering footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh facts of Awful youā€™ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

  • sc_griffith@awful.systems
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    24
    Ā·
    5 months ago

    thinking about how I was inoculated against part of ai hype bc a big part of my social circle in undergrad consisted of natural language processing people. they wanted to work at places with names like ā€œOpenAIā€ and ā€œgoogle deepmind,ā€ their program was more or less a cognitive science program, but I never once heard any of them express even the slightest suspicion that LLMs of all things were progressing toward intelligence. it would have been a nonsequiter.

    also from their pov the statistical approach to machine learning was defined by abandoning the attempt to externalize the meaning of text. the cliche they used to refer to this was ā€œthe meaning of a word is the context in which it occurs.ā€

    finding out that some prestigious ai researchers are all about being pilled on immanetizating agi was such a swerve for me. itā€™s like if you were to find out that michio kaku has just won his fourth consecutive nobel prize in physics

    • o7___o7@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      Ā·
      edit-2
      5 months ago

      itā€™s like if you were to find out that michio kaku has just won his fourth consecutive nobel prize in physics

      hell of a stinger

  • deborah@awful.systems
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    18
    Ā·
    5 months ago

    No, all you lawyers explaining to me how the practice of law works in the U.S., you would totally benefit from GPT. Complete with bonus:

    • Everyone explaining to me that lawyers actually read all the documents in discovery is really trying to explain to me, a computer scientist with 20 years of experience[1], how GPT works!
    • [1] Does OP have actual tech expertise? The answer may (not) surprise you!
    • You lawyers admit that sometimes you use google translate and database search engines, and those use machine learning components, and all ML is basically LLMs, so Iā€™m right, Q.E.D.!
    • Lawyers couldnā€™t possibly read everything in discovery, right?
    • Lawyers couldnā€™t possibly pay for professional translation for everything, right?
    • Even when itā€™s mandated by the court?
    • Really?
    • and many, many more
    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      16
      Ā·
      edit-2
      5 months ago

      This is also a very qucik hypthetical that I wrote up just to show a point not to argue a fucking legal case.

      ā€œGuys I totally didnā€™t expect the lawyers to respond like lawyers when reading my Chat-GPT generated garbageā€

      Exceptā€¦ I admitted I was not a lawyer and not an expert, and rather than working to communicate they kept latching onto errors related to law, while they confidently made statements about the nature and functionality of ML technologies like LLMs and NMTs.

      ā€œWhy are all the lawyers being so mean to me?? Iā€™m just saying they could all be replaced by chatbotsā€

    • V0ldek@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      14
      Ā·
      edit-2
      5 months ago

      Iā€™m sorry, but youā€™re wrong. Youā€™re also mansplaining to an expert. While I admit that I am not an expert on law and am listening when corrections related to LAW and the practice of LAW are concerned, you do not want to admit your lack of understanding of this technology.

      My god DANIEL, no, people are not mansplaining to you, unless thatā€™s a mask for a Danielle.

      EDIT: Down the thread he responds to Kathryn Tewson, an actual expert, with

      Yeah Iā€™m not obligated to answer every question by a horde of people. You should change your name to Karen, because you sure act like a fucking entitled white bitch.

      This guy has such a punchable face, even though Iā€™ve never seen him. I can just tell.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systems
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        11
        Ā·
        5 months ago

        Kathryn Tewson

        Iirc, She is not just an expert, but she is so good at law that while she didnā€™t practice law, but just commented about her interpretations of the law (as ANAL) people hired her and paid for her law degree. She has both talent and expertise.

    • V0ldek@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      11
      Ā·
      5 months ago

      I just want to latch onto one more thing there:

      GPTs are great at transforming information. Transformations include compression, decompression, and inter-language translation, among others.

      Okay mister computer scientist, sure, what is ā€œtransforming informationā€? From what youā€™re saying it appears like youā€™re describing basically any map from information to other information. But AMONG OTHERS that includes a map going from NO INFO to CONFIDENT BULLSHIT. And I do agree LLMs are amazing at it.

      Here, Iā€™ll sketch it out for you in fucking LaTeX:

      $\emptyset \mapsto \mathit{Nonsense}$

    • V0ldek@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      Ā·
      edit-2
      5 months ago

      This thread is an unending source of amusement.

      Someone there found his ORCID andā€¦ Itā€™s not great: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2835-3521

      He has basically nothing published, but has like 40 different ā€œpreprintsā€, read PDFs he uploaded to arxiv with no peer review.

      I use these tools daily. I have also built software which utilizes genAI. I have also worked on fine-tuning GPTs. I have written extensive [sic!] on the topic. I also have formal training in mathematics, computer science, engineering, and anthropology1. [emph. mine]

      šŸ¤”


      1 No he doesnā€™t? His Education lists A.S. in Engineering, A.S. in Computer Science, and B.S. in Mathematics, that anthropology claim seems completely made up.

      • V0ldek@awful.systems
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        12
        Ā·
        5 months ago

        Those ā€œpapersā€ are gold, theyā€™re mostly a few pages long, and they span such a wild range of topics as:

        • How to calculate a mean of numbers?
        • What is a number?
        • Atheism is actually a religion.
        • Ethereum is a store of energy.

        Iā€™ve never seen someone in such a dire need of a wedgie, come on man, you spend the hours of your life writing your farts into LaTeX and generating DOIs for them, this isnā€™t healthy.

            • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              8
              Ā·
              5 months ago

              he also has a personal site, itā€™s linked on researchgate. i took psychic damage reading this, somebody force him to touch grass

              • flere-imsaho@awful.systems
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                9
                Ā·
                edit-2
                5 months ago

                oh goddess, heā€™s already a bleeding muppet, and going to be a major crank. from the researchgate profile:

                I am an aspiring polymath and a rōnin scholar. I also tend to look at questions, rather than fields of study, as a research question often does incorporate many disparate topics. Research interests include the psychological and anthropological nature of religion, vaccine efficacy and impact on asymptomatic carriage, and the application of paraconsistent logic to scientific research.

                rōnin! fucking! scholar!

                • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  8
                  Ā·
                  5 months ago

                  eh iā€™ve seen that before at least once and iā€™m inclined to believe thereā€™s much more of it that nobody cares to notice. on r/chemistry and r/organicchemistry there was a dude, 19, dramatic bitch, who read surface level philosophy and tried getting into ochem for some obscure reason. turns out he wanted to make some anticancer drugs and needs guidance. cool fine maybe get degree in ochem first so you donā€™t do any stupid avoidable mistakes. he wonā€™t listen

                  he tried to get into uni but if i have to guess he got rejected? in any case he didnā€™t learn anything but over time got into contact with some research group, at least thatā€™s what he claimed and started homelab. (youā€™d guess that some medchem research group at uni would have a wet lab, but it must be in other country and youā€™ve never seen them).

                  so anyway our misunderstood hero starts cooking ā€œanticancerā€ ā€œmedsā€ in his living room. how does he know it works, did he made this, sent samples to biologists who would test it for him, or maybe compchem group would simulate it out? nope, heā€™d just got an idea that it will work and thatā€™s just as good, you know, his supreme rationality unrecognized by academic cabal guided him there. so he starts cooking, but does not know how. this included shit like distilling some flammable solvent on wicker table without clamps or anything that would actually make glassware stable. so every other step he asks for advice on really basic shit like heā€™d learn in second year university course (BSc), or in first year of work in organic chemistry lab, his synthesis is avoidably dirty, his purifications are trash, three steps in he has painted himself into corner, yields drop to zero and he has no idea why or what now. this usually means that entire synthesis was shite from the beginning and itā€™s time to go back to the drawing board.

                  (did i mention that he was a dramatic bitch? so he picked it up because he wanted to do something Good for Humanity, and if he fails then well he could just as well commit sewer slide. his first idea involved radioisotopes btw, all in his living room mind you. then objective shifted to ā€œanti-rabies antiviralā€ where he missed the point of about everything he wanted to do. then went back to ā€œanticancerā€)

                  anyway this was his breaking point, after something like three or four people tried to explain politely that he really should get a degree first and set some objective that is not obviously pulled from his supremely rational ass, he started insulting everyone and what eventually earned him sitewide ban was a tirade about how heā€™d genocide everyone who doesnā€™t recognize his genius, given opportunity (he compared himself to milosevic (he was serb))

                  anyway he also had medium blog and posted dick picks with face included from the same account. he made another one, but itā€™s since abandoned. allegedly he also had 2 or 3 accounts before that

                • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  7
                  Ā·
                  5 months ago

                  if his claim of ā€œ20 years studying mathā€ is anywhere close to accurate heā€™s already off the deep end, unless heā€™s counting in everything from kindergarten up. considering heā€™s a cryptobro it already happened pre-pandemic

                • V0ldek@awful.systems
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  4
                  Ā·
                  5 months ago

                  Hey, he didnā€™t update the website to include his research interest in AI, huh, wonder how long heā€™s been a samurai of that

        • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          8
          Ā·
          edit-2
          5 months ago

          nothing wrong with papers a few pages long, as long as they are concisely written and have supplementary information 10x that size. my last paper is 5 pages long, of which the last one are references only, and has 60+ pages of SI

          • V0ldek@awful.systems
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            10
            Ā·
            5 months ago

            Dunno, the funniest thing about them to me is that theyā€™re still divided into 7-8 sections, each one-paragraph long. Just a guy who was never told he was wrong in his life and his idea of what research looks like.

          • V0ldek@awful.systems
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            5
            Ā·
            edit-2
            5 months ago

            Jesus cinnamon crunch Christ. At least the blog posts are mercifully short. He somehow manages to have antivaxx nonsense there as well??

            This is doubly funny because that already exists, at least in Computer Science, and is called a vision paper. You still need to put in a lot of work, perhaps more, into the bibliography and, you know, actually having compelling stuff to say.

      • flere-imsaho@awful.systems
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        9
        Ā·
        5 months ago

        A.S. in Engineering, A.S. in Computer Science

        wait, wait. thatā€™s basically the bootcamp level of education, no?

        • flere-imsaho@awful.systems
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          9
          Ā·
          edit-2
          5 months ago

          (nothing wrong with that per se, i donā€™t have any c. s. degree anyways and yet i work in the field for years. but the gall of a dude who has finished a few two-year courses to tell fucking law professionals that they donā€™t know enoughā€¦ this is indeed the threadnought-level of recklessness.)

          • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            8
            Ā·
            5 months ago

            the sheer hubris of that individual putting out preprints, as if making this available before peer review would hasten chatgpt rapture (none of that shite will be ever published)

        • V0ldek@awful.systems
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          Ā·
          5 months ago

          I know essentally nothing about the US education system butā€¦

          If youā€™re gonna pull credentalist bullshit, maybe at least have the credentials? You took us there mate, I wouldnā€™t be pulling your degrees up if you didnā€™t first talk about how formally educated you areā€¦

      • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        Ā·
        edit-2
        5 months ago

        he does seem to have carefully cultivated case of engineer disease

        also itā€™s not ā€œalmost allā€ preprints, itā€™s all preprints, just one repository calls these papers

        he didnā€™t discover yet predatory journals, it all could have been published for a small fee like with this one (contains mind numbing level of conspiracy-theoretic rambling and related brainworms) hxxps://uraniumisagenocidegiant[.]com/ (you have been warned)

        • V0ldek@awful.systems
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          7
          Ā·
          5 months ago

          Thereā€™s one classified as ā€œSSRN Electronic Journal 2023 | Journal articleā€, I thought this was something like a predatory journal, hence the ā€œalmostā€, but now that I clicked on it I think this is just an arxiv-like website that calls itself an ā€œelectronic journalā€? No fucking idea.

            • V0ldek@awful.systems
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              9
              Ā·
              5 months ago

              Amazing.

              I could ā€œpublishā€ my homeworks from the 5yrs of college onto arxiv and thatā€™d be a more scientifically valuable endeavour. Better formatted, too.

    • FRACTRANS@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      Ā·
      5 months ago

      I wish I was surprised at what the main account was posting about when I looked into it šŸ˜µā€šŸ’«

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      Ā·
      edit-2
      5 months ago

      studied maths and CS for 20 years, all he has to show for it on his orcid is BSc and bunch of lousy preprints (with blockchain!). jfc. in that amount of time, people can finish entire PhD degrees, starting from high school, twice over

      on top of that pile of shite sits a preprint titled ā€œA Scholarā€™s Year in Review: Navigating the Convergence of AI, Economics, and Physics in 2023ā€. might be a bit grandiose and bordering on word salad. why the fuck does he think he needs to release preprints. if he had anything worthwhile to say, it would pass peer review

      • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        9
        Ā·
        5 months ago

        he also has researchgate

        Looking to network with other researchers in a diverse array of fields for collaboration and discussion.

        bet you would want to, you time-waster

        aand his crowning achievement seems to be dead startup where he tries to put covid on blockchain, it has coin and everything. itā€™s even associated with worldcoin and so with sam altman. curious that

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    18
    Ā·
    edit-2
    5 months ago

    Microsoftā€™s AI leader claimed that copyright on the internet can be ignored: https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/ever-put-content-on-the-web-microsoft-says-that-its-okay-for-them-to-steal-it-because-its-freeware

    With respect to content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the 90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been freeware, if you like. Thatā€™s been the understanding, thereā€™s a separate category where a website or a publisher or a news organization had explicitly said, ā€˜do not scrape or crawl me for any other reason than indexing me so that other people can find that content.ā€™ Thatā€™s a gray area and I think thatā€™s going to work its way through the courts.

    Watch the entire interview if youā€™re bored because he is in deep. Microsoft probably just hired the most AI-enthused person they could find.

    • Eiim@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      14
      Ā·
      5 months ago

      I think even wilder is that he thinks content which has explicitly been labeled ā€œdo not scrape except for search engine indexingā€ is a ā€œgray areaā€ with regards to scraping for AI. Like, thatā€™s exactly what it says not to do!

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      13
      Ā·
      5 months ago

      He isnā€™t totally wrong re the unspoken rule, but he forgets the second unspoken rule, that the first rule only applies to human being doing entertainment not corporations trying to make money.

    • o7___o7@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      Ā·
      edit-2
      5 months ago

      Never thought Iā€™d see Microsoft suggest downloading a car, but I should have seen it coming.

    • 200fifty@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      Ā·
      5 months ago

      Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it

      Ewā€¦ stay away from my content, you creep!

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      Ā·
      5 months ago

      Hereā€™s the whole thing from that great quote. Sorkin is not a hard-hitting interviewer, but he just asks the incredibly obvious questions and Suleyman swerves and dodges like a MF while pronouncing at him in an English listen-to-me-you-pleb voice.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      Ā·
      edit-2
      5 months ago

      Amazing claim considering there are I think about 10k cybertrucks in the world right now, and all of them are broken. Ok I admit, that is due to the wiper recall, but even if you ignore the wiper recall the amount of broken cybertrucks is massive.

      And ~0.5% of them have ā€˜Fuck Elon Muskā€™ written on them.

      E: Amazing. (The Cybertruck was released on Nov. 30. Today, Tesla announced it was recalling the vehicle for the fourth time, an impressive rough average of one recall every seven weeks. )[https://bsky.app/profile/charlescmann.bsky.social/post/3kvr3ahwc452h]

    • carlitoscohones@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      Ā·
      5 months ago

      I like the wet your finger and stick it up in the air forecasting model. OK - thereā€™s 1.5 billion pocket-sized iPhones - so letā€™s say 2 billion person-sized robots, you know,

      Iā€™m wondering about the supply chain issues just making the extra half billion robots, might be kind of a big deal. Are there enough rare minerals in the whole world to do this? Lithium batteries? Computer chips?

      Also, yeah, valuation based on revenue and not EBITA / profit margins, but whatever.

    • Jayjader@jlai.lu
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      Ā·
      5 months ago

      Lol. What, are we going to be installing Candy Crush on our robots? Expecting to be able to project recurring revenue from a humanoid robot based on smartphone numbers is a new kind of ignorance.

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      Ā·
      5 months ago

      we have internal confirmation that the rabbit team is aware of this leaking of api keys and have chosen to ignore it

      european regulatory clarity approaching at mach 5 (that is if they ever sold this thing in EU)

    • self@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      Ā·
      5 months ago

      we have internal confirmation that the rabbit team is aware of this leaking of api keys and have chosen to ignore it. the api keys continue to be valid as of writing.

      but of course. rabbitā€™s done pretending they give a fuck now that their shit flopped (not that they gave much of a fuck to begin with)

  • gerikson@awful.systems
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    14
    Ā·
    5 months ago

    The Death of the Junior Developer

    Steve Yegge goes hard into critihype, thereā€™s no need for any junior people anymore, all you need is a senior prompt engineer. No word on what happens when the seniors retire or die off, guess weā€™ll have AGI by then and itā€™ll all work out. Also no word on how the legal profession will survive when all the senior prompt engineerā€™s time is spend rewriting increasingly meaningless LLM responses as the training corpus inevitably degenerates from slurm contamination.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      Ā·
      edit-2
      5 months ago

      If I had a nickle for every time on June 27th 2024 Iā€™ve read someone argue that chatbots make lawyers obsolete Iā€™d have two nickles. Which isnā€™t a lot of money but itā€™s weird that it happened twice.


      As a ā€œseniorā€ programmer; my coworkers, even the newer ones are people. They can think. They are professional. I can describe problems to them and eventually get solutions, or at least sensible follow-up questions. I donā€™t have to baby them or ā€œprompt engineerā€ stuff I tell them. I can just sit back and drink my hot cocoa and occasionally try to sound distinguished while my juniors do all the hard work.

      Chatbros have discovered that you can get a chatbot to string together tutorials from the net into simple programs that almost work with some finangling. Somehow they never realized that you could always do this by web searching for ā€œsocket example I hate unix please make it gentleā€. Of course none of this generalizes to anything complex or not in the training set (read: anything that anyone will actually pay you to do), but the Chatbros donā€™t care because they were never doing real work in the first place.

    • flere-imsaho@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      11
      Ā·
      5 months ago

      this is such a sad slop. i wouldnā€™t guess itā€™s yegge, itā€™s so far from his style when he used to write himself.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      Ā·
      edit-2
      5 months ago

      Funny, as I also assume LLMs will cause the death of the Junior Developer, but not because the job dissapears, but because due to relying on LLMs devs never really build the skills to understand software and will suck so hard people will not hire them for the junion -> senior positions. And it gets even worse for the junior dev when the LLMs enshittify (either by the output degrading or the deal altering more and more pray they donā€™t alter the deal further).

      Guess the difference of opinion here is calling people who use LLMs junior devs vs calling them senior devs.

      Iā€™m oddly reminded of the person who used copilot to write a script to do something (which they offered to others), and didnā€™t know what http errors meant. (they just asked the LLM how to fix it).

        • Mike Knell@blat.at
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          9
          Ā·
          5 months ago

          @dgerard @Soyweiser I thought we were SREs now. At least, the message for years was ā€œSysadmins are useless shit now because they arenā€™t software engineers and hell, they donā€™t even call themselves engineersā€.

            • Mike Knell@blat.at
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              9
              Ā·
              5 months ago

              @dgerard Sometimes I feel like a hospital doctor whoā€™s worked in the clap clinic for decades and has had a series of name badges starting with ā€œVenereal Diseaseā€ and passing through ā€œSpecial Clinicā€ on the way to ā€œSexual Health Clinicā€. Same thankless job, just different labels.

              • rook@awful.systems
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                9
                Ā·
                5 months ago

                Same basic lessons, tooā€¦ ā€œconsider the risks of giving root privileges to people you just metā€, etc.

              • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                6
                Ā·
                5 months ago

                I donā€™t feel like any great shakes as a sysadmin, then I encounter someone with the same job title who has clearly never used a command line before

        • Soyweiser@awful.systems
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          8
          Ā·
          5 months ago

          Wait there are people who cannot use the command line. No wait again, donā€™t answer that please.

              • self@awful.systems
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                7
                Ā·
                5 months ago

                having seen the horror from a distance: VNC, a fuckton of clicking, occasionally mouse and keyboard macros, possibly a networked KVM (itself not a bad idea at all for emergency access to hardware too commodity or misdesigned to have a sensible serial console, but weā€™re talking day to day here), and a massive chip on their shoulder about being forced off their beloved Windows Server 2003 and onto Linux

                • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  6
                  Ā·
                  5 months ago

                  I have had the actually quite heartwarming experience of us hiring on a serious NT BOFH (someone who knows precisely how to wave a hammer at NT to intimidate it) and he sees how Linux does stuff and is trepidatious but eventually delighted

                  then there are others

                  iā€™m at like the pointy-clicky stage with NT admin and sometimes itā€™s just not enough, cos itā€™s Babbyā€™s First OS but with several layers of tentacles underneath

                • V0ldek@awful.systems
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  6
                  Ā·
                  5 months ago

                  How do they sysadmin a server that doesnā€™t have any display devices aside from the terminal then? Which in my experience is almost all of them?

  • V0ldek@awful.systems
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    13
    Ā·
    edit-2
    5 months ago

    Before: searching in Internet Explorer ā€œhow to install Chromeā€

    Now:

  • self@awful.systems
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    Ā·
    5 months ago

    no surprises here, Mozillaā€™s earlier stated goal of focusing on local, accessibility-oriented AI was just entryism to try to mask their real, fucking obvious goal of shoving integrations with every AI vendor into Firefox:

    Whether itā€™s a local or a cloud-based model, if you want to use AI, we think you should have the freedom to use (or not use) the tools that best suit your needs. With that in mind, this week, we will launch an opt-in experiment offering access to preferred AI services in Nightly for improved productivity as you browse. Instead of juggling between tabs or apps for assistance, those who have opted-in will have the option to access their preferred AI service from the Firefox sidebar to summarize information, simplify language, or test their knowledge, all without leaving their current web page.

    Our initial offering will include ChatGPT, Google Gemini, HuggingChat, and Le Chat Mistral, but we will continue adding AI services that meet our standards for quality and user experience.

    Iā€™m now taking bets on which of these vendors will pay the most to be the default in the enabled-by-default production version of this feature

    this is making me seriously consider donating to Servo, the last shred of the spirit and goals of a good, modernized Firefox-style browser remaining, which apparently operates on a tiny budget (and with a whole army of reply guys waiting to point out they might receive grants which, cool? they still need fucking donations to do this shit and Iā€™d rather give it to them than Mozilla or any other assholes making things actively worse)

    thinking back to when I first switched to Mozilla during the MSIE 7-8 days and actually started having a good time on the web, daily driving Servo might not be an awful move once Firefox gets to its next level of enshittification. back then, Firefox (once it changed its name) was incredibly stable and quick compared with everything else, and generally sites that wouldnā€™t render right were either ad-laden horseshit I didnā€™t need, or were intentionally broken on non-IE and usually fixable with a plugin. now doesnā€™t that sound familiar?

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      13
      Ā·
      edit-2
      5 months ago

      we think you should have the freedom to use (or not use) the tools that best suit your needs

      Thanks for giving me the freedom to not use the tools that best suit my needs, Mozilla!

      But seriously I hate how at some point techies decided they know whatā€™s best for the user instead of the user knowing that themself-- thereā€™s been a long trend of technology getting less customizable and less user friendly over time; and Firefox is not at all innocent.

    • blakestacey@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      Ā·
      5 months ago

      The smug presumption that any brand of spicy autocomplete is a viable tool ā€œto summarize information, simplify language, or test their knowledgeā€ is so fucking galling.

      • zogwarg@awful.systems
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        12
        Ā·
        5 months ago

        Itā€™s also insane to believe it should be a first class feature, when those who god forbid want to ā€œopt-inā€ could simply install a plugin.

        • self@awful.systems
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          10
          Ā·
          5 months ago

          according to Mozillaā€™s track record, theyā€™re making it a core feature so itā€™s impossible to remove without a custom fork, and theyā€™ll relentlessly goad the user into enabling it via ads pushed with every update. implementing it as a core feature also means they can easily infect the search bar and other core functionality with this horseshit

          weā€™ve also only got mozillaā€™s word that this shit can be disabled once itā€™s in production Firefox at all, and weā€™ve seen, repeatedly, how Mozillaā€™s AI team does with consent ā€” they use LLMs and marketing tactics to fabricate it

          • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            12
            Ā·
            5 months ago

            In the end they had 18481 words of notes to go through. Which is not nothing but also not that much. [ā€¦] Mozilla also seems to know. And they had an innovative solution: THEY HAD AN LLM SUMMARIZE THE NOTES TO REDUCE BIAS.

            It feels like the AI contingent lost the attention span to actually read stuff somewhere along the line. This isnā€™t the first time Iā€™ve seen this garbage approach. Of course here at awful.systems weā€™ve been innoculated against declining attention spans due to regularly having to read lesswrong dissertations.

            • blakestacey@awful.systems
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              10
              Ā·
              5 months ago

              To avoid confirmation bias and subjective interpretation, we decided to leverage language models for a more objective analysis of the data. By providing the models with the complete set of notes, we aimed to uncover patterns and trends without our pre-existing notions and biases.

              ā€¦ the Hell?

              • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                10
                Ā·
                edit-2
                5 months ago

                Yeah itā€™s wild. Even most AI grifters donā€™t outright try to claim that LLMs reduce bias (they know weā€™d laugh at them even harder than usual) so mozilla.ai is in deep.

          • froztbyte@awful.systemsOP
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            9
            Ā·
            5 months ago

            ah yes, flashbacks to when they bought pocket and instantly forced it on everyone

            where you had to remove the ui icon, untick shit in settings, and then STILL go into about:config to kill even more things there. which I just wanted to share, but then found that apparently at some point my old settings got nuked? or decommissioned or something? and others reinstated/introduced? because none of my changes for that are there anymore

            sigh

            also, their push to telemetry, to labs, to getting people to cohort into running things, them pushing selective bans on plugins because of legal pressure in countries, their absolutely fucking awful track record in spending their cashflow on utter and complete bullshit instead of actually improving the browser, ā€¦

            • earthquake@lemm.ee
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              5
              Ā·
              5 months ago

              go into about:config to kill even more things there. which I just wanted to share

              Well, looks like my custom pocket settings are preserved, if theyā€™re useful to anyone:

              browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.section.highlights.includePocket				false	
              extensions.pocket.api										0.0.0.0	
              extensions.pocket.enabled									false	
              extensions.pocket.onSaveRecs									false	
              extensions.pocket.settings.test.panelSignUp							v1	
              extensions.pocket.showHome									false	
              extensions.pocket.site										0.0.0.0	
              services.sync.prefs.sync.browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.section.highlights.includePocket	false
              
    • o7___o7@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      Ā·
      edit-2
      5 months ago

      Mozilla: Hey, weā€™re going to take you out to a restaurant and get you a burger, as a treat!

      The restaurant:

  • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    Ā·
    5 months ago

    You know what would be awesome is if there was a way to easily see new posts to a thread, like if the ā€œNewā€ button actually put New posts on top. Maybe lemmy truly is too janky for that but itā€™s a shame because I just start to ignore threads after a while.

    • antifuchs@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      Ā·
      5 months ago

      I recently learned there is a page showing just the comments of the communities you are subscribed to; that works for me because this space is so incredibly low-traffic, but I guess falls apart if you use that account to follow higher-traffic chatter.

  • slopjockey@awful.systems
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    Ā·
    5 months ago

    What do normal people - people who donā€™t pay for twitter, or sneer at rationalists - think of Twitter atp?

    Went on to Twitter (my mistake) after seeing Inside Out 2 because itā€™s the latest kidā€™s movie to feature [trope that I found passe that I canā€™t figure out how to spoil inline] and I see a post on my feed from ā€œHBD Chickā€.

    And Iā€™m like okay, that has to be ā€œhappy birthday, right?ā€. Nah, her third retweet is creamy porno redux.

    Just like all the other right wingers and embarrassingly enthusiastic neoliberals and occasional Musk fans, I donā€™t follow her or anybody that follows her, thereā€™s literally no connection or personal interest.

    I feel like the post Elon shift is really understated for how bad the siteā€™s gotten. Like I see more people talk about how Instagram reels is racist than I do about the average twitter replies section. I know a lot of left leaning people fled for bluer pastures, but Iā€™m surprised you donā€™t see more buzz about it from regular, non-power users.

    • V0ldek@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      Ā·
      5 months ago

      First of all, most of my ā€œnormalā€ acquaintances never used Twitter anyway.

      Most of the ones that did just quit when it got weird and dominated by useless suggestions and creepy ads.

      I had one friend last week in a group chat go ā€œTwitter is so racist nowadays innitā€, to which I said ye, why you still using it, and he responded ā€œyouā€™re rightā€ and stopped.

      • gerikson@awful.systems
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        12
        Ā·
        5 months ago

        Itā€™s pretty amazing that this so-called genius spent $44B on a company without apparently knowing anything about how the market it operates in (advertising) actually works.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systems
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          9
          Ā·
          5 months ago

          I assume some PR departments of potential advertisers saw that and went ā€˜lower the twitter spend more!ā€™, Iā€™m imaging the Futurama joke where Fry talks to investors while stock price tally is running live behind him.

          • gerikson@awful.systems
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            16
            Ā·
            5 months ago

            Twitterā€™s main issue is that itā€™s not really very big. It wasnā€™t big even pre-Musk. If you have the choice between advertising on a really big social network (Meta (=FB, IG, Whatsappā€¦)) with a functioning trust & safety team and ad brokers who take you seriously and donā€™t accuse you of being woke, and one which has way smaller reach, no T&S to speak of, and whose owner can use his outsized influence to call your CEO a pedo whenever the ketamine kicks in, the choice is clear.

    • gerikson@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      Ā·
      5 months ago

      I wish I knew any normal people so I could give input.

      Personally my Twitter pre-Elon was pretty curated. I never really ā€œgotā€ a big part of it unless it spilled over in other channels (I never heard of ā€œBlack people Twitterā€ on Twitter, only from Buzzfeed or similar). I also disengaged from US political Twitter hard after the 2016 election. So itā€™s possible I could still be using it and swearing over bots etc. without being overly affected, but I locked my account as an act of principle shortly after he took over.

      • carlitoscohones@awful.systems
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        Ā·
        5 months ago

        Same here - I had a very small universe curated for myself. I didnā€™t leave immediately, but when I did, there were a whole lot more weird ads and bots and stuff in my feed. I think that I only ever saw prĆøn once, and I was actually shocked that it even existed on Twitter.

    • slopjockey@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      Ā·
      5 months ago

      Note: all the talk I mention is online talk. Nobody in my irl life talks about social media dynamics ever, thank GOD

      • Soyweiser@awful.systems
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        Ā·
        5 months ago

        Only time non-online people I know IRL talk about it is when they ask me the most basic of basic stuff.