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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago

good, use your excel spreadsheet and not a tool that fucking sucks at it

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago (2 children)

why do you think hallucinating autocomplete can make rules-based decisions reliably

AI analyses it, decides if applicant is entitled to benefits.

why do you think this is simple

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 day ago (2 children)

and of course, not a single citation for the intro paragraph, which has some real bangers like:

This process involves self-assessment and internal deliberation, aiming to enhance reasoning accuracy, minimize errors (like hallucinations), and increase interpretability. Reflection is a form of "test-time compute," where additional computational resources are used during inference.

because LLMs don’t do self-assessment or internal deliberation, nothing can stop these fucking things from hallucinating, and the only articles I can find for “test-time compute” are blog posts from all the usual suspects that read like ads and some arXiv post apparently too shitty to use as a citation

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

oh yeah, I’m waiting for David to wake up so he can read the words

the trivial ‘homework’ of starting the rule violation procedure

and promptly explode, cause fielding deletion requests from people like our guests who don’t understand wikipedia’s rules but assume they’re, ah, trivial, is probably a fair-sized chunk of his workload

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

this would explain so much about the self-declared 10x programmers I’ve met

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 day ago (4 children)

there’s something fucking hilarious about you and your friend coming here to lecture us about how Wikipedia works, but explaining the joke to you is also going to be tedious as shit and I don’t have any vegan nacho fries or junior mints to improve my mood

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 day ago (1 children)

also lol @

Vibe coding, sometimes spelled vibecoding

cause I love the kayfabe linguistic drift for a term that’s not even a month old that’s probably seen more use in posts making fun of the original tweet than any of the shit the Wikipedia article says

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago (3 children)

did you know: you too can make your dreams come true with Vibe Coding (tm) thanks to this article’s sponsors:

Replit Agent, Cursor Composer, Pythagora, Bolt, Lovable, and Cline

and other shameful assholes with cash to burn trying to astroturf a term from a month old Twitter brainfart into relevance

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago (13 children)

no thx, nobody came here for you to assign them tedious homework

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 days ago

fuck yeah! it’s a very solid start, and I appreciate the (is that clickbaity enough) in the thumbnail

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I like this a lot! the idea of buying a new (and usually quite expensive) device that intentionally does less has never really sat right with me, but repurposing old or secondhand devices with purpose-built software has always made quite a bit more sense.

to expand on the idea in hopefully not too much of a tangential direction, one very nice thing about repurposed hardware over new bespoke hardware is that if the repurposed device is running an open source software stack with resources to spare (which is often the case), you can extend the functionality of the device in ways that are specifically useful to you personally.

as a real-world example, when I set up a new computer for myself these days I usually start with Linux that boots straight into emacs, which is a very competent typewriter running on a kernel that supports most of the hardware I’ll throw at it and comes with a wide compatibility base and fairly minimal hardware requirements. next if I need to work with more complicated documents, I pull in X11 and go graphical. if I need applications, I pull in EXWM and now I have everything I need for a generalized computing environment. but there’s no need to go that far — and every step of the way, I can customize what I’m doing to fit my own needs.

I usually do all of the above on NixOS, but it feels like the general idea has possibly outgrown Nix, and it might do even better as a dedicated Linux distro targeting repurposed devices.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I decided to waste my fucking time and read the awful medium article that keeps getting linked and, boy fucking howdy, it’s exactly what I thought it was. let’s start with the conclusion first:

TLDR: my conclusion is that it is far more likely that Proton and its CEO are actually liberals.

which is just a really weird thing to treat like a revelation when we’ve very recently seen a ton of liberal CEOs implement fash policies, including one (Zuckerberg) who briefly considered running as a Democrat before he was advised that nobody found him the least bit appealing

anyway, let’s go to the quick bullet points this piece of shit deserves:

  • it’s posted by an account that hasn’t done anything else on medium
  • the entire thing is written like stealth PR and a bunch of points are copied straight out of Proton’s marketing. in fact, the tone and structure are so off that I’m just barely not willing to accuse this article of being generated by an LLM, because it’s just barely not repetitive enough to entirely read like AI
  • they keep doing the “nobody (especially the filthy redditors) read Andy or Proton’s actual posts in full” rhetorical technique, which is very funny when people on mastodon were frantically linking archives of those posts after they got deleted, and the posts on Reddit were deleted in a way that was designed to provoke confusion and cover Proton’s tracks. I can’t blame anyone for going on word of mouth if they couldn’t find an archive link.
  • like every liberal-presenting CEO turned shithead, Andy has previously donated a lot of money to organizations associated with the Democrats
  • not a single word about how Proton’s tied up in bitcoin or boosting LLMs and where that places them politically
  • also nothing about how powerless the non-profit associated with Proton is in practice
  • Andy can’t be a shithead, he hired a small handful of feminists and occasionally tweets about how much he supports left-wing causes! you know, on the nazi site
  • e: “However, within the context of Trump’s original post that Andy is quoting, it seems more likely that “big business” = Big Tech, and “little guys” = Little Tech, but this is not obvious if you did not see the original post, and this therefore caused outrage online.” what does this mean. that’s exactly the context I read into Andy’s original post, and it’s a fucking ridiculous thing to say and a massive techfash dogwhistle loud and shrill enough that everybody heard it. it’s fucking weird to falsely claim you’re being misinterpreted and then give an explanation that’s completely in line with the damning shit you’re being accused of, then for someone else to come along and pretend that somehow absolves you

there’s more in there but I’m tired of reading this article, the writing style really is fucking exhausting

e: also can someone tell me how shit like this can persuade anyone? it’s one of the most obvious, least persuasive puff pieces I’ve ever read. did the people who love proton more than they love privacy need something, anything to latch onto to justify how much they like the product?

 

after some extended downtime, I rolled out the following changes to our instance:

  • pict-rs was migrated to version 0.4 then 0.5. this should hopefully fix an issue where pict-rs kept leaking TCP sockets and exhausting its resources, leading to our image uploads and downloads becoming non-functional. let me know if you run into any issues along those lines!
  • NixOS was updated to 24.11.
  • the instance's storage was expanded by 100GB. this increased the monthly bill for our instance by €1.78 per month. to keep the bill low, I disabled an automated backup feature that became unnecessary when we started doing Restic backups.

I have one more thing I want to implement before our big Lemmy upgrade; I expect I should be able to fit it in tomorrow. I'll update this thread with details when I start on it.

 

since we’ve been experiencing a few image cache breakages, I’m scheduling some maintenance for January 24th at 8AM GMT to upgrade our pict-rs version, increase the total amount of storage available to our production instance, and do a handful of other maintenance tasks. this won’t include a lemmy upgrade, but I plan to do one soon after this maintenance round. I anticipate the maintenance should take around 2-4 hours, but will post updates on the instance downtime page and Mastodon if anything changes.

 

we have a WriteFreely instance now! I wrote up a guide to why it exists, why it's so fucking janky, and what we can do to fix it.

 

this is somewhat of a bigger update, and it's the product of a few things that have been in progress for a while:

email

email should be working again as of a couple months ago. good news: our old provider was, ahem, mildly inflating our usage to get us off their free plan, so this part of our infrastructure is going to cost a lot less than anticipated.

backups

we now have a restic-based system for distributed backups, thanks to a solid recommendation from @[email protected]. this will make us a lot more resilient to the possibility of having our host evaporate out from under us, and make other disaster scenarios much less lethal.

writefreely

I used some of the spare capacity on our staging instance to spin up a new WriteFreely instance where we can post long-form articles and other stuff that's more suitable for a blog. post your gibberish at gibberish.awful.systems! contact me if you'd like an invite link; WriteFreely instances are particularly vulnerable to being turned into platforms for spam and nothing else, so we're keeping this small-scale for instance regulars for now.

alongside all the ordinary WriteFreely stuff (partial federation, a ton of jank), our instance has a special feature: if you have an account, you can make a PR on this repository and once it's merged, gibberish will automatically pull its frontend files from that repo and redeploy WriteFreely. currently this is only for the frontend, but there's a lot you can do with that -- check out the templates, pages, less, and static directories on the repo to see what gets pulled. check it out if you see some jank you want to fix! (also it's the only way to get WriteFreely to host images as part of a post, no I'm not kidding)

what's next?

next up, I plan to turn off Hetzner's backups for awful.systems and use that budget to expand the node's storage by 100GB, which should increase the monthly bill by around 2.50 euros. I want to go this route to expand our instance's storage instead of using an object store like S3 or B2 because using block storage makes us more resilient to Hetzner or Backblaze evaporating or ending our service, and because it's relatively easy to undo this decision if it proves not to scale, but very hard to go from using object storage back to generic block storage.

after that, it'll be about time to carefully upgrade to the current version of Lemmy, and to get our fork (Philthy) in a better state for contributions.

as always, see our infrastructure deployment flake for more documentation and details on how all of the above works.

 

this post has been making the rounds on Mastodon, for good reason. it’s nominally a post about the governance and community around C++, but (without spoiling too much) it’s written as a journey packed with cathartic sneers at a number of topics and people we’ve covered here before. as a quick preview, tell me this isn’t relatable:

This is not a feel good post, and to even call it a rant would be dismissive of the absolute unending fury I am currently living through as 8+ years of absolute fucking horseshit in the C++ space comes to fruition, and if I don’t write this all as one entire post, I’m going to physically fucking explode.

fucking masterful

an important moderator note for anyone who comes here looking to tone police in the spirit of the Tech Industry Blog Social Compact: lol

 

this article is about how and why four of the world’s largest corporations are intentionally centralizing the internet and selling us horseshit. it’s a fun and depressing read about crypto, the metaverse, AI, and the pattern of behavior that led to all of those being pushed in spite of their utter worthlessness. here’s some pull quotes:

Web 3.0 probably won’t involve the blockchain or NFTs in any meaningful way. We all may or may not one day join the metaverse and wear clunky goggles on our faces for the rest of our lives. And it feels increasingly unlikely that our graphic designers, artists, and illustrators will suddenly change their job titles to "prompt artist” anytime soon.

I can’t stress this point enough. The reason why GAMM and all its little digirati minions on social media are pushing things like crypto, then the blockchain, and now virtual reality and artificial intelligence is because those technologies require a metric fuckton of computing power to operate. That fact may be devastating for the earth, indeed it is for our mental health, but it’s wonderful news for the four storefronts selling all the juice.

The presumptive beneficiaries of this new land of milk and honey are so drunk with speculative power that they'll promise us anything to win our hearts and minds. That anything includes magical virtual reality universes and robots with human-like intelligence. It's the same faux-passionate anything that proclaimed crypto as the savior of the marginalized. The utter bullshit anything that would have us believe that the meek shall inherit the earth, and the powerful won't do anything to stop it.

 

we’ve exceeded the usage tier for our email sending API today (and they kindly didn’t email me to tell me that was the case until we were 300% over), so email notifications might be a bit spotty/non-working for a little bit. I’m working on figuring out what we should migrate to — I’m leaning towards AWS SES as by far the cheapest option, though I’m no Amazon fan and I’m open to other options as long as they’ve got an option to send with SMTP

 

after the predictable failure of the Rabbit R1, it feels like we’ve heard relatively nothing about the Humane AI Pin, which released first but was rapidly overshadowed by the R1’s shittiness. as it turns out, the reason why we haven’t heard much about the Humane AI pin is because it’s fucked:

Between May and August, more AI Pins were returned than purchased, according to internal sales data obtained by The Verge. By June, only around 8,000 units hadn’t been returned, a source with direct knowledge of sales and return data told me. As of today, the number of units still in customer hands had fallen closer to 7,000, a source with direct knowledge said.

it’s fucked in ways you might not have seen coming, but Humane should have:

Once a Humane Pin is returned, the company has no way to refurbish it, sources with knowledge of the return process confirmed. The Pin becomes e-waste, and Humane doesn’t have the opportunity to reclaim the revenue by selling it again. The core issue is that there is a T-Mobile limitation that makes it impossible (for now) for Humane to reassign a Pin to a new user once it’s been assigned to someone.

 

as I was reading through this one, the quotes I wanted to pull kept growing in size until it was just the whole article, so fuck it, this one’s pretty damning

here’s a thin sample of what you can expect, but it gets much worse from here:

Internal conversations at Nvidia viewed by 404 Media show when employees working on the project raised questions about potential legal issues surrounding the use of datasets compiled by academics for research purposes and YouTube videos, managers told them they had clearance to use that content from the highest levels of the company.

A former Nvidia employee, whom 404 Media granted anonymity to speak about internal Nvidia processes, said that employees were asked to scrape videos from Netflix, YouTube, and other sources to train an AI model for Nvidia’s Omniverse 3D world generator, self-driving car systems, and “digital human” products. The project, internally named Cosmos (but different from the company’s existing Cosmos deep learning product), has not yet been released to the public.

 

so Andreessen Horowitz posted another manifesto just over a week ago and it’s the most banal fash shit you can imagine:

Regulatory agencies have been green lit to use brute force investigations, prosecutions, intimidation, and threats to hobble new industries, such as Blockchain.

Regulatory agencies are being green lit in real time to do the same to Artificial Intelligence.

does this shit ever get deeper than Regulation Bad? fuck no it doesn’t. is this Horowitz’s attempt to capitalize on the Supreme Court’s judiciary coup? you fucking bet.

here’s some more banal shit:

We find there are three kinds of politicians:

Those who support Little Tech. We support them.

Those who oppose Little Tech. We oppose them.

Those who are somewhere in the middle – they want to be supportive, but they have concerns. We work with them in good faith.

I find there are three kinds of politicians:

  • those who want hamburger. I give them hamburger.
  • those who abstain from hamburger. I do not give them hamburger.
  • those who have questions about hamburger. I refer them to the shift supervisor in good faith.
 

it can’t be overstated how important the Nix evaluator is to the Nix ecosystem; it implements the Nix language and package manager, maintains the store, has a hand in the low-level workings of every Nix tool, and is the focus of the push by Eelco and friends to commercialize Nix and keep it appealing to military-industrial interests.

all of the above is why I joined the Aux CLI SIG, which focuses on maintaining a fork of the Nix evaluator for the Aux ecosystem. but just now I saw the announcement for Lix, a Nix evaluator fork that focuses on modernizing the codebase (including gradually replacing C++ with Rust), maintaining correctness (something the upstream evaluator has been notoriously struggling with lately), and doing right by its community. I found myself nodding along to their description of the project and feeling something I haven’t felt since I read the open letter — I’m finally feeling excited for the future of the technology behind Nix.

I have no idea if Lix will become Aux’s chosen evaluator fork, though the Aux CLI SIG can help determine that collectively (and I’ll have many more details on Aux in a post later tonight). here’s what’s truly exciting though: by following Lix’s install steps and pulling auxpkgs-unstable, we can have a package ecosystem and NixOS fork that’s completely independent of the Nix community, and we can have it right now. I’m so excited by that news that I’m going to spin up a host just to give Lix+auxpkgs a try later tonight.

here’s the Aux thread about Lix; so far, there’s a lot of high-level support and excitement for using it as Aux’s evaluator.

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