# Twtxt is an open, distributed microblogging platform that # uses human-readable text files, common transport protocols, # and free software. # # Learn more about twtxt at https://github.com/buckket/twtxt # # This is hosted by a Yarn.social pod Buccipod running yarnd 0.15.1@590ce93 2023-02-04T10:44:50+10:00 go1.19.5 # Learn more about Yarn.social at https://yarn.social # # nick = abucci # url = https://anthony.buc.ci/user/abucci/twtxt.txt # prev = whbdtwq twtxt.txt/1 # avatar = https://anthony.buc.ci/user/abucci/avatar#u6bggyxullhfycik3skwjuqepo7vydotetepz7vlwtkx2t53gkzq # description = Hi, I'm Anthony and I'm a computer scientist # # following = 72 # # link = About me https://bucci.onl/about.html # link = EIS Council Website https://www.eiscouncil.org # link = Home page https://bucci.onl/ # link = My Bandcamp collection https://bandcamp.com/amthonybucci # link = My GitHub Profile https://github.com/axb21 # link = My Google Scholar Page https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=deHJTNsAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao # 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follow = nixos-news https://feeds.twtxt.net/nixos-news/twtxt.txt # follow = nmke-de https://yarn.zn80.net/user/nmke-de/twtxt.txt # follow = notvantablack https://yarn.zn80.net/user/notvantablack/twtxt.txt # follow = novaburst https://twt.nfld.uk/user/novaburst/twtxt.txt # follow = obsidian-roundup https://feeds.twtxt.net/obsidian-roundup/twtxt.txt # follow = ocdtrekkie https://twtxt.net/user/ocdtrekkie/twtxt.txt # follow = phoronix https://feeds.twtxt.net/phoronix/twtxt.txt # follow = prologic https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt # follow = prx https://si3t.ch/twtxt.txt # follow = quark https://ferengi.one/twtxt.txt # follow = rrraksamam https://twtxt.net/user/rrraksamam/twtxt.txt # follow = screem https://twtxt.net/user/screem/twtxt.txt # follow = stats https://anthony.buc.ci/user/stats/twtxt.txt # follow = stigatle https://yarn.stigatle.no/user/stigatle/twtxt.txt # follow = stutteringsteve https://twtxt.net/user/stutteringsteve/twtxt.txt # follow = support https://anthony.buc.ci/user/support/twtxt.txt # follow = taigrr https://ndl.taigrr.com/user/taigrr/twtxt.txt # follow = tate https://twtxt.net/user/tate/twtxt.txt # follow = testuser https://anthony.buc.ci/user/testuser/twtxt.txt # follow = tkanos https://twtxt.net/user/tkanos/twtxt.txt # follow = tw https://astrid.tech/tw.txt # follow = votechess https://botsin.space/users/VoteChess # follow = will https://twtxt.net/user/will/twtxt.txt # follow = win0err https://kolesnikov.se/twtxt.txt # follow = xuu https://txt.sour.is/user/xuu/twtxt.txt # follow = ychbn https://twtxt.net/user/ychbn/twtxt.txt 2023-04-17T13:16:04Z (#pud4w2q) @ That has no relevance to the point! 2023-04-17T13:16:54Z (#pud4w2q) @ Cheers! I'm happy to agree to disagree too of course! Thanks for engaging! 2023-04-18T13:15:24Z On LinkedIn I see a lot of posts aimed at software developers along the lines of "If you're not using these AI tools (X,Y,Z) you're going to be left behind."

Two things about that:
1. No you're not. If you have good soft skills (good communication, show up on time, general time management) then you're already in excellent shape. No AI can do that stuff, and for that alone no AI can replace people
2. This rhetoric is coming directly from the billionaires who are laying off tech people by the 100s of thousands as part of the class war they've been conducting against all working people since the 1940s. They want you to believe that you have to scramble and claw over one another to learn the "AI" that they're forcing onto the world, so that you stop honing the skills that matter (see #1) and are easier to obsolete later. Don't fall for it. It's far from clear how this will shake out once governments get off their asses and start regulating this stuff, by the way--most of these "AI" tools are blatantly breaking copyright and other IP laws, and some day that'll catch up with them. 

That said, it is helpful to know thy enemy. 2023-04-18T14:39:32Z (#54piw5q) @ I would politely suggest again that we not react to people with bad attitudes who talk shit about yarn. If twt is forked, it should be forked to add features that are otherwise not possible. Not to appease people who will probably never be appeased. 2023-04-18T15:14:48Z (#lc7khva) @ yeah. I'd add "Big Data" to that hype list, and I'm sure there are a bunch more that I'm forgetting.

On the topic of a GPU cluster, the optimal design is going to depend a lot on what workloads you intend to run on it. The weakest link in these things is the data transfer rate, but that won't matter too much for compute-heavy workloads. If your workloads are going to involve a lot of data, though, you'd be better off with a smaller number of high-VRAM cards than with a larger number of interconnected cards. I guess that's hardware engineering 101 stuff, but still... 2023-04-18T15:46:24Z (#54piw5q) @ yes! 2023-04-19T13:07:55Z (#mk4mxkq) @ I'm a bit of a GPU junkie (😳) and I have 3, 2019-era GPUs lying around. One of these days when I have Free Time™ I'll put those together into some kind of cluster.... 2023-04-19T16:06:26Z [ChatGPT and Elasticsearch: OpenAI meets private data | Elastic Blog](https://www.elastic.co/blog/chatgpt-elasticsearch-openai-meets-private-data)

Terrifying. Elasticsearch is celebrating that they're going to send your private data to OpenAI? No way. 2023-04-19T23:37:31Z (#7p3yc2q) @ ack, I didn't see this before. Get well soon! 2023-04-21T16:05:46Z (#tvcahla) @ everyone's moving to gated communities! 2023-04-21T17:17:08Z (#tvcahla) @ this is alarmingly catchy 2023-04-21T20:05:28Z (#5lowz6q) @ yeesh, it's a for-pay company I wouldn't give them the output of your mind for free and train their AI for them. 2023-04-21T20:54:03Z (#5lowz6q) @ Who says you need to use anything like that? Where's the pressure coming from? 2023-04-21T21:00:10Z (#zyhzp7q) @ @ I also think it is best called fake. Art is created by human beings, for human beings. It mediates a relationship between two people, and is a means of expression. 

A computer has no inner life, no feelings, no experience of the world. It is not sentient. It has no life. There's nothing "in" there for it to express. It's just generating pixels in patterns we've learned to recognize. These AI technologies are carefully crafted to fool people into experiencing the things they experience when they look at human-made art, but it is an empty experience. 2023-04-23T13:03:02Z (#zyhzp7q) @ @ 

(1) You go to the store and buy a microwave pizza. You go home, put it in the microwave, heat it up. Maybe it's not quite the way you like it, so you put some red pepper on it, maybe some oregano.

Are you a pizza chef? No. Do we know what your cooking is like? Also no.

(2) You create a prompt for StableDiffusion to make a picture of an elephant. What pops out isn't quite to your liking. You adjust the prompt, tweak it a bunch, till the elephant looks pretty cool.

Are you an artist? No. Do we know what your art is like? Also no.

The elephant is "fake art" in a similar sense to how a microwave pizza is "fake pizza". That's what I meant by that word. The microwave pizza is a sort of "simulation of pizza", in [this sense](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation). The generated elephant picture is a simulation of art, in a similar sense, though it's even worse than that and is probably more of a simulacrum of art since you can't "consume" an AI-generated image the way you "consume" art. 2023-04-23T13:05:47Z (#5lowz6q) @ 
> I have to write so many emails to so many idiots who have no idea what they are doing

So it sounds to me like the pressure is to reduce how much time you waste on idiots, which to my mind is a very good reason to use a text generator! I guess in that case you don't mind too much whether the company making the AI owns your prompt text?

I'd really like to see tools like this that you can run on your desktop or phone, so they don't send your hard work off to someone else and give a company a chance to take it from you. 2023-04-23T13:14:38Z (#5lowz6q) @ @
> There is (I assure you there will be, don’t know what it is yet…) a price to be paid for this convenience.

Exactly prologic, and that's why I'm negative about these sorts of things. I'm almost 50, I've been around this tech hype cycle a bunch of times. Look at what happened with Facebook. When it first appeared, people loved it and signed up and shared incredibly detailed information about themselves on it. Facebook made it very easy and convenient for almost anyone, even people who had limited understanding of the internet or computers, to get connected with their friends and family. And now here we are today, where 80% of people in surveys say they don't trust Facebook with their private data, where they think Facebook commits crimes and should be broken up or at least taken to task in a big way, etc etc etc. Facebook has been fined many billions of dollars and faces endless federal lawsuits in the US alone for its horrible practices. Yet Facebook is still exploitative. It's a societal cancer.

All signs suggest this generative AI stuff is going to go exactly the same way. That is the inevitable course of these things in the present climate, because the tech sector is largely run by sociopathic billionaires, because the tech sector is not regulated in any meaningful way, and because the tech press / tech media has no scruples. Some new tech thing generates hype, people get excited and sign up to use it, then when the people who own the tech think they have a critical mass of users, they clamp everything down and start doing whatever it is they wanted to do from the start. They'll break laws, steal your shit, cause mass suffering, who knows what. They won't stop until they are stopped by mass protest from us, and the government action that follows.

That's a huge price to pay for a little bit of convenience, a price we pay and continue to pay for **decades**. We all know better by now. Why do we keep doing this to ourselves? It doesn't make sense. It's insane. 2023-04-23T14:52:19Z (#zyhzp7q) @ What do you mean when you say that art is a lie? 2023-04-23T20:54:23Z (#zyhzp7q) @ Animals have inner lives. Computers do not.

Are you really so desperate to make this point thst you're citing _Quora_??? Believe what you want to believe. 2023-04-23T20:56:47Z (#zyhzp7q) @ You are conflating "aiming your eyes at" with "viewing art". These are fundamentally different activities. 2023-04-23T20:59:10Z (#zyhzp7q) @ So a fiction novel, which is labelled "fiction", is a lie? I still don't understand. The word "lie" entails an intention to deceive, but fiction writing does not intend to deceive. 2023-04-25T21:04:20Z (#zyhzp7q) @ Made up is not the same as lie. That's obvious isn't it?!?! 2023-04-26T13:10:51Z (#pg5dg7q) @ wow this is horrifying. What happened to Opera? It used to be my favorite browser but now they're like that one cousin who started getting into drugs, and then got in trouble with the law, and then before you know it they're scamming old ladies out of their pension money. 2023-04-26T18:58:24Z (#ujrsmkq) @ That's a dissembling answer from him. Github is owned by Microsoft, and CoPilot is a for-pay product. It would have no value, and no one would pay for it, were it not filled with code snippets that no one consented to giving to Microsoft for this purpose. Microsoft will pay $0 to the people who wrote the code that makes CoPilot valuable to them.

In short, it's a gigantic resource-grab. They're greedy assholes taking advantage of the hard work of millions of people without giving a single cent back to any of them. I hope they're sued so often that this product is destroyed. 2023-04-26T19:08:15Z There is a "right" way to make something like GitHub CoPilot, but Microsoft did not choose that way. They chose one of the most exploitative options available to them. For that reason, I hope they face significant consequences, though I doubt they will in the current climate. I also hope that CoPilot is shut down, though I'm pretty certain it will not be.

Other than access to the data behind it, Microsoft has nothing special that allows it to create something like CoPilot. The technology behind it has been around for at least a decade. There could be a "public" version of this same tool made by a cooperating group of people volunteering, "leasing", or selling their source code into it. There could likewise be an ethically-created corporate version. Such a thing would give individual developers or organizations the choice to include their code in the tool, possibly for a fee if that's something they want or require. The creators of the tool would have to acknowledge that they have suppliers--the people who create the code that makes their tool possible--instead of simply stealing what they need and pretending that's fine.

This era we're living through, with large companies stomping over all laws and regulations, blatantly stealing other people's work for their own profit, cannot come to an end soon enough. It is destroying innovation, and we all suffer for that. Having one nifty tool like CoPilot that gives a bit of convenience is nowhere near worth the tremendous loss that Microsoft's actions in this instace are creating for everyone. 2023-04-28T18:06:14Z (#hylyega) @ ![](https://anthony.buc.ci/media/TK3nvMf72apzgFVdmCEdZ7.png) 2023-04-29T13:51:43Z [BlueSky is cosplaying decentralization](https://rys.io/en/167.html#)

> I say “ostensibly decentralized”, because BlueSky’s (henceforth referred to as “BS” here) decentralization is a similar kind of decentralization as with cryptocurrencies: sure, you can run your own node (in BS case: “personal data servers”), but that does not give you basically any meaningful agency in the system.

I don't know why anyone would want to use this crap. It's the same old same old and it'll end up the same old way. 2023-04-29T17:30:48Z (#645gw7a) I get that there are groups of people who don't have many good options besides Bluesky, so moistly this is griping about how bad social media is generally, and how the lousy people in charge continue to be in charge. 2023-04-30T17:52:13Z (#ru6tlia) @ yes, I agree. It's bizarre to me that people use the thing at all let alone pay for it. 2023-05-02T13:09:36Z (#jrfpcaa) @ using the phrase "machine learning" in this article is misleading and bandwagoning. They used a neural model, which neuroscientists were doing long before "machine learning" became a popular term. 2023-05-03T13:03:51Z I've seen BlueSky referred to as BS (as in **B**lue **S**ky, but you know...), which seems apt.

CEO is a cryptocurrency fool, as is Jack Dorsey, so I don't expect much from it. Then again I'm old and refuse to join any new hotness so take my curmudgeonly opinions with a grain of salt.

I read somewhere or another that the "decentralization" is only going to be there so that they can push content moderation onto users. They will happily welcome Nazis and fascists, leaving it up to end users to block those instances.

I wonder how they plan to handle the 4chan-level stuff, since that will surely come. 2023-05-03T14:04:35Z (#fghhzwa) @ I know very little about it, but speaking secondhand, it looks like there's a single centralized server now and they're still building the ability to federate? Like, the current alpha they're running is not field testing federation, which makes me think that's not a top priority for them. 2023-05-03T14:08:36Z (#fghhzwa) Do they legitimately believe that end users will encounter videos of gruesome murders, live streams of school shootings, etc etc etc, and be like "oh, tee hee hee, that's not what I want to see! I'd better block that!" and go about their business as usual?

No, they can't possibly be that foolish. They are going to be doing some amount of content moderation. Just not of Nazis, fascists, or far right reactionaries. Which to me means they want that content on there. 2023-05-03T14:49:24Z Looks like Google's using this blog post of mine without my permission. I hate this kind of tech company crap so much.

 ![](https://anthony.buc.ci/media/NjTvtPh9FVMHcXJhvs3vME.png) 2023-05-03T14:50:57Z (#eaewypq) There's a link to the blog post, but they extracted a summary in hopes of keeping people in Google properties (something they've been called out on many times).

I was never contacted to ask if I was OK with Google extracting a summary of my blog post and sticking it on the web site. There is a very clear copyright designation at the bottom of each page, including that one. So, by putting their own brand over my text, they violated my copyright. Straightforward theft right there. 2023-05-03T14:53:40Z (#eaewypq) I have no interest in doing anything about it, even if I had the time (which I don't), but these kind of thing happen all day every day to countless people. My silly blog post isn't worth getting up in arms about, but there are artists and other creators who pour countless hours, heart and soul into their work, only to have it taken in exactly this way. That's one of the reasons I'm so extremely negative about the spate of "AI" tools that have popped up recently. They are powered by theft. 2023-05-04T12:56:42Z [The Internet Isn't Meant To Be So Small | Defector](https://defector.com/the-internet-isnt-meant-to-be-so-small)

> It's annoying to see millions of dollars thrown at making more-or-less literal dupes of internet
companies that everyone is already using begrudgingly and with diminishing emotional returns. It's maybe more frustrating to realize that the goals of these companies is the same as their predecessors, which is to
make the internet smaller. 2023-05-04T13:09:54Z (#l4nwadq) @ 
- [12 Reasons Why No One Should Ever Listen to Jordan Peterson Ever Again](https://www.unikumnett.no/2019/10/12-reasons-why-no-one-should-ever-listen-to-jordan-peterson-ever-again/)
- [Why Jordan Peterson Is Always Wrong](https://jacobin.com/2020/04/jordan-peterson-capitalism-postmodernism-ideology)
- [Here's why Jordan Peterson is the f*cking worst.](https://oncanadaproject.ca/blog/jordan-peterson-is-the-worst): "his ideology quickly morphed into one that reinforces hatred, discrimination, and the oppression of marginalized groups"

- [ANGRY WHITE MEN MAR. 30, 2016
A History of Piers Morgan’s Terrible Opinions](https://www.thecut.com/2016/03/history-of-piers-morgans-terrible-opinions.html)
- [Shut Up, Piers](https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/02/piers-morgan-loses-cnn-show-the-british-host-was-rubbish.html)
- [Piers Morgan Is Now an Asshole of Record-Breaking Proportions](https://news.yahoo.com/piers-morgan-now-asshole-record-174057611.html)

You're posting Piers Morgan/Jordan Peterson videos lmao??? 2023-05-04T14:43:27Z (#l4nwadq) @ omg yes! They are both ultra-right-wing assholes! The worst of the worst! Please tell me you don't listen to these guys' brain poison? 2023-05-04T14:45:38Z (#l4nwadq) @ I've read half, skimmed the others. Mostly I was going for scale--look at all those headlines. These are horrible people who say horrible things on a regular basis. 2023-05-04T15:10:45Z (#l4nwadq) @ nah, not inclined to do that. The articles suffice--have a read of those when you get the chance. 2023-05-04T15:20:51Z (#h7gltfa) @ 
> Taking Jordan Peterson asn an example, the only thing he “preaches” (if you want to call it that) is to be honest with yourself and to take responsibility.

This is simply untrue. Read the articles I posted, seriously. 

In a tweet in one of the articles I posted, Peterson states there is no white supremacy in Canada. This is blatantly false. It is disinformation. Peterson has made statements that rape is OK (he uses "fancy" language like "women should be naturally converted into mothers" but unpack that a bit--what he means is legalized rape followed by forced conception). He is openly anti-LGBTQ and refuses to use peoples' preferred pronouns. He seems to believe that women who wear makeup at work are asking to be sexually harassed.

He's using his platform in academia to pretend that straight, white men are somehow the most aggrieved group in the world and everyone else is just whining and can get fucked. The patron saint of Men's Rights Activists and incels. I find him odious. 2023-05-04T15:23:12Z (#h7gltfa) @ Because they are rightwing assholes with a huge platform and they are literally *HURTING PEOPLE*. People get attacked because of things people like Shapiro and Peterson say. This is not just idle chitchat over coffee. They are saying things like it's OK to rape women (and NO I am not going to dig out the videos where they say that --that's up to YOU to do, do your own homework before defending these ghouls). 2023-05-04T15:24:18Z (#h7gltfa) @ It went there because you are supporting bad people who themselves operate at the level of outrage. You cannot have a "debate" about the ideas of someone like Peterson or Shapiro, *because those ideas should not be considered debate-worthy*. Rape is not OK, period, the end. It is not up for debate or discussion. Yet Peterson acts as if it is. That is abhorrent, and unacceptable in 2023. 2023-05-04T15:24:56Z (#h7gltfa) @ Maybe so, but that's not because of the people who are objecting to Jordan Peterson, that's for sure. You really need to read the articles I've posted before going there. Really. 2023-05-04T16:11:18Z (#h7gltfa) @ When you unpack what he's saying in that video (which I've watched, and just now re-watched), and strip away all his attempts to wrap this idea in fancy-sound language, he is saying: it would be better if women were viewed as property of men, because then if they were raped, the men who owned them would get mad and do something about it. Because rape would be a property crime then, like trespassing or theft. Left unspoken by him, but very much known to him, is that the man/men who "own" a woman can then have their way with her, just like they can freely walk around their yard or use their own stuff. In his envisioned better world, it'd be impossible for a husband to rape his wife, for instance, because she is his property and he can do almost anything he wants (that's literally what "property" is in Western countries).

It's so fucked up it's hard to put into words how fucked up it is. And this isn't the only bad idea who bangs on about! 2023-05-04T16:11:39Z (#h7gltfa) @ https://twitter.com/ardenthistorian/status/1625653951776292864?lang=en 2023-05-04T16:13:37Z (#h7gltfa) @ yeah man, of course! 2023-05-04T16:17:12Z (#h7gltfa) I may have misspoken in my haste/anguish. I don't know of any examples of Ben Shapiro advocating rape. I do know them of Jordan Peterson. He's known for that, but I've seen it myself. So, to be clear, I don't know if Ben Shapiro is a rape apologist and have no evidence of that. Wouldn't surprise me frankly because the set of ideas he does talk about tends to include being A-OK with crimes against women, but anyway. 2023-05-06T13:55:06Z (#f3xuata) @ nice 2023-05-07T16:22:22Z I am playing some ambient music that begins with a sound that's a bit like the drone of an airplane engine, and I spent a good minute or two adjusting the volume wondering why the music wasn't playing because I thought it was a plane🤦‍♂ 2023-05-08T11:45:19Z The weather all of a sudden went from chilly and wet to warm and pleasant. It's before 8am and it's already 15°C and sunny. 2023-05-08T12:50:02Z [Avalanche caught by FPV drone - Long range mountain surfing in 4k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nOKWF-UdTg)

Wild. 2023-05-09T12:11:57Z (#5pwcfqa) @ that could definitely be a track in an ambient song, no question whatsoever.

The exhaust is amazingly soothing to look at, even though it'd vaporize your entire being in milliseconds if you were anywhere near it. 2023-05-09T12:16:13Z (#ynqmela) @ LOL omfg.

This is the absurd logical endpoint of free market fundamentalism. "The market will fix everything!" Including, apparently, encroaching floodwater.

I do have to say though, after spending awhile looking at houses, that there are a crapton of homes for sale for very high prices (>$1 million) in coastal areas NASA is more or less telling us will be underwater in the next few decades. I don't get how a house that's going to be underwater soon is worth $1 million, but then I'm never been a free market fundamentalist either so 🤷 Maybe they're all watertight. 2023-05-09T12:21:31Z (#h7gltfa) @ hmm, dunno about the recency of that line of thought. I suspect though that given his (recent or not) history, if someone directly asked him "do you support rape" he would not say "no", he'd go on one of these rambling answers about property crime like he did in the video. Maybe I'm mind poisoned by being around academics my whole career, but that way of talking is how an academic gives you an answer they know will be unpopular. PhD = Piled Higher And Deeper, after all right? In other words, if he doesn't say "no" right away, he's saying "yes", except with so many words there's some uncertainty about whether he actually meant yes. And he damn well knows that, and that's why I give him no slack.

There are people in academia who believe adult men should be able to have sex with children, legally, too. They use the same manner of talking about it that Peterson uses. We need to stop tolerating this, and draw hard red lines. No, that's bad, no matter how many words you use to say it. No, don't express doubts about it, because that provides justification and talking points to the people *who actually carry out the acts*. 2023-05-09T12:22:01Z (#ogr5kya) @ @ I don't think I need Jesus. I need more sleep 😴 2023-05-09T12:59:17Z (#ynqmela) @ Yes, and you enjoy the best seafood every day if you want it! 2023-05-09T13:24:15Z (#rt3ekma) @ 
> Let’s assume for a moment that an answer to a question would be met with so many words you don’t know what the answer was at all. Why? Why do this? Is this a stereotype of academics and philosophers? If so, it’s not a very straight-forward way of thinking, let alone answering a simple question.

Well, I can't know what's in these peoples' minds and hearts. Personally I think it's a way of dissembling, of sowing doubt, and of maintaining plausible deniability. The strategy is to persuade as many people as possible to change their minds, and then force the remaining people to accept the idea because they think too many other people believe it.

Let's say you want, for whatever reason, to get a lot of people to accept an idea that you know most people find horrible. The last thing you should do is express the idea clearly and concisely and repeat it over and over again. All you'd accomplish is to cement people's resistance to you, and label yourself as a person who harbors horrible ideas that they don't like. So you can't do that.

What do you do instead? The entire field of "rhetoric", dating back at least to Plato and Aristotle (400 years BC), is all about this. How to persuade people to accept your idea, even when they resist it. There are way too many techniques to summarize in a twt, but it seems almost obvious that you have to use more words and to use misleading or at least embellished or warped descriptions of things, because that's the opposite of clearly and concisely expressing yourself, which would directly lead to people rejecting your idea.

That's how I think of it anyway. 2023-05-09T13:34:42Z (#rt3ekma) @ maybe it doesn't fool you, but it fools lots of people and has for thousands of years. That's why politicians (for instance) keep doing it. 2023-05-09T15:35:28Z (#rt3ekma) @ It's a fun challenge to see how many words you can say without expressing any ideas at all. Maybe this GPT stuff should be trained to do that! 2023-05-10T01:47:03Z (#5bl6sta) @ interesting, because some people are writing articles declaring the metaverse dead: https://www.businessinsider.com/metaverse-dead-obituary-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-tech-fad-ai-chatgpt-2023-5 2023-05-10T12:23:22Z (#5bl6sta) @ @ @ I love VR too, and I wonder a lot whether it can help people with accessibility challenges, like low vision. 

But Meta's approach from the beginning almost seemed like a joke? My first thought was "are they trolling us?" There's open source metaverse software like [Vircadia](https://vircadia.com) that looks better than Meta's demos (avatars have legs in Vircadia, ffs) and can already do virtual co-working. Vircadia developers hold their meetings within Vircadia, and there are virtual whiteboards and walls where you can run video feeds, calendars and web browsers. What is Meta spending all that money doing, if their visuals look so weak, and their co-working affordances aren't there?

On top of that, Meta didn't seem to put any kind of effort into moderating the content. There are already stories of bad things happening in Horizon Worlds, like gangs forming and harassing people off of it. Imagine what that'd look like if 1 billion people were using it the way Meta says they want.

Then, there are plenty of technical challenges left, like people feeling motion sickness or disoriented after using a headset for a long period of time. I haven't heard announcements from Meta that they're working on these or have made any advances in these.

All around, it never sounded serious to me, despite how much money Meta seems to be throwing at it. For something with so much promise, and so many obvious challenges to attack first that Meta seems to be ignoring, what are they even doing? 2023-05-10T12:41:05Z (#5bl6sta) @ I think those headsets were not particularly usable for things like web browsing because the resolution was too low, something like 1080p if I recall correctly. A very small screen at that resolution close to your eye is going to look grainy. You'd need 4k at least, I think, before you could realistically have text and stuff like that be zoomable and readable for low vision people. The hardware isn't quite there yet, and the headsets that can do that kind of resolution are extremely expensive.

But yeah, even so I can imagine the metaverse wouldn't be very helpful for low vision people as things stand today, even with higher resolution. I've played VR games and that was fine, but I've never tried to do work of any kind.

I guess where I'm coming from is that even though I'm low vision, I can work effectively on a modern OS because of the accessibility features. I also do a lot of crap like take pictures of things with my smartphone then zoom into the picture to see detail (like words on street signs) that my eyes can't see normally. That feels very much like rudimentary augmented reality that an appropriately-designed headset could mostly automate. VR/AR/metaverse isn't there yet, but it seems at least possible for the hardware and software to develop accessibility features that would make it workable for low vision people. 2023-05-10T15:24:18Z [Sam Wight :verified:: "Fucking Christ the @protocol i…" - Urbanists.Social](https://urbanists.social/@sam/110339902538138997)

Incredible critique of the protocol Bluesky is creating. It sounds like s shitshow. 2023-05-11T13:09:55Z (#d7vpcza) @ I've not looked into the Bluesky protocol, so I don't know what to think specifically. But this guy definitely is not impressed lol 2023-05-11T13:13:28Z My desktop computer developed a really annoying vibration-induced buzzing sound a few months ago after I added some hard drives to it. It was one of these where it'd be more or less quiet, and then all of a sudden a buzzing would start. If you tapped the case, it often made the buzzing stop.

One by one I went through my components, and the day before yesterday I finally identified the guilty party, one particular HDD. Currently I have the case open and a piece of cardboard jammed under the drive in its tray. The computer has not buzzed since I did that, so it looks to me like securing that drive better will finally end this madness-inducing sound.

Wild that it takes so long to track down something like this and figure out what to do about it. 2023-05-11T20:24:02Z In the "Ben Shapiro says bad stuff" department, here's some anti-semitism:
 ![](https://anthony.buc.ci/media/REVwEHrrB9Tzz5fq4pbpUG.png) 2023-05-12T12:13:22Z (#ldmieda) @ What? There's literally a "Religion, heritage, and values" section on his Wikipedia page. 2023-05-12T12:13:59Z (#d7vpcza) @ Oh? Tell me more if you feel up to it. 2023-05-12T12:16:15Z (#5bl6sta) @ I agree re: AR. Vircadia is neat. I stumbled on it years ago when I randomly started wondering "wonder what's going on with Second Life and those VR things" and started googling around. 

Unfortunately, like so many metaverse efforts, it's almost devoid of life. Interesting worlds to explore, cool tools to build your own stuff, but almost no people in it. It feels depressing, like an abandoned shopping mall. 2023-05-12T12:18:14Z (#2bmrx3q) @ I knew from the get go it was going to be an annoying thing to track down, which is was, but that made it take even longer because I avoided trying. 2023-05-12T12:18:57Z (#ldmieda) @ Yes. 2023-05-12T12:20:09Z (#ldmieda) his...I mean Sanders. I just checked Shapiro's Wikipedia page and his Jewish background is described there too. 2023-05-13T01:42:37Z (#pmcdfnq) @ lol I can't blame you 2023-05-13T15:36:45Z (#bivezxa) @ how many damn AI plugins does obsidian need? This shit is so annoying; it's sucking the oxygen out of every other development effort. 2023-05-14T12:58:12Z (#kcf4vrq) @ why do these fools think anyone wants "social meets payments"? It's such a ridiculous sounding idea. 2023-05-15T12:05:04Z [Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common | Science | AAAS](https://www.science.org/content/article/fake-scientific-papers-are-alarmingly-common)

Probably getting worse fast. 2023-05-15T12:17:56Z (#kcf4vrq) @ lol 😆 2023-05-15T15:39:00Z (#ekj2t6q) @ nice 2023-05-15T23:36:15Z (#3o6hhca) 😒 2023-05-17T10:35:55Z @ hello! Are you intending to post here? Because of issues with spammers, I delete users who have not posted any txts within a few days of signing up. 2023-05-17T16:15:18Z According to the [RedMonk programming language rankings from Jan 2023](https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2023/05/16/language-rankings-1-23/), Go and Scala are tied at 14th place 😏

1 JavaScript
2 Python
3 Java
4 PHP
5 C#
6 CSS
7 TypeScript
7 C++
9 Ruby
10 C
11 Swift
12 Shell
12 R
14 Go
14 Scala
16 Objective-C
17 Kotlin
18 PowerShell
19 Rust
19 Dart

 ![](https://anthony.buc.ci/media/X4pyKvmUfYw77FeFAEsnd5.png) 2023-05-18T12:37:52Z (#5yiy53a) @ I should have posted the more recent one from May, but the rankings are still pretty similar and Go and scala are tied still! 2023-05-19T01:29:58Z (#pjfe6ha) @ Google just sucks in every way it seems. 2023-05-19T11:49:26Z [Debt Collectors Want To Use AI Chatbots To Hustle People For Money](https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvjmm5/debt-collectors-want-to-use-ai-chatbots-to-hustle-people-for-money)

Starting to get ugly already. 2023-05-19T15:12:09Z [Pete Buttigieg Loves God, Beer, and His Electric Mustang | WIRED](https://www.wired.com/story/pete-buttigieg-interview-god-beer-electric-mustang/)

This is so embarrassing. I wonder how much Wired gets paid to sell off its editorial integrity. 2023-05-21T11:49:25Z (#mh2waua) @ doesn't sound like there has been much planning involved in the "planned power outage" if they can't tell you when the power will be out 🤦 2023-05-22T12:56:12Z (#o3jldpq) @ I was visiting Germany once, and saw a guy try to load his bicycle onto the bike racks they have on the front of city buses. There were rules about when you could do that, which were posted on the bus stop sign, and I guess the guy thought this was a time when he could do that. But no, the bus driver disagreed. The bus driver got off the bus *with a rule book*, flipped it open to what I guess were the rules about bikes on the bus, and showed him the rules. The guy pointed at the sign, the bus driver said no and pointed at the book, and they went back and forth for I don't know how long. It felt a lot like these videos lol 2023-05-23T13:11:26Z ![](https://anthony.buc.ci/media/7UFEZkm2RM5x3o4zwASFPG.png) 

This guy is just such an idiot lol.

- There's no such mass migration to "the south". Tons of people are leaving Mississippi, Louisiana, Virginia, and New Mexico for instance. I don't know enough about the states with net influxes like Texas and Florida but I suspect they have policies that make it attractive for people to move there
- Not everybody is able to take account of long-term trends when they make housing decisions. There are financial reasons, family reasons, educational reasons, etc that impact such decisions
- But of course, most laughably, cheap energy is fast becoming a thing of the past, and so the problem isn't "solved" by cheap energy, it's just kicked down the road. And ffs, cheap energy is literally causing the very heating that he pretends air conditioning will "solve"--like "solving" your drinking problem by staying drunk all the time

This oversimplification to drive some kind of political point is so embarrassing coming from someone who pretends to be a university professor. It sounds like a teenage doofus from a 1980s movie talking. He well knows all these things, but he decides to present these views anyway. 2023-05-26T10:17:41Z (#trgb2sa) @ 13th without a break??? 2023-05-26T12:39:08Z (#trgb2sa) @ eesh, that's rough! Hope you get a break soon. 2023-05-28T14:40:46Z (#jvh3w7q) @ I fully agree with this. As the well-worn saying goes, you cannot address social problems with technological solutions. 2023-05-28T14:43:47Z (#hx33uaa) @ You more or less need a data center to run one of these adequately (well, train...you can run a trained one with a little less hardware). I think that's the idea--no one can run them locally, they have to *rent* them (and we know how much SaaS companies and VCs love the rental model of computing).

There's a lot of promising research-grade work being done right now to produce models that can be run on a human-scale (not data-center-scale) computing setup. I suspect those will become more commonly deployed in the next few years. 2023-05-30T15:38:18Z I came across the phrase "long fuse, big bang" used to describe large-scale issues with tipping points facing humanity, like climate change, and it feels pretty apt. 2023-06-01T13:25:41Z (#zx7xowq) @ No. ChatGPT does not improve your code. Coding is thinking. You offloaded your thought to a machine. You will not be able to reproduce what the machine did for you if you don't have the machine, so you learned nothing. 2023-06-01T13:26:59Z (#xa73jea) @ `backintime` for my desktop and work files. A combination of `rsync`, `zfs` snapshots, and redundancy for "at rest" type things. 2023-06-01T14:47:29Z (#xa73jea) @ I clone the important stuff on two separate clusters, but both are in my house. One of these days I'm planning to ask my brother to put a server of mine in his house, and then we can cross-clone for offsite backups that don't require the cloud. 2023-06-03T15:45:57Z (#2qky3jq) @ Is that a jet flying over? People's priorities are fucked up. 2023-06-04T13:57:14Z (#2qky3jq) @ wow. I'd trade crow sounds for car sounds, or jet sounds, or leaf blower sounds, or lawn mower sounds, or.....100% of the time.

As far as fighting the birds goes, maybe they're right, but probably it'd be better to re-balance the ecosystem so that crows aren't so dominant? At least there are things to try. When it comes to reducing how much air travel people use, it takes a terrorist attack or a pandemic to affect it. 2023-06-04T14:00:24Z (#2qky3jq) @ @ I've always liked the sound of crows, and I really really hate the sound of motorized vehicles, so I also find it absurd. I've come to think that some people are at some level afraid of nature, and nature sounds remind them of it. 2023-06-04T16:51:38Z "Sam Altman’s AI Hype Roadshow"

"The project of Altman and his merry band of doomsayers appears to be to capture power and create obfuscation by making new myths and legends"

"It assumes that no one will pull back the curtain and expose it as a market-expansion strategy"

Yes.

[On Understanding Power and Technology](https://rachelcoldicutt.medium.com/on-understanding-power-and-technology-1345dc57a1a) 2023-06-05T15:36:58Z [Dear Stack Overflow, Inc.](https://openletter.mousetail.nl/)

Stack Overflow is being inundated with AI-generated garbage. A group of 480+ human moderators is going on strike, because:

> Specifically, moderators are no longer allowed to remove AI-generated answers on the basis of being AI-generated, outside of exceedingly narrow circumstances. This results in effectively permitting nearly all AI-generated answers to be freely posted, regardless of established community consensus on such content.
>
> In turn, this allows incorrect information (colloquially referred to as "hallucinations") and plagiarism to proliferate unchecked on the platform. This destroys trust in the platform, as Stack Overflow, Inc. has previously noted.

It looks like StackOverflow Inc. is saying one thing to the public, and a very different thing to its moderators. 2023-06-05T15:43:05Z (#65j7vzq) Seems to me you could write a script that:
- Parses a StackOverflow question
- Runs it through an AI text generator
- Posts the output as a post on StackOverflow

and basically pollute the entire information ecosystem there in a matter of a few months? How long before some malicious actor does this? Maybe it's being done already 🤷

What an asinine, short-sighted decision. An astonishing number of companies are actively reducing headcount because their executives believe they can use this newfangled AI stuff to replace people. But, like the dot com boom and subsequent bust, many of the companies going this direction are going to face serious problems when the hypefest dies down and the reality of what this tech can and can't do sinks in.

We really, really need to stop trusting important stuff to corporations. They are not tooled to last. 2023-06-06T13:03:05Z Russia blowing up the Nova Kakhovka dam is an incomprehensible war crime. Among other things, it drains water from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, water that is needed for cooling. They are trying to generate a widespread disaster. 

They *must* be stopped, immediately, without hesitation. This is unacceptable behavior, crossing every red line we have no matter our politics, without any doubt. 2023-06-06T13:07:05Z (#k5eii3q) This demands a response from Europe, the world, not just Ukraine. 2023-06-06T14:10:11Z (#k5eii3q) @ I said nothing about an international violent response. You added that 🤔 

If someone punches you in the face over and over again, you don't stand there and take it to avoid "begetting violence". You stop them from punching you, and do your best to ensure they never punch you again. That's not "violence begets violence". That's rationality. 2023-06-06T15:07:25Z (#k5eii3q) @ I don't agree. I think he's a thug who benefits a lot if everybody thinks he's a madman.

All through this war, there has been a repeated cycle:
- We can't give Ukraine weapon X; that will provoke Putin and he'll drop a nuke!
- Russian propagandists threaten they're about to drop nukes
- After lots of hand wringing, some country gives weapon X to Ukraine
- No nukes are dropped

We're on like the 5th iteration of this. Now it's about F-16 fighter jets. In the meantime, a lot of Ukrainians AND Russians are dying en masse. 2023-06-06T18:43:33Z (#k5eii3q) @ yeah, it's a horrible waste. 2023-06-07T13:05:01Z (#k5eii3q) @ I think I understand NATO's hesitation, but at the same time if this drags on and on for years then it causes massive loss of life and is even more dangerous for everyone. If that nuclear power plant melts down, whether because Russia causes it directly or because of an "accident", then all of Europe can be blanketed with fallout. The longer this goes on, the more likely that possibility (and worse ones!) becomes.

That is scary to be so close to Russia. I hope you're doing OK. 2023-06-07T13:06:18Z (#k5eii3q) @ I tried to call him but he wouldn't answer the phone 😞 2023-06-07T18:14:06Z (#k5eii3q) I found this to be a [good thread](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1666480705637851136.html) on the subject of how the media is covering the dam explosion. The author, Timothy Snyder, is a history professor at Yale and has consistently good commentary on the war in Ukraine. 2023-06-07T19:21:48Z [Crypto collapse? Get in loser, we’re pivoting to AI – Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain](https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2023/06/03/crypto-collapse-get-in-loser-were-pivoting-to-ai/)

Someone on here gave me a hard time when I suggested that the crypto grifters were pivoting to AI after crypto collapsed. But, they were and they still are. 2023-06-07T19:48:52Z [Asleep at the Keyboard? Assessing the
Security of GitHub Copilot’s Code Contributions](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2108.09293.pdf)

40% of code produced by GitHub Copilot has at least one well-known security vulnerability, in the test reported in this paper. 2023-06-07T19:54:06Z [GitHub and OpenAI fail to wriggle out of Copilot lawsuit • The Register](https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/12/github_microsoft_openai_copilot/)

Lawsuits alleging GitHub Copilot breached licenses can move forward. Will be interesting to see how these cases are decided. 

This is a fucked up detail:
> The judge meanwhile rejected the defense argument that the plaintiffs should not be allowed to continue their claim pseudonymously based on death threats sent to the plaintiffs' counsel.

Who is sending death threats to the lawyers of people trying to sue GitHub/Microsoft/OpenAI, and why? Something's fishy there. 2023-06-07T20:11:13Z [Sam Altman on Twitter: "a new version of moore’s law that could start soon: the amount of intelligence in the universe doubles every 18 months" / Twitter](https://twitter.com/sama/status/1629880171921563649)

The more I read from this guy, the more I come to believe he is a gigantic douchecanoe. What a profoundly stupid thing to say. 2023-06-08T12:46:08Z (#hriu5ca) @ hahaha definitely not 2023-06-08T12:46:41Z (#aere2za) @ I mean, I get that there are differences of opinion. But death threats? Who the hell is doing that? 2023-06-09T11:51:12Z (#6ykol7q) @ by far the weirdest plane: https://movq.de/v/863829c893/IMG_4912.JPG