I listened to one of my coworkers using an LLM on their phone to pass an annual review. (Phishing/Spam/etc.) They are really smart. Like almost unicorn rarity smart. The review is a little challenging, but not that hard. You just have to think a bit. It worried me.
God. I get so tired of this.
It's not "take a different tact"
It's "take a different tack"
It comes from boats, not etiquette! It means changing course! Why in the world would "tact" even make sense in any context one would be using this phrase? It wouldn't!
(Closes laptop, goes to bed in disgust)
Gentle reminder, when someone is sharing some small piece of resistance they have done, DO NOT SHIT ON IT. Do not tell them it isn't enough or it's still bad because blah blah other stuff...
Everyone is tired and overwhelmed and trying to find some accessible way they can push back. Cheer that!
Celebrate the small; celebrate the imperfect.
No single action is gonna solve everything, but a whole bunch of small actions start the sea change.
Don't punch down when we all need lifting up.
"Tomorrow is always better because it means you lived through today." - Dr Beaver p123
Tasty fruit, or deadly poison?
- Iroh, probably
😄
I forgot how punny this book is. Today's reading is...
Robert Frezza's _McLendon's Syndrome_ more vampires in space!
"The Fasted and the Furious"
ANACKIRE (1983)
Acrylic on Illustration Board - 28” x 18”
Tanith Lee had a gift for visual writing:
"The lowland girl seemed to contain fire. Her hair stirred, flickered, gushed upward, blowing flame in a wind that did not blow. 1/4
HN discussion on France's telemarketing ban
Yesterday's discussion impressed me with the number of comments indicating total rejection of the mainstream direct-dial phone network (PSTN: Public Switched Telephone Network), by which I mean not merely landlines but mobile and (compatible) VOIP/SIP systems. Spam calls, once largely confined the the US and a few other countries, are spreading.
Comment highlights:
Telemarketers have ruined the phone network for me. I haven't answered an unknown call for the past 10 years, which sometimes means I miss important ones.
I stopped picking up unsolicited unknown calls perhaps a decade ago... It was impossible, however, to convince my 99-year-old grandma to do the same; she vehemently refuses because that would be 'impolite'.
In Brazil no one uses common phone lines anymore because, in part, of the telemarketers and scams calls.
All modern media has evolved technically (and financially) to benefit the producer (the talker). All at the expense of the consumer (listener). Make outgoing bandwidth cost per instance and you’ll see a reduction/optimization of the production. When signal is free to produce, you end up with a lot of noise.
Unless you can block illegal unsolicited scam/marketing calls, the medium of phone calls is dead to me.
In America we have amazing, reliable communication systems (postal, sms, email, telephone) that are rendered horribly degraded in terms of their actual usability because we allow them to be clogged with filth.
Using the web is basically impossible without an ad blocker, and having a phone is basically impossible without a call blocker.
Spam calls killed telephony. The greed of phone companies allowed it to happen.
The only way to enforce this is letters of marque.
The telephone, like postal mail, email, http and a myriad of other protocols suffers from a lack of transaction costs.
Also the suggestions similar to my telco liability/bonding proposal:
The only effective way to police this is to make the telco accountable and have a reporting system.
The way to solve this is to forcibly draft the providers into this; [reporting phone spam] will have the effect of crediting $5 on your next phone bill, and allows the provider to recoup that loss from the originating provider, etc, all the way to the caller itself.
@futurebird Somewhere in my boxes of books, I have a book my journalism internship advisor gave me that chronicled the history of the washington press corps, and how most of them have always done anything the white house wants just to maintain access.
That was kind of an eye-opener when I first read that as a fresh graduate
most people who are into writing systems are not into computers and vice-versa. so Unicode drama was a very particular kind of hobby drama. most of you have no idea how funny the current situation is.
see, it gets pretty tricky to define what's a "character" across every writing system in the world. for 20 years, Unicode had very strict rules about what gets into the standard: no "rich text" or "graphical variations", only "plain text abstract characters" are defined. you might think that "A" is a big pointy wedge with an horizontal stroke but from the point of view of Unicode, "A" is a number (65) and a name ("LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A") and some properties ("Letter", "Uppercase", "Narrow", "Left-to-right"). the facts that "A" is usually this triangley thing, but in some styles A looks more like a round oval with a tail, and in blacktext A looks more like an U shape—all that mean nothing to Unicode. all of those are merely graphical variations ("glyphs") of 65, LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A.
this gets of course fuzzy at the edges. The character 骨, "bone", can be written with the top component facing left, or facing right. This is unarguably a "graphic variation"—it's still the same "abstract character"—so Unicode leaves that for the font to decide. Unfortunately it has become custom in the modern era (but not in historical texts) that mainland China draws it to the left, whereas Japan and Taiwan and the others do it to the right. This means that when people changed their systems from legacy encodings to Unicode, suddenly their characters would be drawn in the hated Chinese way / the hated Japanese way, and since Unicode is a "foreign imposition" they would blame foreigner ignorance of their cultural nuances. In fact the Unicode hànzì team was made of specialists from East Asia and the reasoning for this bug was perfectly logical for nerds: if your system is set to Japanese it should be using Japanese fonts with the glyph to the right, it's not our fault if Microsoft/Linux/etc. is getting the wrong fonts. but in your legacy system it would "just work" and look right; upgrade to Unicode, problems happen. the dorks at Unicode would have endless discussions over this and reject the idea of adding "Chinese 骨" and "Japanese 骨" as different characters because that's technically Wrong, these are the same abstract character.
multiply that by a thousand. imagine 20 years of strict gatekeeping like this, with people constantly proposing new characters from this and that source and the guardians of Unicode rejecting them because they can be understood as merely graphical variations of existing characters, or as too obscure to be worthy encoding, etc. (it took so long to get hentaigana into Unicode, like ~8 years between proposal and finally having the characters encoded! you can't represent any premodern manuscripts without it!)
--
then Japanese people start making cellphones with Internet, before everybody else.
and they put "picture" (e) "characters" (moji) because they're cute. each company makes their own emoji set, incompatible on purpose so you have to buy into their special, incompatible little internets.
see, the only situation where Unicode would make exceptions to their strict gatekeeping was "round-trip compatibility". a character like ª is just an especially typeset 'a' and thus should not count as an abstract character. but some previous text encodings like ISO-8859-1 already had an 'ª' separated from 'a'. so if you converted a text file from ISO-8559-1 and Unicode had no 'ª', it would become 'a', and now you can't distinguish it from regular 'a', so there's no way to convert it back to ISO-8859-1. you cannot "round-trip" between encodings. so in this case and in only ☝️ this case, the Consortium would allow breaking the usual gatekeeping rules, carefully and case-by-case.
then a guy from Google asked to add all the Japanese emoji from every vendor. after all, without that you couldn't represent Japanese meeru messages in Unicode and convert them back. the Consortium obviously refused all those silly pictures as out of scope. so Google teamed up with Apple and kinda highkey threw their weight, financially and otherwise, transparently because they wanted this feature in the nascent smartphone consumer culture, and powerful interests completely overrode the cabal of writing hobbyists who had hitherto kept Unicode so pure. after years of elaborate technical criteria refusing tons of characters that people proposed for serious use, Unicode 6 (2010) included the first set of emoji.
fast forward to now, and all of those Unix greybeards and linguistics associates just nod sadly in a corner from the purely ceremonial Consortium chairs at whatever Big Tech mandarins came up with this year, like, "yeah sure that's what we need, U+1FAE9 FACE WITH BAGS UNDER EYES , whatever. U+1FAC8 HAIRY CREATURE , why not at this point."
Le toujours formidable Cory Doctorow aka @pluralistic à propos de la bulle de l'ia et du risque fasciste de la crise économique qui vient
#ia #ai
#nightmareOnLLMstreet
#Aibubble
#LateStageCapitalism
#Fascism
🌍$💀
There are practical reasons to never leave an unattended crystal ball un-covered and they have to do with optics and fire.
But on a deeper, spiritual level, we should bring back the habit of putting dust covers over smart devices.
RE: https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/117122488745257105
I'd welcome any thoughts you have on this, even if unstructured.
There should be reasoning and a line of argumentation, not just "it's unethical".
I'm interested in the why a specific thing about it is (e.g. "data centers are unethical because of pollution and water use", or "generating text and serving it to humans as your own is unethical because it's deceitful").
It could also be counter-examples, like "generating code that's verified through testing and based on training data from open source projects is not unethical."
(These are just examples which you may or may not agree with, it's not the point.)
“Can you explain the odd gaps in your résumé?”
“Your HR department wanted it in Microsoft Word format.”
If you want to learn more about the super El Niño now unfolding, Carbon Brief has produced interactive maps, charts and other graphics that break down how El Niño reshapes global weather patterns and why the ongoing event could be the most intense on record. 👇
https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/el-nino-explainer/index.html
My favorite instrument
Parents livid at apparently AI-generated materials given to students, full of errors
How do you use the Fediverse, Mastodon? On your phone with an app or the browser on your computer or laptop?