I just got out of You Can See Everything, about Elizabeth Holmes/Theranos, going in with no background. It was a riiiiide, pushes new boundaries in filmmaking. I haven’t seen this many people standing around discussing a movie since Fight Club. Definitely a unique experience in documentaries.
I just got out of You Can See Everything, about Elizabeth Holmes/Theranos, going in with no background. It was a riiiiide, pushes new boundaries in filmmaking. I haven’t seen this many people standing around discussing a movie since Fight Club. Definitely a unique experience in documentaries.
I think the thing that frustrates me the absolute most about American society is that nobody can ever really feel like they can just not work for any length of time because every last iota of human existence has been assigned a dollar value.
All those people that blather about other people "not wanting to work" are just the poor suckers who are too blinded by their own chains to see the truth. It's not that people don't want to work or don't want to do anything -- it's just that capitalism has made it so that they can't do what they want or what they would because it likely doesn't make them enough money to live on. And that required dollar amount keeps going up and up and up.
There's a lot of things I would do, even for a short amount of time, to help out my neighbors and my community if I didn't have to constantly worry about the fact that every minute I spend working has to have a certain monetary level attached to it so that I can continue to live and somebody, somewhere, has decided that the things I would do or could do aren't worth enough money for me to do.
It's so exhausting. Everything costs, all the time.
There's this petition being promoted by a growing number of youtube channels which I find really misleading:
At the top level, it's promoted as being about "keeping humans in control of AI". If you look just a little deeper, however, the effort is being supported by the "Center for AI Safety".
Read a little bit on their website and you'll find that the most recognizable signatories on their other statements are industry insiders like Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Geoff Hinton.
The research they conduct is centered around unscientific topics like "AI Wellbeing", which basically means making sure that language models aren't exposed to tasks which would hurt their non-existent feelings.
A lot of the content creators signing this petition genuinely seem opposed to AI slop and the aggressive buildout of data-centers. I doubt they realize that they're aligning themselves with the owners of the companies behind all that nonsense.
It’s my birthday today. First birthday since my mom died so it felt weird not getting a call some time in the day with her excitedly singing happy birthday to me. If you’ve got a good relationship with one or both of your parents, I hope you get to talk to them soon. If not, well I certainly understand and spent a long time feeling not great about them as well, but I’m glad we had some repair in the last few years.
If you wanted to do something nice to celebrate my birthday, I’d love it if you could go donate to the Blue Ridge Abortion Fund: https://blueridgeabortionfund.org/donate/.
They do a lot of good for the local community in my little slice of this planet. But it certainly doesn’t have to be this. Go donate to a cause that matters to you, or donate your time, or even just talk about something that matters to you and help educate others. It’s all good.
I’ve read today a contributor to an open source project says, in substance: "If generated code is accepted in the project, I will stop contributing because I don’t want to spend time trying to understand the code in order to contribute just to see it changed the next generated commit".
Accepting generated code, even with mild rail guards, is a Pandora box way scarier than you think.
It is not a question of purity, it is a question of keeping your project alive.
People are like "let's fork Linux", "let's make a new OS", or "let all switch to BoobsBSD" kinda need to chill tho.
It is a very common misconception of software especially pervasive amongst coders, that you can just whip up any sort of software package at a whim and build something equivalent to the existing, enduring packages.
Software is a social infrastructure not a product, it is built up over time, it's additive, and accumulative. It slowly accumulates features, edge cases, users, expertise, experts, social purchase, a literature of documentation, help, user/developer's public discussions, and similar.
Something like an OS or a big app also accumulates addons, apps, drivers, extensions, or whatever else they might be called.
When you say "let's make a new Linux", it's like saying the metro sucks let's build a new one. Let's use city X's trains to go to our jobs at city Y that we live in. Let's switch to horse drawn carts instead of the metro.
People would protest if the municipality just decided that they'd trust unpaid teenager interns to drive all public transport vehicles. You wouldn't dream of setting up an entire new transport network because (1) the existing one is YOURS it's a public good, and (2) it's fucking impossible are you insane?
But when it comes to software it feels like it's this simple and easy trivial thing. It's perhaps the exact same mindset that trusts it to LLMs: it's insubstantial and easy, why worry!? Well cos it's fucking not, that's why.
A US appeals court upheld a ruling that AI legal research company Ross Intelligence had broken copyright law by training its legal search engine on proprietary data harvested by their bots, a ruling which presages doom for all AI programs
(I will take goofy as long as it is not self-aware and features Milla Jovovich being a badass.)
The new Resident Evil movie was just straight up goofy. Comedy with some very predictable jump scares. The choice of making the main enemies these weird katamari people rolling things from a game I have never played was just too distracting and a deliberately ridiculous choice. I expect a lot of folks will love it but it was very much not my cup of tea.
This is the dumbest fucking timeline. #dopplegangland
Happy Birthday to Al Jourgensen, who single-handedly makes up half of all Industrial bands. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJqMX1VeFsU
"The people holding up the internet"
A good-looking but somewhat depressing exposé about the people holding up current digital infrastructure as a hobby.
Holy shit.
What are the big nerds buying for their subscription-free outdoor security cameras?
I just got my shiny new #FilthyHumanHands button from the inimitable, amazing, and wonderful @RussSharek !!! I probably will wear it out, but for now it takes a place of prominence near some other things I love dearly.
Learn how to get your own here: https://mastodon.art/@RussSharek/117325393188589023
A while back, @Algot mailed me a box filled with what can be described as "filthy human swag" to thank us for creating the #FilthyHumanHands License.
Inspired by this generosity, I reached out to folks using the license and arranged to mail them a button or magnet to thank them for playing with the thing we made.
I've also covered our toolboxes and fridge. :)
And yet...we still have some left!
If you create something using the fhh, let me know and I'll send you one.