"Hello use our AI research tool, that takes up 60% of the page that contains the document that you want to see."—JSTOR
What the fuck is a research tool? "Research tool" is a fucking category, not a thing. You can't use a category. The shit is so futile and useless and amorphous slop that you can't even define what it is, you gotta call it a "research tool".
Dear "AI" idiots,
a "tool" is a thing with a purpose, and it is built for that purpose. The tool makes it easy—ideally, easier than without the tool—to achieve that purpose.
A generic slop shitter _is not_ a tool. If you think it is, you're an ignorant fuck who's not worth spit.
Everybody else other than you have shit to do. Get out of the way. Get in the fucking sea.
Yes, YES! I've wanted this for ages!
RE: https://infosec.exchange/@prism/117454482069661801
I didn't experience this but something along similar lines: I had installed Office on my Win 10 machine with my uni's licence and unbeknownst to me it had logged the whole OS in to the fucking thing and was almost attempting to upload all my PERSONAL files to the OneDrive associated with the uni account.
Thankfully it was a VM I used to test things out or something and this absurd bollocks didn't happen, but it's incredibly stupid and reckless and inimical and fucking diabolical in a way.
Also my biggest pet peeve is MS Office refuses to do version control without OneDrive. Wasn't the case, is now. Isn't a necessity for LibreOffice.
Hello postor syndrome, I'm dad
I mean cash does flow into the pockets of that faux leather jacket now there's that
RE: https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/117446903957455880
dreams: AI-accelerated workflows
reality: AI-decelerates work, not much flows
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.
This is carbon footprint ass bollocks but what can you teach computer touchers.
You won't switch-to-FOSS your way out of capitalism.
Also whenever this kind of thing comes up people begin circulating bullshit about FOSS sludge but those piles of garbage are replacing proper software suites or in fact casual "end user" apps when "AI" replaces all jobs.
Those "FOSS alternatives" are both too basic for professional tasks and too complex and obtuse for desktop user tasks. They squarely, exclusively, and intentionally target the kind of person who knows what a "config file" is. And most people aren't that.
RE: https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/117435629865309962
AI stands for Absolute Idiocy. We're fucking swimming in it.
RE: https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/117401666800260862
There's so much vulnerability scaremongering around now. Software has bugs. Software has vulnerabilities. In fact all software is definitionally insecure per the physical realities of computing. We do what we can (much less than the best we can, thanks economy :/ ) within those confines.
Vulnerabilities also don't really matter, RCE don't matter. Most "hacking" is social engineering.
We've completely lost sight of what computers are, how they work, what they're good for.
RE: https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/117390225782096263
Papa: cc¹, ne
___
¹ chacchinatio clamorosa²
² I don't Latten, actually
RE: https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/117382481261112688
Coders going slop is not a random thing it's a pattern of behaviour that has its roots in class. Coding has always essentially been putting on a pretty face atop the products of immense labour abuse elsewhere in the world where nobody sees it. Open source has always been a massive source of free labour for the software/tech sector. LLMs are just another mode of extraction from all these sources. It's all just old habits for labour aristocracy.
The other one of these gates in this station has cat food in its tray usually
“Security”
I remember liking this article. Would I, now, no idea. It was a different time, when absurd tech shite was hidden in the craven minds of the human slop in Silicon Valley.
Damn I was thinking of this paper randomly for years but never bothered to find it, I had read it ages ago at undergrad I think.
@Stoori you're bound to have opinions about this lol
https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/meta/1992-v37-n1-meta335/003356ar/
Grigori M. Kružkov, "Quantum Mechanics and the Theory of Poetry Translation", 1992.
Looks like there's a good handful of recent articles that are stealing the idea from this one, sneakily. Plagiarism, it's the geist of our zeit..