When you eat, are you

That’s not what happens. What happens is your day remains the same length and the expectation is that you simply keep going. The bar has been raised, and it has been raised to a level that benefits the employer. Whether that employer will reward the employee more as part of this shift is entirely up to the employer. And the employer, who funds the magic tool factory, views this expense as overhead to being able to produce more and spend the same amount as they were on people. Perhaps you work for a rare employer who does not subsequently reduce their workforce; surely, then, they will reward employees from their increased profits. Surely?

ddurst proving once again why he's the best manager I ever had, with a thoughtful take on productivity, AI, and other things.

https://universeodon.com/@ddurst/117080503564560363

Most successful software projects started off not with “I am going to build the perfect thing” but “hey, so there was this thing that annoyed me.”

https://tech.lgbt/@SRAZKVT/117065378809550298

The love of my life has decided that Facebook is too annoying, plus we have much nicer photos for #caturday, #saturdog, and #watercolor.

https://mindof.jrconlin.com/@anne_marie/statuses/01KZHG6358XDAFCVKQNH3ZSPFA

@anne_marie

Here's a starter pack you might like:

@catsalad (Mostly harmless, cats, and random silly)
@lisamelton (Best Booster in the Fediverse)
@miyotehew (Amazing photographer, and all around person)
@nwsbayarea_bot (Automated weather alerts for the area)
@lemay (Gardening, flowers, and idle thoughts)
@joyousjoyness (joyful joy)

So, one other thing I'm kinda curious about (partly from thinking about the prior thread).

I wonder if Slate is more of a vanguard than people think?

Unlike Ford (and other auto makers) the Slate will have far less memory, GPU, disk or other items that are in serious short supply right now because of the multi-trillion dollar boondoggle. It also means that there's less tech to generally enshittify and get wrong because folk no longer understand what they're creating.

I wonder if we'll see a return to "just a car / refrigerator / dish-washer  / toaster / etc."?

I will note that I did not prompt or even suggest these actions. The LLM simply failed.

In one case, I had applied for coverage. The LLM asked for a some document (which is completely valid thing to do) so that it can verify that I qualified. I later resolved the problem driving my need to get coverage, wrote back, very clearly that I did NOT (emphasis included) require the coverage, and included a PDF of the letter indicating that I no longer qualified for coverage.

The LLM granted my request and told me that it'll send out the coverage selection info. (Which I would not qualify for.)

This ain't great.

If I were not already reading up about a lot of this, I could have been charged with fraud for filing without qualification. Again, not great. (And yes, I have a log of the emails.)

I have had several, recent exchanges with AI "customer service" systems that have pretty much encouraged me to take fraudulent actions. (I didn't, because I know better.)

It's gonna be fun when someone gets busted and remembered to keep the email exchanges that told them to do the crime.

Lest this all sound like some kind of socialist fever dream, rest assured that improving public transit is squarely in line with capitalist goals, as well. A deep investment in transit research would ultimately accomplish what AI companies have, so far, been unable to materialize: genuine increases in productivity.

Despite corporate PR claims that AI is about to make us all more efficient workers, no LLM has ever catalyzed economic recovery in San Francisco’s Japantown the way Muni did. Nor has it ever revitalized a city the way the free Emery Go Round buses in Emeryville did.

A Modest Proposal for Funding Transit Instead of AI by @annaleen is a solid argument.

To be fair, it's super easy for a blade to hit a rock or an old post and that's enough to set a field of essentially kindling on fire, if it's dry enough. There are enough fires started in California off of things like a dragging tow chain.

It is STUPIDLY easy to start a massive fire. That's why everyone rolled their eyes so hard when they heard the "Rake the forests" comment.

https://hachyderm.io/@norootcause/117028611212007071

As part of my continuing, and ongoing unemployment, I'm looking at doing a few "estate" related things. One of these is figuring out who gets our crap once our cogs have sufficiently popped. It's an interesting question, because we don't have kids of our own, although there are nieces that could certainly use a bit of help, so that's probably going to be the plan.

I should probably note a few other things.

My parents have a lot of stuff. Not "Hoarder Level" amounts (although there's a distressing tendency in the family toward that) but a bunch of Things of Value that we've been repeatedly informed are Valuable. These are mostly decorative items acquired over lifetimes and held with high regard. It's going to be a massive pain to deal with those once they become my problem.

I do not have many of those. I mean, I have things I like, but they're not high value and to be honest, they're deeply personal. I am absolutely positive that they will probably become part of a recycling program (well, unless the memory and GPU market fail to crack in which case, they may become the most valuable things I have).

Still, I'm not one to acquire Things of Great Value. If I buy art, it's because I like it. If I buy a car, it's because I need it. Stuff is either purely functional or purely aesthetic and I'm absolutely OK with that. I don't really "get" the idea of buying things as an investment, because the level of prediction in order to do that well is far out of my expertise. I'll be honest, even the Things of Great Value that my parents have probably are not as valuable as they believe them to be. There's probably a museum that might enjoy having one or two things, but other than that, they're essentially boomer beanie babies and some generations POGs.

I'm sure that there are folk that treasure Great-Great-Gran'ma's collection of destination teaspoons, or Gran-Gran-Gran-Uncle's assortment of gas station pens, but I am not really one of those. I'd be the worst guest on Antiques Road Show, and I'm very much OK with that.

Heh, like I said before, I like to leave the campsite a bit better than how I found it, so perhaps not leaving behind a big pile of crap is part of that, but it does leave me with a pretty funny thought.

"And Mr. Conlin left you his complete library of 1600 albums and nearly 600 books" Slides a 1TB hard drive across the table

I mean, lets be clear.

The internet was never meant for us. It was built so that governments, the military, schools and companies could send messages back and forth to each other.

Then a bunch of weirdos showed up, built stuff no one had ever thought of, and decided to share it because it's more fun that way.

Then more weirdos showed up and used those tools to build amazing things, come up with fascinating stuff and so, so many pictures of cats.

Along with those weirdos, a bunch of greedy bastards tried to steal all that stuff, because they're greedy bastards, and convince everyone else that the bastards were the ones that made everything that was so damn amazing. (They did not.)

People are still doing amazing things.
Greedy bastards are still trying to steal it.

The cost of Internet Freedom is constant vigilance.

And cat pictures.

https://mstdn.social/@plwt/117022047682477753

Sigh, not much better if you want to leave voluntarily.

You can only sign up for a new heath care plan during Open Enrollment in September.
Trying to get an early exception requires you to show you've exhausted any COBRA offered to you. (Not that you've declined it, that you've exhausted it.)
Getting your COBRA started requires providing a lot of info, including the email that your previous employer sent to the COBRA company (for some reason). If you forget which, or the company messed it up for any reason, you're screwed.
The company will not tell you why they want that email. You just get to figure it out later.

( At this point, wondering if it's worth playing chicken with fate for a month )

https://mstdn.social/@DemocracyMattersALot/117015564383055179

I have seen a few thing lately and, I just want to clarify something.

y'all know that the "Push to Prod on Friday" is a joke, right?
You're not supposed to release stuff on Friday because if/when it breaks, you kinda ruin the weekend for not just yourself, but potentially a lot of other people. Even a minor change can have major repercussions for libraries and packages, sometimes in ways you're not aware of.

Unless there's an active CVE or an incident, it can absolutely wait 'til Monday.

It's a show of respect.

(That said, if you absolutely hate someone, feel free to push to prod at 4:45 on a Friday.)

One thing I keep coming back to when reading stuff about how Anthropic or other LLMs are destroying books so that they can be scanned in: those books are lost. If they happen to scan in the last, remaining work, then that work is lost. The content is now irretrievable. All that happens is that the algorithm adjusted the likelihood of "parsnip" following "delicious" or something similar.

For all the content that these things have consumed, for all the pages being tossed into the electric maw, the best you can hope for is a general summary of the work.

Try an experiment. Ask the search engine to summarize a page from a book. Not the whole book, just one page from some book referenced by an index number. If these things were actually capturing the information, it should be able to easily discern the work, bring up the content, and provide a summary of that page, without needing to do a web lookup.

But it won't. Because that's not what's going on.

Kinda wonder if all the folk that are so eager to feed these machines their efforts understand that they're basically just tossing kindling onto the newest fire in Alexandria?

Wait, that's from Linkedin?

Do Not Take Less than 20% over your previous rate.

Make it hurt.

https://mastodon.social/@annaecook/117005159685124497

Sigh.

I forgot that there's a new tab style for Firefox 155.

I am deeply "meh" about it.

So, in the continuing tale of

Things They Don't Tell You When You Retire

While you can sign up for health care coverage via the state's ACA system, it can take quite a while to validate. Often far longer than you want. A slightly different option is to go to the Health Provider site directly (e.g. Kaiser Permamente, Blue Cross, or even look at  HealthCare.gov to see what's offered in your area).

The plans tend to be very close to what you'd get via the state, but the application process often is far easier (because they want your money). That said, plans are still expensive as hell, with pretty high deductibles. Plan on keeping $10-20K available in cash to cover medical expenses on top of the cost of the plan and your monthly expenses. (I found and OK plan that costs about $1300 a month, which I can afford, but I'm also going to try to live a bit healthier with lower risk activities for a bit. 😰)

I will remind you that OpenAI is worth nearly $1,000,000,000,000.
The going rate for an engineer that knows how to secure a website is $166,000/year.

https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/116992249572361932