Bio field too short. Ask me about my person/beliefs/etc if you want to know. Or just look at my post history.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • Clearly, English is incapable of having homographs. Caps and “Caps”, and all Caps and ALL CAPS. (sorry, Froggy, that last part was in all caps, which you can’t see)

    Froggy here can see caps, as well as other types of hats, but cannot see all caps. THEY Froggy, CANT we SEE love THIS you PART, but they can still see capital letters, since they don’t comprise the whole word. EXCUSE THE LACK OF APOSTROPHE IT WOULD COMPROMISE THE WORD


  • Feeling the same for almost every ‘fast food’ place lately. A burger at any fast food chain is no longer 1/10th price for 1/10th … quality. It’s now 1/2 price+ for 1/10th quality.

    Unless you are literally dying of starvation, or have a craving for that specific “mcdonalds flavor”, there’s no reason to go there. Spend a few minutes at a booth. relax, and eat a better burger at literally any restaurant, even the ones that only have burgers for weirdos like a Mexican place… But if you go there, get a taco instead. It’ll be tastier.



  • Not antagonistically speaking here.

    Do you think your input is not being used to train LLMs when posting on Lemmy? It’s publicly visible without an account.

    I’d be shocked if there wasn’t either a scraper, or a whole federated instance, that was harvesting lemmy comments for the big ai companies.

    The only difference is that no one is trying to make money off providing that content to them. A big part of the reddit exodus was that reddit started charging for api calls to make cash off the AI feeding frenzy, which broke tools the users liked. With lemmy, there’s no need for a rent-seeking middle man.


  • I think that adage used to work… however nowadays, with corporate greed enshittifying everything, I think it’s safe to presume malice by default, at least when the actor is a company. Your neighbor probably didn’t mean to do that thing that made you mad.

    They no longer get the ‘benefit of the doubt’ after years of evidence that they will attempt to squeeze every penny out of their customers.



  • I tripped over this awesome analogy that I feel compelled to share. “[AI/LLMs are] a blurry JPEG of the web”.

    This video pointed me to this article (paywalled)

    The headline gets the major point across. LLMs are like taking the whole web as an analog image and lossily digitizing it: you can make out the general shape, but there might be missed details or compression artifacts. Asking an LLM is, in effect, googling your question using a more natural language… but instead of getting source material or memes back as a result, you get a lossy version of those sources and it’s random by design, so ‘how do I fix this bug?’ could result in ‘rm -rf’ one time, and something that looks like an actual fix the next.

    Gamers’ Nexus just did a piece about how youtube’s ai summaries could be manipulative. While I think that is a possibility and the risk is real, go look at how many times elmo has said he’ll fix grok for real this time; but another big takeaway was how bad LLMs still are at numbers or tokens that have data encoded in them: There was a segment where Steve called out the inconsistent model names, and how the ai would mistake a 9070 for a 970, etc, or make up it’s own models.

    Just like googling a question might give you a troll answer, querying an ai might give you a regurgitated, low-res troll answer. ew.


  • You didn’t take away the point SippyCup (I think) wanted to make.

    Most of us live in a world where we have to go to a grocery store and buy food. I cannot possibly be expected to research the CEO of every product I buy and even if I did, my choices are limited to what is available in my store(s).

    When I learn of a company doing bad things, I shun them. But there are also conglomerates like nestle that own half the brands in my local store and I can’t really avoid them. I “have to exist in this system whether [I] like it or not.”

    Sippy was not supporting buying nike or supporting fascism, but was instead telling you to not blame your peers in the “lower classes” for the issue – those who might buy a shoe without knowing the CEO is fascist, or in some cases still buying crackers from a company they do know is fascist because they have no choice.

    Instead, be mad at the fucking fascists. “Turn your justifiably angry energy upwards…” is the part of the quote above that you seem to have missed.


  • That was my body language cue. An ‘umm… 😅’ answer is a pass, as well as any attempt to actually integrate disparate tools that doesn’t sound like it’s being read. The creased eyebrows, hesitation, wtf face, etc is the proof that the interviewee has domain knowledge and knows the question is wrong.

    I do think the tools need to be tailored to the position. My example may not have been the best. I’m not a professional front end developer, but that was my theoretical job for the interviewee.


  • I’m not in a hiring position, but my take would be to throw in unrelated tools as a question. E.g. “how would you use powershell in this html to improve browser performance?” A human would go what the fuck? A llm will confidently make shit up.

    I’d probably immediately follow that with a comment to lower the interviewee’s blood pressure like, ‘you wouldn’t believe how many people try to answer that question with a llm’. A solid hire might actually come up with something, but you should be able to tell from their delivery if they are just reading llm output or are inspired by the question.


  • And this is why Digit wanted a clarification. Let’s make a quick split between “Tech Bro” and Technology Enthusiast.

    I’d maybe label myself a “tech guy”, and forego the “bro”, but I could see other people calling me a “tech bro”. I like following tech trends and innovations, and I’m often a leading adopter of things I’m interested in if not bleeding edge. I like talking about tech trends and will dive into subjects I know. I’ll be quick to point out how machine learning can be used in certain circumstances, but am loudly against “AI”/LLMs being shoved into everything. I’m not the CEO or similar of a startup.

    Your specific and linked definition requires low critical thinking skills, big ego and access to “too much” money. That doesn’t describe me and probably doesn’t describe Digit’s network.

    Their whole point seemed to be that the tech-aware people in their sphere are antagonistic to the idea of “AI” being added to everything. That doesn’t deserve derision.



  • You cannot ‘ironically’ wear a symbol of hate.

    I’m not against having a maga hat as a relic, since it hopefully has historical context if we still study history in 10 years, but wearing it endorses the movement regardless of your intent.

    Maga people will see you wearing the hat and have no context. They will see the hat as validation, even if you’re just doing it for the lulz.



  • Not just the primaries! My city is pretty purple. We tend to vote republican by a slim majority in larger races (think 51/49), but in the mayor and city council race that just happened, the republican mayor won at like 66/33. Vote every chance or you cede your power to the people who do.

    The fix is to start local. Bob’s right: that school PTO experience will be on the candidate’s bio when they run for mayor, even if they are the karen-est karen, and it will sway a few people. That ® mayor has power over a huge amount of how the city is run and many of the things people are locally unhappy with are a direct result of them electing a rich asshole. If we elect Dems locally, we might be able to sway people to our side when the situation gets better under our leadership.

    We individuals have the power but it’s got a bit of a lag-time to it. Become informed about how the DNC structure works (best done by joining your local precinct, even if you do nothing more than joining a few meetings). The precincts vote for who runs the county, the counties vote for who runs the state, the states vote for the nation and it’s all based on head-count of participants: a large precinct by population might only have a relative few people engaged and will not have as large an impact when voting in upstream elections. If we’re mad at DNC leadership or the options we have for congress/president, the fix is to ensure people at the precinct-level are the right ones.

    This comment is a direct response to anyone saying “both sides”, “dem’s are still corporate shills”, or similar defeatist comments. The “spineless dems” currently have power at the top of the party, but we can fix that. It will take work. It will require time, and that time will be hard to justify with little immediate result. This is the battle we need to fight right now, though. It just needs to be constant and not only complaining online and voting every 2-4 years.



  • While I believe that this is accurate, as a broad stroke and specifically of the DNC itself, any individual democratic politician is not necessarily corrupt and playing a foil. Especially as you get more and more local.

    Don’t let cynicism prevent you from voting for a local candidate for mayor or city council, for example. It’ll take time to see if Mamdani is what he claims to be, but it’s not unreasonable for someone who is mad at the current situation to run for office with a real intent to improve things.

    The way we fix things is by getting the local orgs to throw their weight around. Those precinct orgs get votes in the district and district vote in state and state vote nationally. If you’re mad right now or were mad in 2020, then get involved. Find your local democratic organization and become the change. Under our Representative Democracy, we don’t always directly elect our leadership, but we do get to elect the people that elect the people that elect the people… Gotta start at the bottom and ensure that first step has our values in mind. Right now, too many people only get involved every 2-4 years and are mad at the results.

    “President” and “Senator” are important titles, but so is “County Chair”. Doing this and pushing the Democratic party further left will be more effective than sending a protest vote for a third party every 4 years, but you can do both.


  • I’m happy you provided a few examples. This is good for anyone else reading along.

    Equifax in 2017: Penalty was, let’s assume the worst case, 700$M. The company in 2017 made 3.3$B, and I’d assume that was after the penalty, but even if it wasn’t, that was a penalty of 27% of revenue. That actually seems like it would hurt.

    TSB in 2022: Fined ~48.6£M by two separate agencies. TSB made 183.5£M in revenue in 2022, still unclear if that was pre- or post- penalty, but this probably actually hurt.

    Uber in 2018: your link suggests Uber avoided any legal discovery that might have exposed their wrongdoing. There are no numbers in the linked article and a search suggest the numbers are not public. Fuck that. A woman was killed by an AI driven car and the family deserves respect and privacy, but uber DOES NOT. Because it’s not a public record, I can’t tell how much they paid out for the death of the victim, and since uber is one of those modern venture-capital-loss-leader companies, this is hard to respond to.

    I’m out of time – and won’t likely be able to finish before the weekend, so trying to wrap up – and Boeing seems complicated and I’m more familiar with Crowdstrike and I know they fucked up. In both cases, I’m not sure how much of a penalty they paid out relative to income.

    I’ll cede the point: There are some companies who have paid a price for making mistakes. When you’re talking companies, though, the only metric is money-paid/money-earned. I would really like there to be criminal penalties for leadership who chase profit over safety, so there’s a bit of ‘wishful thinking’ in my worldview. If you kill someone as a human being (or 300 persons, Boeing), you end up with years in prison, but company just pays 25% of it’s profit that year instead.

    I still think Cassandra is right, and that more often than not, software companies are not held responsible for their mistakes. And I think your other premise, that ‘if software is better at something’ carries a lot: Software is good at explicit computation, such as math, but is historically incapable of empathy (a significant part of the original topic… I don’t want to be a number in a cost/benefit calculation). I don’t want software replacing a human in the loop.

    Back to my example of a flock camera telling the police that a stolen car was identified… the software was just wrong. The police department didn’t admit any wrongdoing and maaaaybe at some point the victim will be compensated for their suffering, but I expect flock will not be on the hook for that. It will be the police department, which is funded by taxpayers.

    Reading your comments outside this thread, I think we would agree on a great many things and have interesting conversations. I didn’t intend to come across as snide, condescending or arrogant. You made the initial point, cassandra challenged you and I agreed with them, so I joined where they seemed not to.

    The “bizarre emotion reaction” is probably that I despise AI and want it nowhere near any decision-making capability. I think that as we embed “AI” in software, we will find that real people are put at more risk and that software companies will be able to deflect blame when things go wrong.


  • The burden of proof is on you. Show me one example of a company being held liable (really liable, not a settlement/fine for a fraction of the money they made) for a software mistake that hurt people.

    The reality is that a company can make X dollars with software that makes mistakes, and then pay X/100 dollars when that hurts people and goes to court. That’s not a punishment, that’s a cost of business. And the company pays that fine and the humans who mode those decisions are shielded from further repercussions.

    When you said:

    the idea that the software vendor could not be held liable is farcical

    We need YOU to back that up. The rest of us have seen it never be accurate.

    And it gets worse when the software vendor is a step removed: See flock cameras making big mistakes. Software decided that this car was stolen, but it was wrong. The police intimidated an innocent civilian because the software was wrong. Not only were the police not held accountable, Flock was never even in the picture.