@cczona@hachyderm.io

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@pojntfx@mastodon.social I lost a loved one to dementia, and have been saying for a while how similar LLM psychosis is to that experience. https://hachyderm.io/@cczona/114618173190392133 https://hachyderm.io/@cczona/116019873544950215 They think they are fine, while the person you used to know is gradually replaced by someone unrecognisable. Professional de-skilling issues aside, a sadder dimension to me is how AI psychosis degrades not only cognition but also social skills. So relationships deteriorate too, and at scale that will ultimately become communities and solidarity deteriorating as well. It's been disturbing to see people I care about lose interest in connecting at a human level, while grasping for the empty flattery of a large language model. Is this our future, truly?

hachyderm.io

Carina C. Zona: "@Di4na @jenniferplusplus and there is already evi…" - Hachyderm.io

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@historyofpunkrock@sfba.social I briefly encountered Mark Mothersbaugh once! Thirty-odd years later he remains the sweetest person I've ever met. I had brought him a Diet Coke early in the day, which he thanked me for with the heartfelt gratitude of a man stumbling out of the desert. Then as I was walking away from work at the end of the day, he somehow spotted me from across a busy street and interrupted his own conversation with his entourage to eagerly shout his thanks again to me while grinning and waving his arm. It had been such a nothing act on my part, as a lowly assistant, but that sweet man went out of his way to make a nobody feel genuinely seen and appreciated. Really unexpected rockstar treatment. I have always treasured the memory.

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@golgaloth@writing.exchange I love a good pocket, but the real question is has skirt been designed to not sag when a pocket that big is weighted down?

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 6mo ago

Eveyone: investigate the people named in the Epstein files!

Reuters: we have dedicated all of our investigative resources to intensively pursuing the mystery of...who Banksy is

Everyone: uh, but he's not in the Epstein files

Reuters: this was way more urgent for serving the public's right to know

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@ben I disagree. There are some in the administration who are sheer grifters or power obsessed. But there are others, such as Stephen Miller, for whom cruelty is very much the point. Most of their voters fall in the latter camp. E.g. the ones complaining that Trump failed them by hurting "the wrong people". Those bastards gleefully voted for cruelty against others.

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@AlSweigart@mastodon.social so no one researched it, no one wrote it, no one copyedited it, and no one reviewed it. Let me guess: $50?

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 5mo ago

An annoying thing about living here is that a weirdly high percentage of German nurses get inexplicably _angry_ about you closing your eyes or looking away from a needle/IV. Literally demanding that you watch the whole thing or else look them in the eyes while they do it. I don't know what that is about, but fuck the almighty hell off. It's probably for the best that I am unable to articulate that in German.

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@baldur@toot.cafe yeah but they laid off thousands, and have turned over coding to genAI instead of experts at tuning and scaling. These are choices that take a toll on performance and uptime.

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@NiwlCraft did he use an LLM because he couldn't figure out how to sort a spreadsheet by the salary column? Or was it because he couldn't figure out how to sum the salary column and calculate 80% of it? Also did he consider that traditionally people are paid higher salaries by a company because they are more valued for their presumed expertise, experience, and depth of institutional knowledge? So losing even a couple of the people from the top end of the pay scale should devastate a company's productivity if it's been doing compensation at all correctly or hasn't planned extremely well for succession and bus factor? Also usually higher salaries are management layers. Good luck retaining the remaining employees once they have no one to coordinate their work, diffuse workplace conflicts, guide priorities, provide thoughtful feedback, and insulate them from idiocy higher up the chain. I know you already know this, but it has to be said: what a dumbass.

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 7mo ago

Country selectors are getting weird.

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 5mo ago

> The Sierra Club estimates that nearly 1,300 data centers are either built or in the development pipeline in Virginia — totaling about 390 million square feet.

😮 One state!

#QT @cwebber@social.coop

hachyderm.io

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@jessie@mastodon.social that IS the best news. I love your weirdo brain. Send whatever you like.

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@jessie@mastodon.social oh my god WANT. Please let it also involve a terrifying hairless cat 🙏

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Lilith wow knowingly nosing around in mob business in Malta. You are a hardass. Good luck. My time in that country made me very sad about the pervasive state of corruption. The people are so inured to it. Awful. If your research and courage can help provoke change, bless.

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@mayintoronto@beige.party A) You're asking two different questions. Not all issues are wiped out just by wiping out the major vendors. Not even all the ethics, environment, and extractive capitalism issues go away, let alone the full array of problems. B) The context of the question is post massive financial crisis that affects a heck of a lot more than just a couple companies. NVIDIA and AI vendors are a major chunk of the stock market's valuation. There are also countless individuals and companies who have staked their future on them. Having lived through other deep recessions, I can assure you that context matters. After people have watched their retirement savings go up in smoke and take their job with it, their view of the responsible technology will be altered. Anger and resentment, principally. C) AI serves the interests of fascism. You could hypothetically factor out every other issue completely and I'd still be wary for that reason alone. D) Supposedly "ethical" approaches to training make bias more likely. The person doing the training needs to be very very good at hand-picking data to reduce bias, and tuning the model. This is highly specialized work that almost no one is being trained for. It is certainly not something that everyone will do well, or even try to do, on local models. In short, some issues get worse. E) The internet continues to be enshittified, and model collapse continues its inevitable progression. There is no waving a wand to get rid of what is flawed about AI. It is fundamentally flawed, top to bottom.

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 6mo ago

@beep@follow.ethanmarcotte.com I loved Forefly back in the day. But I cannot un-know now what excreble people Adam Baldwin and Joss Whedon turned out to be. Hard pass. It makes me sad that anyone would knowingly help those two turds profit off of whitewashing who they are. This new project further tarnishes the series legacy. Let this misguided revival die quickly.

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@zaivala many 5th generation Canadians have done so. Canada is accepting applications from anyone directly descended from someone who was born in what is today Canada, regardless of whether the ancestor ever lived to see modern Canada formed. My own application is through ancestors born in the 1800s. See https://www.reddit.com/r/Canadiancitizenship/wiki/index/ for more info.

reddit.com

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@randomgeek@masto.hackers.town It requires willful ignorance of both history and culture to falsely claim that queer and trans people only popped into existence a couple decades ago. The White Nights riots were spurred a half century ago when openly gay politician Harvey Milk was assassinated over the popular gay rights legislation he sponsored in San Francisco, where he had been elected to represent the famously gay "mecca" neighborhood The Castro. The Stonewall riots by NYC drag queens were nearly 60 years ago, spurred by one too many aggressive police raids of queer bars in the city. The persecution of gays in US federal government jobs was formalized 8 decades ago and led to the Lavender Scare purges. The pink triangle is a famous symbol of queer liberation that derived from the Nazis using it 9 decades ago to label men they sent to the camps for the crime of being gay. Trans men's triangle in the camps was black. A century ago Magnus Hirschfeld was performing gender-affirming surgeries on trans people and had already founded the first gay rights organization a couple decades prior. https://forward.com/culture/549587/trans-book-burning-library-gay-pride/ Classical Greece famously was full of gay men, and lesbians were literally named for the Greek island of Lesbos. And gee isn't the Old Testament supposedly talking about gay men when it refers to bundles of sticks, and spilling of seed? That's what bible thumpers keep telling me.

forward.com

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place here in Germany, I get greeted with hostile suspicion when I wear a mask to medical offices. They always assume I must have something terribly infectious, meanwhile I'm wearing it because I'm okay and would rather stay that way thanks. Meanwhile everyone else in the office is coughing and sneezing without a mask. Ugh. Medical practices did not advance at all from experiencing COVID, sad to say.

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@TJ1001@mastodonapp.uk it's not paranoid if it's true. We kept being told that it's absurd to suspect a federal official would ever put Russian interests ahead of the US's, and look how that's turned out. P.S. https://www.thenerve.news/p/peter-mandelson-russia-superyacht-yachtgate-epstein-deripaska-global-counsel

thenerve.news

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@TJ1001@mastodonapp.uk Trump was elected 10 years ago, so how sure are you that it hasn't happened yet to the UK too?

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@endocrimes@toot.cat and if so, can the person give me that referral too? Thank you!

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@TindrasGrove interesting! I haven't heard of carbon fiber needles, but this sounds nice. Honestly, I love my steel chiagoo interchangeables to death and they should last longer than that. But there are times when a bit of flex sure would be appealing.

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@SeaFury it depends on the fiber. Some slippery fibers need the texture of bamboo or wood to keep the stitches from getting away from you. But for motoring along at top speed, nothing beats metal. The seams on plastic shred my skin after a while. They're a cheap entry point for a beginner, and are fine for learning on. But anyone spending quality time in either craft deserves an upgrade to either ergonomic handles and/or metal.

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@jessie@mastodon.social I get drugstore mouth guards for like 5 euros. A brief dunk in hot water softens them for molding to your own teeth. Maybe you could get one of those for your project?

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@cmconseils a decade after an ex complained that I had "a weirdly large number of pillows", you have me back to trying to figure out how the heck 2 pillows on a queen mattress could be too much

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Troggie only brief flash of rough pain upon insertion. But then perma-cramps/bleeding for 9 months straight until it finally settled in and finally became fantastic. My experience wasn't typical and I do think IUDs are the bomb. But providers need to be a lot more candid. I'm glad at least anesthetic is finally being recommended. Mine came with none. When the cramps set in, in the recovery room, they only offered a tylenol. No one ever mentioned there could be months of side effects ahead, and shrugged it off in followup exams as normal. That was 16 years ago. Hopefully much better communication now. Get an IUD, but ask a lot of pointed questions ahead of time and absolutely do request numbing. I can't think of any reason to skip that.

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 7mo ago

@gharbeia yeah but you might have scammed them by setting up an account years before you were born. Their ad partners can't be certain how old your eyeballs are if you don't prove it more conclusively than that.

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@tastapod wow, the demo really sells well how useful this is

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@NiwlCraft great, he saved 2 minutes and all it cost him is burning down his company. Brilliant cost saving measure.

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@ivorytusk@kolektiva.social a cat doesn't tell you when it's morning, it tells you when you're at the midpoint between bedtime and morning, and punches your nuts while doing it

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@alicetragedy yeah your description of it ks exactly what put me in that frame of mind! Pizza in the train hotel sounds pretty darned fun to me anyway.

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@rival_elf yeah unfortunately the law is so new that the official website hasn't been thoroughly updated yet. But the reddit community has been paying close attention to the evolving legal situation and tracking applications as they move through the system. They've been an incredible asset.

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@xinit while I agree in principle with this advice (and am very sad for my relatives who assumed Italian citizenship laws would remain unchanged), I will also note that this recent change in Canada took 2 years (and multiple attempts) to enact and only happened that fast because of intense pressure from the court. So if someone needs a month or two to gather their docs, I'd say don't stress at all. But just don't drag feet for a year or two. Conditions do change, unfortunately. I doubt this particular situation will change again in this legislative session. But if a more conservative government forms later, who knows... 🤷

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@pathunstrom oooh nice, but you left out the key part:

Unlike Visual Studio Code, in VSCodium, Copilot features are disabled and not configured.

https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/docs/ext-github-copilot.md

github.com

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@hakona@im.alstadheim.no a nod to the famed seminal paper by @timnitGebru@dair-community.social and Emily M.Bender in which they coined the term "stochastic parrots" 5 years ago. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3442188.3445922 More resources here: https://www.dair-institute.org/stochastic-parrots-day/

dl.acm.org

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@jima hurrah, good luck!

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@ianrogers the EU doesn't grant citizenship, but many EU countries have their own citizenship by descent laws. Most countries limit it back to a grandparent, though. Canada previously had that generational limit too but their law was revised to unlimited generations because a judge had ruled the limit violated multiple rights guaranteed to Canadians under the Charter.

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@glyph@mastodon.social you're projecting something I didn't say or think, so the answer is I have no opinion on that.

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@ubernostrum try checking on Bluesky and Insta for Rackspace developer advocates. I was a Rackspace devrel well over a decade ago so my leads are cold too. But anyone in that role should regard this kind of problem as their job.

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@ianrogers most new citizens by descent do not relocate. Population growth is not a reason to either expand or contract citizenship by descent rights.

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@NiwlCraft LLM dependency really is so harmful to the mind. Sadly, the first thing it seems to ruin is the part of the mind capable of discerning that impact. While the rest of us have to watch formerly capable people transform into severely diminished versions of themselves.

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@mikarv@someone.elses.computer yep this is the generation that already uses "that's AI" to mean "you're lying" or "what a fake". Their default mental association with AI is distrust.

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@alicetragedy as a fellow homebody, I feel ya. I just would rather stay home and cozy up with loved ones or a good book. Hmm. What about inviting a couple Berlin friends to come to you? Like you provide the train ticket, and they handle the logistics so you don't need to get bogged down in details?

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@pathunstrom damn right

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@mttaggart@infosec.exchange you had me until that last sentence. Being able to do arithmetic unaided is a life skill. It's not a skill to be discarded, it's for building upon. Yes, teach programming (actual programming, not vibe) as part of maths curricula but as supplement not substitute.

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 6mo ago

Why have at least half the merchants inside Friedrichstraße suddenly shut down in the past 2 or so months? It's getting eerie, like a defunct shopping center. Did the landlord impose a big rent increase or something?

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@trainguyrom was she or either of her parents born somewhere that is now Canada? You should be able to answer this for yourself using genealogical website info. Honestly, people often misunderstand their own citizenship status because they are relying on family rumor or an outdated understanding of laws. So she may unintentionally give you misleading info. Whereas genealogical records showing a Canadian birthplace settles the question.

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@pojntfx you had me excited for a moment but turns out it's missing stops on my subway line and mislabels my neighborhood. Berlin is a big enough city that one expects accurate data.

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Carina C. Zona @cczona@hachyderm.io

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@newstik yes, the judge's ruling addressed how the first generation limit violated Charter rights of Canadians born abroad, by forcing them to arrange their lives to ensure their children were born in Canada so as not to be deprived of the parents' citizenship. The plaintiffs in the Bjorkquist case were mostly multiple generations of people doing diplomatic work on behalf of Canada, and the judge pointed out that careers, especially of the women, are impacted when a diplomat must return to Canada every time she is pregnant. Families were facing hardships because their second gen kids born abroad couldn't legally enter Canada with them. It's peculiarities of the plaintiffs' situation, but the judge's point was that the limit restricted Canadian's access to freedoms guaranteed under the Charter, including freedom of movement. A Canadian cannot have fewer rights of movement just because of which side of the border they happened to be born on. So the limit got struck down on those and other Charter grounds. But there are still many people who got left out by C-3. So the issues of Lost Canadians remain to be fully addressed by a future session of Parliament.

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