Michael

I think it’s fair to say that encouraging the use of technology specifically created to enclose the commons constitutes abdication of responsibility in leading a community project.

this thing has really exceeded its anticipated lifespan. to this day I have rarely seen something with a lithium battery and display in it that was the actual thickness of a credit card

in addition to the maths-by-LLM thing, I think a significant and overlooked component is just that LLMs are “good at” problem spaces that look like fuzzing. fuzzing is really effective when the scale is unfathomable and you can use (gasp) a real program to sift the success cases from the failures. it remains funny to me that the thing doing the actual work here is the checker program and not the supposedly magic LLM.

Chris Luxon is the king of the extremely implausible lie that would only make him look worse if it was true

also, I already spent over 20 years avoiding proprietary software and ensuring nothing I did relied on it, because it was already apparent decades ago that the people who made it weren’t doing so in my best interests. that they immediately jump on the LLM fashtech bandwagon is not a huge change there to me.

having LLM delusions destroy the decades worth of by-the-people-for-the-people labour and community that was created specifically to address this problem, is an entirely different kind of sadness

It is funny? to see people up in arms about OpenAI maybe having stolen someone’s maths homework when their entire business is just peddling stuff they stole from people. It’s literally all they do.

The normal way people get radicalised against “AI” is that they look at some output that is in their area of expertise and realise it’s complete trash. The fact that programmers overwhelmingly look at “AI” and go “wow this is amazing!” is a bad sign for programmers.

I nearly forgot but it’s the 100th anniversary of the launching of the Hikitia today!

I am not doing as much volunteer work with the vessel at the moment but work continues as ever on the restoration project :)

Feel pretty strongly that “free software” that doesn’t take mismatch of social privilege in to account isn’t sufficient. Making “use someone else’s giant stolen graph database of other people’s code” part of free software only makes this problem worse.

I don’t have beef with computation, computation seems to be a fundamental property of the universe for one thing.

I do have beef with people needlessly misrepresenting computation to control one another.

Monday reminder that the output of an LLM is “this is what an XYZ looks like” not “this is an XYZ”

guess it must be time to perform The Ritual again

It is frustrating that even forking the Linux kernel means staying somewhat “downstream” of techfash weirdos for quite a while, because what are you going to do, ignore when they find a security issue that also affects the fork?

Daylight DC-1 with the rear case removed. There are some sticky strips that cause the unpleasant creaking while the tablet is in use.