Basically, X11/Xorg doesn’t isolate programs from one another. This is horrible for security since malicious software can read every window, as well as all the input from mice and keyboards, just by querying the X server, but it’s also handy for screen reading software, streaming, etc. Meanwhile, Wayland isolates programs in their own sandbox, which prevents, say, a malicious browser tab from reading all of your keyboard inputs and logging your root password, but also breaks those things we like to use. To make matters worse, it looks like everyone’s answer for this and similar dilemmas wasn’t “let’s fix Wayland” but “let’s develop an extension to fix Wayland” and we wound up with that one fucking xkcd standards comic that I won’t bother linking because everyone has seen it a zillion times.

ETA: Basically, my (layman’s) understanding is that fixing this and making screen readers work in Wayland is hard because the core Wayland developers seem to have little appetite for fixing this themselves. Meanwhile, there’s 3-4 implementations of Wayland that do things differently, so fixing it via extensions means either writing multiple backends in your program to do the same damn thing (aka a giant pain in the ass) or getting everyone to agree on the same standard implementation (good fucking luck).

Why make a better UI when it’ll probably introduce a slew of new bugs?

There’s something primal about making something with your own hands that you just can’t get with IT. Sure, you can deploy and maintain an app, but you can’t reach out and touch it, smell it, or move it. You can’t look at the fruits of your labor and see it as a complete work instead of a reminder that you need to fix this bug, and you have that feature request to triage, oh and you need to update this library to address that zero day vulnerability…

Plus, your brain is a muscle, too. When you’ve spent decades primarily thinking with your brain in one specific way, that muscle starts to get fatigued. Changing your routine becomes very alluring, and it lets you exercise new muscles, and challenge yourself to think in new ways.

Lmao, from an NPR article on the same topic:

They filed an affidavit from an insurance broker saying it is “not possible” to find a bond that big. The broker was an expert witness for Trump during the trial.

The trial judge already noted in his decision that this broker was a “close personal friend” of Trump’s and had a financial interest in the outcome. A decision could come from the appeals court later this week.

I’m sure the judge will give the broker’s opinion all the deference it’s due. /s

I mean, I’m not the one who had the unmitigated gall and sense of entitlement to compare the thousands of hours each of the tens of thousands of artists (whose artwork was scraped by LLMs without so much as a by-your-leave) spent practicing to get good at artwork to the… what, ten? twenty? hours you took to get good at “prompt engineering.” Nor did I have the absolute nerve to then complain about how you have it SO ROUGH because you have to “fiddle with Photoshop” but all the mean people mock all your hard effort!

Hint: You’re being mocked because you deserve to be mocked. At best, AI “artists” like yourself are lazily piggybacking off the literal millions of collective man-hours of labor that actual artists spent honing their talent, and trying to pass off the creative equivalent of a boneless chicken nugget shaped like a dinosaur as being of worthy of the same respect as a beef wellington, or at least a damn good burger.

I hate hate hate hate it, I’d be happy if they were all banned, tbh.

This is prolly gonna be a hot take but the only reason I don’t block AI art communities is so that I can downvote them whenever I see an AI art post. Yes, I’m that petty, and no, I don’t give a shit.

Still orders of magnitude less effort than actually learning to draw for yourself and making something actually creative

But please do go on about how your pink slime regurgitated by an LLM trained on stolen artwork scraped from hundreds of thousands of actual artists requires so much effort and creativity

More like they were a darling up until they were compromised by Russian intelligence and turned into the propaganda arm of the protofascist party in the US.

It makes sense to judge how closely LLMs mimic human learning when people are using it as a defense to AI companies scraping copyrighted content, and making the claim that banning AI scraping is as nonsensical as banning human learning.

But when it’s pointed out that LLMs don’t learn very similarly to humans, and require scraping far more material than a human does, suddenly AIs shouldn’t be judged by human standards? I don’t know if it’s intentional on your part, but that’s a pretty classic example of a motte-and-bailey fallacy. You can’t have it both ways.

Still a copyright violation, especially if you make it publicly available and claim the work as your own for commercial purposes. At the very minimum, tracing without fully attributing the original work is considered to be in poor enough taste that most art sites will permaban you for doing it, no questions asked.

Yeah, last time I ordered through grubhub from a Chinese restaurant, by the time I paid the delivery fee, inflated menu price, service charge, and driver tip, I was looking at almost $90 for mid-tier Chinese food. I ordered by calling the restaurant up and ordering takeout and paid $40 instead.

I literally could order from halfway across the state and make a road trip out of it and still come out ahead.

Smaller doesn’t matter if they’re going in a 3.5" tray. There are some models that only come with 2.5" trays, but go figure, the only 2.5" model that isn’t a 5-figure all-flash enterprise-scale model is one of our least popular models

I work tech support for a NAS company and the ratio of HDDs to SSDs is roughly 85-15. Sometimes people use SSDs for stuff that requires low latency, but most commonly they’re used as a cache for HDDs in my experience.

I don’t think that most of us are outright fascist, but I do think most of us are not just apathetic, but also willfully ignorant. For one reason or another–lack of education, viewing politics as “boring,” no energy to pay attention beyond headlines, a lack of media literacy–most Americans simply cannot see the impact an administration has on society beyond their immediate experience. For these people, Trump was a guy who said stupid shit, lowered their taxes (ignoring the sleight of hand where the ‘tax cut’ was almost entirely due to changes in tax withholding so the extra money on their paycheck was counterbalanced by a lower tax return), and held a rally when he lost. They’re not explicitly fascist–if the tanks start rolling down their town’s Main Street, they’ll wail and moan about “I never wanted this, how could this have happened”–but to them, things like “economics” or “human rights” or “democracy” or “equality” are boring toys that nerds play with. They’re the type of person that complains about crumbling roads and potholes and bad traffic, then turns around and complains about construction projects to fix the very things they were complaining about.

So I don’t necessarily fully agree that America is more fascist than we like to admit, but I think it’s largely a distinction without a difference–most Americans are perfectly happy to stand by and let fascism take the reigns, to do nothing and complain about anybody who does try to fight against it, right up until it’s too late and THEY’RE the ones up against the wall.

The public has the memory of a goldfish. We’re less than 3 years out from the single worst administration in the history of this country, and we’re seriously considering putting him back in office.

You need to learn your Internet history. It wasn’t so long ago that we had a diverse, interoperable community of instant messaging platforms based on XMPP, an open, federated protocol. Anybody could host their own XMPP server, and communicate with any other XMPP server. Then in 2006, Google added XMPP support to their Talk app and integrated it into the Gmail web interface. But there were problems:

First of all, despites collaborating to develop the XMPP standard, Google was doing its own closed implementation that nobody could review. It turns out they were not always respecting the protocol they were developing. They were not implementing everything. This forced XMPP development to be slowed down, to adapt. Nice new features were not implemented or not used in XMPP clients because they were not compatible with Google Talk (avatars took an awful long time to come to XMPP). Federation was sometimes broken: for hours or days, there would not be communications possible between Google and regular XMPP servers. The XMPP community became watchers and debuggers of Google’s servers, posting irregularities and downtime (I did it several times, which is probably what prompted the job offer).

And because there were far more Google talk users than “true XMPP” users, there was little room for “not caring about Google talk users”. Newcomers discovering XMPP and not being Google talk users themselves had very frustrating experience because most of their contact were Google Talk users. They thought they could communicate easily with them but it was basically a degraded version of what they had while using Google talk itself. A typical XMPP roster was mainly composed of Google Talk users with a few geeks.

Only a few years later, Google would discontinue Google Talk, migrated all their users to Hangouts, and decimated the XMPP community in an instant. Most of the Google users never noticed, outside of some invalid contacts in their list.

That’s why everyone distrusts Meta. Even with Threads being a relatively unsuccessful platform by commercial social media standards, its active userbase still dwarfs the entire Fediverse combined. There’s absolutely nothing stopping Meta from running the exact same playbook:

• Add ActivityPub support, but only partially

• Add new features to ActivityPub without consulting with the rest of the Fediverse or documenting the extensions, degrading the experience for everyone not using Threads

• Entice Fediverse users to migrate to Threads–after all, why use Mastodon or Lemmy when 95%+ of ActivityPub traffic originates from Threads?

• Deprecate ActivityPub support after most of the Fediverse is on Threads, leaving it smaller and more fragmented than if Threads had never federated at all, while forcing everyone who migrated from another Fediverse platform to Threads into an impossible choice between abandoning the vast majority of their contacts or subjecting themselves to Meta’s policies, tracking, and moderation

Nah, I got that, you’re all Gucci

You think there are curves on this abomination?

Who even knows? For whatever reason the board decided to keep quiet, didn’t elaborate on its reasoning, let Altman and his allies control the narrative, and rolled over when the employees inevitably revolted. All we have is speculation and unnamed “sources close to the matter,” which you may or may not find credible.

Even if the actual reasoning was absolutely justified–and knowing how much of a techbro Altman is (especially with his insanely creepy project to combine cryptocurrency with retina scans), I absolutely believe the speculation that the board felt Altman wasn’t trustworthy–they didn’t bother to actually tell anyone that reasoning, and clearly felt they could just weather the firestorm up until they realized it was too late and they’d already shot themselves in the foot.

…So your metric of “too much AI safety” is that it won’t let you fuck the fish…?