I have been predicting for well over a year now that they will both die before the election, but after the primaries, such that we can’t change the ballots, and when Americans go to vote, we will vote between two dead guys. Everyone always asks “I wonder what happens then,” and while I’m sure that there’s a technical legal answer to that question, the real answer is that no one knows,

Very well could be. At this point, I’m so suspicious of all these reports. It feels like trying to figure out what’s happening inside a company while relying only on their ads and PR communications: The only thing that I do know for sure is that everyone involved wants more money and is full of shit.

US Leads World in Credulous Reports of ‘Lagging Behind’ Russia. The American military, its allies, and the various think-tanks it funds, either directly or indirectly, generate these reports to justify forever increasing the military budget.

All these always do the same thing.

Researchers reduced [the task] to producing a plausible corpus of text, and then published the not-so-shocking results that the thing that is good at generating plausible text did a good job generating plausible text.

From the OP , buried deep in the methodology :

Because GPT models cannot interpret images, questions including imaging analysis, such as those related to ultrasound, electrocardiography, x-ray, magnetic resonance, computed tomography, and positron emission tomography/computed tomography imaging, were excluded.

Yet here’s their conclusion :

The advancement from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4 marks a critical milestone in which LLMs achieved physician-level performance. These findings underscore the potential maturity of LLM technology, urging the medical community to explore its widespread applications.

It’s literally always the same. They reduce a task such that chatgpt can do it then report that it can do to in the headline, with the caveats buried way later in the text.

My beloved internet friend, thank you so, so much. I like duolingo for expanding my vocabulary, but the infantilizing gamification drives me nuts, to the point where when I run out of hearts, I just don’t use it for weeks. This little trick will make it so that I actually use it!

Parahprasing greatly here, but in her recent book, Naomi Klein pointed out that most Americans are pilled as fuck on neoliberalism, and because the pandemic is a naturally occurring and obvious contradiction to its fundamental tenets (individualism, meritocracy, competiton, etc.), the only way to square that circle was to go insane.

I find that framework very useful. These so called activists are pilled as hell on this fundamentally individualist concept of freedom that inundates us Americans from birth. It’s an almost entirely empty conception of freedom. Basically, we can say whatever we want while owning guns and generally being selfish. No one is entitled to be free of childhood disease though. That’s not freedom because it encroaches on others being selfish. If you genuinely believe in individual liberty above all, as Americans are taught from birth, then childhood vaccinations are wrong.

Unfortunately it’s a really fucking stupid way to run a society.

I don’t really agree with this. It is the answer that I think classical economics would give but I just don’t think it’s useful. For one, it ignores politics. Large corporations also have bought our government, and a few large wealth management funds like vanguard own a de facto controlling share in many public companies, oftentimes including virtually an entire industry, such that competition between them isn’t really incentived as much as financial shenanigans and other Jack Welch style shit.

Some scholars (i think I read this in Adrienne bullers value of a whale, which is basically basis for this entire comment) even argue that we’ve reached a point where it might be more useful to think of our economy as a planned economy, but planned by finance instead of a state central authority.

All that is to say: why would we expect competition to grow, as you suggest, when the current companies already won, and therefore have the power to crush competition? They’ve already dismantled so many of the antimonopoly and other regulations standing in their way. The classical economics argument treats these new better companies as just sorta rising out of the aether but in reality there’s a whole political context that is probably worth considering.

Honestly I almost never have to deal with any of those things, because there's always a more fundamental problem. Engineering as a discipline exists to solve problems, but most of these companies have no mechanism to sit down and articulated what problems they are trying to solve at a very fundamental level, and then really break them down and talk about them. The vast majority of architecture decisions in software get made by someone thinking something like "I want to use this new ops tool" or "well everyone uses react so that's what I'll use."

My running joke is that every client has figured out a new, computationally expensive way to generate a series of forms. Most of my job is just stripping everything out. I've replaced so many extremely complex, multi-service deploy pipelines with 18 lines of bash, or reduced AWS budgets by one sometimes two orders of magnitude. I've had clients go from spending 1500/month on AWS with serverless and lambda and whatever other alphabet soup of bullshit services that make no sense to 20 fucking dollars.

It's just mind-blowing how stupid our industry is. Everyone always thinks I'm sort of genius performance engineer for knowing bash and replacing their entire front-end react framework repo that builds to several GB with server side templating from 2011 that loads a 45kb page. Suddenly people on mobile can actually use the site! Incredible! Turns out your series of forms doesn't need several million lines of javascript.

I don't do this kind of work as much anymore, but up until about a year ago, it was my bread and butter…

I agree. I've actually written about this.

It gets solved by planning. Actual long term planning that includes the relevant stakeholders. Currently everything is run by and for VCs who only plan in terms of funding rounds and exits.

Yeah, I totally see that. I want to clarify: It's not that I don't think it's useful at all. It's that our industry has fully internalized venture capital's value system and they're going to use this new tool to slam on the gas as hard as they can, because that's all we ever do. Every single software ecosystem is built around as fast as possible, everything else be damned.

Yeah, I think helping people who don't know how to code and letting them dabble is a great use case. I fully encourage that.

I don't think it's actually good for generating scaffolding in terms of helping people write quality software, but I do agree with you that that's how people are going to use it, and then the expectation is going to become that you have to do things that fast. It's kind of mindboggling to me that anyone would look at the software industry and decide that our problem is that we don't move fast enough. Moving too fast for speed's own sake is already the cause of so many of our problems.

I do software consulting for a living. A lot of my practice is small organizations hiring me because their entire tech stack is a bunch of shortcuts taped together into one giant teetering monument to moving as fast as possible, and they managed to do all of that while still having to write every line of code.

In 3-4 years, I'm going to be hearing from clients about how they hired an undergrad who was really into AI to do the core of their codebase and everyone is afraid to even log into the server because the slightest breeze might collapse the entire thing.

LLM coding is going to be like every other industrial automation process in our society. We can now make a shittier thing way faster, without thinking of the consequences.

Yet another program that supposedly helps the poor by giving money to the rich.

third peg of the program will see the federal government draw up a public list of buildings it owns that could be made available for sale to help bolster development.

Jesus Christ. If the government wants to build housing, then it should build fucking housing. Selling publicly owned buildings to private developers to turn into rentals for poor people is trickle down neoliberal bullshit.

I am totally in favor of criticizing researchers for doing science that actually serves corporate interests. I wrote a whole thing doing that just last week. I actually fully agree with the main point made by the researchers here, that people in fields like machine vision are often unwilling to grapple with the real-word impacts of their work, but I think complaining that they use the word "object" for humans is distracting, and a bit of a misfire. "Object detection" is just the term of art for recognizing anything, humans included, and of course humans are the object that interests us most. It's a bit like complaining that I objectified humans by calling them a "thing" when I included humans in "anything" in my previous sentence.

Again, I fully agree with much of their main thesis. This is a really important point:

As co-author Luca Soldaini said on a call with 404 Media, even in the seemingly benign context of computer vision enabled cameras on self-driving cars, which are ostensibly there to detect and prevent collision with human beings, computer vision is often eventually used for surveillance.

“The way I see it is that even benign applications like that, because data that involves humans is collected by an automatic car, even if you're doing this for object detection, you're gonna have images of humans, of pedestrians, or people inside the car—in practice collecting data from folks without their consent.” Soldaini said.

Soldaini also pointed to instances when this data was eventually used for surveillance, like police requesting self-driving car footage for video evidence.

And I do agree that sometimes, it's wise to update our language to be more respectful, but I'm not convinced that in this instance it's the smoking gun they're portraying it as. The structures that make this technology evil here are very well understood, and they matter much more than the fairly banal language we're using to describe the tech.

I post our stuff on lemmy because I'm an active user of lemmy and I like it here. I find posting here is more likely to lead to real discussions, as opposed to say Twitter, which sucks, but is where I'd be if I was blasting self-promotion. It's not like lemmy communities drive major traffic.

Isn't that exactly what lemmy is for? It's what I used to love about Reddit 10 years ago, or Stumble Upon, or Digg, or any of the even older internet aggregators and forums: People would put their small, independent stuff on it. It's what got me into the internet. I used to go on forums and aggregators to read interesting stuff, or see cool projects, or find weird webcomics, or play strange niche web games, or be traumatized by fucked up memes. Now the entire internet is just "5 big websites, each consisting of pics from the other 4" or whatever the quip is, and it's fucking boring.

So yes, I and a few others are theluddite.org. It's an independent site written by leftists working in tech and academia, mostly aimed at other people in tech and academia, but also for everyone. It's not like I'm hiding it; it literally says so in my bio. We are not professional opinion-havers, unlike "mainstream" sources; I personally write code for a living every day, which is something that surprisingly few tech commentators have ever done. That makes it possible for me to write about major topics discussed in the media, like google's ad monopoly,, in a firsthand way that doesn't really exist elsewhere, even on topics as well trodden as that one.

And yes, we post our stuff on the fediverse, because the fediverse rules. It is how we think the internet should be. We are also self-hosted, publish an RSS feed, don't run any ads or tracking (and often write about how bad those things are for the internet) because that's also how we think the internet is supposed to work.

There are two issues. First, self-driving cars just aren't very good (yet?). Second, it will make millions of people's jobs obsolete, and that should be a good thing, but it's a bad thing, because we've structured our society such that it's a bad thing if you lose your job. It'd be cool as hell if it were a good thing for the people who don't have to work anymore, and we should structure our society that way instead.

I like technology. I think it can make our lives better, but some people, notably capitalists, often use technology to make our lives worse. When that happens, we should smash their machines.

Based

Don't be too impressed. So far I've only taken in a couple bucks.

But seriously, that's why I do The Luddite. There are some good tech journalists and commentators, but they're usually professional journalists or opinion-havers. I code for a living. I think that perspective is often missing. How many people who write about the app store have actually submitted an app? Or like this post, how many have made and then monetized a website?

The point of the post is to talk about it because I care about the internet and don't want it to be filled with generated trash.