• 3 Posts
  • 386 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Ah yes, the classic “you can only be upset about one thing at a time”!

    If you’re upset I pissed on the floor instead of in the toilet while Biden is complicit with genocide you’re part of the problem!

    Sorry boss, I can’t care about my job because of Palestine!

    How dare you pull me over for going 80mph in a school zone, pig! Don’t you know what Israel is doing?

    How could you possibly expect me to care about something so insignifIcant as wiping? Don’t you know that children are dying?


  • Do you not have a bug tracker or ticketing system of some sort to manage these things coming your way?

    Incredibly few people at my work get much more than dismissive small talk from just walking up or from sending me a message expecting me to re-prioritize everything else for their special pet problem.

    My manager sets my priorities, any changes to that need to come from him. They can take it up with him if they don’t like it or disagree.

    I don’t respond to IMs or emails not from my boss or from my own team except when I’ve hit a mental road block and need to think about something else to refresh.

    And I don’t actually work on any of those requests until there’s a ticket in. If someone comes to me asking why my main job duty isn’t done, I’m sure as hell going to have a paper trail documenting who fucked up the timeline. No ticket, no work.

    That also puts some weight on anyone else able to pick up tickets for your team to do it, so it’s not always falling to you because you’re not jaded enough to say no.


  • I think this is a misunderstanding of how most of the AI that feed into workflows work. Most of them don’t dynamically re-train live based off how users are using them. At least not outside of the context of that user/chat instance.

    Most likely what these and others are doing is to download pre-trained open source AI datasets thrn and run them locally so they aren’t restrained by any of the commercial AI’s limitations on what they will and won’t output to users. I highly doubt there’s enough material out there to truly train a new AI model on only explicitly racist material. This is just a bunch of assholes doing prompt engineering on open source models running locally.




  • This isn’t about right or wrong though. It’s explicitly about whether or not they broke the law.

    They did. They did so loudly and proudly. This is why we are here, where they lost the legal battle.

    If someone is pointing a gun at you with their finger on the trigger, and you say “Just try to shoot me! I dare you! You know you won’t you little chickenshit.” then you should have a pretty good expectation to get shot.

    Everything else is valid, but significantly less important. IA has to operate in the rules that currently exist, not what the rules should be. There are better ways to get bad laws changed than to dare someone to find you guilty of them.

    Maybe this case will be the first building block towards overturning the asinine digital lending laws. I would love if it was, but I’m not holding my breath.



  • Yes, let’s just completely misrepresent someone and pretend it’s a quote! That’s fun!

    There are effective ways to challenge laws and to push for new rights. Loudly shouting “I don’t care about your rules, just try and stop me!” was not an effective way for IA to try and do this.

    Furthermore, IA constantly misrepresenting the problem and why they were sued in all their blog posts and press shit also does not help the cause.

    It’s a law in desperate need of abolishment, but this is not how you go about changing it.

    This also was not an effective way for them to ensure these books would continue to be available digitally for the public. They could have quietly leaked batches of the content that only they had out to the ebook piracy groups in a staggered fashion to help obsfucate where it was coming from, then hosted a blog post telling people how to pirate ebooks and where, with a cover your ass disclaimer that everyone needs to abide by their local laws.

    By any metric of success, the way they handled this set them up to lose from the start, and jeapordized one of the most important public resources in the current era. This would be understandable from some small operation of like 5 people trying to digitize shit, not from an organization as large and old as IA.

    I’m not the person who said he had no sympathy, but that is why I have little sympathy about all this: They don’t deserve this outcome, I wish they had won, and I hope the law gets overturned or revised… but they absolutely should have know better that to try and do this the way they did. They fucked around and found out. This coild have ended so much worse for them.


  • Kang also effectively got defeated by Loki in a TV show too, where that instance of him should have been the strongest (as the one who conquered the multiverse and wove it into a single reality/sacred timeline).

    To be fair, Kang essentially let himself be killed because he believes/d that he’s an inevitability of reality so in some sense immortal. But he still also lost. He was just taunting in death.

    But now that the multiverse is back and being held together by Loki, all there should be left Kang-wise are the ones that weren’t powerful enough to conquer the whole multiverse, so how are they supposed to be as threatening?

    And again, all of this content was only in a spinoff show rather than hinted at and weaved through the movies.

    I have no idea who greenlit that idea, or where they go from here to make it feel impactful.



  • I miss the “Tales from…” subs. Tales from tech support was regular reading material for me for many years, and in general just having a place to commiserate with others in the same field as you is wonderful. The other ones also helped me be more concious of what I could do to keep myself from being a nuisance to other professionals like my doctor and pharmacist.

    More niche, I miss the gunpla sub a lot. We have subs for model making and tabletop miniatures, but the gunpla community was very well run.

    In general, I think the lack of moderation tools has made it difficult for communities to do regular “event” posts and the like which used to really help keep subs alive, guide discussions, and gave good examples of the type of content that fit. Like it’s a lot easier to start a new conversation at a party where everyone is talking than to be the first person to speak up in a silent room.






  • Similar to your #2, but less serious, I once wrote a script to power down virtual machines for a data center move. It was a nice piece of work too, grouping them in batches, sending shutdown commands to the guest OS, falling back to forcing a power off through the hypervisor after a configurable timeout…

    I don’t recall the specifics of the problem or the virtual infrastructure I was working with, but in short I didn’t have sanity checks on what was being shut down. Ended up force shutting off the hypervisor/virtual infrastructure management system.

    Added an extra few hours the move with that.



  • Blockchain also has some useful applications. Most (but not all) of them are also possible with technology and such that existed when bitcoin was first created, at far lower cost for a minor tradeoff in accuracy. On top of that, almost none of them are related to speculative markets.

    It’s a way to do distributed transaction logs in a non-refutable and independantly verifiable way. That’s useful and important, but it was a solution in search of a problem. Even for the highest security, most at risk transactions, the existing international fincancial systems are “good enough” to ensure reliability of transaction logs.

    In the end, blockchain and now AI are just falling victim to con men trying to milk as much money as they can from things before people build a working understanding of them. They’ll just keep moving onto the next big thing as it comes.