this made me cackle

very nice

I used Firefox for largely political reasons (summarized as “Google needs a competitor”), but it was becoming harder and harder to justify. Eventually, I just switched to a Chromium-based browser. I will say that, as an almost-good-enough solution until I wake up from this nightmare to a functioning Servo (🙏🙏🙏) , DNS level ad blocking (using Mullvad’s DNS servers) + uBlock Origin Lite (filtering mode set to “complete”) has been sufficient for me. It even blocks Spotify ads. I think it blocks YouTube ads as well, although I barely watch YouTube on my browser.

Ungoogled Chromium supports MV2 extensions and seems like a good choice if Firefox becomes unusable or you get fed up. I use Trivalent, a security hardened Chromium-based browser, but it may be tough to install if you aren’t on Secureblue. Also it only supports MV3 extensions.

this shit is so fucking frustrating, just leave our browsers alone. we want security updates, not an unethically sourced bullshit-and-vulnerability-generator stapled onto the biggest attack surface on our fucking machine

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/my-goal-is-to-eliminate-every-line-of-c-and-c-from-microsoft-by-2030-microsoft-bets-on-ai-to-finally-modernize-windows

My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030. Our strategy is to combine AI *and* Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases. Our North Star is “1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code”. To accomplish this previously unimaginable task, we’ve built a powerful code processing infrastructure. Our algorithmic infrastructure creates a scalable graph over source code at scale. Our AI processing infrastructure then enables us to apply AI agents, guided by algorithms, to make code modifications at scale. The core of this infrastructure is already operating at scale on problems such as code understanding."

wow, *and* algorithms? i didn’t think anyone had gotten that far

Alice: what is 2 + 2?

LLM: random.random() + random.random()

Alice: 1.2199404515268157 is better than nothing, i guess

yeah it was pretty wild

like we get it, you think your farts smell good, but this is an elevator sir

https://awful.systems/post/5776862/8966942 😭

also this guy is a bit of a doofus, e.g. https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/853934, where he is a dick to someone reporting a bug, and https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/885027, where someone points out that you can execute anything as root because of a security issue, and he argues like a total shithead

You mean that a program designed to let an unprivileged user
mount/unmount/eject anything he wants has a security flaw because it allows
him to mount/unmount/eject anything he wants? I’m shocked.

Implement a system that allows an appilcation to mount/unmount/eject USB
devices connected to the system securely, then make sure that system is
universally adopted on every linux install in the universe. Once you’ve done that, feel free to
re-open this ticket.

i would not invite this person to my birthday

the chair of my cs department at a public university expressed this sentiment

“the cat’s out of the bag, now we must teach students to use it responsibly”

BECAUSE THAT HAS WORKED SO WELL BEFORE

(sorry for shouting)

something i was thinking about yesterday: so many people i respect used to respect have admitted to using llms as a search engine. even after i explain the seven problems with using a chatbot this way:

1. wrong tool for the job
2. bad tool
3. are you fucking serious?
4. environmental impact
5. ethics of how the data was gathered/curated to generate^[1] the model
6. privacy policy of these companies is a nightmare
7. seriously what is wrong with you

they continue to do it. the ease of use, together with the valid syntax output by the llm, seems to short-circuit something in the end-user’s brain.

anyway, in the same way that some vibe-coded bullshit will end up exploding down the line, i wonder whether the use of llms as a search engine is going to have some similar unintended consequences — “oh, yeah, sorry boss, the ai told me that mr. robot was pretty accurate, idk why all of our secrets got leaked. i watched the entire series.”

additionally, i wonder about the timing. will we see sporadic incidents of shit exploding, or will there be a cascade of chickens coming home to roost?

tom sawyer literally rolling in wealth

but he never helps huck finn out financially?

pretty shit story, mark

seize the meowns of production

sorry

as someone who identifies greatly with diogenes, i say: do not trust anyone who compares themself to diogenes

Like a complete fucking idiot, I paid for two years of protonmail right before discovering they are fascists. I would like to move to another provider. I have until August. I have been considering Forward Email. Anyone have thoughts on this provider or recommendations?

I just saw this. I sent an email to Framework a few days ago asking if they would delete my account and letting them know this was the reason.

This is a fundamentally flawed argument. If you ask a human who already knows the algorithm for solving the Tower-of-Hanoi problem to solve a Tower-of-Hanoi problem with twenty discs, for instance, he or she would almost certainly fail to do so. By that logic, we must conclude that humans cannot think either.

“I don’t understand recursion” energy

from the folks who brought you

we’ve trained a model to regurgitate 19th century pseudoscience

the field of computer science presents: How to destroy a public good by skipping all the required reading in your liberal arts courses

my face to your foot style

Glad to see.

Baldur Bjarnason has a piece from July 2023 called The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con^[1] that you might appreciate, if you haven’t read it yet. :)

yeah the trick is to already know you’re an idiot

after fedora announced that ai contributions are cool, this is really refreshing