Sigh. Love how he claims it’s worth it for “learning”…

We already have a thing for learning, it’s called “books”, and if you want to learn compiler basics, $14000 could buy you hundreds of copies of the dragon book.

Fascinating how that product page is full of marketing fluff, but nowhere does it say what this actually is…? What does it do? It’s some kind of… memory expansion? But what’s beneath the big heatsink then? All they say is that it’s somehow amazing:

In the age of local AI, GIGABYTE AI TOP is the all-round solution to win advantages ahead of traditional AI training methods. It features a variety of groundbreaking technologies that can be easily adapted by beginners or experts, for most common open-source LLMs, in anyplace even on your desk.

A variety of groundbreaking technologies, uh huh, okay then. In so many ways this is the perfect companion product for AI.

Look, we’ve almost solved counting letters in several types of berries. Generating instant solutions to global warming will become possible right after that, it’s only logical.

Why is it always transphobia with these kinds of people… is it because they feel racism is too risky? So they need a different outlet for hating on people based on what they believe is “science”?

Procreate, a digital painting software for iPads, has not just avoided AI, they even have an anti-GenAI statement on their website.

When an 8 year old thinks an AI is “far more knowledgeable than me about reasonable human behavior” that could lead a person to self-reflection. Could.

I once randomly found Hossenfelder’s YT channel, it had a video about climate change and someone linked it somewhere, I didn’t know who she was. That video seemed fine, it correctly pointed out the urgency of the matter, and while I don’t know enough climate science to say much about the veracity of all its content, nothing stuck out as particularly weird to me. So I looked at some other videos from the channel… and boooooy did I quickly discover some serious conspiracy-style nonsense stuff. Real “the cabal of physicists are suppressing the truth” vibes, including “I got this email which I will read to you but I can’t tell you who it’s from, but it’s the ultimate proof” (both not quotes, just how I’d summarize the content…)

And the language’s main data container is a kind of stack, but to push or pop values, you have to wrap them into “boats” which have to cross a “river”, with extra rules for ordering and combination of values.

cognitive forehead strap-on

ahahahaha, thank you that’s perfect

Nice sneer: In the Future All Food Will Be Cooked in a Microwave, and if You Can’t Deal With That Then You Need to Get Out of the Kitchen

Yes, doing the thing which the entire business world is pouring billions into and trying their hardest to shove onto everyone to maximize imagined future profits, that’s what counterculture is all about.

I’m just confused because I remember using Dragon Naturally Speaking for Windows 98 in the 90s and it worked pretty accurately already back then for dictation and sometimes it feels as if all of that never happened.

Similar case from 2 years ago with Whisper when transcribing German.

I’m confused by this. Didn’t we have pretty decent speech-to-text already, before LLMs? It wasn’t perfect but at least didn’t hallucinate random things into the text? Why the heck was that replaced with this stuff??

If anyone else is wondering: DSP here I think stands for “Delivery Service Partner”, and driver for someone driving a vehicle. (I assumed the context “Digital Signal Processing” and driver as in “device driver” at first and was quite confused :P)

On-topic: I think regulation needs to come down hard on the delivery industry in general, be it parcels or food or whatever, working conditions there have been terrible for a long time.

rsyslog goes “AI first”

what

Thanks for the “from now on stay away from this forever” warning. Reading that blog post is almost surreal (“how AI is shaping the future of logging”), I have to remind myself it’s a syslog daemon.

Yes, right, Reddit too! Forgot that one. When I visit there I use alternative Reddit front-ends now which luckily spare me from this.

btw I noticed that Etsy is not actually in SV, so the problem is bigger than that.

I need to rant about yet another SV tech trend which is getting increasingly annoying.

It’s something that is probably less noticeable if you live in a primarily English-speaking region, but if not, there is this very annoying thing that a lot of websites from US tech companies do now, which is that they automatically translate content, without ever asking. So English is pretty big on the web, and many English websites are now auto-translated to German for me. And the translations are usually bad. And by that I mean really fucking bad. (And I’m not talking about the translation feature in webbrowsers, it’s the websites themselves.)

Small example of a recent experience: I was browsing stuff on Etsy, and Etsy is one of the websites which does this now. Entire product pages with titles and descriptions and everything is auto-translated, without ever asking me if I want that.

On a product page I then saw:

Material: gefühlt

This was very strange… because that makes no sense at all. “Gefühlt” is a form (participle) of the verb “fühlen”, which means “to feel”. It can be used in a past tense form of the verb.

So, to make sense of this you first have to translate that back to English, the past tense “to feel” as “felt”. And of course “felt” can also mean a kind of fabric (which in German is called “Filz”), so it’s a word with more than one meaning in English. You know, words with multiple meanings, like most words in any language. But the brilliant SV engineers do not seem to understand that you cannot translate words without the context they’re in.

And this is not a singular experience. Many product descriptions on Etsy are full of such mistakes now, sometimes to the point of being downright baffling. And Ebay does the same now, and the translated product titles and descriptions are a complete shit show as well.

And Youtube started replacing the audio of English videos by default with AI-auto-generated translations spoken by horrible AI voices. By default! It’s unbearable. At least there’s a button to switch back to the original audio, but I keep having to press it. And now Youtube Shorts is doing it too, except that the YT Shorts video player does not seem to have any button to disable it at all!

Is it that unimaginable for SV tech that people speak more than one language? And that maybe you fucking ask before shoving a horribly bad machine translation into people’s faces?

A prompt-injection attack on Google’s Gemini model was disclosed through 0din, Mozilla’s bug bounty program

TIL

Whenever I think Mozilla can’t get any worse…

So now they do “Agentic Security” and “Real-time GenAI intelligence on emerging threats”.

HN really is an attractor for the most boring people in the world.