V0ldek

joined 1 year ago
[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago

OpenBrain "responsibly" elects not to release its model publicly to avoid it being called "underwhelming" and, to use a technical term, "gobshite".

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 10 points 2 days ago

It's eugenics but as a religious cult for reactionaries

Yud is that creepy nerd from your middle school who wrote disturbing fan fiction, but it wasn't just a phase and now he has the aforementioned cult

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 6 points 4 days ago

Misogyny is the free square, easy to forget

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 11 points 4 days ago (1 children)

There's a fucking for profit that does this and it's used by the god damn USA Speaker of the House so that his son can monitor his fondling

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 3 points 1 week ago

While all the comments are correct, i.e. what the fuck is wrong with you, this is also wrong since it immediately leaves the duck unsupervised after the first trip. So really not sure what you're trying to prove here.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 8 points 1 week ago (21 children)

In my head transhumanism is this cool idea where I'd get to have a zoom function in my eye

But of course none of that could exist in our capitalist hellscape because of just all the reasons the ruling class would use it to opress the working class.

And then you find out what transhumanists actually advocate for and it's just eugenics. Like without even a tiny bit of plausible deniability. They're proud it's eugenics.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 3 points 1 week ago

Unlike in the paragraph above, though, most LW posters held plenty of nuts in their hands before.

... I'll see myself out

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 3 points 1 week ago

Can post only if you look like this

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 5 points 1 week ago

Bwahahaha, as I said on bsky: let them do it, can't wait to use it as a cautionary tale of why full rewrites are a terrible idea during freshman programming lectures

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 4 points 2 weeks ago

Jesus christ this is so cringe, they used The One Joke three times in the first minute and that's not even the halfway point, I'm not finishing this nonsense

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 4 points 2 weeks ago

The secret is to have cultivated a codebase so utterly shit that even LLMs can make it better by just randomly making stuff up

At least they don't get psychic damage from looking at the code

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 11 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

To be fair, many men see every women, including cis, as one they're allowed to abuse and all the other things you mentioned. And then it'll be her fault for being "hysterical" or something similarly dumb.

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submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by V0ldek@awful.systems to c/freeasm@awful.systems
 

I'm looking for recommendations of good blogs for programmers. I've been asked about what I would recommend by younger folks a few times these past few months and I realised I don't really have a good list that I could just share with them.

What I'm interested in are blogs that don't focus specifically on any particular tech but more things like Coding Horror that are just for devs in general. They don't have to be for beginners. It'd also be interesting to see which of those are most popular in our little circle, so please upvote comments that contain recommendations you agree with.

I'm implicitly assuming stuff shared by folks here is going to be sensible, well-written blogs, and not some AI shill nonsense or other tech grift.

Note that I'm specifically interested in the text medium, podcasts or YT not so much.

 

An excellent post by Ludicity as per usual, but I need to vent two things.

First of all, I only ever worked in a Scrum team once and it was really nice. I liked having a Product Owner that was invested in the process and did customer communications, I loved having a Scrum Master that kept the meetings tight and followed up on Retrospective points, it worked like a well-oiled machine. Turns out it was a one-of-a-kind experience. I can't imagine having a stand-up for one hour without casualties involved.

A few months back a colleague (we're both PhD students at TU Munich) was taking a piss about how you can enroll in a Scrum course as an elective for our doctor school. He was in general making fun of the methodology but using words I've never heard before in my life. "Agile Testing". "Backlog Grooming". "Scrum of Scrums". I was like "dude, none of those words are in the bible", went to the Scrum Guide (which as far as I understood was the only document that actually defined what "Scrum" meant) and Ctrl+F-ed my point of literally none of that shit being there. Really, where the fuck does any of that come from? Is there a DLC to Scrum that I was never shown before? Was the person who first uttered "Scrumban" already drawn and quartered or is justice yet to be served?

Aside: the funniest part of that discussion was that our doctor school has an exemption that carves out "credits for Scrum and Agile methodology courses" as being worthless towards your PhD, so at least someone sane is managing that.

Second point I wanted to make was that I was having a perfectly happy holiday and then I read the phrase "Agile 2" and now I am crying into an ice-cream bucket. God help us all. Why. Ludicity you fucking monster, there was a non-zero chance I would've gone through my entire life without knowing that existed, I hate you now.

 

Turns out software engineering cannot be easily solved with a ~~small shell script~~ large language model.

The author of the article appears to be a genuine ML engineer, although some of his takes aged like fine milk. He seems to be shilling Google a bit too much for my taste. However, the sneer content is good nonetheless.

First off, the "Devin solves a task on Upwork" demo is 1. cherry picked, 2. not even correctly solved.

Second, and this is the absolutely fantastic golden nugget here, to show off its "bug solving capability" it creates its own nonsensical bugs and then reverses them. It's the ideal corporate worker, able to appear busy by creating useless work for itself out of thin air.

It also takes over 6 hours to perform this task, which would be reasonable for an experienced software engineer, but an experienced software engineer's workflow doesn't include burning a small nuclear explosion worth of energy while coding and then not actually solving the task. We don't drink that much coffee.

The next demo is a bait-and-switch again. In this case I think the author of the article fails to sneer quite as much as it's worthy -- the task the AI solves is writing test cases for finding the Least Common Multiple modulo a number. Come on, that task is fucking trivial, all those tests are oneliners! It's famously much easier to verify modulo arithmetic than it is to actually compute it. And it takes the AI an hour to do it!

It is a bit refreshing though that it didn't turn out DEVIN is just Dinesh, Eesha, Vikram, Ishani, and Niranjan working for $2/h from a slum in India.

 

I'm not sure if this fully fits into TechTakes mission statement, but "CEO thinks it's a-okay to abuse certificate trust to sell data to advertisers" is, in my opinion, a great snapshot of what brain worms live inside those people's heads.

In short, Facebook wiretapped Snapchat by sending data through their VPN company, Onavo. Installing it on your machine would add their certificates as trusted. Onavo would then intercept all communication to Snapchat and pretend the connection is TLS-secure by forging a Snapchat certificate and signing it with its own.

"Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted, we have no analytics about them," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a 2016 email to Javier Olivan.

"Given how quickly they're growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them," Zuckerberg continued. "Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this."

Zuckerberg ordered his engineers to "think outside the box" to break TLS encryption in a way that would allow them to quietly sell data to advertisers.

I'm sure the brave programmers that came up with and implemented this nonsense were very proud of their service. Jesus fucking cinammon crunch Christ.

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