The age of book shovelware has arrived: https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2024/10/ai-audiobook-narrators-in-overdrive-and-the-issue-of-library-ai-circulation-policy/

Edit: TIL about the US copyright office website’s ai generation info on works. That’s a thing we will be making a bunch of use of, I imagine.

Apparently there are two GitHub repos up with strongly conflicting information on what happened, this is gonna be a three-buckets-of-popcorn incident.

I live like 15mi from there, I would prefer the containment bubble to stay intact. But the tech bubble is welcome to go blow up any moment

Some cool stuff: I went to a cs high school kind of deal and we learned some pretty fun stuff, then were encouraged to experiment:

• teacher showed us to render the Mandelbrot set, and when I had that written I wrote a little thing that lets you zoom into it (it was buggy, but who cares! Infinite fractals!)

• in school, I installed Linux on my pc, played around and then fucked up my primary disk’s boot sector and partition table. That meant my DOS install would be fucked up too (and I needed that for homework!), so I read up on MBRs and realized that if I remember the size of the partition, I can restore it to how it was.… and ext2 gives you a correct size even if the partition table is screwy, meaning that with the first primary partition activated I could find the correct size and then make an entry for the second one, and so on, until everything was working again. Data loss prevented!

• I’d written a pretty good solution to a homework problem in C, but typo’d a cleanup command and deleted the source file. The previous data loss scenario had prepared me: I rebooted into a rescue disk, grepped the disk drive for parts of the source and got the file back! (Got multiple copies of the file back, in fact. That’s when I started using version control, hah)

It’s called “safe superintelligence” because they want investors to sign SAFE agreements and feel very smart about it.

Damn you, to this day I had no idea what his face looks like and it’s gotta be this golden retriever looking windwards type of visage?

Easy to arrive at that being the ideal profile:

• Ufos are a psyop
• Ufos fly
• cruise missiles fly
• hence, cruise missiles are a psyop.

Bit of a wash, tbh: I like that the “but simplicity!” computer touchers now write their trash code in a memory-safe language; it sure reduces the amount of extremely preventable issues by introducing some other extremely preventable issues.

Ehhhh. This is the identical PR they ended up accepting: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/24648

I have feels about the implied “the author behaves like a shithead because he’s ESL” but eh. If it works.

Just leave the computer running, the capacitors will explode before the model is done evaluating.

(Or it’ll spring a pre-auth vuln and turn into a buttcoin miner, or it’ll experience a blip in communication latency and lose its ability to talk to the others in its cluster, …)

Author has a pronoun right in the title. Just like one of these “there is a huge spider perching on your shoulder” situations.

With just a little bit of creative bin-packing they can share a core with the processes that simulate the smell of sewage and leafblower noise.