Now I’m thinking about an ex-programmer supervillain who does this as her big foray into supervillainy

You’ve got to be careful with rolling your eyes, because the parallelism of the two eyes means that the eye roll can be twice as powerful ^1

(1) If measured against the silly baseline of a single eyeroll

“vendored my library”

I’m unfamiliar with this phrase, are you able to explain what it means (or point me towards an explanation)? Is it relating to forking?

I read this article a few months ago that I found quite interesting: Original link Unpaywalled link

The manufacturer in this blames the DEA, and whilst I don’t trust a pharmaceutical company to do anything other than ruthlessly maximise profits, in this case I’m inclined to believe this depiction of the DEA as the overly persnickety bad guy (because I have even less reason to trust the DEA)

I wonder what would facilitate people to make their own solutions in this way. Like, I have made a few apps or automation things myself, but if I look at my “normie” friends who don’t have the level of tech familiarity that I do, they struggle with whatever out of the box solutions they can find. Poor IT education is a big part of this, and I’ve been wondering a lot about what would need to change for the average “normie” to be empowered to tinker

When I was at university, the student union had a small fund for creative projects that weren’t related to your degree. Many of the people who applied for cameras also included Adobe licenses on their funding application, because many of them were new to film or photography so they defaulted to what is “industry standard”, because that’s what the majority of online tutorials are available for.

I think the “Moved from Jekyll to Hugo” dot has an implicit catchment area around it, which includes people who don’t technically fit that description, but they’re close. I’ve used neither Jekyll nor Hugo, but the fact I understood that archetype meant I felt pulled in by the gravity of that point.

Yeah, I’m super salty about the hype because if I had to pick one side or the other, I’d be on team “AI is worthless”, but that’s just because I’d rather try convincing a bunch of skeptics that when used wisely, AI/ML can be super useful, than to try talk some sense into the AI fanatics. It’s a shame though, because I feel like the longer the bubble takes to pop, the more harm actual AI research will receive

Eh, it depends on what we count as “AI”. I’m in a field where machine learning has been a thing for years, and there’s been a huge amount of progress in the last couple of years[1]. However, it’s exhausting that so much is being rebranded as “AI”, because the people holding the purse strings aren’t necessarily the same scientists who are sick of the hype.

[1] I didn’t get into the more computational side of things until 2021 or so, but if I had to point to a catalyst for this progress, I’d say that the transformer mechanism outlined in the 2017 paper “Attention is all you need”, by Google scientists.

My ex cried when watching this scene for the first time after coming out as trans

The thing is that that was how Google became so big in the first place. PageRank was a cool way of trying to filter out the garbage and it worked real well. Even my non techy friends have been getting frustrated with search not working like it used to (even before all this Gemini stuff was added)

The words it chooses to capitalise is funny. For all the training on online stuff, it doesn’t get that it should be calling you a fucking IDIOT for even asking such a BASIC question about grilled cheese!

I personally don’t have nearly as much of a problem with that than I do with Reddit making AI deals. I’m still not keen on the idea of having anything I interact with being scraped for training AI, but aside from only interacting in closed wall spaces that I or someone I trust controls, I can’t change that. That’a not great for actually interacting with the world though, so it seems that I need to accept that scraping is going to happen. Given that, I’d definitely rather be on Lemmy than Reddit.

And this way, who knows, maybe we’re on our way to the almost utopian “open digital commons”

I wish I could feel hopeful for this.

Doubts about Starmer’s Labour aside, even if I had complete trust in an incoming Labour government, I’d be worried; it’s a lot easier to destroy than it is to build, and something I fear is if in 5 years, progress has been made, but the amount of readily visible progress is small enough that the Tories go “see, we told you that Labour couldn’t be trusted with the economy” and slide back into government.

Probably not helping is seeing the news from the US also gearing up for an election — it doesn’t feel like it’s been very long at all since we were all relieved that Biden won out over Trump, but now here we are again.

My late best friend and I came up with a bunch of these. “Morrowind in VR” meant “the absurd enthusiasm and dedication of nerds” or an endeavour requiring such. Often said with a shrug when responding to someone surprised at an impressive endeavour. E.g. "oh my god, someone made a 32bit computer inside of Terraria!"

Another one that my medievalist friend came up with when I made her watch this episode of Star Trek was “TV archivists with white gloves”, because it really annoys her to see archivists on TV wearing white gloves when that hasn’t been best practice for years — consensus is that they reduce dexterity and make cracking pages more likely, and that skin oils are way less of a risk (especially if you wash your hands before handling manuscripts, as you should). She speculates that white gloves have become a signifier of expertise, and that’s why they persist. I like this particular phrase as an attempt at Tamarian because it captures aspects of how pop culture understanding takes so long to that it is often straight-up wrong.

I was talking to a friend recently about this. They studied medieval English and aren’t especially techy, besides being a Millennial with techy friends; I said that merely knowing and using the term LLM correctly puts their AI knowledge above the vast majority of people (including a decent chunk of people trying to make a quick buck off of AI hype)

One of my favourite Yorkshire dialect jokes is how “tin tin tin” can mean the complete sentence “It isn’t in the tin”

This post and the discussion on it made me think of Moon Duchin’s essay "The Sexual Politics of Genius

It’s a long read, at 34 pages, but is easier to read than the title might suggest, possibly because Duchin is a mathematician, which I speculate contributes to her pretty straightforward prose.

Big agree. I also want the option of having evil, edgy queers who aren’t from the mirror universe, but that would only make sense against a backdrop of more representation in general