They could donate the food to a food bank and be completely shielded from liability by Good Samaritan Act

They don’t want to because it means that poor people can eat for free (gasp) which might slightly impact the restaurant industry and indirectly reduce their profit margin by 0.1%

I have never bought and will never buy an apple thing (because it’s a super-enshittified walled garden), but honestly I’m just fine with 60Hz. My phone supports 120Hz and I have switched it back to 60Hz because it gives me a couple extra hours of battery. I can tell the difference but it doesn’t bother me one bit. I’d even be OK with 30Hz if it was an option and had a significant battery life advantage.

Maybe having all the animations in the OS and apps turned off helps keep it not noticeable.

Whatever is the standard going forward, I hope that there’s always an option to cut back the refresh rate in exchange for battery life, either at the time of purchase or in the settings.

We actually have a big shortage of talent

That review may lead to changes in roles, responsibilities, and continued employment. Individual outcomes will be communicated directly once decisions are finalized.

Knowing how the hiring/onboarding process works in IT — i.e. how fucking hard it is to find, hire, onboard, train and build up a working relationship with an adequate employee — I strongly doubt they have a “shortage of talent” if they’re willing to fire (or even just threaten to fire) people over what amounts to tooling use.

Oh, also, if I got an email threatening my “continued employment” over shit like this I’d be looking for a new job ASAP. And I have been using LLMs for my work for a couple of years now.

Soooo happy that I invested the time and effort into self-hosting my own email server.

Until dovecot and/or postifx enshittify, that is.

Impressive (in a scary way). For some reason made me think of Atom Heart Mother by Pink Floyd.

It will definitely be profitable for the hardware makers. Companies whose entire value proposition depends on the model weights not leaking in an increasingly sloppy vulnerability-filled world of IT? Not so much.

Contributions from russians make up a sizeable portion of Linux and GNU tooling. A myriad of foundational software, from nginx to strace, were created and are currently maintained by russian citizens.

While there has been a lot of brain drain (hello), russia is still a country of 140 million people and the remains of great soviet theoretical education. In such conditions there will be both a bunch computer science geniuses and a small army of half-competent coders which would allow you to roll your own OS, let alone a distro, if the efforts were organized enough.

Baikal went bankrupt in 2023 because they used TSMC for chip production.

Elbrus is barely hanging on but it’s helplessly far behind, you can’t really run a modern DE and browse modern web on anything but their flagship Elbrus-16C, but that’s made for servers, AFAIK there are no “desktop” form-factor motherboards for it at all, and it’s exceptionally pricy compared to competition.

I think a more likely outcome is that russia starts bulk-purchasing chinese CPUs soon.

Thanks! I enjoy your work a lot as well, in fact your Italian bridge pic is what inspired me to start posting random photos from my trips again :)

Middle of nowhere in Serbia

I’ve been trying out JPEG-XL, because the quality I can get within Lemmy’s 1MB upload limit is much better, but I think I’ll switch back to regular old JPEG from now on (also because Lemmy’s UI doesn’t work too well with JXL).

Here’s the biggest JPEG that fits:

I think you’re joking, but in case you’re not… This is just like the paradox of tolerance, everyone has a right to privacy and freedom but if they violate other’s rights, society will in exchange take away theirs. We don’t (generally) call imprisoned criminals “victims of kidnapping” either.

Also similar to the BMW heated seats nonsense.

There is clearly a push coming from these companies in the past month to present AI as something extremely dangerous. The way I see it, it’s just marketing for the industry to keep the grift bubble going a while longer still: (1) there’s no such thing as bad press, (2) if it’s dangerous it must also be good. IMO public statements like this is just another element in that marketing campaign.

Maybe the bubble is closer to bursting than I imagine and they’re trying to stretch it out until the US midterm elections end.

I suspect in reality it’s a combination of all those reasons, probably in different amounts for all three.

There is an near-infinite expanse of stuff to learn in every direction you look. Human knowledge and culture is a fractal, even when you think you know everything about a subject there’s always more to be surprised by or to do.

I’ve recently been reading up on cryptography. That part of software engineering alone can take years to catch up with the latest post-quantum developments.

There is also always some basic shit which you forget with time. I need to re-read The Art of Computer Programming at some point.

If you just pipe an LLM straight into a feedback loop with a console, it is going to destroy things rather soon, depending on the context window and other factors. All the agentic fluff is basically the workaround for LLMs going off the rails.

Pipe it into root on your laptop for a couple days and see how it fares.

Nah, LLMs are pretty useful for a wide range of tasks. I would grant them the status of “locally intelligent for text manipulation”. They can find patterns, transform, compress, and even generate text pretty well if you formulate the prompt correctly.

The problem with them is two-fold:

1. There is no actual grounded intelligence involved and yet they are used for all sorts of tasks where it is required, like research or decision-making or software architecture or creative writing.
2. They also captured human emotional states really well, which makes them scarily addictive for people looking for human connection (see all the “companion” chatbots) and terrifyingly useful for pushing propaganda, misinfo, and scams. This also multiplies the first problem tenfold because LLMs are trained to come off as confident which means they will “pretend” to be good at things they really are not, and if you don’t know how the underlying tech works you can be lulled into believing its confidently incorrect research results or execute a totally insane decision it makes.

Wars in the Middle East start sounding more and more like statistics that no one really wants to hear about

Has this not been the case for the past 25 years already? No real need for “AI” when you already have an obedient and trigger-happy military with plenty of remote-controlled toys and your populace is brainwashed to believe “brown person = terrorist”.

way less soldiers to choose to disregard unlawful orders

What is the last known case of a US soldier disregarding an unlawful order? If anything, the military is full of assholes who are happy to kill for fun. See: Graham Platner

Will AI make it easier and/or cheaper? Probably, sadly. But it won’t be a qualitative change.

five minutes earlier: “hey dude, marketing here. if you quit and post this dramatic text about the inevitability of AGI on your X account you’ll get a huge golden parachute”.

Seriously, how can competent people look at the current state of LLMs and think that it’s anywhere near AGI material?

Sure, it is already making civilizational changes for the worse. Not because it’s good, rather because it makes us lazy and dumb, has decimated creative jobs, and is used relentlessly for propaganda and misinformation. And it’s much better at using the scaffolding of existing structure to make chaos, than it is at making new structure, making it a weapon more easily yielded by the evil then by the good. A few more software vulnerabilities discovered along the way will not be such a big deal in comparison.