Even in the wide world of dubiously useful AI chatbots, Copilot really stands out for just how incompetent it is. The other day I was working on a PowerPoint presentation, and one of the slides included a photo with a kind of cluttered looking background. Now, I can probably count the number of things that AI is genuinely good at on one hand, and context aware image editing trends to be one of them, so I decided to click the Copilot button that Microsoft now has built directly into PowerPoint and see what happens. A chat window popped up and I concisely explained what I wanted it to do: “please remove the background from the photo on slide 5.” It responded on that infuriating obseqious tone that they all have and assured me that it would be happy to help with my request just as soon as I uploaded my presentation.

What?

The chatbot running inside an instance of PowerPoint with my presentation open is asking me to “upload” my presentation? I explained this to it, and it came back with some BS about being unable to access the presentation because a “token expired” before requesting again that I upload my presentation. I tried a little longer to convince it otherwise, but it just kept very politely insisting that it was unable to do what I was asking for until I uploaded my presentation.

Eventually I gave up. The photo wasn’t that bad anyway.

Oh yeah, this has happened multiple times, and the story is always the same:

1. The government says they’re going to release info on UFOs. This caused a brief flury of interest from the general public which is reinforced by the conspiracy theorists who swear that this will finally be proof of little green men at area 51, or whatever.
2. The government takes a while to follow through, during which time the general public slowly loses interest. The conspiracy theorists start getting impatient and publicly worrying that there must be a faction within the government that’s deliberately slow walking the release or even modifying the documents because they don’t want The Truth to get out.
3. The documents are finally released. They consist of 99% dry, beauracratic paperwork and 0% admissions that aliens have every visited earth, but the conspiracy theorists dig through and pull out a few scraps that can be spun to make a good headline.
4. The nation spends at most a week talking about “video taken out the window of a fighter jet of a mysterious floating orb thats porobably just a balloon” #27, or “eye witness account from a sleep deprived 18 year old soldier who swears he saw an alien space ship while on guard duty at 2am” #382.
5. The national news cycle moves on, and most people promptly forget about the whole thing. Meanwhile, the conspiracy theorists take whatever scraps they were able to find and add these to their rotating library of bullshit to talk about. The initial promise that this was going to be irrefutable proof that aliens have visited earth is quietly forgotten. If it ever does come up, they blame that shadowy faction of the government which must have succeeded in watering down the release before publishing it.

Rinse and repeat.

In case you’re wondering how to get a list of all the apps installed on your phone, these instructions worked for me https://www.javathinking.com/blog/how-to-get-the-list-of-all-apps-on-android-device-using-terminal/

I just wrote a quick script to check my list against the google doc. The official Merriam Webster app and the official Letterboxd app both got flagged.

An excellent talk from Doctrow as always. A lot of it I’ve hard before, but this part was new to me.

The thing is, software is not an asset, it’s a liability. The capabilities that running software delivers – automation, production, analysis and administration – those are assets. But the software itself? That’s a liability. Brittle, fragile, forever breaking down. …
Now, obviously, tech bosses are totally clueless when it comes to this. They really do think that software is an asset. That’s why they’re so fucking horny to have chatbots shit out software at superhuman speeds. That’s why they think it’s good that they’ve got a chatbot that “produces a thousand times more code than a human programmer.”
Producing code that isn’t designed for legibility and maintainability, that is optimized, rather, for speed of production, is a way to incur tech debt at scale.

Every time I see a headline like this I’m reminded of the time I heard someone describe the modern state of AI research as equivalent to the practice of alchemy.

Long before anyone knew about atoms, molecules, atomic weights, or electron bonds, there were dudes who would just mix random chemicals together in an attempt to turn lead to gold, or create the elixir of life or whatever. Their methods were haphazard, their objectives impossible, and most probably poisoned themselves in the process, but those early stumbling steps eventually gave rise to the modern science of chemistry and all that came with it.

AI researchers are modern alchemists. They have no idea how anything really works and their experiments result in disaster as often as not. There’s great potential but no clear path to it. We can only hope that we’ll make it out of the alchemy phase before society succumbs to the digital equivalent of mercury poisoning because it’s just so fun to play with.

my name is Cow,
and wen its nite,
or wen the moon
is shiyning brite,
and all the men
haf gon to bed -
i sneak inside.
i lik the head.

Volkswagen AG Group

Copy pasting my reply from the last time this came up:

Check how nearby colleges and universities dispose of used assets. The state school near me maintains a very nice website where they auction off everything from lab equipment to office furniture. It’s also where all their PCs go when they hit ~5 years old and come up in the IT department’s refresh cycle. The only problem in my case is that they tend to auction stuff in bulk. You can get a solid machine for $50 to $100, but only if you’re willing to pay $500 to $1000 for a pallet of 10.

I looked into it a while ago but I gave up on the idea after realizing how few programs can actually run on one. There’s no “reverse VM” software that allows you to seamlessly combine multiple physical machines into one virtual one. Each application has to be specifically designed to take advantage of running on a cluster. If you’re writing your own code, or if you have a specific project in mind that you know supports cluster computing then by all means go for it, but if you’re imagining that you’d build one and use it for gaming or video editing or some other resource intensive desktop application, unfortunately it doesn’t work like that.

Edit: I dug up a link to the post I made about it in /c/linux. There’s some good discussion in there if you’d like to learn more https://lemmy.world/post/11528823

Check how nearby colleges and universities dispose of used assets. The state school near me maintains a very nice website where they auction off everything from lab equipment to office furniture. It’s also where all their PCs go when they hit ~5 years old and come up in the IT department’s refresh cycle. Only problem in my case is that they tend to auction stuff in bulk. You can get a solid machine for $50 to $100, but only if you’re willing to pay $500 to $1000 for a pallet of 10.

TBH I just use the Feeder app on my phone. Fully self-contained. No account, no server, no middleman of any kind. Just the app.

I’ve been meaning to set up something more elaborate, but this really does work fine, and I like to mention it in these threads for anyone who’s interested in RSS but thinks it’s a big lift to set up. It can be complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. Download an app and start adding publications that interest you. That’s all it takes to get started.

Time to quote Dan Olson again. This was originally written about NFTs, but just replace “crypto” with “AI” and it’s still 100% relevant:

When you drill down into it, you realize that the core of the crypto ecosystem … is a turf war between the wealthy and the ultra-wealthy. Techno fetishists who look at people like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, billionaires that have been minted via tech industry doors that have now been shut by market calcification, and are looking for a do-over, looking to synthesize a new market where they can be the one to ascend from a merely wealthy programmer to a hyper wealthy industrialist.

From the incomparable line goes up

Not sure if this is an intentional reference to the Lonely Island song “Sushi Glory Hole,” but either way here’s a link

https://youtu.be/XbGchfT3yMs

What’s interesting to me is the lack of crossover between the two. As far as I’m aware, no popular Youtube creator has ever successfully transitioned to doing Hollywood movies or TV shows. Sure there’s been the occasional cameo, short-lived series, or direct to streaming movie, but none of them had any staying power. Why isn’t Hollywood treating youtube as a farm league for new talent and IP that they can snatch up and exploit after the market for it is proven?

To be clear, I’m not saying I want that to happen. The good content creators deserve better as far as I’m concerned. But the opportunity seems so obvious that I’m truly baffled at the apparent lack of interest.

Maxim 43: If it’s stupid and it works, it’s still stupid and you’re lucky.

Scales now

He’s losing his tail now

Legs will grow

Kinda sorta Ian Hubert. He does “lazy tutorials” which are like 1 to 5 minute speed runs of different VFX tricks. There’s not really enough detail to recreate what he’s doing unless you’re already pretty proficient, but it’s cool to watch and get the creative juices flowing.

I thought the Tiffany video was pretty meh, but the followup video about how the Tiffany video got made was one of his best. He’s clearly a thorough and passionate researcher. The way he refuses to settle for anything less than the primary source is both entertaining and vitally important in our modern information landscape.

Ceci n’est pas une rock

I’ve wondered before how large an order would be required to entice a white label manufacturer of robot vacuums into doing a production run of units with Valetudo preinstalled.

I would absolutely buy one if someone could work out a fair business arrangement with the developer and throw the project up on kickstarter.