If it were merely a search engine, it risks not being ai enough. We already have search engines, and no one is gonna invest in that old garbage. So instead, it finds something that you might want that’s been predigested for ease of ai consumption (Retrieval), dumps it into the context window alongside your original question (Augmentation) and then bullshits about it (Generation).

Think of it as exactly the same stuff that the LLM folk have already tried to sell you, trying to work around limitations of training and data availability by providing “cut and paste as a service” to generate ever more complex prompts for you, in the hopes that this time you’ll pay more for it than it costs to run.

And, whilst I’m here, a post from someone who tried using copilot to help with software dev for a year.

I think my favourite bit was

Don’t use LLMs for autocomplete, use them for dialogues about the code.

Tried that. It’s worse than a rubber duck, which at least knows to stay silent when it doesn’t know what it’s talking about.

https://infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/113690087142854474

(and also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging for those who haven’t come across it)

Interesting article about netflix. I hadn’t really thought about the scale of their shitty forgettable movie generation, but there are apparently hundreds and hundreds of these things with big names attached and no-one watches them and no-one has heard of them and apparently Netflix doesn’t care about this because they can pitch magic numbers to their shareholders and everyone is happy.

“What are these movies?” the Hollywood producer asked me. “Are they successful movies? Are they not? They have famous people in them. They get put out by major studios. And yet because we don’t have any reliable numbers from the streamers, we actually don’t know how many people have watched them. So what are they? If no one knows about them, if no one saw them, are they just something that people who are in them can talk about in meetings to get other jobs? Are we all just trying to keep the ball rolling so we’re just getting paid and having jobs, but no one’s really watching any of this stuff? When does the bubble burst? No one has any fucking clue.”

What a colossal waste of money, brains, time and talent. I can see who the market for stuff like sora is, now.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-49/essays/casual-viewing/

For VPNs, at least, I can offer some suggestions. If you wanted to securely access a specific box or network of yours, tailscale is pretty great and very painless to use. If you wanted to do stuff without various folk noticing then that’s a bit trickier but I’ve been happy using mullvad… they’re not the cheapest, though they have some splendid anonymous payment mechanisms (you can literally mail them a wad of banknotes with a magic code on a bit of paper… you don’t even need to muck about with bitcoin).

In further bluesky news, the team have a bit of an elon moment and forget how public they made everything.

https://bsky.app/profile/miriambo.bsky.social/post/3ldq2c7lu6c25 (only readable if you are logged in to bluesky)

Bluesky’s approach to using domain names to mean identity is now showing cracks that everyone can see: https://tedium.co/2024/12/17/bluesky-impersonation-risks/

(it was always shaky, but mostly only shown by infosec folks who signed up as amazon s3, etc)

TL;DR: scammer buys .com domain for journalist’s name, registers it on bluesky, demands money to hand it over or face reputational damage, uses other fake accounts with plausible names and backgrounds to encourage the mark to pay up. Fun stuff. The best bit is when the sockpuppets got one of the real people they were pretending to be banned from bluesky.

Nvidia doing their part to help consumers associate AI with unwanted useless bloatware that’s foisted upon them.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/12/the-new-nvidia-app-is-probably-hurting-your-pc-gaming-performance/

What’s a hard quality of life indicator?

Interesting post and corresponding mastodon thread on the non-decentralised-ness of bluesky by cwebber.

https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

https://social.coop/@cwebber/113527462572885698

The author is keen about this particular “vision statement”:

Preparing for the organization as a future adversary.

The assumption being, stuff gets enshittified and how might you guard your product against the future stupid and awful whims of management and investors?

Of course, they don’t consider that it cuts both ways, and Jack Dorsey’s personal grumbles about Twitter. The risk from his point of view was the company he founded doing evil unthinkable things like, uh, banning nazis. He’s keen for that sort of thing to never happen again on his platforms.

It’s a long read, but a good one (though not a nice one).

• learn about how all the people who actually make decisions in c++ world are complete assholes!
• liking go (the programming language) correlated with brain damage!
• in c++ world, it is ok to throw an arbitrary number of highly competent non-bros out of the window in order to keep a bro on board, even if said bro drugged and raped a minor!
• the c++ module system is like a gunshot wound to the ass!
• c++ leadership is delusional about memory safety!
• even more assholes!

Someone on mastodon (can’t remember who right now) joked that they were expecting the c++ committee to publicly support trump, in the hopes he would retract the usg memory safety requirements. I can now believe that they might have considered that, and are probably hoping he’ll come down in their favour now that he’s coming in.

The austin allegro was far ahead of its time.

big walmart is watching you.

https://old.reddit.com/r/walmart/comments/1gqphel/body_cameras_for_front_end/

is this creating a potential surplus of computing power in all devices

Haha, no. Flat UI was done for reasons of fashion, not efficiency. UI will always expand to consume the available memory and compute, regardless of how boring it looks. Exhibit A: Electron!

He will say what he thinks needs to be said, and the forced-birthers understand this. They haven’t defeated abortion yet and aren’t going to split their efforts, but they will continue to put pressure on ivf in the meantime. Remember, they weren’t always anti-abortion, and didn’t switch to it overnight! Their current position that life begins at conception necessarily conflicts with current ivf practises, and they’ll say they don’t disapprove of ivf in principle, and they might even have a friend who’s getting ivf, but talk is cheap and they’ll absolutely oppose any legislation that tries to guarantee access to it. Which is precisely what is happening.

They can sell out to someone else instead? Amazon seems to want to be an AI company, for example, and their current offering isn’t great even by the relaxed standards of LLMs.

I’ve taken to calling the constant background sprinkles and unnecessary fine detail in gen ai images “greebles” after the modelling and cgi term. Not sure if they have a better or more commonplace name.

It’s funny, meaningless bullshit diagrams on whiteboards backgrounds of photos were a sure sign on PR shots or lazy set dressing, and now they’re everywhere signifying pretty much the same thing.

He professed to have invented the video-sharing technology later made famous by Snapchat and TikTok.

Have a heart… the guy’s side-hustle in fluorocarbon refrigerants got poached, too.

The reality is that some of us only have glimmers of sapience, and many not even that. Most humans, most of the time, are mindless zombies following a script

It’s a funny thing, that there are certain kinds of people who are assured of their own cleverness and so alienated from society that they think that echoing the same dehumanising blurb produced by so many of their forebears is somehow novel or informative, rather than just following a script.

(the irony of responding with an xkcd is not lost on me)

Much like the promptfondlers proudly claiming they are stochastic parrots, flaunting your inability to recognise intelligence in other humans isn’t a great flex.

Not sure where there’s a good summary of the drama, but it started (I think) back in February with some serious concerns about transphobic moderation on tumblr. Openly trans user predstrogen posted

I hope photomatt dies forever a painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere

and he took it a bit too seriously, including banning them for dubious reasons then looking them up on twitter and listing all their old alt account names to their followers, because he’s totally not a transphobic stalker y’all and this is a reasonable thing to do when you’re worth half a billion.

The trackpad and trackpoint of my aging linux laptop stop working if the thing gets its lid shut. The touchscreen continues to work just fine, however. It turns out that while two stupid things can’t make a good thing, they can sometimes cancel each other out.