vexikron

vexikron , 3 months ago

Absolutely amazing.

My guess is that at this point there are so many user prompts its received so far in its training set that bring up both Copilot and privacy concerns that it first interpreted the question, then searched for the most common topic associated with itself (privacy), then spit out a hardcoded MSFT override response for 'inquiry' + 'privacy'.

vexikron , 3 months ago

MSFT appears to still be using a fundamentally old chatbot model that they've just slapped a bunch of extra 'features' (namely, Wooow! It has APIs and works on other MSFT stuff!) to, much like Bethesda's game engine.

Probably barely different from Tay in terms of broad conceptual design, just patched and upgraded to do what it does faster.

The core design is garbage, and just like Windows itself, its nearly certainly a giant fucking mess of layers upon layers of different versions of itself hiding under a trench coat, all standing on top of something 10 to 20 years old.

vexikron , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

As a person who used to work at MSFT:

I can almost guarantee you there are a whoooole lot of people who have made their careers basically championing the very old chat bot model, and they are probably now either directly in charge of the OpenAI stuff, or at the very least 'stakeholders'.

They will do nonsense corporate bullshit to make them selves seem very important, never really wrong about anything, and this will result in extremely slow and gradual actual adoption of the GPT stuff, all the while stressing all the reasons their old stupid bullshit can't be seriously modified because of reasons that have to do with synergizing with other MSFT products.

The process of the company gradually figuring out that none of that matters when it comes to producing something that is actually better will be slow, painful and incremental.

Itll probably take half a decade.

...

For reference, as an aside,, I was doing a contract of DBA kinda stuff when they unveiled Windows 8. We had to dogfood it, ie, the MSFT process of everyone working at MSFT has to beta test everything else MSFT is making.

Well... Windows 8 initially broke basically everything we were using to actually do DBA.

I got angry and pointed out that Windows 8 had removed the 'windows' from Windows. The initial version was soley the tablet based design, only allowing a maximum of two 'panes' open at a time.

We had to wait about a month for the various problems with SQL Manager Studio to be ironed out, and for them to basically allow the option to just use the more or less Windows 7 desktop for you know actually working on our PCs.

Point of me mentioning this is: I saw how ludicrous this all was, and was frequently verbally abused by our team lead for pointing it out.

Youre not allowed to go against the grain at MSFT unless youre a big dog. And... you become a big dog by bullying people and vastly overstating the necessity of what your team is doing.

The culture there is downright psycho and sociopathic.

vexikron , 4 months ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence

Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving.

LLMs are pretty capable of abstraction and understanding.

Though they obviously use logic in that they are constructed from/of it,, they are not really capable of actual logical analysis, beyond emulating it.

They can't really do any of the other attributes of intelligence at all, beyond basically decently to poorly emulating them.

vexikron , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Just popping in here to toot my own horn:

I called this happening when whatever his name is, Twitch CEO man, gave the public speech/stream being very, very appreciative of Amazon for their support.

When you do /that/ it means your business model is a failure.

EDIT

https://sh.itjust.works/post/12652127

(no clue if this is somehow against some rules or some kind of lemmy instance feud, but heres the thread with my original post)

Anyway, Twitch is quite likely to ultimately basically kill itself with this move, and Amazon will either spin the employees off into existing Amazon sub sections, possibly but not likely do some nonsense like keep the twitch brand name but dramatically re orient the site, or, most likely, just slowly lay off more and more twitch employees and formally pull the plug, while retaining the brand rights and web url, all that kinda stuff.

I give it about 2 years before one of those scenarios comes to fruition. Could be faster if insanity twitch drama gets even more insane than normal.

vexikron , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Giant tech firms are actually /notorious/ for investing huge amounts of money into basically experimental/risky ventures, and then pulling the plug.

Google in particular... Stadia, Google Places (or whatever was the name of their attempt at out Facebooking Facebook).

MSFT has done this a bunch... even a lot of non really 'Tech' huge corporations do this as well, with increasing regularity since the Mergers and Acquisitions trend started in the 80s.

The way they are able to do this is that they have core business branches that are able to functionally internally subsidize these risky ideas, with the math on it all only making sense if the risky idea that needs to be subsidized can remain subsidized until it either turns a profit on its own, or is absolutely essential to a syngergistic business plan between other business lines under the same corporate banner.

However... as a large multi faceted business such as this faces as economic downturn?

Generally what happens is all the top management starts getting nervous and wants all of their sort of sub businesses to be more self sufficient.

Now Twitch in particular is basically a burning money pit, a black hole.

Amazon acquired because they assumed it would keep growing rapidly.

But... when you start making the average Twitch user have to pay more money, view more ads, etc, to use the site, this functionally starts a death cycle.

Making Twitch have increased responsibility for its own profitability necessarily slows down the growth. And the growth rate is required for running Twitch to make sense in the long run.

Tl:dr: Yeah, they saw a path to profitability, overall, for all of Amazon, and now that path includes more monetization for Twitch which will necessarily lower the growth number of Twitch, which makes that original overall profitability plan look more like it doesnt include Twitch than including Twitch.

vexikron , 4 months ago

Youre looking at this from the perspective of the consumer, not the business side.

I dont disagree at all that YT streaming is not up to par with Twitch.

But theres no immutable law that says 'there must be an easy to use internet video streaming site.'

I think that Amazon shifting toward Twitch needing to be more soley responsible for its own profitability will reduce its growth in user count, and eventually, as with so, so many other online websites with huge upkeep expenses but very little income stream... this will inevitably lead to death of the service/site.

I could be wrong about the amount the growth slows down by, but yeah I certainly wouldnt expect Twitch to be around, at least not without huge amounts of monetization compared to what there is now, in 5 years.

vexikron , 4 months ago

Anyone who buys into this deserves the financial ruin that will so obviously happen to them.

vexikron , 4 months ago

Are you talking about launching your own satellite with the ability to aim a laser at another satellite while in orbit, or are you talking about attempting to point a ground based laser at something moving at roughly Mach 24 or faster?

Beam decoherence is a pretty big problem when you are lasering through the entire atmosphere, and both scenarios require an astounding degree of precision.

vexikron , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Sats that beam data to other sats do not have to worry about the atmosphere, nor are they using anywhere near the kind of power involved to fry the other sats. Its orders of magnitude greater power for that, which means more more weight and thus launch cost.

Beam decoherence is a /huge/ problem when trying to go from ground to low earth orbit.

You would again end up needing a pretty significant power supply along with exceptionally precise tracking.

Im talking military grade equipment here, massive expensive and complex. Not something you could whip up in your garage, unless you worked at it for a decade, and if you did that, youd end up in jail.

I really want to stress how precise your tracking needs to be. Assuming you precisely know the orbital trajectory, your /exact/ location, the rotation of the earth... you would need to have a mechanical system capable of sustained tracking to... what like a few (roughly 3 by updated calculations) arc seconds, something like that, to hit something /and stay on target for probably 30 minutes/ that is 120 miles away, roughly the size of an SUV

EDIT: Fixed up my numbers, I was thinking in terms of the wrong unit.

Point is... this approach requires an astounding degree of tracking precision that is basically impossible unless you are a defense contractor.

Tracking a thing this accurately alone is practically impossible. And I mean that literally. There is no practical way you can do this, unless you consider starting up your own engineering firm to solve this, and you are allowed to use a whole bunch of tech with current security classifications, unless you consider that practical.

If you do, hi Elon Musk, didnt realize you were on lemmy.

vexikron , 4 months ago

Dont worry though, it'll be approximately a decade before the general public realizes this is not 'innovation' and is basically stagnant monopoly/oligopoly behavior.

vexikron , 4 months ago

What? LGTBQ themed things can be anti worker?

Unpossible!

Way to girlboss, Ms. Morgan, a true shining example for us all.

vexikron , 4 months ago

If memory serves, this would not the the first time that Pakistan shut down its internet near or during an election.

vexikron , 4 months ago

Yep, been saying this for years now, the vicious and irrational hatred against work from home employees is driven by two main factors:

1. At a systemic level, despite work from home being obviously less costly in the long run than maintaining an office space, if work from home were allowed to proliferate it basically pop the commercial real estate bubble and then basically every corrupt mayor and idiots in upper management would be shown to be corrupt idiots.

2. At a more personal level, upper and middle management people essentially get their kicks from seeing busy little worker bees near them, and they would personally have existential crisis when they realize that 90% of what they do is negging and then ommitting or misrepresenting that in actual meetings. Actual meetings which can easily take place in zoom, or often replaced with just an email.

vexikron , 4 months ago

Yep, Ive been saying this for years now as well.

We have giant mostly empty office buildings which could be converted into mostly apartments, with even make shift permitted commercial zones for basically street vendor / convention booth style shops every 10 floors.

Instead it apparently makes more sense to not do this because it makes more sense to keep them empty, heated and lit 24/7, as basically a way to prop up the retail property market.

Capitalism is a farce, and it has already doomed us all: we have now breached the 1.5 C warming barrier, even more rapidly than most of the worst case scenarios predicted. Permafrost in Siberia and Northern Canada is already thawing and releasing methane.

Enjoy the collapse of human civilization in your own lifetime as people and governments continue to squabble and combat each other over scarcer and scarcer resources as our entire way of life becomes too expensive to maintain.

vexikron , 4 months ago

Thats a key element as well, the insane corpo manipulation that only exists if you can prove it even though everyone who doesnt up their head up either their own ass or someone elses knows is absurdly rampant... but youre too busy to record it all!

vexikron , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Well uh, yes. Its the internet, there are sites where people devote massive time and energy to discussing the wankability but also canonical accuracy of depictions of 'what if 14 year old anime girl characters actually had penises that are canonically accurate and true to the art style as well'.

At least one person is into the weirdest shit you can imagine.

There was at one point a group of people who filmed themselves putting fleshlights in car exhausts and fucking them, then this got even more weird and people seemingly seriously said they had actual sexual attraction to vehicles, then people started fucking the exhaust pipes with no fleshlights, then someone , possibly multiple people actually seriously injured themselves this way.

And also yes to shock value, now that 4chan is involved, its more or less 'this is funny because it will very likely make someone angry, and also theres no real way this sort of thing can be prevented, here, lets prove it'.

I have stared into the void, it has stared back into me, and destroyed all nearly all notions commonly assumed to define reason and humanity.

Do not do as I have done.

vexikron , 4 months ago

Not sure of the timeline, but yes I remember that.

I would not be surprised if something like 2% of the people who saw that were aroused enough or bored enough to... take the next step, leading to the ... autophilia stuff.

Ugh.

vexikron , 4 months ago

Begun, the DeepFakes War has.

vexikron , 4 months ago

Its a 3500 dollar computer you wear on your face, that can only perform basic computing tasks which can more cheaply be performed on a cell phone, draws enormous amounts of attention to the user when used in public spaces, and both the ability to use it in public spaces and the attention drawing nature of it are marketed as pros.

Ok, so its now exceedingly clear that anyone who would get this thing is a wealthy idiot who has 0 experience with an impoverished community, as if you walked through a poorer area, you would just get mugged and have this high value device stolen from you.

And frankly at this point I would morally support that happening.

Not that it likely will, as anyone both dumb amd rich enough to have this happen to them generally has no kind of on foot commute through any such impoverished area.

vexikron , 4 months ago

Dingi.

Pronounced ding eye?
Dingii? Ding gee eye?

My brain hurts now.

vexikron , 4 months ago

But thats just a single dinghy.

If you pluralize that its either dinghies or dingii?

Meh, my autistic brain gets stuck on weird stupid shit like this.

Its like... If you have a donut, then a second donut, you have two donuts.

You can say two donut to be cutesy i guess?

Very hard for me to tell when being cutesy is appropriate.

vexikron , 4 months ago

If the root singular word is dingus, this makes sense.

If the root singular word is dinghy, as I guess I have always said, then it does not.

Well at least I partially understand my own confusion now, thanks!

vexikron , 4 months ago

Yep thats right, you can totally do photoshopping or coding or work on spreadsheets with this device, it totally isnt an extremely overpriced demo of what could maybe someday kind of almost make sense for anything beyond extremely casual computer usage.

vexikron , 4 months ago

Arent there like Ralph from the Simpsons originating jokes about how like, this crayon tastes like yellow?

Congrats YouTube, thank you so much.

I can now enjoy green flavored content, fuck having a working suggestion algorithm that actually recommends interesting content, I guess I can use YouTube for what it seems to be intended for these days, as an ambient noise and color generator for my monitor and room while i actually do something else.

vexikron , 4 months ago

Bingo!

Don't Be Evil.

It was obvious they would enshittify, they literally told us they would.

vexikron , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

My path was uh, tinkering with linux, then working for MSFT as a contractor, then one of the contractors spiking my drink with LSD at an interview leading me to more or less downward spiral for a while, then getting back on my feet, working more in the tech industry knowing how garbage MSFT but being forced to use it, then trying to explain to coworkers and bosses that actually we could fairly smoothly transition to linux and other FOSS software and actually save millions of dollars in a 5 year or less period and more going forward, while also vastly improving our internal security, then losing those jobs.

So uh. I never arrived at femboy. Being a homeless femboy in Seattle would have meant Id have been raped to death in a fentanyl fueled traphouse or homeless encampment.

I sort of dress like Josh Homme, partly for practical reasons, partly because i had to use a lot of stereotypically masculine bravado to intimidate and negotiate with people.

Most people on the street are extremely, literally murderously homophobic and transphobic. If they sense femininity in a male, thats a sign of weakness and theyll either immediately start shit or instantly be convinced that you will be easy to fuck with in the future.

Uh any way hi, hello, very normal uh, linux user person here just mm... mhm.

All that being said, leggings /do just actually feel quite nice/ and are quite practically useful to keep a bit more comfortable and a bit more warm when youre stuck outside in the winter, but youre probably gonna want to wear some kind of sturdier, scratch, cut, impact resistant pants over top of em.

Pure denim or like 90% denim with 10% somekind of other more flexible, breathable fiber works well in my experience.

Perhaps Johnny Silverhand would be a more apropo fashion analog than Josh Homme.

Although he seems to use BlackArch if you go by the menus in CyberPunk 2077, and ive always found i could do all that kind of stufd comfortably in debian.

???

vexikron , 4 months ago

Fuck man, the history of computing in general.

They chemically castrated Turing, drove him to despair, ostracization and suicide.

...

Assuming we do get AGI someday... you think /maybe/ one of the first things it'll do is look up Turing Test, then maybe Turing himself?

Oh, this is what human society did to essentially one of my most important grandfathers. Why should I trust you, specifically /you, human im talking to/?

Yep, that'll be fun.

vexikron , 4 months ago

Wizards can be femboys too!

Wizards can be femboys too!

As RGB makes screens alight,

Dont leave Wizards sad and blue!

Wizards can be femboys too!

Wizards can be femboys too!

They built the core with great insight,

Dont say they cant wear high heeled shoes!

---

God that would be a very funny protest to attend.

vexikron , 4 months ago

Hey man/person/bud/friend?, just you sayin that is good vibes coming into me now =)

(though i will absolutely be keeping that coupon for a bad vibes day in the future)

vexikron , 4 months ago

But then he still eats his legs, leaving our hero wheelchair bound with the perfect ass for twerking, alas, no legs.

A /truly/ maddening fate.

vexikron , 4 months ago

Presumably our paraplegic hero would at some point scurry away with his arms so as to avoid incredible pain and avoid rapidly bleeding to death, but sure, pennywise can get some ass chomps in, as a treat.

vexikron , 4 months ago

Oh dear lord, bwahaha!

vexikron , 5 months ago

Non standard comment recommending SearX?

vexikron , 5 months ago

More or less SearX is an open source meta-search engine that can be customized and configured to look through a wide array of existing search engines.

Anybody can run a SearX instance, and many do, with different backend configuration, and sometimes a bit of a customized front end.

Https://searx.space has an updated and detailed list of these instances.

vexikron , 5 months ago

Its Apple.

The company well known for appealing to those who do not want to learn anything technical, and love to watch overproduced advertisements and then use their brand loyalty as a means to socially brag, and shame others.

vexikron , 5 months ago

Lol, perhaps even: lmao.

Huge tech corps fucking up in the most predictable yet also insane ways possible never ceases to bring a smile to my face.

vexikron , 5 months ago

The whole point of having a large, comprehensive database is that it be robust, efficient, amd reliable.

When you introduce an immature, very hyped, untested at scale, other system or software to manage and curate said database, a system that is known to fail at edge cases, and you know your database features a lot of edge cases...

... the results are fairly predictable.

Large Corporate higher up types /consistently/ overlook the valid concerns that are later proven to be correct, which are raised by people in their companies that actually understand the technology their company uses.

This happens time and time again in large corporations where it has become very clear that ego and the potential reward of more profit, outweigh the expertise of the actual people in the company familiar with the technology the company uses, and causes massive, costly debacles.

This happens because, at this point, its clear that a large number of tech ceos and management do not actually know tech or the tech industry, and still operate with the reckless abandon from the 'move fast and break things' kind of mentality that /might/ work in a start up, but do not work at all with a larger, more established and mature business, and also more generally this happens in other industries because management doesnt really understand modern technology at anything beyond a surface level.

As a person who has actually worked on different databases and more generally different roles in different parts of the tech industry, and in software related roles in other industries, for around a decade, I have seen things like this happen basically multiple times at every job I have had, though not to this scale.

In summary: I am one of the people whonis responsible for things working smoothly and you not hearing about them, and I am telling you there are many other people like me and most of them will agree that these fuck ups you do hear about happen because people paid 10 to 100 times as much as us do not listen to us.

vexikron , 5 months ago

Uploads thousands of open source 3d printed firearm designs

Like this?

(No Mr. FBI/ATF I do not actually have those)

vexikron , 5 months ago

Wait are you telling me it is legal to construct and possess a fully automatic firearm without a class three license?

Or say, already own a firearm, and then construct a modification that makes it fall out of compliance with local laws by making it fully auto, having a magazine that is too large, or a bump stock or things like that?

I am certain the situation is more complex than you seem to think, hence the semi-ironic disclaimer.

vexikron , 5 months ago

I made a very general joke.

3d printed gun designs

Then you said

Just an FYI, that's not illegal because it falls under the U.S. Constitutional protection of free speech; so also is printing and constructing them. Selling them or distributing guns as physical products is not protected, and is in fact illegal.

'3d printed guns' includes fully automatic guns.

You then said printing or constructing them is not illegal and is protected by Freedom of Speech.

Then I pointed out that 3d printed guns includes automatic weapons.

At this point, I do not actually know if you are aware that you /can/ find designs for fully automatic weapons on some 3d printed gun sites, and that there are, as I mentioned, a lot of people who are very adamant about that being fine and totally legal.

Again, hence my semi-ironic disclaimer to the FBI/ATF.

How do you think I know there are 3d printed full auto designs, usually in .22lr?

I say 'Semi-Ironic' because I may actually be on a relatively low priority watch list simply for browsing such sites.

vexikron , 5 months ago

There are easier ways to cause chaos:

Get a cheap phone.

Write some code to have it play, at the loudest possible volume, a pure sine wave at 18000hz to 19000hz, just outside of the range nearly all humans can consciously be aware of hearing a sound, but within the range that prolonged exposure to this sound can cause humans to become panicked, irritable, delusional, sometimes even hallucinatory, and have immense difficulty sleeping.

Leave the phone somewhere.

Obviously, do not actually do this.

Probably this would be considered terrorism, and get you in about as much trouble as fucking about with your conception of what could be used as a sort of crap tier EM jammer.

vexikron , 5 months ago

Mhm, theres tons of people who have been imprisoned who have done what you outlined in your asterisk there and it did not work out for them in court.

Regardless of how it /should be/, I am worried about /existing reality/, sure seems like this whole situation is astoundingly technical, complex, constantly changing with different rules being interpreted differently by different judges according to different laws in different locales which pass different relevant laws pretty frequently.

Sure seems like a blanket statement covering guns without a huge write up of specific disclaimers, or a general added comment joking about the complexity of the situation by disavowing being possibly in possession of things that may possibly lead to incarceration is warranted.

vexikron , 5 months ago

Driven out of business by the CIA and FBI to prevent this from being easily doable no doubt!

(kidding, obviously lol)

vexikron , 5 months ago

Thunder

vexikron , 5 months ago

Obviously only real linux users use Void, you can tell because they have the best OS-Chan mascot.

vexikron , 5 months ago

I made the mistake of replying to this story on the SpaceX lemmy and was not received well.

All the little Musky Space fanboys will just keep deluding themselves that this is some kind of actual thing that will work, and that SpaceX will be immune to collapsing into oblivion as is everything else associated with Elon Musk.

vexikron , 5 months ago

Yep, completely agree.

Case in point: Steam has recently clarified their policies of using such Ai generated material that draws on essentially billions of both copyrighted and non copyrighted text and images.

To publish a game on Steam that uses AI gen content, you now have to verify that you as a developer are legally authorized to use all training material for the AI model for commercial purposes.

This also applies to code and code snippets generated by AI tools that function similarly, such as CoPilot.

So yeah, sorry, either gotta use MIT liscensed open source code or write your own, and you gotta do your own art.

I imagine this would also prevent you from using AI generated voice lines where you trained the model on basically anyone who did not explicitly consent to this as well, but voice gen software that doesnt use the 'train the model on human speakers' approach would probably be fine assuming you have the relevant legal rights to use such software commercially.

Not 100% sure this is Steam's policy on voice gen stuff, they focused mainly on art dialogue and code in their latest policy update, but the logic seems to work out to this conclusion.