Posts by dpnash@c.im
(DIR) Post #Av0AaTHYSq2CqUfvKi by dpnash@c.im
2025-06-10T22:51:02Z
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@futurebird My employer is dealing with this now.A bit over two years ago: my data engineering team determines that a rather niche 3rd party database product, already in use by another team, is a logical choice for my team as well, since the two teams will likely need to share data in a way that the database is a good fit for.About 1 year ago: get email that the 3rd party database company is bought by an "AI"-focused company.About 1 year ago minus 10 seconds: *groans internally*, knowing what will probably happen soon.About 2 months ago: new company stuffs "AI" features into the database service and doubles the price for the "AI"-enabled service. There is no "old service, hold the AI, please" option. Since my company is gigantic, it is able to negotiate a one-time 12-month extension of the current DB service, but it's not going to be able to do that indefinitely.4 hours ago: Discover all of this in a meeting, and get annoyed at having to contemplate completely throwing out a bit over 2 years of work to get something similar to what we were using just fine back then.
(DIR) Post #Av0D0MeZvpBnizv1ua by dpnash@c.im
2025-06-10T23:18:09Z
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@futurebird > I don't know if this makes anyone else upset, but it's very annoying to me.It's not just you.LLMs making equivalent fsckups of basic info in other sciences (especially astronomy and chemistry, where I have fairly extensive background) is something I found intensely obnoxious from the very start.Literally the very start. One of my first 2 or 3 prompts to ChatGPT back in 2022 or so was an astronomy question that it completely butchered in a manner that was close to jaw-dropping.I won't go into extra detail here (I post egregious examples here on Fediverse every so often), but this phenomenon has made me dislike this tech from the beginning. Even if it has some utility in other areas (and I believe it does, albeit massively overhyped), it's not something I feel I can be comfortable using for anything meaningful.
(DIR) Post #Av4ImCHUTGbzg5JLxg by dpnash@c.im
2025-06-12T22:41:43Z
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@tomjennings Portland, OR here.I will be at one of the smaller ones in the more residential part of Portland instead of the (likely giant) ones downtown.Hoping for a lot bigger than "tiny" even if it's not one of the giant ones.
(DIR) Post #Aw80DqqzY0wVBHMPaa by dpnash@c.im
2025-07-14T15:24:44Z
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@futurebird >Who would my brother be if not terrified that playing chess made him seem "gay" (which means not like a guy)Which is remarkable, given how much of a misogyny problem the chess community has had over the years, especially at the professional level.Can't win either way. Men are supposedly somehow unmasculine if they play, but lady brains supposedly can't hack it either.
(DIR) Post #AwT0WZcPRLAq4nIIRk by dpnash@c.im
2025-07-23T03:29:58Z
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@catsalad The HTTP.cat protocol has a standard set of verbs, similar to the ones for HTTP, but not identical:GETHEADBONKSCRATCH (the equivalent to POST, since what does any self-respecting cat do with a POST?)PET (note, not PUT, that is regular HTTP)SHRED (the rough equivalent of HTTP DELETE)MEOW (essential in this protocol; sadly missing from regular HTTP)
(DIR) Post #AwwAoEQXnJMaguSYL2 by dpnash@c.im
2025-08-07T17:35:03Z
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@futurebird @omgubuntu The Studio Ghibli-inspired image with the gravity-defying building blocks? Nope. That was in the original by the Github CEO.
(DIR) Post #AwxTXNxpAz6VdJfOmu by dpnash@c.im
2025-08-07T16:13:18Z
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@gerrymcgovern One of the first prompts I gave ChatGPT back in 2022 came from my main hobby (amateur astronomy). I asked it to tell me something about the extrasolar planets orbiting the star [[fake star ID]].[[fake star ID]] was something that anyone who knew how to use Wikipedia half-intelligently could verify was fake within a few minutes.I wasn't even trying to be deceptive; I genuinely wanted to see how ChatGPT would handle a request for information that I knew couldn't be in its training data.The torrents of bullshit it produced -- paragraph after paragraph of totally confabulated data about these nonexistent planets orbiting a nonexistent star -- told me everything I needed to know about ChatGPT and its buddies, and I've never been tempted to use them for anything serious since.
(DIR) Post #AwxTXP27CW88wugL7A by dpnash@c.im
2025-08-07T20:34:20Z
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@gerrymcgovern Ah, and since this seems to be making the rounds: it's time for my occasional reminder of one especially unpleasant aspect of the LLM hype storm.LLMs take advantage of a faulty heuristic many (probably most, but don't have exact stats) people have about human intelligence: namely, someone or something that produces fluent and grammatically coherent text about a wide range of topics, on demand, is "intelligent".This is a very compelling heuristic and also very wrong. In the case of LLMs, it's wrong in the way we're all talking about here: it leads people to see thinking or reasoning in the statistical word salad these beasties produce. But it's even more of a problem when people invert the heuristic and turn it into "someone or something is *not* producing fluent text about a wide range of topics, therefore they are *not* intelligent". This mirror-world version causes enormous social harm to people who for whatever reason (autism, selective mutism, etc.) can't speak the way people expect they would be able to "if they were smart".
(DIR) Post #AxGkSjgKOOpslY5eHg by dpnash@c.im
2025-08-17T17:32:23Z
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@futurebird Not sure about times previous to this, but I started working with AWS for work purposes about 13 years ago, and "compute" was the standard term there (and then) for "virtual machine instance, or similar resource, used for CPU-heavy operations, as distinct from networking and other uses". "Elastic Compute Cloud", AWS's service for building and launching general-purpose virtual machines, goes back to 2006. So it's close to 20 years old at a minimum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Elastic_Compute_Cloud
(DIR) Post #AyiWiL4cgsXfamsFoO by dpnash@c.im
2025-09-29T16:27:52Z
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1985: (writes a crappy BASIC program to find a few thousand prime numbers, which runs in maybe 10 seconds): "wow, the computer is so much faster than I am"2005: (uses Google to find three obscure song lyrics and five obscure academic references in about 5 minutes): "wow, the computer is so much faster than I am"2025: (visits a web site, waits 10 seconds, sees the "Continue" button finally appear, moves to click it, but the button flies away as another page element creakily staggers in and instead I accidentally summon an AI demon or three): "why the fuck am I so much faster than the computer?"
(DIR) Post #Aypv5ye7U7bTzW08um by dpnash@c.im
2025-10-03T15:26:26Z
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@futurebird I voted "has pressured", but it was relatively modest pressure (the result of one manager who was really enamored with ChatGPT 4 for a while and who has largely stopped bugging people about it since then). This was a bit over a year ago, when all the dev teams had to do a short workshop for MS Copilot.I did the workshop, it generated crappy code, I walked away. There are some *very* choice comments on internal chat from one web dev team who did a slightly different workshop and had an unbelievably bad experience.I've not felt any pressure since then.
(DIR) Post #Aypv64GaaWLXQH2R4S by dpnash@c.im
2025-10-03T15:31:54Z
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@futurebird Although I haven't had further pressure myself, I have *already* had to deal with other people's botshit, since every so often I encounter a bug report that has (a) "that ChatGPT style" and (b) errors in the steps to reproduce or its effects on end users, and in some ways this is more annoying than the brief corporate pressure was a few months back.
(DIR) Post #AzNHIJklRc5Q8Y4nDM by dpnash@c.im
2025-10-19T17:52:59Z
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@futurebird @Flisty That's "YYZ". "Zzyzx" is the latest medication for moderate to severe psoriasis. (More seriously, it's this place, which is very prominently signed on I-15 northeast of LA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zzyzx,_California)
(DIR) Post #AzNXZuLCGRULniWjE8 by dpnash@c.im
2025-10-19T20:55:27Z
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@futurebird I visited London a few years back and stayed in a place where one of the closest surface rail line stops wasTootingAnd the closest Tube stop wasTooting Bec And of course, one of the major Tube lines (the Piccadilly line — already a mildly amusing name) has a northern terminus of … Cockfosters.
(DIR) Post #AzVbjKWiEIT8haLCjo by dpnash@c.im
2025-10-23T18:19:08Z
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@foone "...according to this unverified data source, the decline in human intelligence began with the appearance of the rapidly spreading virus, COVID Em Dash One Nine."
(DIR) Post #Azk2LrGQNMOfOHLcBM by dpnash@c.im
2025-10-30T17:23:51Z
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@futurebird > Price: 0.5 BTCBitcoin is old-school. All the cool cats accept only Kitcoin.
(DIR) Post #B0K1pbyKpdRDpAwXU8 by dpnash@c.im
2025-11-17T02:07:45Z
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@ricci Printer connections are Hydras. Regular deletion just makes them grow back in greater numbers. The only solution is to burn each severed connection with a lighted torch as soon as you delete it. Make sure you have thorough backups before going this route.
(DIR) Post #B0LfgYJ9eJFfjXYQhE by dpnash@c.im
2025-11-17T18:23:47Z
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@david @futurebird @Alice @TheBreadmonkey @KevBot The incredibly satisfying THUNK of the big red switch on really old PCs (like the OG IBM PC and the PC XT/AT series). When that sucker went THUNK, you knew the system was completely off, none of this “kind of, sort of off but not really off” state we have now.
(DIR) Post #B0vCpzlSafQPHIYrfE by dpnash@c.im
2025-12-05T00:35:21Z
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@futurebird Give 'em three years, by then some of them will turn it into "one zero zero zero one zero one" (which will be ... umm, nice the first time it happens, but it will probably happen dozens of times)
(DIR) Post #B0xtF52Ohs9pGN30Ua by dpnash@c.im
2025-12-06T07:39:56Z
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@ricci It’s the bafflement of my adviser’s day, my thesis committee’s despair:For when they reach the equipment room – Recapity Coill’s not there!