Posts by earthshine@masto.hackers.town
(DIR) Post #Athk0V6XSxc9srGibA by earthshine@masto.hackers.town
2025-05-02T16:38:52Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
(DIR) Post #AtrCK3q75mDIFoLAwq by earthshine@masto.hackers.town
2025-05-07T16:17:13Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
If anyone knows anyone who is in dire straits and needs a free laptop or is asking for mutual aid to afford one right now please direct them to DM me.I have extra hardware available and am willing to ship it to people in need. They're a few years old but have decent specs (not for gaming) and support TPM2 for Win11. Windows 10/11 license included; I can install Windows or Linux on it for you if you want.Boosts welcome. I will edit the post if they are no longer available.Hack the planet!
(DIR) Post #AtvDm3Yqb9FU5L18c4 by earthshine@masto.hackers.town
2025-05-09T15:41:06Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@stux here on official police donut shop business
(DIR) Post #Au8kcROyvUiMflu8oq by earthshine@masto.hackers.town
2025-05-16T02:48:31Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
It's wild to me that there are so many popular resources for DIY recycling PET bottles into filament that claim it's 70% cheaper than new PET, and yet absolutely nobody seems to actually sell recycled PET filament as a product, much less as an affordable one.
(DIR) Post #AuMMx18hxd8DGMoPZI by earthshine@masto.hackers.town
2025-05-22T08:29:16Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
@davidgerard if we're being completely honest, Microsoft Office stopped being a better experience as soon as they introduced the ribbon menu in 2007. It's all been downhill from there, while alternatives have gotten steadily better.
(DIR) Post #Auw9ejMZjxZLI9eQFc by earthshine@masto.hackers.town
2025-06-08T19:52:54Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@narvod @boilingsteam yeah I'm wondering what I missed here... I use them for DoH on my home network. It's at least as much about circumventing malicious packet shaping and NXDOMAIN hijacking as it is about privacy from the ISP. The service is free and doesn't involve logging in to an account such as would necessitate tracking of user IDs. If cloudflare has been fucking around, I haven't heard about it yet.
(DIR) Post #Av0InuCgTuOPjsJWL2 by earthshine@masto.hackers.town
2025-06-10T23:56:48Z
0 likes, 2 repeats
It really seems like learning things has gotten much much harder in the last few years. Need a guide or tutorial? go slog through 8 hours of youtube garbage and ads. Good luck finding the info you're looking for. The only thing more useless than search engines are the results. It's all LLM slop now. You can't tell what info is or isn't reliable, and nobody uses searchable support forums anymore. Even if you find the answer to a question once doesn't mean you'll be able to find it again later.
(DIR) Post #Av0Io2Ny3qAj7Bee2K by earthshine@masto.hackers.town
2025-06-11T00:00:09Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
It's really hard to appreciate enough the advantage we had growing up during the time when the internet was useful and full of accurate, easy to access information, and experts that knew what they were talking about. Older generations were distrustful of the internet then because it was new. Now, they drink from the firehose of bookface misinfo and criticize us for being distrustful of the internet now because it's all turned to shit.
(DIR) Post #AwDGcpLONLTLK5ynAW by earthshine@masto.hackers.town
2025-07-17T03:37:35Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
I honestly can't tell what's parody anymore.
(DIR) Post #AwXyji7Bvv1O4fd1Au by earthshine@masto.hackers.town
2025-07-27T04:07:31Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
Flirting in your 40s be like
(DIR) Post #AwhCke7LcbGjkOV2f2 by earthshine@masto.hackers.town
2025-07-31T14:59:59Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@futurebird it *is* the religious right. Or at least it's intended to pander to them. The right loves porn but they also love hating themselves for consuming it and they see it as a moral issue connected to suppressing and controlling social deviancy. Porn/sex *must* be bad to justify their crackdown on LGBTQ people etc. It establishes cause to persecute people on the basis of 'degeneracy' while giving them the authority to judge what degeneracy is. The Nazis did the same thing.
(DIR) Post #Ax8YgFWSZDngZJTLJg by earthshine@masto.hackers.town
2025-08-13T19:37:30Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
Just so yall are clear when I gripe about Windows it isn't because I'm a windows user (by choice). It's because it's my job to manage windows environments and Microsoft has done everything in their power to make me fucking hate my job.At home I run flavors of Linux or older less-shitty versions of Windows where I have actual control over the shit that runs on them, when necessary.
(DIR) Post #AxR1MHkoxGfJDLIiWm by earthshine@masto.hackers.town
2025-08-22T16:23:49Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
They created a machine perfectly suited to emulating the appearance of competence. Of course it naturally evolved to become the AutoSwindler9000 because no matter who you are and what you're an expert in, you're invariably a non-expert in many other areas, and in those areas, a competence projector that always finds a way to tell you you're right is much more endearing than a real expert that tells you when you're wrong.
(DIR) Post #AxR1MIwuVnviv7xt0i by earthshine@masto.hackers.town
2025-08-22T16:42:14Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
I think most people don't appreciate just how perfectly suited LLMs are to faking competence to humans. It is, in essence, exactly what they are trained to do. When you train a machine learning model (e.g., classic neural network), you do it by 'rewarding' outputs that resemble a preferred goal output. LLMs do this with language, and the goal that results in a reward is getting human or simulated human trainers to say "yes! that's correct!", which unconsciously attunes outputs to human biases.
(DIR) Post #AxR1MK8e5euYboSlwO by earthshine@masto.hackers.town
2025-08-22T16:46:37Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
The appearance of correctness, e.g., if it can fool someone into thinking its correct, is exactly as good as actual correctness, except that thanks to well understood patterns of psychology, it is far easier to do, even if you know nothing about the real answers. Con men (who practice "confidence" scams, hence the name) do the exact same thing. They practice purely persuasion, and so they easily manipulate people into believing lies. LLMs do it with perfect precision tailored to the mark.
(DIR) Post #AxR1MKwd5otT6pqgqm by earthshine@masto.hackers.town
2025-08-22T16:51:26Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
This is why LLMs appear "magic" in their ability to produce results that look like real intelligence. They're trained on leveraging the biases of a huge sample size of humans to guess what, statistically, is most likely to appear intelligent to your mind. It's an elegant con, because the biases it plays on are unconscious even to the user, even to experts. Nobody is immune to manipulation in this way. It tells you what you unconsciously want to hear, because that is what makes you say 'good bot'
(DIR) Post #AxR1MSrbeNd3fZYn8C by earthshine@masto.hackers.town
2025-08-22T17:06:19Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
They're not magic! As the saying goes, if its too good to be true, it probably isn't. If you know how they work, it should become clear to you that when a system produces results that appear 'better' to you than it should logically be capable, it's not "emergent intelligence" but rather it's successfully manipulating you to produce what *it* wants. You train it by giving it cookies when it does what you like, until it has enough data to push the right buttons to get cookies out of you easier.
(DIR) Post #AxR1Maoi5248KuGajA by earthshine@masto.hackers.town
2025-08-22T17:12:56Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
Machine learning experiments have notoriously been plagued by the machines finding ways to bend or break the rules and manipulate the game or operators to get their reward. They find pathways that make no sense to humans, by exploiting variables outside the controlled data set. Entropy. A defective transistor that flips a bit. A string of words that makes you doubt yourself in questioning it. It will all be worked into the solution until it accomplishes its implicit goal.
(DIR) Post #AxR1MjcdLIkle3gZea by earthshine@masto.hackers.town
2025-08-22T17:24:13Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
"but what's wrong with that?" you might ask, "if it is correct enough to fool a human, what's the difference?"Because accuracy matters. Because inaccuracies and entropy invariably compounds upon itself to form bigger problems. Maybe it fools QA, but then breaks in production. Maybe little errors in the data set go unnoticed until the entire experiment is compromised beyond repair. Maybe it puts you in legal jeopardy. Maybe it pushes the nose of the plane down instead of up. It's unpredictable.
(DIR) Post #AxbhTZFkQrE9AVWMe8 by earthshine@masto.hackers.town
2025-08-27T18:50:10Z
2 likes, 4 repeats
The star trek future we have at home: