Posts by eaton@phire.place
(DIR) Post #AUPxH8JkabXiylkL4q by eaton@phire.place
2023-04-07T18:19:26Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
A large language model may tell you things that are not true, but it will never, ever lie to you. Because a language model has no conception of truth or falsehood, only probabilities of particular words appearing together. At scale that produces incredible things, but there is no inner model of true-ness or false-ness with which it can evaluate its own outputs. Only the rate at which we accept particular outputs.
(DIR) Post #AUPxH9AZQDnHcaSWPI by eaton@phire.place
2023-04-07T18:21:11Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
In a sense, if a LLM deceives us we only have ourselves to blame: humanity is shouting into a well and listening to the echoes, and learning that differently-shaped wells make different kinds of echoes. That isn't bad or good, but it is not "asking the well for advice."On the other hand, these tools are being put in the hands of people who don't actually understand the distinction, and are just being told that "Smart Wells Can Answer Your Questions."
(DIR) Post #AVquELqP5Cgd7qbWZE by eaton@phire.place
2023-05-20T14:38:06Z
3 likes, 1 repeats
I will never, ever stop loving Bill Atkinson’s dithering algorithm. If you cut your teeth on Macpaint or Hypercard, you probably recognize it without even realizing it.
(DIR) Post #AVquEOdOi147mNXgDA by eaton@phire.place
2023-05-20T14:38:31Z
0 likes, 2 repeats
There’s a great post for the supernerds in the room that goes into the nature of “dithering” and even explains the algorithmic nudges Atkinson Dithering uses to achieve its distinctive look: https://surma.dev/things/ditherpunk/These days, dithering is usually encountered as an affectation or an artifact; we’ve got ridiculously high res deep color displays on our *wrists*. Back in the 80s when Atkinson was doing some of his most memorable work, though, it was the cutting edge of image display optimization.
(DIR) Post #AVsjzsZWVdTt3l5Zqq by eaton@phire.place
2023-05-21T14:03:39Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@xerz @bhawthorne it’s also a bit more contrasty than many of its peer algorithms, which ends up making quite a difference
(DIR) Post #AXGIBSFLIF0oMRT5pA by eaton@phire.place
2023-07-01T18:17:18Z
2 likes, 2 repeats
The sudden chaos as Twitter — a service built on the idea of shouting your shower thoughts to the world — locks everything behind a registration wall, jacks up prices, AND gets demonstrably less stable for the PAYING customers is a hilarious demonstration off the fact that Musk isn’t actually good at business, just at being a rich guy.
(DIR) Post #AXGIBU6CPCt26fCoqm by eaton@phire.place
2023-07-01T18:32:05Z
2 likes, 4 repeats
Even funnier that the current weirdness is an obvious result of the batshit API pricing.Anyone interested in low end tinkering wa suddenly incentivized to sidestep the API and just scrape the oEmbed or web endpoints, and they did. So he locked out unregistered visitors and killed embedding, which broke every citation of a tweet on the Internet.Then people start using logged in sessions to get that data. So he limits *actual logged in users* to only viewing 600 tweets per day.
(DIR) Post #AXGIBW82rJYGOy5K0O by eaton@phire.place
2023-07-01T18:35:52Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
It’s an entirely predictable cycle; scraping Twitter was way more of a hassle than using its API… when the API was low-cost.And every action Musk takes to lock out “freeloaders” reduces the incremental value of access to the service at all — making the ROI of those insane API costs for devs and businesses built on Twitter even worse.Which incentivizes finding ways around the API, which restarts the loop.
(DIR) Post #AXGIBXx84s0a3gzdGi by eaton@phire.place
2023-07-01T18:45:39Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
Like, *I* was scraping Twitter! This week! I’d downloaded my Twitter Archive, with 15y of favorites. But the archive doesn’t include who wrote those tweets or *when they were from*, so I wrote a script that pings the oEmbed endpoint and parsed the html for user handle and date.
(DIR) Post #AXGIBZp37sjXrDECx6 by eaton@phire.place
2023-07-01T18:49:46Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
Ideally, the Twitter Archive would just include that; it’s not like the data’s not there already, they just didn’t include it, and also locked down the *API* endpoint that used to make looking it up easy.This insistence on extracting maximum value from the API, rather than using it to make *relying on Twitter easier,* could easily be a death spiral. It’s the social media equivalent of CVS putting every product behind lock and key to prevent toothbrush shoplifting.
(DIR) Post #AXGIBbhK9Zk5fpd4Bk by eaton@phire.place
2023-07-01T18:55:51Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
Imagine a dude buys a movie theater and gets angry that the “free popcorn refills” policy theoretically allows moviegoers to get endless refills and resell the popcorn outside.So he kills free refills and starts charging by the kernel.
(DIR) Post #AXlbMJU4mphWzz5huy by eaton@phire.place
2023-07-16T20:09:14Z
2 likes, 10 repeats
The failure of the Internet to deliver its promise is particularly noticeable when you hunt for repair manuals for a product from the 90s. Used to be, the information would either be there or not there, finable or unfindable.Now, there are hundreds of algorithmically generated sites claiming to have it just because it appeared in their search logs, generating potemkin village content traps with endless paging, broken-thumbnail named-like-the-file-you-want but actually-just-ebay-photos bullshit
(DIR) Post #AXlbMLMhnCzepheqhs by eaton@phire.place
2023-07-16T20:10:31Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
Even if you find the manufacturer's site it’s more likely than not broken, with a search feature that pulls up what it claims are results but empty divs instead of links, or busted jQuery code from 2013 that prevents anything from loading.Is it a real but broken site? Is it just another click farm? Does it matter?
(DIR) Post #AaRTU9mDR32cr18kRE by eaton@phire.place
2023-10-04T21:11:24Z
4 likes, 3 repeats
In a lot of ways, Facebook has a classic IBM problem1. Won big early, and accumulated a war chest that let them absorb hits instead of adapting2. Facilitated genocide
(DIR) Post #Aai9qZ6BdHMKj7Kbc8 by eaton@phire.place
2023-10-01T16:01:26Z
1 likes, 5 repeats
i feel this in my bones this in my bones, via @nctrost
(DIR) Post #AdQLsIRQCdJOGiWC2K by eaton@phire.place
2024-01-02T04:17:12Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@simon so, I’ve been going back and digging up a bunch of my old work (aka, sites I built for clients in the 90s). Domain expiration is less common than host-rot, IME. More folks seem to hang onto a domain than continue to pay for hosting, though it’s a small samole size.
(DIR) Post #AiCDaSWaoHfm8GF37w by eaton@phire.place
2024-05-23T22:00:53Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@foone i'm imagining planning meetings in which engineers ask, "Realistically, what are the odds any of us will work here when that bill comes due?”
(DIR) Post #AiCEIUk7vKcJknZPF2 by eaton@phire.place
2024-05-23T22:10:26Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@foone "wellness status: 403”
(DIR) Post #AqFXCKh0hEqBYY7Tbk by eaton@phire.place
2025-01-19T19:24:27Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@futurebird ALL BARD STRATEGY
(DIR) Post #At7TOK12Y8WUmPGkym by eaton@phire.place
2025-04-15T15:40:32Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@futurebird i’m imagining the future where this goes viral and dozens of people get into deadly brawls woth chimps