Posts by tommorris@mastodon.social
(DIR) Post #AuMt0YBakRlV9mtCl6 by tommorris@mastodon.social
2025-05-21T09:57:02Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
Also the classic coding one: using LLMs to generate basic boilerplate code. This is a sign, perhaps, of a lack of maturity of the language ecosystem.Outside of university assignments/personal study, why are you reimplementing textbook/boilerplate code rather than it being in stdlib or a trusted annex to stdlib (e.g. Java’s Commons-Lang)? That’s a genuine question to ask.Hard to find? Dependency management sucks? Risk of (supply chain) vulns? These are language/community issues worth fixing!
(DIR) Post #AuS2xNCgMN4veryx9s by tommorris@mastodon.social
2025-05-24T14:17:27Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
Nick Clegg says that a law requiring tech companies to ask permission to train AI on copyrighted work would ‘kill’ the industry, according to The Times.Okay, maybe let it die then. Maybe we can get back to building tech that actually works rather than hyping up hallucinating plagiarism machines in order to fluff up corporate quarterly reports.If generative AI just went away tomorrow, it would be a net positive for the world.
(DIR) Post #AvAPVdHmgDqX8VFyQC by tommorris@mastodon.social
2025-06-15T08:47:47Z
2 likes, 3 repeats
Good news: GitHub Copilot is scared shitless of the concept of gender.Instead of foo, bar and baz, use “genderqueer”, “demisexual” and “leather_daddy” and you’ll reduce the likelihood of getting a spammy PR from a sad robot.https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/72603
(DIR) Post #Avf1oLAUWnX8oxoV8q by tommorris@mastodon.social
2025-06-30T07:45:50Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
If you asked a programmer whether it is possible to write a really short program that’s stable, fast, deals with all edge cases (foreseeable and not) and is understandable by human beings, they’d say “no, engineering requires trade offs”.But when it comes to open source licenses, brevity of license text is seen as the main concern. Hence why people like stuff like the “do WTF you like”license.Please, grasp that explicit error handling is as valuable in legal drafting as it is in coding.
(DIR) Post #Avr4BKeubeVrTJ0ZsG by tommorris@mastodon.social
2025-07-06T09:45:00Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
This morning, I requested a number of popular LLMs answer a simple legal question of the form "it is illegal in England and Wales to do [X] - please set out the legislation that makes it such".The response discussed a piece of legislation that was repealed in 2005.And another piece of legislation that applies in Scotland. The fact "(Scotland)" is in the short title might be some kind of clue.It completely failed to state the current law.Still, let's pump it into the nation's veins.
(DIR) Post #AxUhoBTCgx4BNivTVo by tommorris@mastodon.social
2025-08-24T11:57:30Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
A very slow handclap for Nick Clegg taking god-knows-how-many years to work out that Silicon Valley is filled with a bunch of vain sociopaths.You’d think the apprenticeship of British politics would have attuned his sensors, but apparently not.https://mas.to/@carnage4life/115081221350850904
(DIR) Post #AxWIXnCZ2nmawY9Mw4 by tommorris@mastodon.social
2025-08-25T06:28:37Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
Given the attitude to consent of tech executives when it comes to forcing everyone to use their shiny but shitty toys, it is completely reasonable to draw inferences about their wider attitude to consent.https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250822-youtube-is-using-ai-to-edit-videos-without-permission
(DIR) Post #AxYwtHrkcCKobw8fjs by tommorris@mastodon.social
2025-08-26T09:02:55Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
“AI welfare” is conspiracy theory bullshit but for people with MSc degrees.It’d be amusing if it weren’t for the fact they’re wasting brain cycles worrying about the suffering of electrons while their fellow sentient living creatures suffer and die in horrific and preventable ways.https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/26/can-ais-suffer-big-tech-and-users-grapple-with-one-of-most-unsettling-questions-of-our-times
(DIR) Post #Axd1Rrb1SEL5iktevg by tommorris@mastodon.social
2025-08-28T09:23:31Z
2 likes, 3 repeats
"LLMs allow dead (or non-verbal) people to speak" - spiritualism/channelling"what happens when the AI turns us all into paperclips?" - end times prophecy"AI will be able to magically predict everything" - astrology/tarot cards"...what if you're wrong? The AI will punish you for lacking faith in Bayesian stats" - Pascal's wager"It'll fix climate change!" - stewardship theologyTurns out studying religion comes in handy for understanding supposedly 'rationalist' ideas about AI.
(DIR) Post #Axd1RwiIQc81alL2Se by tommorris@mastodon.social
2025-08-28T09:25:00Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
Meanwhile, I'm the odd one for suggesting that maybe we could get most of the purported benefits of the AI revolution for a fraction of the total cost by... just fixing the fucking website.
(DIR) Post #AxrUUpcyqYtzMu1FLs by tommorris@mastodon.social
2025-09-04T10:59:24Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
Remember that scene in The Big Short where they realised there was a bubble in the American real estate market... yeah, I kinda feel like maybe "we've put AI in our pizza oven" should be a tip off that we're in a bubble.And it's about as stupid as the time people decided monkey JPEG derivatives were the future of the financial sector.https://www.theverge.com/news/768542/ooni-volt-2-pizza-oven-ai-pizza-intelligence
(DIR) Post #AyMLW8urstmc1bXzl2 by tommorris@mastodon.social
2025-09-19T08:18:26Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
If I trained a large language model with the goal of making evidence-free libel, but with no specific goal to libel any particular person, am I liable?As in, it takes data from the web, subtly misinterprets it, conflates distinct people, and treats hazy/unevidenced connections as certainties… and I’m reasonably confident it will make mistakes quite frequently, but I have no idea who it will hurt.Basically imagine automating Redditors investigating people after crimes or conspiracy logic.
(DIR) Post #Azi0r2W7zvmf2pVuj2 by tommorris@mastodon.social
2025-10-29T17:25:42Z
0 likes, 2 repeats
Satya Nadella says AI use is "no longer optional".Microsoft lays off 15,000 employees in the last year.And today Azure shits itself. Enjoy.
(DIR) Post #AzsCjRfZjwCZldg2vg by tommorris@mastodon.social
2025-10-07T14:49:19Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
Microservices adds lots of benefits to the development process like:- network call overhead for every operation- more cloud infrastructure to manage—IAM policy writing, costs accounting, etc.—on all those services- submitting PRs on 50 Git repos in order to make cross-cutting changes- reimplementing a type system in a YAML file- buying developer laptops with 64GB of RAM to spin up 50 containers to replicate the functionality previously provided by a damn bash script
(DIR) Post #B0bcI4W18EwPoVclQu by tommorris@mastodon.social
2025-11-25T12:55:16Z
3 likes, 2 repeats
Docker Desktop apparently now has an AI chatbot built in. And, no, you can't turn it off because fuck you.You know what doesn't have an AI chatbot built in? chroot. LXC. Podman. FreeBSD jails. Literally every other attempt at OS-level virtualization in the last 40 or so years.Why I need an AI chatbot for taking some software on a Mac and running it in a Linux container, I have no idea.No more confirmation is needed: we're in a goddamn bubble.
(DIR) Post #B1GaqL93ZlXwoASDom by tommorris@mastodon.social
2025-12-13T18:33:47Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
Spoke to a former colleague recently. Their employer monitors employee AI use and wants to see number go up.Since the obligatory AI nannying, multiple product teams have fallen apart and they’ve stopped delivering new features of value while users are leaving.A whole layer of middle management are destroying good products to make a Potemkin village of fake automation to justify their bosses buying crap enterprise software. It’s as if the entire industry had their heads kicked in by a donkey.
(DIR) Post #B1a0hUQEGu1AFmv7y4 by tommorris@mastodon.social
2025-12-24T11:45:46Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
I'd be curious to see a Venn diagram showing the overlap between people mentioned in the Panama Papers and the Epstein Papers.
(DIR) Post #B2LVkCJSxrXT1GxdJ2 by tommorris@mastodon.social
2026-01-16T12:03:24Z
6 likes, 2 repeats
The future of software development is Gemini adding and removing the "status/needs-triage" tag from an issue on GitHub 5,000 times.Gemini is made by Google, a company once famous for incredibly high quality software engineering.https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/16723
(DIR) Post #B2NhfIFZ3CtHkdU2d6 by tommorris@mastodon.social
2026-01-17T16:18:18Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
If you'd bought a $300,000 Bored Ape NFT in 2022, it'd now be worth about $20,000.By contrast, if you'd put that money into a really boring All-World ETF, you'd have about about $425,000 now.Turns out cryptographically verified receipts for legally unrecognised rights in ugly monkey art might not be a good investment.
(DIR) Post #B2nrsA95z2VD5MHsPY by tommorris@mastodon.social
2026-01-30T07:14:41Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
Imagine if every AI data centre was a library. Full of readers of every age and demographic, reading everything and anything - romantic bestsellers, pop science, reference books, magazines and newspapers, the poetry and philosophy of every culture imaginable. People exercising their actual intelligence, thinking for themselves rather than generating endless slop.Then consider who would be most scared by this.