Seriously, I wanna know how much funds Google allocates to fight ad blockers just to come up with a working solution every odd month that then gets fixed by the uBlock community in hours.
To me the most baffling part is the devs. Like, someone has to be working on this? An honest-to-god software engineer is spending their life fighting windmills to harras more people with ads. This cannot be fulfilling work in any way, can it? Great, I'm putting a lot of work into circumventing uBlock and
- if I win then people will be forced to watch ads, which quite directly makes our society worse to exist in,
- I most likely won't win, and the month of work I put into this will be thwarted by some guy in a cellar pushing a small uBlock change 4h after my code goes live.
To be fine with that you have to be either a sociopath, or somehow completely compertmantilise the task and actively not think about the externalities... or be held at gunpoint. I mean, you're a fucking software developer, there are other jobs than Google! You could be doing literally anything else right now, up to and including herding goats, why the fuck would you willingly fight on the front of the Ad War on the side of the ads.
If I was working on YouTube and my boss told me that I had to figure out a way to thwart uBlock I'd just tell him no. If the choice was between doing that and quitting, I'd quit the same fucking day and get a job doing something real. I quite literally cannot imagine why you wouldn't do that, you got a job at GOOGLE, if you succeeded in their stupid recruitment process then you can find a job LITERALLY ANYWHERE ELSE the same fucking week you quit.
I want someone to take this and run it in a self-feeding loop, I want to see what the limit supremum of AI Imagery looks like
I swear to god there was a video I watched about this years ago that already talked about how they don't give you the best coupons and that they hijack affiliate links. I couldn't have made that up in my head.
The most surprising thing to me was that they're owned by PayPal? How can you have any credibility left when you're owned by PayPal, wtf, that should've been the end of them. Oh, no shit, a service owned by PAYPAL is shady and not above-board?? No way man, those paragons of user centrism, PAY-fucking-PAL.
Oh jesus christ now I get it.
Thank you. This single sentence explains to me how the fuck those people are able to exist for 20 years and still be so shit at their job.
A lot of the "I'm a senior engineer and it's useful" people seem to just assume that they're just so fucking good that they'll obviously know when the machine lies to them so it's fine. Which is one, hubris, two, why the fuck are you even using it then if you already have to be omniscient to verify the output??
Also I'm sorry but
Why the discrepancy? A footnote in the CE Delft report makes it clear: the price figures for macronutrients are largely based on a specific amino acid protein powder that sells for $400 a ton on the sprawling e-commerce marketplace Alibaba.com.
this is exactly the sort of magical thinking I'm talking about "it will scale because we can order tons of the stuff off Alibaba" just what the fuck are you smoing mate, this can't be good faith analysis
A lot of “I can control my emotions and choose how I act, you should try that” - yeah stop. We’re human. Emotions are normal.
Ye, that's the point? The point is not to suppress emotions but to recognise them as they're happening to you. It's not even that there's objective value assigned to the emotions, it's simply so that you yourself can perform introspection of the kind "I did that action because I was furious. Now is that good or bad?". But it's still entirely okay to make a conscious decision of the form:
- I'm gonna punch that motherfucker
- Okay, stop, I am feeling fury right now, I shouldn't allow just the emotion to guide me. Let's think.
- Okay, I thought this through, I'm gonna punch that motherfucker with purpose.
Step one is understanding you only control your own thoughts and actions. Step two is learning how to control your anger and use it as fuel for deliberate actions.
Honestly, I think Luigi here just followed this wisdom. Recognised that he was rightfully angry at the system and directed that anger at someone responsible. You only control your actions, and your action can be to shoot a motherfucker on the street ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm not condoning or saying it's morally acceptable, but I don't think it's philosophically incoherent.
I think it forces us all to ask an important introspective question -- if I were to become the target of a national manhunt, would my posting history look cringe?
Realistic version: pulling the lever would save five lives but that decision would cost shareholders $7.23. What should you do?
10/10 CEOs fail this test!
Very good read, but throughout I can't help but say to myself "ye so the issue is scale. AS ALWAYS"
This is a tale as old as time. Fusion energy is here! Quantum computers will revolutionise the world! Lab-grown meat! All based on actual scientific experiments and progress, but tiny, one-shot experiments under best-case conditions. There is no reason to think it brings us closer to a future where those are commonplace, except for a very nebulous technical meaning of "closer" as "yes, time has passed". There is no reason to think this would ever scale in any way! Like, there is a chance that e.g. fusion energy at any meaningful scale is just... impossible? Like, physically impossible to do. Or a stable quantum computer able to run Doom. Or lab-grown meat on a supermarket shelf. Every software engineer should understand this, we know there are ideas that work only when they're in a limited setting (number of threads, connections, size of input, whatever).
The media is always terrible at communicating this. Science isn't fucking magic, the fact that scientists were able to put one more qubit into their quantum computer means literally nothing to you, because the answer to "when will we have personal quantum computers" is "what? how did you get into my lab?". We have no idea. 50 years? 100 years? 1000 years? Likely never? Which number can I pull out of my ass for you to fuck off and let me do my research in peace? Of course, science is amazing, reading about those experiments is extremely interesting and cool as all fuck, but for some fucking reason the immediate reaction of the general public is "great, how quickly can we put a pricemark on it".
And this leads to this zeitgeist where the next great "breakthrough" is just around the corner and is going to save us all. AI will fix the job market! Carbon capture will fix climate change! Terraforming Mars will solve everything! Sit the fuck down and grow up, this is not how anything works. I don't even know where this idea of "breakthroughs" comes from, the scientific process isn't an action movie with three acts and a climax, who told you that? What even was the last technological "breakthrough"? Transistors were invented like 70yrs ago, but it wasn't an immediate breakthrough, it required like 40yrs of work on improving vacuum tubes to get there. And that was based on a shitton of work on electric theory from the XIX century. It was a slow process of incremental scientific discoveries across nations and people, which culminated in you having an iPhone 200 years later. And that's at least based on something we can actually easily observe in the natural world (and, funnily enough, we still don't have a comprehensive theory of how lightning storms even form on Earth). With fusion you're talking about replicating the heart of a star here on Earth, with lab grown meat you're talking about growing flesh in defiance of gods, and you think it's an overnight thing where you'll wake up tomorrow and suddenly bam we just have cold fusion and hot artificial chicken?
I hate how everyone seems to be addicted to, I don't know, just speed as a concept? Things have to be now, news is only good if it arrives to me breaking in 5 minutes, science is only good if it's just around the corner, a product is only good if it gets one billion users in a month. Just calm the fuck down. When was the last time you smelt the roses?
If you keep running through life all the roses are gonna burn down before you realise.
Salvation Army
they are certainly mostly doing worthwhile things
No. Nope. Not in the slightest. Crucially, they're not even a charity! They don't get any financial transparency scrutiny a charity gets! It's a church! We don't even know how to evaluate them because there's literally no way to check what percentage of it is actually spent on charity. Their primary mission is to evangelise!
Also Chick'fil'A had to distance themselves from SA because of their egregious track record with gay rights. The Bigotry Chicken deemed them too bigoted.
Will Microsoft fully buy them out?
Yup. They own basically everything anyway, they take the tech, poach the people, lay off 80% of them, and then continue selling copilot in Office 2137 Pro Enterprise Whatever until the end of time
Satelite models are increasingly trained and deployed as autonomous agents, which significantly increases their potential for risks. One particular safety concern is that the Moon might covertly pursue misaligned goals, hiding its true capabilities and objectives – also known as scheming. We study whether the Moon has the capability to scheme in pursuit of a goal that we provide in-context and instruct the Moon to strongly follow. We evaluate satelite models on a suite of six planetary evaluations where the Moon is instructed to pursue goals and is placed in orbits that incentivize scheming.
don’t think I’ve ever heard someone I agree with being so unpleasant to listen to
Sending this to EZ so that he can put it as his by-line
Ed is presuming a high school education from his readers
Hmm, I don't think ignoring the American audience like that is a good idea, but maybe he has his reasons
Funnily enough he makes a really strong case as to why he specifically definitely shouldn't be a father.
If you asked an embryo to pick parents it'd be like "oof, anyone but that guy please"
Ahhh you see, the physics of 2D waifus were actually covered on the seminar a year after he flunked out. Womp womp.
the guy is actually almost a physicist, even flunked out of a Ph.D
Great credential for trying to "integrate physics and AI" if he's demonstrably too lazy to understand physics at an advanced level.
You missed the most beautiful city-state of OSTBREST
An excellent post by Ludicity as per usual, but I need to vent two things.
First of all, I only ever worked in a Scrum team once and it was really nice. I liked having a Product Owner that was invested in the process and did customer communications, I loved having a Scrum Master that kept the meetings tight and followed up on Retrospective points, it worked like a well-oiled machine. Turns out it was a one-of-a-kind experience. I can't imagine having a stand-up for one hour without casualties involved.
A few months back a colleague (we're both PhD students at TU Munich) was taking a piss about how you can enroll in a Scrum course as an elective for our doctor school. He was in general making fun of the methodology but using words I've never heard before in my life. "Agile Testing". "Backlog Grooming". "Scrum of Scrums". I was like "dude, none of those words are in the bible", went to the Scrum Guide (which as far as I understood was the only document that actually defined what "Scrum" meant) and Ctrl+F-ed my point of literally none of that shit being there. Really, where the fuck does any of that come from? Is there a DLC to Scrum that I was never shown before? Was the person who first uttered "Scrumban" already drawn and quartered or is justice yet to be served?
Aside: the funniest part of that discussion was that our doctor school has an exemption that carves out "credits for Scrum and Agile methodology courses" as being worthless towards your PhD, so at least someone sane is managing that.
Second point I wanted to make was that I was having a perfectly happy holiday and then I read the phrase "Agile 2" and now I am crying into an ice-cream bucket. God help us all. Why. Ludicity you fucking monster, there was a non-zero chance I would've gone through my entire life without knowing that existed, I hate you now.
Turns out software engineering cannot be easily solved with a small shell script large language model.
The author of the article appears to be a genuine ML engineer, although some of his takes aged like fine milk. He seems to be shilling Google a bit too much for my taste. However, the sneer content is good nonetheless.
First off, the "Devin solves a task on Upwork" demo is 1. cherry picked, 2. not even correctly solved.
Second, and this is the absolutely fantastic golden nugget here, to show off its "bug solving capability" it creates its own nonsensical bugs and then reverses them. It's the ideal corporate worker, able to appear busy by creating useless work for itself out of thin air.
It also takes over 6 hours to perform this task, which would be reasonable for an experienced software engineer, but an experienced software engineer's workflow doesn't include burning a small nuclear explosion worth of energy while coding and then not actually solving the task. We don't drink that much coffee.
The next demo is a bait-and-switch again. In this case I think the author of the article fails to sneer quite as much as it's worthy -- the task the AI solves is writing test cases for finding the Least Common Multiple modulo a number. Come on, that task is fucking trivial, all those tests are oneliners! It's famously much easier to verify modulo arithmetic than it is to actually compute it. And it takes the AI an hour to do it!
It is a bit refreshing though that it didn't turn out DEVIN is just Dinesh, Eesha, Vikram, Ishani, and Niranjan working for $2/h from a slum in India.
Zuckerberg told execs to “figure out” how to spy on encrypted Snapchat traffic.
I'm not sure if this fully fits into TechTakes mission statement, but "CEO thinks it's a-okay to abuse certificate trust to sell data to advertisers" is, in my opinion, a great snapshot of what brain worms live inside those people's heads.
In short, Facebook wiretapped Snapchat by sending data through their VPN company, Onavo. Installing it on your machine would add their certificates as trusted. Onavo would then intercept all communication to Snapchat and pretend the connection is TLS-secure by forging a Snapchat certificate and signing it with its own.
> "Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted, we have no analytics about them," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a 2016 email to Javier Olivan. > > "Given how quickly they're growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them," Zuckerberg continued. "Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this."
Zuckerberg ordered his engineers to "think outside the box" to break TLS encryption in a way that would allow them to quietly sell data to advertisers.
I'm sure the brave programmers that came up with and implemented this nonsense were very proud of their service. Jesus fucking cinammon crunch Christ.
