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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th November 2024
  • Despite worrying my brains out about getting deported from my home of 14 years because I wasn’t born in this godforsaken place, I’m extremely excited that Elon will get fired in the next 6 months or less. Gives me life to think about him getting very publicly humiliated by an even greater piece of shit than he is.

  • "I consider myself a dark elf"
  • Right, sure he picked the most glorified fantasy race out there, “but evil”. When in reality he’s a Duergar at best:

    Personality Tyrannical, grim, industrious and pessimistic,[11][20] the lives of the gray dwarves were bleak and brutal. Rather than a flaw, however, they viewed their lack of happiness as their greatest strength, the defining feature of duergar pride.

    Sounds about right for the joyless world he imagines his ideal society would represent.

  • None of those words are in the Bible 2.0 (Tossed Salads And Scrumbled Eggs — Ludicity)
  • Yes we do AGIle: we ask ChatGPT what our customers want and then ask it to write software to fulfill those requirements. Every two weeks it writes up some imaginary sprint retrospective meeting notes. Planning poker doesn’t work so well, this iteration isn’t so good at bluffing yet.

  • Salesforce invites a horse into the hospital
  • The industry called it “field engineering” previously, and “customer support” prior to that; renames happened every time the execs heard how this portion of their business is only a cost center and can easily be done by chat bots (to which the customer success people would say, good luck with that).

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 22 September 2024
  • Hm, I don’t really see the sneer. They wrote a nasty bug, got notified and had a patch out for it within 36h. The remediations look reasonable too: better privacy, less firebase, actual security audits; even the bounty program is probably the right call (but they result in so many shit reports, it’s probably a wash).

    I gotta admit I’m kind of partial to them and their browser? It’s the non-Brave one that ships with an Adblocker by default, has much nicer UI than the existing ones, and the sync thing isn’t half bad (if it doesn’t sync security badness to all your instances, ouch). Sure they sound like a cult but I guess that’s how browser dev gets funded since the 1990s.

  • Nature: Al generates covertly racist decisions about people based on their dialect
    www.nature.com AI generates covertly racist decisions about people based on their dialect - Nature

    Despite efforts to remove overt racial prejudice, language models using artificial intelligence still show covert racism against speakers of African American English that is triggered by features of the dialect.

    AI generates covertly racist decisions about people based on their dialect - Nature

    Got the pointer to this from Allison Parrish who says it better than I could:

    > it's a very compelling paper, with a super clever methodology, and (i'm paraphrasing/extrapolating) shows that "alignment" strategies like RLHF only work to ensure that it never seems like a white person is saying something overtly racist, rather than addressing the actual prejudice baked into the model.

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    Yet another completely normal use of generative AI: not-obviously-illegal CSAM
    www.wgal.com Police investigate AI-generated nude photos using Susquehanna Valley students' faces

    News 8's Meredith Jorgensen spoke with a victim and learned why a legal loophole may mean no one can be charged.

    Police investigate AI-generated nude photos using Susquehanna Valley students' faces

    School student tells AI to put 20 other students’ faces on nude pictures, shares them in chat; it takes months for anyone including the school administrators to act because of some extremely, uh, dubious loophole.

    If someone does that in photoshop, it’s a crime; if they do it in AI pretending to be photoshop, it’s somehow not. Gotta love this legal system’s focus on minor technicalities rather than the harm done.

    3
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)AN
    antifuchs @awful.systems
    Posts 3
    Comments 53