I’m a huge personal privacy advocate, until my job is IT security and then I’m evil Michel Foucault and your corporate laptop is my personal panopticon. Oftentimes because the job is to protect customer privacy and information first.

I don’t normally care what you’re doing on your computer, until what you’re doing is:

• installing cracked games with keylogging malware
• falling for banal and obvious phishing emails
• installing Russian malware because an OF model told you to
• looking up celebrities and influencers to see what their health insurance claims are
• looking up your Ex to spy on them (police love this one weird trick!)
• gambling and/or playing markets all day
• storing your personal vacation photos (and pornography…) on shared company servers
• and this is just the tip of the ridiculous iceberg of shenanigans I’ve run into. The companies that promise to safe guard your privacy are full to bursting with idiots that don’t care about your data and would abuse the slightest amount of power available to them if it would save them 5 seconds or reward them in any way.

This article is what’s dumb:

The durable version is agents whose native language is precise, machine-facing state, with the warm, concise, human version generated only at the boundary.

Cool bro, we’ll take the natural lagauage machine, somehow make it generate machine language instead, and then magically convert “machine facts” into “human interpretation” only at the “rendering boundary” which is always very clearly defined, as this article points out when it mentions how sometimes humans read LLM output and sometimes they pipe it directly to other LLMs.

There is no formula that generates only true statements.

Gemini is so bad, you could train a better LLM with your old gameboy.

Good IDEs have multiple ways of showing you this info, and many languages have named parameters that fix this. Also, just putting a comment on them is not a crime, it just won’t update when you change the function but then your IDE can often only do so much at call sites, so you often need to update the calls (and the comments) manually. I’m sure LLM agents can change both as well.

Or, in JavaScript like these examples were, yeah, just pass in an object. Passing in an object should be standard in JS when you have more than like 2 params anyway because it solves several issues with parameter identification, optional parsms, method overloading, and so on. And JS passes everything by reference so you aren’t losing performance.

I used to work for one of the nation’s largest survey marketplaces. Y’all have no idea how deep this hole goes.

Surveys\polls are largely requested by political polling groups, research teams, and ad agencies. They put those up on an auction block just like ads, and then we would route traffic into it from various places. Mostly the survey takers come from mobile games (take this 3 question survey for 20 Blorp Points kind of stuff) or survey taker apps that give you points for gift cards and such.

So even before bots, most polls are taken by “professional” survey takers who use banks of phones to maximize their point earnings. We spent a lot of energy on “proving” to the survey provider side that real humans were answering, and not using scripts or bots to just rapid finish them (answer B to everything kind of stuff). Using sophisticated bots to randomly answer was super common.

They were super ready for AI. We talked about it everyday, game planned how it would work, designed systems around it. “Synthetic survey” was the buzz word. Why ask humans for answers if the statistics machine can convincingly predict the answer for you? We proposed ideas like generating the prediction fast and early, then using actual polls to adjust the result towards reality over time. We had tools to track people and connect their spending to poll questions so we could ask follow up questions on purchases, to provide “lift” metrics to agencies on if their ads were working. We were working on the “verification can” tech, only it would have been “Answer this 10 question survey to continue watching your movie.”

I was so glad to leave that place. They got bought and consolidated into the world’s largest survey company a year later and they fired everyone else that had been left. All they wanted was the tech and the customers.

Since I’ve been unemployed, I’ve been taking on more “pay what you can” work for friends and neighbors.

You know what a whole lot of people are struggling with right now? Their somewhat outdated laptops, that were always budget priced and underpowered, are practically self-immolating they’re trying so hard to run Windows 11. Its so bloated and ad-and-ai-riddled that it just plain sucks to use now.

They’re so fed up that when I’m like “Linux is pretty easy to use these days. I can set you up with Mint in a couple of hours?” They’re usually ready to try if it means a useful computer again. And setting them up for my friends made me happy and excited about computers in a way I haven’t felt since childhood.

I set up some open source audio and DJ stuff for a podcasting and dabbling musician friend, Krita for an artsy friend, etc. These are mostly just web browser and word processors, but I get to ensure my friends are using ad blockers and a privacy enhanced browser, libre office instead of MS. And they get some fun! Computers used to be fun; little wonder boxes that wanted to help you do the things you loved better.

I would like to tell you that the skills you develop in any language or framework will help you with every other one. A joke I’ve been making my entire career is that every 5 years or so, someone reinvents the database or schemas or the spreadsheet or document rendering (or buses or trains) or some other fundamental tech. When you step back from the specifics and the proprietary bullshit tacked on to “add value”, most software is just a database.

If anything, working in many kinds of environments is very good for teaching one to see problems abstractly and find general solutions. From .NET (a jit compiled, memory-managed system), you might branch out into functional programming (F# is .NET and a good intro to ML-style functional languages) or into more dynamic environments (python, Ruby, typescript) or lower-level systems where you need to manage memory (c\c++\rust).

Anyway, I say “I would like to tell you” because as my initial comment laments, I kind of think this industry is dying. The push to replace development teams with one dev and some AI (or even one cheap non-technical “manager” and some AI) is breaking the ersatz system of mentorship that sustains actual knowledge transfers in this field.

I’m starting to feel like a dinosaur, not sure the kind of tech world I learned to survive in is going to exist much longer.

Most of my career is built on MS’s stack (I fell into .NET development and got good at it. Now I’m in the same boat as COBOL, Java, and Ruby-on-Rails devs: I’m basically a software doula.)

Every job I go into now I’m reccomending they get a migration plan for self-hosting and self-owning. The American tech system is collapsing. AI is causing massive ruptures in knowledge: it obscures searches, it deskills devs, it’s castrated the junior-senior-principle ladder such that we’re not training enough developers to even pass along all of the knowledge of how current systems work. SaaS is reaching the enshittification threshold and all those businesses that moved everything into the cloud are about to discover that they’re hostages and the sinking empire will drag down a lot of collateral damage with it.

Riding somewhat on what other’s were saying regarding the neutron bombardment experiments: there’s also stuff like the “demon core,” the fissile core for the planned-but-never-made-or-dropped 3rd nuclear bomb. The scientists did create nuclear piles that were subcritical and measured them and such. Those are the “small (and extremely slow) explosions” that led to the big (fast) ones later.

We value “breakthroughs” way too much, for precisely the same reason we overvalue critical “climactic” events in history: we’re storytelling apes and good stories have singular inflection moments that teach lessons. But real life doesn’t have that, real life has incremental change that humans arbitrarily assign a critical moment after some accumulation to in order to make narratives.

Having now read the article, I will also add that this article is exactly emblematic of why Western elites simply do not get this stuff. They don’t even have language to describe it.

Describing these videos as “Trojan horses” is such a bad metaphor. Likewise all the fake-history and myth-making that being politically informative and entertaining are somehow left-wing phenomena invented by Jon Stewart.

People don’t engage with politics rationally, they do it emotionally. Most people engage with most things emotionally; thinking is hard and energy-intensive. Easily absorbed cartoons and entertainment are not “Trojan horses” because there is no secret message. This is the fundamental misunderstanding conservatives have about media: the messages aren’t secret, they are overt and obvious, you just aren’t trained to understand them.

Taking a media illiterate person and flinging complex jargon and symbols at them makes them feel stupid, so they reject it. Feeding them simple symbols (made for children) that speak in the language of simple emotions makes them feel like an insider who understands secrets. This feeling is so good that people start hunting for symbols in things with limited understanding of how to properly do so or experienced knowledge, so they start finding whatever their mind expects to find: demons, angels, enemies, government communist agents, whatever they’re afraid of.

Trump’s camp has become so insular they’ve forgotten that even media illiterate people understand things like not being able to afford food while the president posts a video of himself shifting on you.

Interviewer:

"In your opinion, if anyone around the world wants to take their revenge on the assassination of Soleimani and intends to do it proportionately in the way they suggest — that we take one of theirs now that they’ve got one of ours — who should we consider to take out in the context of America?

Iranian Cleric Shahab Moradi:

“Think about it. Are we supposed to take out Spider-Man and SpongeBob? They don’t have any heroes. We have a country in front of us with a large population and a large landmass, but it doesn’t have any heroes. All of their heroes are cartoon characters — they’re all fictional.”

They’re brilliant: using Lego to create violent short form cartoons. In a very “master-slave dialectic” way, it’s quite apparent that Americans know nothing about the world while the rest of the world understands us all too well.

SyncThing will do it. I keep sync folders across all my devices, and use a write-only folder (requires some advanced config) to backup phone camera photos. It can be configured per device to only use WiFi.

Makes sense if you consider how LLMs work. No expert starts off a piece of writing with “I am an expert in math, here is a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem.”

You’d get better results prompting it for a style of document. Instead of “you are a screenwriter” just start it off “Script for Harry Potter Goes for Surf n TERF. Scene 1: The Sweaty Troll, a wizard gay bar” and then let it run from there.

There are a lot of tools out there not pretending, let alone the AI ones.

You’re understanding of “gig work” is comically outdated. You sound naive or trollish. “Jobs for teens” like fast food work, grocery clerking, and working at movie theaters have always been taken by people who need “real jobs” and not just teens looking for extra money. So you’re wrong that these careers exclusively for kids to get pocket money ever existed, certainly not in living memory.

Secondly, OP isn’t talking about working the carwash for the summer. He’s talking about Uber and AirBNB. Maybe you heard of them? Over the last decade, they’ve caused massive disruption of the hotel and taxi industries by allowing thousands of unlicensed and unregulated “micro entrepreneurs” 🤮 to create a new economy of pay-per-task workers who end up owning all the physical assets (which rapidly deprecate in value) but none of the infrastructure or investments (which do not, or do so on much different schedules).

Houses being bought up for short term rentals has contributed to the housing crisis. Its caused economic harm to inner cities. It’s a looking part of the polycrisis destroying the practical economy and the planet’s livability. But yeah man, the real problem is lazy people just don’t want real adult jobs, give me a fucking break.

Rich people always threaten this and never do it, because it’s a John Galt problem. Rich people need poor people to trickle money to for services and goods. If they all move to “Rich Asshole Island” where there’s no laws or taxes, they quickly discover there’s also no workers.

Fuck all of them, I dare every millionaire to leave NYC. They almost certainly cannot. All their wealth is actually tied up in business and assets. In NYC. They could sell them, but to whom? All the rich are fleeing right? If the city or collectives of workers buy them, thats more socialism and proof the rich aren’t necessary.

So no, they won’t leave. They’ll whine and cry and then fund police and paramilitaries and lobbiest to try and force their view. They’ll spend millions propping up friendly candidates like Coumo and running smear campaigns.

In other words, they’ll do what they’ve historically always done when threatened.

I agree with the analysis of the east coast, and will add that the South (“Silicon Bayou” is such a sad joke) is in basically the same place.

But I don’t think the West coast actually has all those advantages either, not anymore. What passes for “innovation” is all some variation on crypto, ai, or “being the Uber of $NICHE.” Throw in some buzzwords like IoT, quantum, blockchain, or “smart” and you’re all set to race with the other founders to get a piece of that sweet sweet VC dollar.

The financiers have taken over everything and are going to drive the economy off a cliff so they can scavenge and sell the parts. They’ve taken over film, gaming, tech, all traditional media, journalism, and they’re using the banner of “privatization” to finish off healthcare, education, postal services, and anything else they can convince idiots to sell them. The bankers are winning.

SE/SO has been on the decline for a long time now. They pivoted to find more ways to monetize the answers and started enshittifying, trying to appeal to business clients and money-people instead of the users and developers who built the knowledgebase. It was good when it felt like a community helping each other, it fell off when it felt like a company milking you to build out their monetized wiki.

At this point, from their perspective, the biggest fuck up was not locking down SE from scrapers and building their own AI. It is in every way the same situation that Reddit is in, just with a more focused and higher quality data set (and fewer, arguably “higher quality,” users).

(As a lover of mixed-style and chaos in general, I picked what seemed like the “normiest” option for maximum impact, haha)

I’m kind of weirdly horny for Torvalds making unilateral decisions about long running controversies? Tell me what standards are best kernel daddy.

Maybe next he can ban tabs and ‘\t’ from Linux? Everyone indents with spaces now, debate over.