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  A good way of thinking about companies like Proton or Anthropic that proudly declare they're using LLMs to code is that they've declared "we're replacing all of our junior engineers with unpaid interns from a temp agency." The unpaid interns have photographic memories and have memorized all of the code on github, but they're still pretty clueless and clumsy, and they also have zero loyalty to the company, zero ability to learn from mistakes, and zero understanding of or...

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  I'm re-reading Dune right now for a variety of reasons, and there's a lot wrong with it IMO (including serious queerphobia/misia & fatmisia), but it also has a ton of very cool ideas. Just came across this chapter-starter quote: "The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future." This perfectly matches part of what I was trying to express with my recent short story about the pessimism of techno-optimism: https://kolektiva...

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  The Segway is here to stay, you know! Once someone invents something, the cat's out of the bag! Oh you don't use a Segway? Watch out, or this amazing new technology will leave you (slightly) behind! You'd better invest now you know! This technology is poised to revolutionize personal transportation! If you don't get in early, you'll never catch up and make the big bucks (unless you can manage a brisk jog or have a car or something). I don't know what they're teaching...

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  Since it's the 4th of July and also the 250th anniversary of the founding of the USA, a great occasion to remind people that this country has been an especially bad one from start to the present day. Worst atrocities you can imagine, throughout history? The US has participated in all of them. Slavery, genocide and colonialism, systematic war crimes, mass incarceration and concentration camps; you name it the US has done it not just once but multiple times. Now is a great time to rid yourself...

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  Kinda a subtoot, but I'm begging people to stop using the "civilization/barbarism" dichotomy, even if you're somehow applying it "in reverse." From day 1, the notion of "civilized" nations contrasted against "barbarians" was propaganda for empire, and it still is. When you observe that those who called themselves "civilized" were more violent and destructive than those they called "barbarians", or that the standard of living f...

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  Not shown in the slides: the goose needs to ingest 2.5kg gold for each 1kg golden egg it lays. The eggs have a thin gold coating but the center is lead (they're much smaller than real goose eggs when shown to-scale, which they never are in the marketing material). The goose is still going to be quite valuable if everything goes according to plan: early private investments make it seem like a great idea; once regular people and retirement funds are drawn in and they start paying to feed the...

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  @eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place Kitsune Tails is a really good game. Good mechanics and level design; played smoothly on my mediocre hardware, unlike many indie platformers, and has a charming story with an even more charming twist. Design-wise, the way the levels hold up to multiple characters with different movement abilities is excellent.

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  #AI and "productivity", some thoughts: Edit: fixed some typos. Productivity is a concept that isn't entirely meaningless outside the context of capitalism, but it's a concept that is heavily inflected in a capitalist context. In many uses today it effectively means "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations." This is not really what it should mean: even in an anarchist utopia, people would care about things like how many shirts they can prod...

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  @bit101 @stefan oh good point. Having the stripe width be a multiple of the bus length means both moving edges become harder to track simultaneously.

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  @stefan @bit101 Thanks! For me it only works for a very narrow range of stripe widths, which is not what I had expected!

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  @stefan @bit101 I think the explanation is off though. It's not that the blue bus appears to move faster/slower, it's that it appears to stop when its front enters a black stripe, because what had been a stark moving gradient line turns into a very faint gradient and so your brain goes "movement was detected but no longer; object must have stopped." When the front emerges into a white stripe again, your brain goes "oh I guess that thing is still moving, but now it's fa...

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  @jcoglan I've written a short post about a related topic: LLMs are the opposite of DRY: https://cs.wellesley.edu/~pmwh/advice/aiDRY.html I just read a security post that talked about an AI code review process successfully rejecting poisoned instructions that attempted to manipulate it into using it's permissions to let a bad actor in. The post made it seem like this was good "defense in depth" but to anyone thinking about it for a minute, you can see that this isn't reliab...

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  Definitely a star sentence of my current Wikipedia dive: "Like other rootless land plants of the Silurian and early Devonian Aglaophyton may have relied on arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi for acquisition of water and nutrients from the soil." From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_history_of_plants Writing a song that includes verses on plant evolution turns out to be a lot of fun.