µblog - archive for 2024-04 🏳️‍🌈

Futurism: Catholic Group Defrocks AI Priest After It Gave Strange Answers

Seriously, none of the people at this outfit, which claims it has “staff apologists”, considered that adding an AI bot was literally the work of Satan?

“As Catholics we of course believe in the dignity of human labor, but this charismatic consultant called Damien made a compelling case to let robots answer questions about our core beliefs.”

Edit more ill-considered blendings of religion and “AI”: https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/112354073517369881

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smdh at nerds mansplaining to other nerds on how to visit Japan

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Anduril: exploring new frontiers in autonomous defense tech and concern trolling.

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🔗 The Age of Steam

This page provides a single entry point to all the posts in the story of the steam engine.

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To be honest, I’m not convinced adding bay leaves to food actually does anything. It’s a conspiracy by Big Bay Leaf to sell more tasteless leaves.

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HN: “Any fun ways to learn Emacs?”

No

Learning Emacs is pain

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🔗 David Gerard: Christopher Harborne defamation suit: WSJ motion to dismiss, Bitfinex/Tether, Bank of America, Sackville Bank

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Fediversians: you may have seen reports of Trump tooting in court. It’s ok, he’s not joined Masto, we don’t have to deal with his stench.

(and yeah technically I know Правда Social is a AP client clone but c’mon let me have this joke)

(via jwz)

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🔗 Web3 Is Going Just Great: tea.xyz causes open source software spam problems, again

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🔗 Critical Forminator plugin flaw impacts over 300k WordPress sites

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🔗🇯🇵🎬 Perfect Days

You learn a lot about some specific public toilets in Tokyo in this excellent film, which according to Wikipedia is a homage of sorts to the movies of Yasujirō Ozu. I noticed the 4:3 format, at least.

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Product idea: Peloton Hedonic Treadmill (h/t Wintre)

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I don’t want to be the person who tells a tilde admin to do their jobs, but I feel that for the effort put into developing bunkchat it would have been more effective setting up a common IRC config for all new users and running a local IRC server. That way you have a one-stop journey to group chat (“run this command to launch an IRC client and connect to a common channel”) with the added option to actually use IRC, which I think is a big draw of tilde servers.

(via)

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LLM apologetics have now moved to “if you’re a domain expert and can tell where a model returns blatantly incorrect results, it’s sometimes quite useful as a rubber duck”. Good return on billions of dollars and gigawatts of power.

Edit I swear I wrote this before reading Molly White’s excellent overview of LLMs.

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I’ve played a lot of Fallout 4, but only this weekend did I realize you can max out Preston Garvey’s affinity without having to have him bug off to assemble a team to take back the Castle.

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🔗🐘 David Gerard provides a capsule summary of fediverse server software

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🔗 Mark Simonson: Interview with Douglas F. Jones, Designer of the Skin & Bones typeface

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🔗🇬🇧📺 Kiri

Low-key UK drama about the aftermath of the murder of a young black girl, soon to be adopted by a wealthy white family. Great acting but it does raise a lot of questions on how adoption allegedly works in the UK.

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🔗🎬 Kung Fu Panda 4

I wanted to see the latest Wim Wenders, but the kid wanted to see this, and we don’t hang out much nowadays so it was worth it. It’s fun but you have to be like six to not see the twist coming.

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🇸🇪 SN fortsätter att sätta rubrikerna på världkrigsnivå: ”SMHI megavarnar - gräsbrandsvarning i jätteområde”

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🔗💳💸 patio11: Anatomy of a credit card rewards program

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🇸🇪🇪🇺 Folklistan eller folkilskan? Och journalister vill verkligen att Swexit blir en grej. Jag kanske är väldigt skyddad men jag uppfattar inte ett uppdämt kritik mot EU hos väljarkåren (förutom SD då). Det ska bli intressant att se vilka nollor/nazister som avslöjas som dom andra 6 namnen på listan. Frugan tippar att en av dom är Hanif Bali!

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Not sure of the total lack of coverage of the latest crazy anti-EU party in Sweden on the fediverse is good or bad.

For people who might care:

• the person who registered the party was thrown out as MEP of the local christian democrat party for first advocating for weed legalization, then playing footsie with the local populist ex-nazi party to “keep her job”
• but wait! The first person on the list isn’t her, it’s a previous reality show winner, ex-social democrat, millionaire from building refugee housing, and probably a patron of brothels. He sounds like a dime-store Trump
• the party has 6 other people on the list, but who they are is a mystery for now
• the party’s website seemed to have been llm-generated, with bizarre mispellings and denoting existing MEP’s as “traitors”

Journos here are ecstatic, at last something fun is happening with the EU elections! Some are really hoping #swexit will be a thing, but realistically the only people interested in voting for these clowns are the ones already voting for the EU-skeptic “ex-nazi” party.

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🔗🇸🇪📺 Miraklet i Gullspång

Två syskon från Norge köper en lägenhet i Gullspång och säljaren är på pricken lik deras avlidna syster. Hur hänger det ihop? Vad är sanning och vad är lögn?

Dokumentär, streamas på SVT.

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everything is terrible but seeing Apple’s $3,500 VR headset collapse like a bad soufflé makes it slightly better

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🔗🎬🇩🇰 Rom

Rom-com with (and for?) OAPs. Danish couple arrive in Rome for a 40 year anniversary holiday. He’s a boor, she’s artistic, and meets her old art teacher. Seen in a theater!

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life goal: mismanage your IT project so much that it becomes the villian of a TV show

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🔗 Thomas Depierre: I am not a supplier

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2 examples of “AI brain” in recent submissions to lobste.rs. One clickbaity defense of Go’s error handling relies entirely on ChatGPT code samples. Another “cites” ChatGPT and Bing AI as being part of the “consensus” of using regex to remove XML comments.

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🔗 Ed Zitron: Bubble Trouble

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One of the many depressing things about being out of work and applying for jobs is the recruitment platform sending me customer satisfaction surveys. “How satisfied are you with the soul-deadening experience of applying for yet another job where we will let you know we went with another applicant in 3 months time?”

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🔗🛴 Peugeot Tweet 125: Because Somebody Has To

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🔗🌇 Science Fiction and the Death of the Sun

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THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND

In the wake of the xz debacle, there’s been a weird reaction among some FLOSS[1] supporters. Some of them are advocating for intrusive and frankly problematic changes to how projects should accept contributions. Among them are enforcing “real name” or even ID requirements, and what would require FLOSS teams to essentially become HR departments.

Note, that this is to control people who donate their time to produce software that is provided free of cost to anyone.

It’s as if some people feel the “FLOSS community”, loosely defined, has to “step up” and “take responsibility” for the quality of their software. Despite almost every project having some variant of the title of this post (from the MIT license) that clearly states that if you use the software, it’s on you.

Are these people afraid that if they don’t provide these assurances, the huge corporations who are now happily using their software would stop providing them with zero compensation for their labor, and start using some other software that does? It’s like racing to the bottom, when you’re already there.

There are legitimate reasons to critically discuss the ways in which the xz attackers gained access to a software repository, and how they managed to hide malicious code within what looked like innocuous test data. But those discussions should be focused on the internal needs of the FLOSS community. If they happen to coincide with the needs of companies using this software for free, so much the better.

For consumers of FLOSS, how about not relying on the kindness and integrity of literal strangers on the internet? Maybe set up something Underwriter’s Laboratories, where you can pool resources for security experts to scrutinize the code your company relies on but doesn’t pay for. Naturally, any flaws this organization finds will be fixed and given back to all.

(This post is an expansion on my comment on lobste.rs.)

See also: The XZ Utils backdoor is a symptom of a larger problem

[…] when we take software from the commons, we are like raccoons digging through a dumpster to find something useful. There is no “supply chain” in reality, but there is an effort by corporations which consume software from the commons to pretend there is one in order to shift the obligations related to ingesting third-party code away from themselves and to the original authors and maintainers of the code they are using.

[1] FLOSS = free/libre open source software is an umbrella term that tries to bridge the Free Software/Open Source philosophical divide.

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🔗 Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,593: Robert Kardashian

Kardashian may have loved OJ, but he loved money and celebrity more and there was no way he wasn’t going to profit off of this after he got his old buddy off the hook. So he did the whole media circuit, wrote a book, etc. Was this an abuse of attorney-client privilege? I don’t know the specific details of the law here, but it does seem kind of sketchy, kind of like helping your friend get away with killing his wife.

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