hendrik

For some reason, La’an Noonien-Singh and Erica Ortegas always remind me of the Belters from The Expanse. No idea if it’s the make-up or hairstyle. Wonder if that’s just me… But every other scene I expect them to drop the fake accent, speak Belter language and plot against someone. Especially La’an sometimes shows character traits which go roughly that direction. Make-up art also fits.

Sorry, I just saw the recommendations. I’m using a Matrix server myself. And it’s connected to the internet, since I use it 24/7 and on my phone, etc.

I guess technically, most protocols can be used in an internal network. But maybe you’ll need to put in some extra effort, for example if a platform requires SSL certificates or something like that.

I mean you could try… If it asks for a hostname, just put a local hostname in. Or the IP address. Or set up a DNS entry on the router. And see if it works.

Or try something like RocketChat, or depending how your team’s workflow is, maybe you don’t want a messenger. But some (online) collaboration platform more focused on documents, like Nextcloud.

I think some people here recommended Snikket. It’s supposed to be easy to install and modern. I don’t know what components it’s made up of. It’s a dockerized XMPP server + Apps.

The issue with the tools I’ve seen is, they either don’t factor in how language models are trained and datasets are prepared in reality. Or they’re based on some outdated information. I’ve never seen any specific tool backed by science or even with a plausible way of working against current data gathering processes… So for all intents and purposes, they’re a bit more alike homeopathy or alternative medicine. Sure, you’re perfectly fine taking sugar pills, there’s nothing wrong with that. But don’t confuse it with actual science-backed medicine.

And I mean the poisoning goes even further than that. There’s not just people trying to make a LLM output gibberish. There’s also lots of people with a vested (commercial) interest in sneaking in false information, their political agenda, or even a tire company who wants ChatGPT to say “Company XY” is the most trustworthy shop for new tires for your car. Judging by the public information out there, we’re already way past simple attacks. And the AI companies are aware of it. It’s an ongoing cat and mouse game. And while there’s all these sweatshops, they’ll also use other AI to sift through the data, natural language processing. From what I remember they have secret watermarking in place in a lot of commecial chatbots and image generators… So unless people come up with very clever mechanisms, the “poisoning” attempt will probably be detected with some very basic (fully automated) plausibility checks and they’ll just discard your data without wasting a lot of resources on it.

Depends and no. The tools are completely ineffective.

There was a paper once about how feeding generative AI it’s own output makes it deteriorate. But that’s not the entire story. Many/most modern large language models are in fact trained or fine-tuned on synthetic text. Depending on how it’s done, it can very well make models better. For example in “distillation”, and AI companies can replace expensive RLHF with synthetic examples. It can also make them worse. But you’re not the one curating the datasets or deciding what goes where and how.

In general in ML it’s not advised to train a model on its own output. That in itself can’t make the predictions any better, just worse.

Sure. I guess what I meant is, you (or someone) need to ask… In my layman’s understanding of religion (in general), it should be there for the people. And there should be someone around for random individuals to ask “Hey, I’m having this situation in my life and I’m not sure which is correct. Can you tell me? Or can you refer me to someone with enough background to do so?”

IMO, if religion claims absolute authority, and to know what’s the correct morals on earth… It better have answers for these questions.

But sometimes you need to ask?! At least that’s what I think. I mean Free Software is around for a mere 45 years, and doesn’t have that much of an organized lobby. And the other side better avoid a definite answer to the question, as it could be negative.

I don’t know the correct answer. Maybe it’s more nuanced than a binary opposition, or depends on other factors? Or - how we construct our technology is not involving God’s judgement, and it’s more about what we do with it? Or it is haram? I bet there’s a lot of computer programmers out there working for some companies, who’d need to be told if it were. To me, all that selling of personal information, and manipulating the people and the world by algorithms for some corporate interest feels 0% ethical. All I can say is whatever intuition God gave me(?) regarding what’s right and wrong, tell me that one is wrong. And we should do better with technology that shapes our modern world. But my opinion isn’t funded in scripture at all. I’d tend to just handle it like other exploitative gains for business, which aren’t right. But that still doesn’t really answer if the 4 essential freedoms of free software are mandated. I mean even back then, property and contracts were recognized. So it could be completely fine to license software as a product without source code?!

I’m not a Muslim, but aren’t there scholars around to answer those questions? As far as I know you’d need a mufti to provide you with that kind of answer to the question. Not a random person from the internet. As it’s a bit complicated and we won’t find direct references to Free Software in 1400 year old scripture. But we have text on trade, and knowledge. Which are related to what computer software is.

Ba dum tss…

By the way, the linked 3h YouTube video answers my question. It is poorly written. Already the cover art was stolen. And apparently there’s not a single thing right about this book. I watched just the first few minutes and that’s enough to tell.

Hmmh. There’s several questions here. Maybe I’d read some, if ChatGPT were able to write really good smut 😆 So it remains to be one of my questions.

But yeah. Not only NYT, the Reddit person who wrote a long post about it, also seems to know what they’re doing.

Gee. God beware anyone answer the one interesting question. And that’s whether the book / storytelling is any good.

I mean it’s not surprising to me how random internet people disagree. They always do… But we could just ask a professional?! Book critic is a real job. They could tell us within a few hours if the book is any good. Or full of common story tropes. And “sudden plot twists” like when I tried writing a story with AI 😅 And whether it’s going anywhere, or how it compares to other books which have some artistic quality or meaning to them.

Yes. My question is just, how do you participate in modern life with that? For example if you commute by train, you need a ticket. And the Deutsche Bahn tries to get rid of paper tickets. Their monthly subscription is an App now, available for Android and Apple. Do you install Waydroid and whip out your laptop once the conductor asks for your ticket? Do you also pull it out of your backpack 3 times on the platform to look up all the delays, changed platforms, trains you have to transfer to? What’s with the pkpass file for the concert, cinema, exhibition? I mean we can still print the QR codes. I do that, I have a printer at home and sometimes do the extra effort. I can’t take my laptops and tablets to concerts. And some other things will get more complicated as well. For example Shop & Go is almost impossible without a phone. You’re guaranteed to wait in line at the few cash registers left and waste an extra 10min… You’ll have to apply for a chip card to charge your EV, can’t update some of your electronic gadgets any more… And if you drive by car, how do you listen to Music and Podcasts? With an USB stick or a 12xCD changer in the trunk like in the early 2000s?

Yeah, probably jump ship to a life without a mobile phone, online banking and train tickets. 🙁

That’s correct. I went with OP’s original question, what happens after it happened… Not sure what OP meant, they’re nowhere in the comments… Maybe they’re a bot as well, and we’re subject to the very same thing we’re talking about, right now…

But sure. All the fabricated pull requests, issue reports etc are massively problematic. We got quite some bot activity. Then we also need to protect our servers and platforms from their crawlers who just DDOS everyone… Documentation went down the drain, StackOverflow, Reddit… The industry is trying to get rid of entry level programmer positions, so you’ll have a bad time entering the job market as any programmer… We’re just drowned in all that stuff. Supply chains also get affected by AI, people need to choose between using existing libraries, licensing, money… Or replacing it with something the AI generated, and we get structural challenges in all kinds of projects…

Nothing? I mean an if/else works the same way, no matter if it’s written by a human or an AI or a cat or whatever…

The Linux kernel developers are opinionated, though. Everything gets quite an amount of scrutiny. There will be several people having their eyes on submissions. They’re looking for security vulnerabilities. They’re adamant on maintainability. Have a standard on how to phrase things, indent lines… Send in the patches… They generally have high standards. I mean if someone submits some AI slop, there’s a high chance it just gets declined and they’re getting scolded for doing it.

There’s of course always the chance someone tries to sneak something in. Or it creeps in on its own. But it’s the same for bugs or security attacks. And maybe some of the devs work for companies who push AI and they’ll do silly things. But the Linux community is pretty strong. They’ll find a way to handle it. And maybe in the far future, AI will get as good as human programmers and there won’t be an issue accepting AI code, because it has the same quality as human code. But that’s science fiction as of now.

Ah, thx. Makes sense, now I get it.

Hehe. Sure. I mean it’s both a blessing and problematic at the same time… I think most people appreciate a TV set is a few hundred bucks these days. Or the availability of smartphones and home computers. That’s only possible because of modern pick and place machines. I think our world would look a bit more like the victorian age if we didn’t have those modern perks. Each computer would be hand-soldered by a workforce of hundreds of people. Fill several rooms and be slow and unaffordable for anyone except the government. It wouldn’t have a screen… We couldn’t sustain billions of humans on the planet without all the machines and science in agriculture…

But automation is problematic as well. I mean we’re arguing about it since the Industrial Revolution. I think they painted a dark picture of the future in the early 20th century. Like the movie Metropolis. I think these days, we’ve solved some of the issues that come with industrialization. But we’re doing stupid things as well. And it’s an everlasting struggle not to end up in some machine dystopia. Not sure if machines are the root cause of everything, though. I mean scientists use them, they’re on every assembly line and in logistics centers. And not even the handyman with a more down-to-earth job renounces their modern battery-powered power tools… I mean sure we could use a handsaw and the hand drill from my grandpa… But I don’t think that’s the point?

But I value the human aspect as well. I mean I don’t need soylent green out of a dispenser. I’d rather have a cook and waiter.

Weird article. Is this some domain specific breakthrough? Because I’m fairly sure laboratories and researchers use some ultra precise experimental setups and sampling machines for like half a century now? For example an elaborate machine that loads 200 blood samples at a time and it’ll return the lab results to the hospital within a few hours. For what used to be a time consuming, labor intensive job with a higher error rate before… But we have these machines for quite some time now… They didn’t include any AI in the advertising, though. Same with material sciences, I believe. Either they’re doing something very specific and it’s a lot of manual labor. Or they have to test a lot of samples, or handle things very precisely, and someone is going to build a jig with robots or actuators. But that’s kind of what people always did? I mean they did palletizing robots in the 60s, and the KUKA robot arm was patented in 1973. And this article reads a bit (to me) like the job description of such a KUKA robotic arm… But what’s newsworthy about this in 2026?

I mean Retrospect is kind of an episode about date rape. Implying something about false memories in assault victims. And it ends on: Maybe the main thing behind the story never happened. The End. Which are the endings that often feel very disappointing to me. And we don’t even learn if it was an illusion. I get why that episode isn’t cherished by people.

I think the pon farr episodes are weird as well. And I don’t think I particularly enjoyed that episode. But at least some of the good guys are trying to do the right thing? And even if the Vulkan gets away unpunished, I don’t think he’s portrayed in a positive way. As far as I remember the crew unanimously thinks sex is unacceptable. Minus the people who are out of their mind. And Tuvok. But he has kind of a weird role with arguing logic in that situation. And the episode ends on a happy end. They’ve averted danger and death for the moment, and nobody had to have sex. And as a viewer I’m glad it turned out they didn’t need to follow through with Tuvok’s “logical” plan, either. That feels a bit more right to me.

But the entire set up of pon farr and biology or tradition just causing violence, is a bit rapey. I guess from a storywriting perspective it’s a bit difficult to bring up that topic in a creative way. But movie or TV is a lot about violence and sex. So I can see how storywriters make it part of stories.

Some Voyager episodes were just a bit weird in my opinion. I think it’s okay if it provokes thought. And less so, if it makes the audience start to confuse right and wrong.

I think the entire origin story of Amazon and why they outcompeted other bookstores, online- and mail-order companies was automation and their more streamlined processes. Afaik they’ve made sure to implement it as an entire chain from end to end, and that’s been their huge advantage from early on.

Yeah, and super weird to write something like this about Star Trek of all the fiction out there. I can’t remember any episode where stupidity is portrayed as good or acceptable?! I mean the whole point of TOS is all the characters who are lined up on that picture, being clever in very different ways and combining that to have some fun in outta space…