Jul

I mean all of their products are subscription based and this is only a 1 year subscription. They’re just giving away a free trial to open up a new market is all. Not really big news. If they were making it free for the life of the product, that might be a bigger deal.

But yeah, also F*** the SA government.

Wish my company held off. So few with any experience left and “AI” not only isn’t going to replace an experienced engineer, only junior ones really, but the things I work on are proprietary and so “AI” has no way to understand them much less interact with them or deal with the proprietary devops, upgrades, migrations, etc. There’s basically 4 people left doing the jobs that used to belong to 20. Sure “AI” is a useful timesaver oncenin a while, but it can’t replace thinking, actually intelligent people, much less all of their experience that’s not documented anywhere for “AI” to even learn it.

Yeah and when teachers or employers use it to reject things outright, it’s really dumb. But if it’s presented as a probability to the user rather than a binary like most LLM results are presented to users, then it is useful. If something has a high probability of being LLM generated then it can cast suspicion and investigation can happen. Unlike how things like facial recognition are used to prove guilt without any investigation when the probability of a match is low, but no better matches were found and the police aren’t told it’s low probability because then the product would look useless in solving crimes for them which is what they want in a product, not an investigation tool. That’s not what they were sold.

Point being. It’s a tool. It’s a metric. And used as such it can be helpful if all of a developer’s contributions get flagged as high probability, then looking more closely at the code can be warranted. Though if LLMs themselves were configured to tell the user how probable that their answer is correct, it might not even be an issue needing investigation. It’s not the malicious ones that they’re looking to stop with these policies. It’s those unwittingly submitting bad LLM generated code with serious consequences. Like all those destructive things that happened at Amazon (and others I’m sure, just Amazon was in the news) when they started replacing senior developers with cheap contractors armed with LLMs and no experience. Even my company has been doing it. It sucks all that we’ve lost and how bad things have gotten.

There are “signatures” that can be detected in code just like universities detect it in student work, online stores detect it in reviews they compensate people for, and some employers detect it in resumes and cover letters. It’s bland, just like when it tells you to remove colorful phrases or adjectives that add emphasis from your text in an email. Things like that.

That said it doesn’t detect it all, and it does rely on the developer to be honest. But it’s also a good indicator when reviewers post questions to the developer and they can’t answer them because they don’t understand the code and things like that. Also, if the developer did not follow coding standards, which LLMs can sometimes have trouble with. And there’s always been malicious code submissions in open source software, so there are other ways.

Anyway, it’s more of a policy discussion at this point, and why LLM generated code is bad. I use them for manipulating data, figuring out syntax, and getting examples, but there are always problems with anything they generate, so I never would allow one to write any production bound code. I see use in the technology, but it’s not creative and it doesn’t understand what it’s writing so it can’t write code with consequences in mind. So it can write Jr level code, but not solid code, at least not without being properly trained on only well written code, and that proper training would be too expensive for an LLM company to actually do it.

Yeah, gotta keep your employees poor so they can’t afford to leave no matter how badly they’re treated.

Too bad LLM “AI” can’t pick up the slack which is the whole reason it was still around and so active.

Oh, yeah, but at least the courts would intervene back then. Now many of the courts have been corrupted and the ones that haven’t are bound by precedent which the supreme court no longer obeys and courts above them that are corrupted. So these specific interpretations are becoming more and more common and not just against poor people who can’t afford lawyers.

I got a smart TV because the dumb ones were more expensive. But I’d never do that with a monitor. A monitor is not meant to be interacted with directly. Just display what the computer says to display. The computer is all that should be running software besides basic firmware for adjusting overall settings like brightness and contrast which computer OSes don’t have enough information to do most of the time. But that’s it.

The current administration has stated that even for US Citizens, border entry suspends all constitutional rights. They’ve also said they believe this applies to allow warrantless searches within 100 miles of a border, which includes most major US cities, thus allowing ICE to search and kidnap basically anyone, not just immigrants. And they have stated that searching an electronic device is not a “search” as mentioned in the 4th Amendment and so you can’t refuse to unlock the device or “destroy evidence”. And that once you give them that access, that you have also “freely given” them access to your private social media, bank, etc., records and so those no longer require a warrant to access. And it’s “gun to the head” tactics because they also believe they can detain you indefinitely in the 100 mile zone without a lawyer or any other usual rights, because you aren’t being arrested, just an extended interview or whatever they call it. All in the name of terrorism prevention, of course.

Since they have corrupted the Supreme Court, this has been mostly upheld in various court cases so far. But any legal scholar will tell you it’s nonsense. But that doesn’t matter to authoritarians. They don’t work within the law.

Disclosure isn’t “cracking down”. I think it’s becoming common knowledge anyway or the FTC would never even go that far, especially the current administration.

Instead of spending money on improving the product or mitigating the impact technologically.

For me at least, and I love cool tech, so it has to be broken or too costly (in terms of money or privacy) for me not to use it:

Adaptive cruise control: I live in a medium sized city and there’s rarely a case where I don’t have to be extremely quick to react to people who are aggressive and dangerous, so I need to change speed way too often for it to be useful. But even driving outside the city it’s rare that there are any significant stretches of road where there aren’t people camping in the left lane and causing lots of big groups of cars piling up together. And many highways don’t have enough long stretches of straight road. So it’s rare to be able to drive long enough stretches where I’m of constantly turning it off and on.

Lane keeping: mine only works over 45 and so only on highways outside the city mostly or for short stretches inside the city. I do turn it on most of the time. But it has one really major flaw. If you’re driving in the right lane and come to an exit and there’s even the slightest bend in the road, it’s about a 50/50 chance that it’s not going to try to pull me off the exit and scream at me when I stop it from doing that. Also, the safety feature that determines the person has their hands on the wheel gets tripped if you hold the wheel in one place for too long. In the places I most would find it useful like long stretches of straight highway, it’s constantly complaining and shutting itself off thinking I’m not holding the wheel just because I’m going straight the whole time.

Automatic braking: mine doesn’t actually brake, just screams at you and flashed a huge warning. Problem is it triggers when someone is turning and will be out of my way significantly before I get there because I don’t tailgate, so there’s no need to slow. Or it will suddenly trigger when there’s an odd narrow shadow across the road from something above the road like a pedestrian bridge, and it mistakes that for a car or something. Haven’t figured that one out. It’s not too common, but the fact that the car has both camera and radar my wild guess is on hotter days, the areas of asfalt in the shade are giving off less heat and possibly the air above has slightly different density than the areas in the sun. Wild guess though, but if the car did have auto braking, it would be braking randomly for no reason and causing accidents or near accidents too often.

Voice assistants: screw LLMs

Augmented reality: I don’t have that, but I might understand that being a distraction. I’m ADHD so I’m not sure how that would affect my distraction especially commuting when I’m too tired or not enough stimulants in my system.

Massaging seats seem possibly distracting or too relaxing which then causes distraction. I don’t have it, but font blame buying a car with some feature and not using it since a lot of cars have packages of features and it might not be an option to not have that but still have some other useful feature like heated seats. I do love my heated seats in winter so if it was both or neither I’d choose both and ignore the massage feature.

Remote start: I’d be afraid of opening it up to theft vulnerabilities and I don’t like wasting gas and generating pollution for some minor convenience.

Backup cameras: I use mine in the daylight, but there’s no night vision so the quality is really poor at night if there’s not street lighting or if there’s too much glare from a bright light, basically useless in a lot of conditions.

Driving Mode: I think this refers to the modes that change the sensitivity of brakes, acceleration, power steering, struts, etc. My partner’s car has 3 modes and I can definitely see switching being distracting. It would be like getting used to driving three different cars. Just choose one and use that. Might be useful if it’s an off road mode that increases the shock absorption and gives more torque while off road and gives more “feel of the road” while on well paves roads.

Yeah FUTO uses a “source first” model of licensing that isn’t fully FOSS. It does mean all the source code is available to everyone. But it is only for non-commercial use even of derivative works. And a few other limitations that violate some of the tenants of FOSS. Personally, I don’t see a major issue as long as the company remains as it is. The issue with this kind of thing is a lot of time these nonprofits get acquired, consensually or hostilely, and the new company revokes some things and makes it all proprietary and then sues everyone for profit. Or other really shady things can happen if licenses aren’t open enough. Of course the flip side is that big corporations rarely obey copyleft licenses or other things, especially now that LLMs do the stealing of code for them.

So, for now GrayJay and some other FUTO apps are sufficiently open and free for me, but that could change.

And it’s all fake since neither the demand nor the supply exists, it’s all future promises to buy/sell what get manufactured. As soon as the data centers collapse and cancel their orders, the prices will plummet if no new fad takes it’s place. One of many ripples this bubble pop is going to trigger since so much is based on lies and promises not supply and demand.

It’s what always happens. People never learn. Discogs, crowdsec, google maps, all of the things that have ever benefitted from crowd sourcing inevitably end up locking up the information and it becomes polluted with junk when they have to start using poorly sourced and moderated commercial data.

It still existed, just not used by many people for a long time. Probably mostly just bots talking to each other. 🤣

GrayJay is what I usually use. It’s working currently.

Copyright hasn’t benefitted creators in centuries, it’s for publishers who then gatekeep the money from the vast majority of creators.

But even then it was never really meant to be a “welfare system” for creators, but a way to incentivize creators to keep creating by allowing them a short term boost in income while they create the next thing. Create one popular thing and never have to create again as well as your kids and grandkids never having to contribute to society was never meant to be the point.

Oh I totally agree that ICE should not be allowed to get the information no matter what. Just saying there are several ways to get medicaid without having an SSN and sometimes even being in the country “illegally” and this is why they want the info. They don’t care about those special situations like an emergency or cancer or being an abuse victim or other exceptions, they want any means to find anyone they can deport even if it’s extremely cruel to do so. So yeah, for anyone they deported from those lists it was especially cruel to do so and nothing can justify giving them the info in the first place, but especially knowing the extreme situations the people that would be on those lists would have endured, it was beyond unconscionable.

Depends on the state. Some check immigration status and some don’t. And situations like for children they don’t require as much information since there’s not a work requirement and they don’t have driver’s licenses or other identification requirements that might also require legal status to get. It’s better for a community to have as many people as possible, especially underprivileged children, having healthcare so that diseases don’t spread as quickly in a community.