t3rmit3

@t3rmit3@beehaw.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Another article conflating LLMs and AI.

  AI is unfortunately supercharging lots of systems, especially in the police/intelligence spaces. Surveillance driven by AI is absolutely skyrocketing both in capabilities and prevalence.

  xAI and OpenAI aren’t seeing good ROI, being LLM companies. Palantir and they’re ilk are another beast altogether.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I’m Fighting for My Freedom Using Outdated Technology⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  This is 1000% a scheme by the prisons to make it as onerous and fraught as possible to appeal. They certainly aren’t going to help their ‘revenue-sources’ get out.

  US prisons have tons of things like this.

  • Prison commissaries are notoriously designed to gouge prisoners for small “luxuries”.
  • Some prisons limit the list of allowed books to almost nothing (or force prisoners to use e-readers with per-minute subscription costs that are also exorbitant), or even use kiosks that they get very little time to access.
  • Many states and prisons charge room and board while you’re confined.

  All of it is done to both extract maximum profit while they’re inside, and to try to ensure people exit in debt, so they’re both hard-pressed to find work and desperate for money, because both things make people more likely to end up back in prison.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Framework Desktop and Linux have shown me the path to PC gaming in the living room⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  You can buy it ‘naked’ without the desktop shell, for clustering (though also just to choose your own case).

  It’s really meant as an LLM-runner that fits on your desk, for people who aren’t looking to have a rackmount setup. Hell, unless I want to add a 4U monster to my rack for a GPU setup, even a single FWD is going to outperform most rackmounts for running LLMs.

  I do think there’s value to it as a gaming machine if only because other OEMs aren’t offering desktops with Linux, and certainly not ones that can run games very well without any user upgrades, but yeah, it’s definitely not intended as a “gaming machine”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨To the dismay of sweaty 'movement kids,' Battlefield 6 is nerfing Call of Duty sliding and jumping to maintain a 'traditional Battlefield experience'⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I think so. I was mostly a chopper pilot flying blackhawks so I don’t recall most of the fixed wing aircraft, but an A10 would make sense.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨To the dismay of sweaty 'movement kids,' Battlefield 6 is nerfing Call of Duty sliding and jumping to maintain a 'traditional Battlefield experience'⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Interesting. TIL

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨To the dismay of sweaty 'movement kids,' Battlefield 6 is nerfing Call of Duty sliding and jumping to maintain a 'traditional Battlefield experience'⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Desert Combat was my childhood. Really great memories from that mod.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨To the dismay of sweaty 'movement kids,' Battlefield 6 is nerfing Call of Duty sliding and jumping to maintain a 'traditional Battlefield experience'⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  No, it means the guys who don’t take hygiene seriously. The Cartman Gamers, so to speak.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨4chan will refuse to pay daily UK fines, its lawyer tells BBC⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  But why do that when they can just shift the burden onto the other party (the website), and demand money from them too?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Inside the Underground Trade of ‘Flipper Zero’ Tech to Break into Cars⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I use mine to check for chips in stray cats in the neighborhood, and to have a backup for my keyfobs. Awesome tool.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bay Area tech titan [Cisco] announces mass layoffs just after soaring revenue report⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  More brilliant moves from Chuck and co. This is why I left Cisco.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We can't keep making videogame stories for players who aren't paying attention to them⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Exposition != story.

  A good story can be (and usually is) told with minimal exposition. AAA games being exposition-fests is a result of game executives and writers infantilising players in the name of “widest audience appeal”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We can't keep making videogame stories for players who aren't paying attention to them⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This is not a good argument for unnecessary exposition though, this is just an argument for shorter, bite-sized narratives, or even what some games already do (like The Witcher 3) where they recap where you are in the loading screen. If anything, unnecessary exposition just wastes what little time you have to play, or forces you to skip the dialogue entirely.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit is using AI to determine users beliefs, values, stances and more based on their activity (posts and comments) summarizing it to Subreddit Mods.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, those should have been emoticons! (╬≖_≖)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Framework is teasing a ‘big’ update for August 26th — could it be Framework 16?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  gimme dat more powerful GPU!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ollama bug allows drive-by attacks - patch now⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Note that this vuln is in the desktop GUI, not ollama itself (Ollama Core).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Privacy‑Preserving Age Verification Falls Apart On Contact With Reality⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s absolutely possible to have privacy-preserving age verification, but it requires government to trust literally anyone, rather than just maintaining the validation themselves.

  Go to gas station. Hand cashier your ID, like you do to buy liquor. Cashier gives you a one time use token/password to the age verification system website. You go there and upload a public key you generate before the OTP expires. Voila: now the site could easily verify that you control the private key and are thus of age, without having to know literally anything about you.

  It only breaks if you treat everyone as a criminal until proven innocent, which is exactly what every government implementing this is doing, which is why it’s not really about porn at all but about removing privacy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs. Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It sounds like he’s an Operations/SRE specialist, but his quals seem like he’d be overqualified for most Ops/SRE roles unless it’s a director or VP. Especially with the shift to devops, he might need to shift domains or grow out of pure Ops work. It’s going to be nearly impossible to hire into an Architect or Director role unless he already has that on his resume, without getting promoted into that internally.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Study: Social media probably can’t be fixed⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The problem with training AI bots is that they will model the human behavior from the bad environment per their training, but not the human psychological reactions to the changing environments, so it’s not really going to tell you whether the different platform makes humans behave differently.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How language is hiding the real internet from you⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  One of the interesting things of exploring other languages on especially social media is that you realize just how un-moderated the US platforms are for anything but English. When people talk about Facebook advancing genocides, it’s the platforms not bothering to moderate non-English content but still applying their maximum-engagement algorithms in those spaces, so you get this snowballing of negative content.

  Be wary if you go looking for non-English social media (it’s actually not hard at all, you use a VPN and change either your OS or browser locale settings), because you can easily end up seeing some grisly stuff.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China has built the world’s largest bullet-train network⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Congrats (¬`‸´¬)

  Happy for you ( •̀⤙•́ )

  Nice ( ` ᴖ ´ )

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The train that never came; how maglev technology was derailed⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s not diminishing returns in terms of time and speed, which is CanadaPlus’ point. 100km/h faster is 100km/h faster, not 100% each time. It would be diminishing returns if doubling the speed each time didn’t halve the travel time, but “diminishing input = diminishing output”, or 100% -> 50% -> 25%, etc, is not diminishing returns, that’s linear.

  An actual example of diminishing returns would be the cost to speed ratio, where doubling the budget each time will not result in a doubled speed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Your CV is not fit for the 21st century⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I actually asked my locally running LLM(s) to rework my resume and specifically to add in any common skills or tools for the roles that I didn’t have listed (8 years as a generalist you touch a LOT of stuff, and I hadn’t remembered quite a few of them), and removed any that weren’t applicable.

  I’ve been getting a decent number of interviews (3 this week, 2 last).

  One would hope a network engineer knows how to configure routers, but if you just say Cisco, the AI won’t give it as much weight as when you say both

  Honestly this isn’t just an AI issue, this is also a recruiter issue. The hiring manager gives a role description and a list of skills or other keywords for the posting, but the recruiter doesn’t know what half of them are. An actual human may not know that “Cisco” + “network engineer” = configured routers. Hell, I’ve had people ask me if Cisco (who I actually did work for, but not as a network engineer) is the food company (Sysco).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs. Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  From what I’m seeing and hearing in the tech space, I think the opposite is true. I think the current admin’s war on non-white people is making companies really wary of hiring H1B holders (even European ones) and even green card holders. A lot of companies are just halting hiring altogether for a bit, and the ones who are hiring are looking for local, laid-off tech workers at lower salaries, who have to take it because there’s such a glut of them to compete with. Somewhat counterintuitively, this doesn’t mean an easier time for Americans to get hired, it means fewer overall Americans getting hired period (which the recent jobs reports prove to be the case).

  Companies tend to hire visa’d workers when they are doing rapid business expansion, because that’s when saving the 20-30% per-head adds up (e.g. if you’re saving 20% per-head when hiring 100, you’re saving yourself 20 salaries-worth, but if you’re hiring 5, you’re better off getting the most experienced ones who give you the best bang-for-your-buck). And no one is doing rapid business expansions in this economy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs. Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That sucks, that’s way beyond what anyone I’ve met has been out for. They’re either very specialized, in an area that requires in-person work (and they’re not nearby to anyone), or there’s something that’s red-flagging them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Is A Money Trap⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  and there is not a single actually profitable company

  This is a little misleading, because obviously FAANG (and others) are all building AI systems, and are all profitable. There are also tons of companies applying machine learning to various areas that are doing well from a profitability standpoint (mostly B2B SaaS that are enhancing extant tools). This statement is really only true for the glut of “AI companies” that do nothing but produce LLMs to plug into stuff.

  My personal take is that this is just revealing how disconnected from the tech industry VCs are, who are the ones buying into this hype and burning billions of dollars on (as you said) smoke and mirrors companies like Anthropic and OpenAI.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs. Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The other side is that the mass layoffs of the last year mean that there are plenty of experienced people to hire over new grads. I can’t imagine any company right now taking on the cost and risk of training up entry level folks when they can hire a 10+ yr senior in that position for the same or a little more than the entry level cost.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI claims new GPT-5 model boosts ChatGPT to ‘PhD level’⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “Polly want a cracker” has been around since before anyone alive today was born, and that’s the same thing as what LLMs are doing, in essence, but no one was taking advice from parrots.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI claims new GPT-5 model boosts ChatGPT to ‘PhD level’⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a sad reflection of our current state when being able to string together coherent sentences is impressive enough to many as to be confused with truth.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Australia Completely Loses The Plot, Plans To Ban Kids From Watching YouTube⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They’ve been a Murdoch-influenced cesspool politically for years now, this is par for the course for them; just more social control by the government under the guide of protecting kids.

  Gotta stop kids from learning about the wider world until they’ve had their worldview shaped to their regressive government’s liking.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Spotify Is Forcing Users to Undergo Face Scanning to Access Explicit Content⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Literally all the time.

  Every major piece of tech in use by police domestically was built originally for military use. Every large police department in the US operates fixed-wing surveillance drones, stingrays/imsi-catchers, camera-based tracking systems, etc. All but the smallest departments receive tons of milsurp vehicles, weapons, and gear. Night vision and thermal imaging systems were military tech, and now they’re standard for police. CS gas was military gear (until it was banned under the Geneva Convention), and now it’s used exclusively by police.