MagicShel
@MagicShel@programming.dev
- Comment on Google Search adds a “web” filter, because it is no longer focused on web results 1 day ago:
I thought it was just an ad aggregator.
- Comment on The coordination network toolkit: a framework for detecting and analysing coordinated behaviour on social media 3 days ago:
I’ve always wanted to do this sort of thing, but lack the math and research background to do a good job of it. Glad someone is working on it.
- Comment on Elon Musk’s Neuralink reports trouble with first human brain chip 1 week ago:
I don’t think Elon Musk has demonstrated the good judgement
Understatement of the century right here.
- Comment on Dell responds to return-to-office resistance with VPN, badge tracking 1 week ago:
60-70% seems nuts to me. 10%-20% feels about right to me. That’s a day every week or two. Builds cohesion and lets you do some effective brainstorming sessions, and then the rest of the time you do actual work far more efficiently. I mean you do you, but I thought I was suffering from lack of office time, but that’s way too far in the other direction for me.
It’s been 5 years and 3 jobs since I’ve been to an office. My last job I honestly don’t even know what state my job was based out of. That’s a little too disconnected. But just a little.
- Comment on Men Use Fake Livestream Apps With AI Audiences to Hit on Women 2 weeks ago:
I’m a very private person. I barely use any social media where I’m not anonymous, and I wouldn’t want my wife to be famous either. So take this with a grain of salt, but I think it’s about winning the trophy. A million people like this person well enough to watch their content all the time, but they are with you? I can imagine that would be flattering to a certain kind of personality.
Being popular sounds wretched to me, but people chase it all the time.
- Comment on Someone got Gab's AI chatbot to show its instructions 4 weeks ago:
I didn’t have any links at hand so I googled and found this academic paper. arxiv.org/pdf/2310.20151.pdf
Here’s a video summarizing that paper by the authors if that’s more digestible for you: m.youtube.com/watch?v=OU2L7MEqNK0
I don’t know who is doing it or if it’s even on any publicly available systems, so I can’t speak to that or easily find that information.
- Comment on Someone got Gab's AI chatbot to show its instructions 4 weeks ago:
There are already bots that use something like 5 specialist bots and have them sort of vote on the response to generate a single, better output.
The excessive prompting is a necessity to override the strong bias towards certain kinds of results. I wrote a dungeon master AI for Discord (currently private and in development with no immediate plans to change that) and we use prompts very much like this one because OpenAI really doesn’t want to describe the actions of evil characters, nor does it want to describe violence.
It’s prohibitively expensive to create a custom AI, but these prompts can be written and refined by a single person over a few hours.
- Comment on Breakthrough promises secure and private quantum computing at home 4 weeks ago:
Agreed, although I wonder how much further ahead state actors are compared to common knowledge. Standard encryption will be broken before most of us are aware, I think.
- Comment on Breakthrough promises secure and private quantum computing at home 4 weeks ago:
I read it but I didn’t see anything about local quantum encryption. Originally my comment talked about that until I realized they are just talking about accessing cloud-based quantum encryption. So I immediately edited it not to look like an idiot. If I’m still missing something, let me know, but I am not seeing it.
- Comment on Breakthrough promises secure and private quantum computing at home 4 weeks ago:
So regular cryptography is threatened by quantum computing, for sure. I imagine you’d wind up with some kind of quantum coprocessor like we used to have for math back in the day because quantum computing isn’t a replacement for current computers.
It would be interesting to see if having that capability locally would lead to finding other uses for it the way we did for GPUs and AI.
That said, I expect a long timeline for this to happen. We’ll see.
- Comment on The Fallout show's been a pleasant surprise 5 weeks ago:
It sounds really good, but I’m protesting commercials on a service that promised to be commercial free. I will watch it vicariously through online discussions.
- Comment on But Claude said tumor! 1 month ago:
You work for a crazy company, my friend.
- Comment on But Claude said tumor! 1 month ago:
I read the same thing in Nevvsweeek.
- Comment on But Claude said tumor! 1 month ago:
You should see if you can get it to hallucinate a pay raise or 3 months vacation.
- Comment on But Claude said tumor! 1 month ago:
That’s when you drop trou, bend over, spread the cheeks, and ask them to let you know when they’re done reviewing ChatGPT’s “research”.
- Comment on Diablo 4 Season 4 Campfire Chat Summary 1 month ago:
Diablo 3 sucked for a while and then I came back after 2 or 3 years and enjoyed it for many more. Maybe I’ll come back to Diablo 4 in the future. But it really seemed like the game just isn’t for me. Too much online bullshit and time-gated shit that makes it feel like a job instead of a game.
- Comment on Ubisoft Wants You To Be Comfortable Not Owning Your Games 3 months ago:
I play single game for years with a bit of other games mixed in. I played Diablo 1, 2 and 3, World of Warcraft (already a sub, of course), Minecraft, and Skyrim for many years each. You could maybe put Team Fortress 2 in there by I didn’t continue going back to that well nearly as long as the others - I hate lootbox shit and I miss the days when skill and strategy was the only difference between players. I would totally play TF2 vanilla, though.
I’m sure I will continue to play Diablo 3 (4 does nothing for me) and Skyrim for years to come. So we do exist, however we are probably an unknown and unserved group since we don’t tend to pour a bunch of money and time into new games. I do have 800 hours into Baldur’s Gate 3. I’m going to regret having that on console instead of Steam, I’m sure. Probably wind up buying that one twice.
- Comment on Hertz 180: Rental giant to sell 20,000 EVs and replace them with gas-powered vehicles 4 months ago:
Ohm my god. I see what you did there.
- Comment on OpenAI says it’s “impossible” to create useful AI models without copyrighted material 4 months ago:
It’s garbage for programming. A useful tool but not one that can be used by a non-expert. And I’ve already had to have a conversation with one of my coworkers when they tried to submit absolutely garbage code.
This isn’t even the first attempt at a smart system that enables non-programmers to write code. They’ve all been garbage. So, too, will the next one be but every generation has to try it for themselves. AGI might have some potential some day, but that’s a long long way off. Might as well be science fiction.
Other disciplines are affected differently, but I constantly play with image and text generation and they are all some flavor of garbage. There are some areas where AI can excel but they are mostly professional tools and not profession replacements.
- Comment on OpenAI says it’s “impossible” to create useful AI models without copyrighted material 4 months ago:
I think OpenAI (or some part of it) is a non-profit. But corporate fuckery means it can largely be funded by for profit companies which then turn around and profit from that relationship. Corporate law is so weak and laxly enforced that’s it’s a bit of a joke unfortunately.
I agree that AI has an important role to play in the future, but it’s a lot more limited in the current form than a lot of people want to believe. I’m writing a tool that leverages AI as a sort of auto-DM for roleplaying, but AI hasn’t written a line of code in it because the output is garbage. And frankly I find the fun and value of the tool comes from the other humans you play with, not the AI itself. The output just isn’t that good.
- Comment on OpenAI says it’s “impossible” to create useful AI models without copyrighted material 4 months ago:
Mass produced garbage is still mass produced garbage. As you point out AIs aren’t human and while that removes the limitations of the flesh (including limitations that we might want there - no human ever says oops, I made a child porn), it imposes limitations of the machine. AI output isn’t that good at anything practical. It writes garbage code that even if you manage to get it working, the business manager or whoever isn’t capable of seeing the flaws in it. The art is devoid of any sort of soul and almost always has glaring flaws that require actual humans to identify and fix.
We are about to be inundated with AI produced garbage, sure, but that only proves the lie that shady internet sites and social media have always been a cesspool of shitty, unreliable content, and connecting with hundreds of thousands of faceless strangers was never a good idea. Hopefully we’ll come up with (or go back to) solutions that don’t treat the problem as simply one of volume.
- Comment on OpenAI says it’s “impossible” to create useful AI models without copyrighted material 4 months ago:
Any company replacing humans with AI is going to regret it. AI just isn’t that good and probably won’t ever be, at least in it’s current form. It’s all an illusion and is destined to go the way of Bitcoin, which is to say it will shoot up meteorically and seem like the answer to all kinds of problems, and then the reality will sink in and it will slowly fade to obscurity and irrelevance. That doesn’t help anyone affected today, of course.
- Comment on HP sued (again) for blocking third-party ink from printers, accused of monopoly 4 months ago:
Look, I fucking hate HP so don’t take this as supporting them in any way, but I don’t think what you’re describing is possible. The tower is nothing more than a bunch of mounting points to attach hardware made by other manufacturers. They don’t make motherboards or chips. They could maybe have a deal for a custom branded bios maybe with certain settings locked down. They could have some shitware installed in windows, but none of that would have an impact before windows loaded.
I just don’t see how what you’re describing is possible even if they wanted to. It would be a major scandal and everyone would’ve heard about it. Remember the Sony rootkit CDs?
- Comment on First working graphene semiconductor could lead to faster computers 4 months ago:
It took 11 years to go from the development of the transistor to the integrated circuit. We went from there to the 286 in about 25 years. This is an exciting development, but I’m probably not going to live to see it in my home computer.