u_tamtam

@u_tamtam@programming.dev

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI and the American Smile⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Isn’t that the essence of the issue, that those models are loaded with biases, that might or might not overlap with dominant ones in inscrutable ways, hence producing new levels of confusion and indirection?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TikTok Stacking Algorithms in Chinese Government’s Favor with Pro-China Content Originating from State-Linked Entities, Study Claims⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If you have the impression that there’s a dominant, homogeneous “mass” sharing the same opinion, you are right there in the middle of an information bubble and a victim of those “algorithms”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hacktivists release two gigabytes of Heritage Foundation data (Project 2025)⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Would that make a difference?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Web publishers brace for carnage as Google adds AI answers⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d like to share your optimism, but what you suggest leaving us to “deal with” isn’t “AI” (which has been present in web search for decades as increasingly clever summarization techniques…) but LLMs, a very specific and especially inscrutable class of AI which has been designed for “sounding convincing”, without care for correctness or truthfulness. Effectively, more humans’ time will be wasted reading invented or counterfeit stories (with no easy way to tell); first-hand information will be harder to source and acknowledge by being increasingly diluted into the AI-generated noise.

  I also haven’t seen any practical advantage to using LLM prompts vs. traditional search engines in the general case: you end up typing more, for the sake of “babysitting” the LLM, and get more to read as a result (which is, again, aggravated by the fact that you are now given a single source/one-sided view on the matter, without citation, reference nor reproducible step to this conclusion).

  Last but not least, LLMs are an environmental disaster in the making, the computational cost is enormous (in new hardware and electricity), and we are at a point where all companies partaking in this new gold rush are selling us a solution in need of a problem, every one of them having to justify the expenditure (so far, none is making a profit out of it, which is the first step towards offsetting the incurred pollution).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Use WhatsApp without a smartphone?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You can always give a shot at using a third party client (possibly acting as bridge for other/better protocols, like e.g. slidge.im>xmpp or the buggy matrix equivalent), but you need to keep in mind that they will all require you to authenticate (and remain authenticated) using a smartphone, and that usage of 3rd party clients is forbidden from WA’s terms and conditions (which may lead to your account being blocked/deleted).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Twitch "isn't profitable" admits CEO, in wake of recent layoffs⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s part of the reason why I think decentralized services could be the future. Lemmy or Mastodon can have a lot of small servers with reasonable costs spread across many admins, instead of one centralized service that costs a significant amount to run.

  Ohh, absolutely, or rather, it is the past. I mean, internet was built that way, as a resilient federation of networks and protocols. Lemmy could be seen as us just rediscovering emails after the tech giants almost succeeded in killing it. We should approach all the services we use by asking ourselves basic sustainability questions:

  • is that thing opensource?

  • self hostable?

  • does it federate/interoperate with equivalent services?

  • can I pull my data out of it/relocate to another provider on a whim?

  • if not, is this a trustworthy and ethical business?

  • is it profitable?

  • are there open financial records available showing where/for what the money is going?

  • is it at risk of being acquired?

  • is it subject to foreign/unlawful interference

  Etc Etc

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Linux is Best for Most People⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Until i can give a laptop with linux to my neighbour without also needing to also provide support, its not there yet.

  I mean, isn’t your neighbor already getting Windows support from his son or nephew anyway? Let’s not pretend that there exists a magical and perfect OS for those who don’t want to learn one. Some learning is required, whichever the OS, and I would be hard to convince that a current preinstalled Linux is more difficult to handle than a current preinstalled Windows.

  Windows has for itself that it’s a devil most people know/got exposure to (thanks to Microsoft schemes and monopolistic practices), there is nothing inherently better or easier about it (and arguably quite the opposite).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Atuin is an open-source shell command history app for Linux with syncing, unlimited history, and with contextual search⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What I found compelling about the sync is that you can have your other machines’ histories there with you, but in the background, behind a different shortcut, just in case you need to re-run or check that command you ran somewhere else few years ago…

  As I said, I haven’t used that yet, but that’s in many ways more appealing than having to SSH onto said machine (assuming it’s even possible).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Atuin is an open-source shell command history app for Linux with syncing, unlimited history, and with contextual search⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Atuin is an open-source shell command history app for Linux with syncing, unlimited history, and with contextual search⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I figured starship.rs but not the CTT part, any pointer to help me?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Atuin is an open-source shell command history app for Linux with syncing, unlimited history, and with contextual search⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Been using it for months, haven’t gotten to use the sync yet, my only regret so far is that it doesn’t support case insensitive search which is a pretty big deal for me unfortunately.