a terrible place for both information and security

And in fact barring the inevitable fuckups AI probably can eventual handle a lot of interpretation currently carried out by human civil servants.

But honestly I would have thought that all of this is obvious, and that I shouldn’t really have to articulate it.

you keep making claims about what LLMs are capable of that don’t match with any known reality outside of OpenAI and friends’ marketing, dodging anyone who asks you to explain, and acting like a bit of a shit about it. I don’t think we need your posts.

good, use your excel spreadsheet and not a tool that fucking sucks at it

why do you think hallucinating autocomplete can make rules-based decisions reliably

AI analyses it, decides if applicant is entitled to benefits.

why do you think this is simple

and of course, not a single citation for the intro paragraph, which has some real bangers like:

This process involves self-assessment and internal deliberation, aiming to enhance reasoning accuracy, minimize errors (like hallucinations), and increase interpretability. Reflection is a form of “test-time compute,” where additional computational resources are used during inference.

because LLMs don’t do self-assessment or internal deliberation, nothing can stop these fucking things from hallucinating, and the only articles I can find for “test-time compute” are blog posts from all the usual suspects that read like ads and some arXiv post apparently too shitty to use as a citation

oh yeah, I’m waiting for David to wake up so he can read the words

the trivial ‘homework’ of starting the rule violation procedure

and promptly explode, cause fielding deletion requests from people like our guests who don’t understand wikipedia’s rules but assume they’re, ah, trivial, is probably a fair-sized chunk of his workload

this would explain so much about the self-declared 10x programmers I’ve met

there’s something fucking hilarious about you and your friend coming here to lecture us about how Wikipedia works, but explaining the joke to you is also going to be tedious as shit and I don’t have any vegan nacho fries or junior mints to improve my mood

also lol @

Vibe coding, sometimes spelled vibecoding

cause I love the kayfabe linguistic drift for a term that’s not even a month old that’s probably seen more use in posts making fun of the original tweet than any of the shit the Wikipedia article says

did you know: you too can make your dreams come true with Vibe Coding ™ thanks to this article’s sponsors:

Replit Agent, Cursor Composer, Pythagora, Bolt, Lovable, and Cline

and other shameful assholes with cash to burn trying to astroturf a term from a month old Twitter brainfart into relevance

no thx, nobody came here for you to assign them tedious homework

fuck yeah! it’s a very solid start, and I appreciate the (is that clickbaity enough) in the thumbnail

I like this a lot! the idea of buying a new (and usually quite expensive) device that intentionally does less has never really sat right with me, but repurposing old or secondhand devices with purpose-built software has always made quite a bit more sense.

to expand on the idea in hopefully not too much of a tangential direction, one very nice thing about repurposed hardware over new bespoke hardware is that if the repurposed device is running an open source software stack with resources to spare (which is often the case), you can extend the functionality of the device in ways that are specifically useful to you personally.

as a real-world example, when I set up a new computer for myself these days I usually start with Linux that boots straight into emacs, which is a very competent typewriter running on a kernel that supports most of the hardware I’ll throw at it and comes with a wide compatibility base and fairly minimal hardware requirements. next if I need to work with more complicated documents, I pull in X11 and go graphical. if I need applications, I pull in EXWM and now I have everything I need for a generalized computing environment. but there’s no need to go that far — and every step of the way, I can customize what I’m doing to fit my own needs.

I usually do all of the above on NixOS, but it feels like the general idea has possibly outgrown Nix, and it might do even better as a dedicated Linux distro targeting repurposed devices.

I decided to waste my fucking time and read the awful medium article that keeps getting linked and, boy fucking howdy, it’s exactly what I thought it was. let’s start with the conclusion first:

TLDR: my conclusion is that it is far more likely that Proton and its CEO are actually liberals.

which is just a really weird thing to treat like a revelation when we’ve very recently seen a ton of liberal CEOs implement fash policies, including one (Zuckerberg) who briefly considered running as a Democrat before he was advised that nobody found him the least bit appealing

anyway, let’s go to the quick bullet points this piece of shit deserves:

• it’s posted by an account that hasn’t done anything else on medium
• the entire thing is written like stealth PR and a bunch of points are copied straight out of Proton’s marketing. in fact, the tone and structure are so off that I’m just barely not willing to accuse this article of being generated by an LLM, because it’s just barely not repetitive enough to entirely read like AI
• they keep doing the “nobody (especially the filthy redditors) read Andy or Proton’s actual posts in full” rhetorical technique, which is very funny when people on mastodon were frantically linking archives of those posts after they got deleted, and the posts on Reddit were deleted in a way that was designed to provoke confusion and cover Proton’s tracks. I can’t blame anyone for going on word of mouth if they couldn’t find an archive link.
• like every liberal-presenting CEO turned shithead, Andy has previously donated a lot of money to organizations associated with the Democrats
• not a single word about how Proton’s tied up in bitcoin or boosting LLMs and where that places them politically
• also nothing about how powerless the non-profit associated with Proton is in practice
• Andy can’t be a shithead, he hired a small handful of feminists and occasionally tweets about how much he supports left-wing causes! you know, on the nazi site
• e: “However, within the context of Trump’s original post that Andy is quoting, it seems more likely that “big business” = Big Tech, and “little guys” = Little Tech, but this is not obvious if you did not see the original post, and this therefore caused outrage online.” what does this mean. that’s exactly the context I read into Andy’s original post, and it’s a fucking ridiculous thing to say and a massive techfash dogwhistle loud and shrill enough that everybody heard it. it’s fucking weird to falsely claim you’re being misinterpreted and then give an explanation that’s completely in line with the damning shit you’re being accused of, then for someone else to come along and pretend that somehow absolves you

there’s more in there but I’m tired of reading this article, the writing style really is fucking exhausting

e: also can someone tell me how shit like this can persuade anyone? it’s one of the most obvious, least persuasive puff pieces I’ve ever read. did the people who love proton more than they love privacy need something, anything to latch onto to justify how much they like the product?

tech apologists love to tell you the legal terms attached to the software you’re using don’t matter, then the instant the obvious happens, they immediately switch to telling you it’s your fault for not reading the legal terms they said weren’t a big deal. this post and its follow-up from the same poster are a particularly good take on this.

also:

When you use Firefox or really any browser, you’re giving it information

nobody gives a fuck about that, we’re all technically gifted enough to realize the browser receives input on interaction. the problem is Mozilla receiving my website addresses, form data, and uploaded files (and much more), and in fact getting a no-restriction license for them and their partners to do what they please with that data. that’s new, that’s what the terms of use cover, and that’s the line they crossed. don’t let anybody get that shit twisted — including the people behind one of the supposedly privacy-focused Firefox forks

tons of communities are now insulated to a point where you can’t even get in if you want to, because unless you’re large enough or have enough booster points (which, to no one’s surprise, cost money, and only last for a limited time) you can’t generate permanent invite links, so you gotta know someone to get in.

you fucking what now? I’m unwillingly in so many discords but I avoid anything to do with their shitty micropurchase economy so I didn’t know about this. that’s why so many projects have expired discord links in their docs? holy fuck this is unworkable. discord is a shitty landlord rentseeking from so many open source projects with this crap

legally, it absolutely does, and it gets even worse when you dig deeper. Mozilla is really going all in on being a bunch of marketing creeps.

oh good, the open source discords I’m unwillingly a part of already had an unbearable number of zero effort generated meme images, and now they’ll have even more!

Discord hired a pile of ex-Meta management in mid-2023, to disastrous internal effect.

of course they did. nobody does confidently wrong and incredibly damaging like an ex-Facebook PM

so Firefox now has terms of use with this text in them:

When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.

this is bad. it feels like the driving force behind this are the legal requirements behind Mozilla’s AI features that nobody asked for, but functionally these terms give Mozilla the rights to everything you do in Firefox effectively without limitation (because legally, the justification they give could apply to anything you do in your browser)

I haven’t taken the rebranded forks of Firefox very seriously before, but they might be worth taking a close look at now, since apparently these terms of use only apply to the use of mainline Firefox itself and not any of the rebrands

after Proton’s latest PR push to paint their CEO as absolutely not a fascist failed to convince much of anyone (feat. a medium article I’m not gonna read cause it’s a waste of my time getting spread around by brand new accounts who mostly only seem to post about how much they like Proton), they decided to quietly bow out of mastodon and switch to the much more private and secure platform of… fucking Reddit of all things, where Proton can moderate critical comments out of existence (unfun fact: in spite of what most redditors believe, there’s no rule against companies moderating their own subs — it’s an etiquete violation, meaning nobody gives a fuck) and accounts that only post in defense of Proton won’t stick out like a sore thumb