Wow, I am in awe of the rapid pace of these changes!
Live Posts : Mods can designate a post as a Live Post. A Live Post will continuously update with new posts coming through will sorting by new
Something is not right here though - it looks like either the first occurrence of the word “post” was meant to be community, or else the second one was meant to be comments?
I hope to see this pace of improvement continue - there are so many front-end usability issues left to polish! :-)
That should help! 😃
The first paragraph in the article says:
Documentation files on more than 100 websites are referencing potentially dangerous executable content that gets installed automatically when visited by many AI agents. A few dozen companies, some of them Fortune 500s, are among those that executed proof-of-concept code. At least one misconfigured site is directing visitors, human or AI, to live malware.
So… yes. All someone has to do is register to become the new owner of the previously non-existent resource and then they can serve up whatever content they wish to the slop machines.
Laughs in Linux.
This seems geared more towards programming languages like C++, whereas in scripting such as BASH it seems to me like it absolutely would get to be a mess to have so many functions, particularly those called only once (either total for the execution of the entire program or within the context of being inside another function, so once per function).
I am curious now what would Linus Torvalds say about that?
It made their human workers 70% less efficient. You know the solution to that don’t you… MORE AI!
J/k, and btw this actually seems like a good article to read, acting as a cautionary tale about reliance upon this high unstable technology in its current (HAHA!) state.
Tech-pilled people that naively believe whatever they read, especially in previously believable sources of “news” that have since sold out.
I already posited that LLMs may perform lower-level thinking. Also, in the reference you linked to read their third stated limitation. Perhaps one day some kind of AGI will do “higher-level” aka more realistic thinking… but not yet. Which, I want to add, is not entirely relevant to their utility to us as humans.
Talking about “thinking” gets us distracted from what can actually be done, though if we do want to do it then we’d need to come up with a working definition of what “thinking” actually is.
The difference between the cash register and an inference engine is the training data. Also, barring something like mechanical failure, I would trust the calculation of a cash register (that has previously been demonstrated to function with high fidelity, and barring any major incidents such as dropping it onto the floor that might make me question the relevance of those prior tests to its current performance).
But the results of a LLM “calculation” - and I mean this with total sincerity - might be something like:
“What is 1+1=”?
“Answer: 6, 7!! 🤪”
Or in ye olden times, one expected response might be “ur mother!” or some other flippant remark… exactly like a small child, imitating others might do. Monkey see, monkey do => the principles undergirding LLM technology? It does not understand what it sees, hence it does not “know” when to apply what answer, only going by the most popular (whatever the weighting scheme is - probably highest upvoted answer on Reddit?) string of words that seem to be associated with the question.
He admits himself that nobody really knows how people think, and so all the talk about LLMs looking like they are “thinking” is based purely on vibes rather than reality.
Then again, the thought occurs to me to ponder, how many actual humans really think also? Do 4-year-olds? Do <insert name of opposing political party here>?
That thought experiment helps me to understand. Even if an LLM does perform a kind of “lower thinking” - i.e. mere imitation, of the kind that a monkey or even a 6-year-old human child might - even then, I still would not trust it to vibe-code anything for me.
And it most definitely does not “think think” i.e. higher-level thinking, though again, neither do many humans, seemingly the largest majority of the time.
I am not so sure that we disagree actually.
Jobs that LLMs manage to replace - within the engineering ecosystem at least, which is a HUGE caveat I need to make there (as it differentiates between e.g. that vs. graphic design artists) - are jobs that did not need to exist in the first place. Although I am not certain that I could name any particular role there - maybe Project Manager could be the closest, but even there they become super useful for large & complicated setups yet don’t many companies seem to use them regardless of the need?
If you can remove an entire position and replace their tasks with a glorified autocorrect, then I would definitely wonder how important those tasks were to begin with!?
And if they are important, then I would not rely upon an LLM to perform them correctly.
Though my worry is less than LLMs will perform so well as to replace humans, and more that the humans will be fired and replaced with LLMs anyway, which will then do such a fantastically shitty job of replacing the role formerly performed by a human being that the load upon all the humans will be increased. i.e. not computers aiding humans to accomplish more effectively, but humans propping up computers that are constantly misbehaving simply for the reason that it makes the C-suites “feel” more in charge to have such surveillance systems working for them.
Which is a simple extension of the current model where, when misapplied, takes as much if not more time to fuss over Jira tickets than to actually accomplish any real work. Do you Stall the ticket or close it and create a follow-up, thereby breaking the cohesion of the comments, despite how Jira is nearly impossible to find things in once a Sprint is over anyway - no matter what decision is made for you by the ones in charge, somehow it always manages to be your fault for not doing it right. Except now substitute the person doing that with an LLM, with even less capacity (as you said, zero actually) to understand why it is even doing what ends up having been done.
Narrator: and they did.
Juicy and delicious 😋
I dunno if I believe any of that. On the one hand we definitely knew that some of it was coming, though it is uncertain (iirc?) how it would shake out, like is the role of Project Manager now in jeopardy? (Article seems to suggest that one of those will now take on a higher workload) What about Product Manager - or is that simply a different kind of technical? But especially this bit:
You cannot lead from behind anymore. Not when the people you’re leading have tools that let them move at a speed no status meeting can keep up with.
So… LLMs are actually capable now of speeding up someone’s work? Bc everything I’ve ever read says the opposite: that people spend more time trying to figure out what went wrong when you trusted “AI” (implication: AGI… except we all are aware that these do not exist yet in anything besides the wet dreams of managers) misbehaved, like deleting the entire prod database or escaping from its container and wreaking havock, though performing “well” since for some reason it was trusted to measure its own performance, hence it simply deleted all unit tests and now it gets a perfect score, no flaws, yay!
This article is either spouting complete nonsense, or else saying something that I cannot understand in the slightest. And the fact that it seems to lack internal consistency makes me strongly lean towards the former. Although I can’t help but shake the feeling that at the same time it is also telling the truth (some version of that anyway?), like passing on the corporate BS that will come down regardless of how much sense it makes none of.
Truthiness - it doesn’t matter if something is true or not, it’s how managers make all their decisions regardless, bc they simply feel it in their gut.
Mind you, I think what the article is trying (but failing) to say - e.g. that Product Owners are going to stay - is absolutely true. It’s just that the article is so heavily AI-pilled, and also so full of embedded advertisements to “go back and re-read” seemingly everything that author has ever written before, that it never manages to actually say that, and it certainly does not separate what I just said from the cult of AI worship.
Leaving me to ultimately feel like I’ve been scammed of my time and attention after reading this article - did it ever really say anything at all, or just pretend like it did?
Though the fact that I am a complete moron might also have something to do with why I feel that way. But I am leaning currently towards both being true? Which seems far more plausible than neither.
About Tesseract: Admins tend to move exceedingly slowly… but I would guess that at this point given the severity of the breach, most instances might be amenable to at least roll back to an older version before implementation of the hidden shadow list, or perhaps even to switch to using db0’s fork that removes it? Except that db0 is also antagonizing especially LW and possibly even calling for defederation from them at some future date, so I could see strong hesitancy to make stronger tie-ins with him at that point, especially given the sensitivity already surrounding the Admiral Patrick issue - so perhaps they would want to simply deprecate it altogether. It is a quite popular one though.
Most of the discussion that I’ve seen so far is merely bravado e.g. bragging about having made it into the list of shadow-banned users, rather than efforts to move forward to a positive resolution.
So instance admins might welcome such a discussion… perhaps after a cooling-off period first?
However, Tesseract is not a 3rd-party app - it’s an alternative front-end UI for Lemmy. So that means then that i.e. it’s not up to individual users to change the version offered, and instead is solely under control of each individual instance admin that offers that alternative.
Oh that’s so freaking awesome!!! 😎
On the wider scale, I am saddened about the fight between Rimu and you - but I get it, despite how he admitted himself that he did not handle things fully properly (afaik? not that I even begin to comprehend matters involving licensing), I understand if you are just so completely “done” with that whole situation.
I just wanted to say that from my POV I see you two as allies (even though definitely not friends) in the struggle against corporate enshittified platforms.
And I love seeing the development of features that apparently you both agree are quite good - hehe even good enough for Rimu to steal:-P.
Thank you for making your code available as FOSS, and thereby contributing to the growth of the Threadiverse. I’m losing hope that we will ever attract mainstream normies by virtue of continual in-fighting but that has basically nothing to do with you, and in fact PyLova seems actually a force that helps heal the divisions a bit by e.g. decoupling the OG PieFed code from certain authoritarian tendencies lately. Such as shadow-censoring of votes even from Lemmy or Mbin users delivered to PieFed communities, rejected (if I am understanding them correctly) due to the vote quotas that are never once explained to them as a reason for rejection - although tbf Lemmy also offers admins the ability to shadow-censor whole entire communities without mention of that fact either. No software is perfect, but you are continuing to pour your love into this project, which I find awesome and want to say thank you for.:-)
Lemmy most definitely has shadowbans, but they are applied at the level of whole entire communities rather than end-users. I remember being on the StarTrek.Website instance when that functionality was added to the Lemmy code, and discussing with someone my finding out that ChapoTrapHouse was no longer accessible from it, despite the fact the instance remained federated. No announcement of that fact was ever made iirc, it’s just that one day poof the behavior has changed, after Lemmy deployed a version that allowed for that.
Some few instances are very open about their hiding of communities - see e.g. https://legal.programming.dev/docs/hidden-communities/, listing in detail every one - but most are not, and the Lemmy UI has nothing at all like the list that it shows for (de)federations.
The Lemmy admins also can remove people even from the modlogs, in cases of severe abuse. Tbf it’s exceedingly rare and there is little evidence of this being abused (well there was one time, but the excuse that it was due to a bug seemed believable to me and most everyone else - Lemmy.ml quite often tests new versions of the code before they get rolled out to the rest of the Threadiverse, which is quite helpful actually).
Lemmy also fails to notify someone of their having been moderated. The various communities are FULL of stories of people asking where their posts went, or why they can no longer post to a community, or stating their discovery that they have an event in the modlog. The notification of moderation activities is exceedingly poor on the Lemmy platform.
Sadly, Reddit does a much better job at notification of an event, and also provides for a modmail to communicate with the mods to discuss the situation, e.g. to ask why, rather than leaving it to the end-user to wonder if they should DM each one listed in sequence until they find one that is even active much less responsive…
Lemmy is imperfect. At least Huffman is not in charge here, but conversely the tools have aways to go before we catch up even to what Reddit offers.
Bots don’t just program themselves (… yet?), someone places them here, with intentionality.
Liars and thieves and trolls have existed since the dawn of time (the ideas of antagonism and predatory behaviors have surely even predated cellular lifeforms).
Conversely, a bot that is properly labeled as such can be quite welcome to perform its specific tasks? Someone built it for a reason after all.
PieFed offers quite a number of tools to help detect and label bots when the OP fails to do so. Most are in the mod tools rather than for an individual end-user. In such cases though, it is impossible to tell whether someone simply ran a post through an LLM for refinement or whether the latter wrote the whole damn thing.
TLDR: “bots” are (ostensibly) fine, it’s people who suck - particularly liars and non-empathetic ones who feel that their right to speak (or vote or whatever) should trump yours, and use such deceptive practices to try to overwhelm others.
Perhaps: in the realm of the blind, the one-eyed man is king?
Searching for one, though that’s a big project. I typically abandon PieFed for Lemmy every time I need to do a search.
Oh and speaking of, a feature that’s probably significantly easier would be to either search through comments, or else expand them all at once - to allow a browser search to work.
Otherwise it’s mainly UI things not being polished rather than back-end. I’ve been trying out 3rd-party apps for the last month so there’s a slight possibility that it’s fixed by now (I had made a codeberg request a long time ago related to it, but I can’t log into PieFed’s codeberg right now, and it seems to not allow anonymous read-only access. One thing that has been hella annoying for more than a year in various forms has been that a goodly number of links from the notifications menu don’t take you to what it is trying to point at. When the conversations get longer, when things happen to cause a comment to be collapsed (bc of being too deep in the chain), and especially when there is a large number of comments, the post page typically begins to load, then doesn’t always indicate that you should wait (causing you to get hella lost if you start scrolling, which you would normally do, except in this case it’s the worst possible decision), then finally loads the large number of comments, and finally takes you to the place that it is attempting to notify you about - when someone tagged or responded to you - except that it doesn’t. And then the hunt begins, like maybe you have to click to expand a comment first, or scroll way back up, or perhaps down.
It works a helluva lot better now than it did a year and a half ago - I used to have to abandon PieFed and go back to Lemmy just to be able to find the comment, by searching for my username and seeing if there were any replies I had missed. It got way better, but the method of loading comments after loading the page broke it again - which is just poor design philosophy, like if I click a link to a COMMENT (from a notification), then yes maybe I want the page to load the COMMENTS, perchance/mayhaps, hrm?
PieFed was initially being built up to work for the most usual and basic scenario. Being able to handle >100 comments where some are nested >10 deep I understand was less of a priority. But sometimes those are where the absolute BEST conversations are!!
Also, the post/comment preview function keeps randomly disappearing. I mean with regards to a particular PieFed version it will either always be available or not available at all, but between version updates it kept disappearing like it would work for posts but not comments, or more rarely might not be available for either. I guess I’m ranting here but this is the kind of stuff that I find hella annoying and I’m not sure what’s easy to fix vs. hard. Greater stability of this feature, maybe?
Lemmy may have significantly fewer features but in many ways it comes across as being significantly more polished. Until you try to write a long comment that is (in my Firefox on Android the screen keeps jumping around like it’s drunk! 🥴), and then you really appreciate how PieFed’s features work better, some of the times, while for general browsing and readability (like for lurkers) Lemmy can be better - e.g. its search tools. Another example: having the votes be above comments rather than below them is very helpful to me sometimes, bc they can become exceedingly long (like the one I am writing right now!) and sometimes at least (like when modding) it helps to know how well it was received by a community before reading through it all, so not having to scroll down to the bottom and then scroll back up to the top is helpful.
I think PieFed tried to reinvent the wheel and just be different from Lemmy for the sake of being different, even if the way was not actually any better?
I don’t know if I am helping at all here but wanted to get back to you quickly so hopefully these ramblings can at least spark something within you.
Obviously, you should spend your efforts working on something that gives you joy to do so!!
PieFed, and now PyLova, and also Lemmy (and Mbin etc.) are so fantastic! We may never fully replace Reddit but who cares if we can at least have something worthwhile here.