• 9 Posts
  • 417 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Thiel is weird, like being willing to admit in an interview that he regularly gets blood transfusions from healthy young people in order to prolong his life back in 2016 or 17, or hesitating when on a podcast and asked if he believed in humanity surviving into the future… but he’s generally not completely fucking bonkers. He’s one of the most successful Silicon Valley investors. Remember that he basically made JD Vance, Planatir is getting deeply entrenched in multiple countries’ intelligence agencies and law enforcement groups, he has a ridiculous amount of connections to everyone involved with Project 2025, some connections to the current AI bubble, and at least some connection to getting Trump into office in the first place. He is probably the closest thing we have to a real life supervillian, as trite as saying that is.

    This is an absurd statement, but he’s saying it for a reason. He’s trying to make something happen with this. He’s trying to push things in a certain direction. Don’t just laugh at the absurdity or make some cheap laugh statement about delusional Christians and turn your brain off.



  • I’m running into this at work lately. Suits are forcing everyone to move from one email sending service to another to save a few $, and I got stuck tracking the progress of everything that needed to be moved.

    Entire departments that openly told me all they do for the company is manage software to generate reports that get sent out via email automatically. One of their guys is using python. One is using some SQL server plugin that mixes “no code” shit with straight C#. Another is using an entire suite of outdated software that has its own proprietary email generation logic, and the only part they’re using is the email generation. The fucking lead? A god damn vbscript, used to dynamically construct a string that is sent to the command prompt to be executed. That string? Launch an existing PowerShell script that sends an email. I’ve seen the whole thing, that’s all it fucking does front to back. Just fucking use PowerShell straight for the love of all that is holy instead of this awful rube goldberg mess.

    In other departments, people whose entire job description is “I admin and support these three systems” being unable to do literally anything in their systems without relying on the vendor’s help desk for the software. Shit that I was able to find out in 30 seconds with a search that got me the system documentation, they open a support case and are fucking helpless.

    I just want to close the door and get back to working on my stuff, so I can stop taking mental damage from exposure to all the cognitive hazard messes these other supposedly technical teams have shit into existence.




  • I’d imagine some of the movie wouldn’t hit as hard without seeing the season you missed. And it definitely spoils the biggest event of the last season right out the gate. The season you missed is kind of filler, but it spends so much time building up all the characters and showing how far they’ve come that it’s important. And the final episode is heavy. Basically the season you missed is everything right up until the big confrontation at the end of a normal season. So Infinity Castle starts right at the start of that.

    I enjoyed Inifinity Castle a ton, but… it’s like they took an episode or two leading into the season ending big fight, then weaved multiple season ending big fights together, condensed it all into the best parts, and then spent like four times their normal budget for a full season on it. Don’t get me wrong, that’s fucking great, might be the best shonen anime fight scenes I’ve seen, but it isn’t some sort of movie that I’ve found myself thinking back to too much. Other than to lament that it’s going to be so long until the next one.


  • Meh. I’d rather they have their meeting places out in the light like this than hidden away in the dark web or something.

    Just block, defed, move on. No need to feed their narrative of being the last bulwark against the bad guys by dogpiling them. People are allowed to be wrong and you won’t change their minds by storming in all righteous at them anyway. That will just entrench them more.

    If you truly want to turn them, there’s plenty of studies and research done on how to actually influence people and change minds. Some of it is even in leaked classified intelligence agency field guides, which is a fun way to end up on a list!









  • Some poor souls who arguably have their hearts in the right place definitely don’t have their heads screwed on right, and are trying to do hunger strikes outside Google’s AI offices and Anthropic’s offices.

    https://programming.dev/post/37056928 contains links to a few posts on X by the folks doing it.

    Imagine being so worried about AGI that you thought it was worth starving yourself over.

    Now imagine feeling that strongly about it and not stopping to ask why none of the ideologues who originally sounded the alarm bells about it have tried anything even remotely as drastic.

    On top of all that, imagine being this worried about what Anthropic and Google are doing in the research of AI, hopefully being aware of Google’s military contracts, and somehow thinking they give a singular shit if you kill yourself over this.

    And… where’s the people outside fucking OpenAI? Bets on this being some corporate shadowplay shit?



  • The abuse potential would be that I think it opens the door to more easily create convincing doctored screenshots of comments and interactions. It’s technically possible already, but I don’t think we’ve really seen it on lemmy yet. There’s ways around that, like formatting replaced text differently or marking those comments with a clear icon to indicate a regex replacement was used on them, but I still don’t particularly like the idea.

    I’m thinking that it would also make it easy for people to have confusing interactions, if somehow a regex ends up changing the meaning of a statement or something, and the user forgets they have it set up. I guess the “big icon indicating regex was applied” idea would work there too though. Maybe the icon could even be a button to toggle it on/off per comment?

    The common use case I see for regex features on social media apps and addons is for hiding entire comments that match one of your patterns, and I generally think that’s the best choice for implementation.

    That said, with a clear indicator it had been applied it probably wouldn’t be awful.