Notices by Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social), page 5

Alt-right *inverted and weaponized* Poe's law: "I'm not a racist, it's just sarcasm!"

They *relied* on the fact that Poe's Law gave them cover. "You're mistaking my sarcasm for the real article!"

It took us a decade or so to wise up to that and recognize they need to be denied this cover by not letting them hide behind the "sarcasm defense" after being called out.

We need to wise-up to the need of not letting people hide behind "of course it's AI generated" in the context of disinformation.

Simple Push Demo: https://simple-push-demo.vercel.app/
Simon Willison's summary: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/27/simple-push-demo/

I have strong mixed feelings about this: In today's Attention Economy this will be near-universally misused. But on iOS push notifications already are, with this promising to bring sites which should be sites back to the web.

As for my own browsers: I'll support pull notifications (RSS/Atom) & demand webdevs be happy with that! That's my appropriate choice.

Sysadmin - Manuel Moreale: https://manuelmoreale.com/@/page/djZRMpGozUZTZdo5

Ditching TypeScript for JavaScript - Go Make Things: https://gomakethings.com/ditching-typescript-for-javascript/

Lex Fridman* proclaims that #AGI is exciting because it will "empower humans to flourish, escape poverty and suffering and to succeed in the pursuit of happiness".

I find these kinds of statements to be extremely baffling. Do they actually think it's not enough intellect that is the reason poverty and suffering is maintained in the world? All we need is better reasoning? Don't they know there are already mountains of rational arguments?

* I know, I shouldn't give him the time of day.

i am seeing so many conferences returning, being all like "finally, covid is over! we can all have drinks in person", with absolutely no requirements on vaccination/masking/distancing…

it's not like thousands of people are still testing positive every day or anything 🙄

when these conferences also market themselves being inclusive and accessibility-focused, their hypocrisy really shows.

What is one computer thing that you do that might be considered weird in our modern computer time?

I’ll start:
I regularly unplug my computer from the internet when I don’t do internet stuff. It’s kind of my security blanket.

And that your land isn’t big enough for others to care. And that your people are too foreign for others to care. Yet you’re flooded with well meaning but useless advice to consume less individually, while corporations destroy homelands, poison waters, and release toxic fumes. No one blinks an eye.

fontconfig-pure 0.2 has been released, with a few bug fixes!

Hmmmm, my heisenbug seems to have disappeared & I don't know why... Hard for me to trust that... But I'll see if it resurfaces!

Will be releasing a fontconfig-pure update soon!

I've been reading "Afterlives of Data: Life and Debt under Capitalist Surveillance" and it's forcing me to come to terms with how naive my take on "open data" is when it comes to data about people 🙁

Even when data is "anonymized" (lol), with enough information from other sources (some of which was hacked/leaked out of compliance with the law) a number of organizations spend a lot of money to bring it all back to us, mostly without regard for ethics.

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520307735/afterlives-of-data

@48kRAM ahhhh true!!

@48kRAM don't forget the popup trying to get you to agree to browser notifications

1990s web experience

- Open site in browser
- Watch framework of site gradually appear
- Start reading site text
- View images once they load
- Click a hyperlink to more information on the thing you're looking for

2020s web experience

- Open site in browser
- Wait for Cloudflare to verify you aren't a bot
- Wait for background movie to load
- Dismiss cookie popup
- Decline to subscribe to their mailing list
- Decline to speak to a chatbot that promises it's a human
- Scroll infinitely looking for the information you want that's probably not there since it's all generated text intended for other robots to read anyway

@conatus "Conversation is like a game of Minesweeper. Select the right topics and it illuminates other squares for conversation. Select the wrong ones and everyone dies in an explosion."

L.I.N.U.S. from Magus Elgar by Kennedy Phillips

When discussing with Blink devs, there's often disconnects I fail to get past. Their simps are easier to converse with.

Do browsers need to be as complex as they are now? When there's devs asking for a feature does the web have to be the protocol to deliver it? I say no!

And then there's the whole argument over whether the open web needs surveillance advertising to stay afloat...

And the dismissiveness over the fact that proprietary bundling led to much of Blink's success...

What's particularly galling about this is that people are making these claims about a system that they don't have anywhere near full information about. Reminder that OpenAI said "for safety" they won't disclose training data, model architecture, etc.

https://twitter.com/emilymbender/status/1635697381244272640

But people want to believe SO HARD that AGI is nigh.

Remember: If #GPT4 or #ChatGPT or #Bing or #Bard generated some strings that make sense, that's because you made sense of them.

Ugh -- I'm seeing a lot of commentary along the lines of "'stochastic parrot' might have been an okay characterization of previous models, but GPT-4 actually is intelligent."

Spoiler alert: It's not. Also, stop being so credulous.

(Some of this I see because it's tweeted at me, but more of it comes to me by way of the standing search I have on the phrase "stochastic parrots" and its variants. The tweets in that column have been getting progressively more toxic over the past couple of months.)

Unlocking the Power of PHP Enums: Best Practices for Effective Use - Doğan Uçar: https://www.dogan-ucar.de/unlocking-the-power-of-php-enums-best-practices-for-effective-use/

There's also utility commands to perform statistical analysis on the results & render charts via GNU PlotLib.

There's some shared utility libraries for these commands, including one to tweak CPU settings. And a benchmark suite, with its own testrunner.

There's perl-script to generate profiled versions of the MPN library.

And I'm not even going to dig through the testsuite...

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