@dmbaturin

This is a very misleading post. Most of the Internet is not actually in the two-story building, but in the massive bunker that goes several kilometres down underneath the building.

@amy Well, that’s the claim. I can’t really see a path to a Sam Altman that can pass as human more than 20% of the time. The current techniques used to implement Sam Altman appear to be severely limited and throwing more money at the problem is, if anything, making it worse.

OpenAI announced this week that they are less than a decade away from a Sam Altman that can convincingly pass as human 60% of the time.

@deepmud @munin Jury tampering (which would cover deliberately deanonymising jurors) is a separate and more serious charge. And they absolutely should be prosecuted for it.

@jonty Is there a thing set up to buy the domain from whoever ends up owning it and point all of the NFTs at goatse?

@grrrr_shark @KimSJ @futurebird

This is partly why I enjoy working on CHERIoT so much: I can understand the entire hardware-software stack.

@AbramKedge @hiway @futurebird

A lot of VB code was like that. I did encounter one bit of in-house VB6 that was beautifully structured, had clean abstractions, and spoke to a SQL Server back end, so I at least have an existence proof that good, clear, maintainable code was possible in VB. I never managed to write any though. Somewhere I have some floppy disks full of truly terrible VB2 to VB4 that I wrote as a child.

@futurebird @grrrr_shark

Have you played with Godot at all? It’s been on my to-learn list for a couple of years and some initial poking suggested it would be a great learn-to-program platform:

• It’s got some nice visual tools for the scaffolding.
• You don’t write code except in places where code is the simplest way of expressing what you want.
• It’s cross platform (and can deploy to the web).
• It makes it easy to create nicely visual things so creates things that feel like they’re exciting from the start.
• In addition to its own scripting language, it supports a bunch of ‘real’ programming languages so gives a nice on ramp for them, without introducing new languages in completely unrelated domains and environments.

@grrrr_shark @futurebird

I think there are probably some interesting incentives for people to study here. It’s struck me a lot that the popular GUI frameworks today take far more code to achieve good results than good ones from the ‘90s (though less than the worst of the ‘90s). I suspect that it’s a combination of three things:

• Good API design is simply not taught anywhere.
• Poor API design is an externality. Consumers of your library / framework pay the cost, not you.
• Frameworks that require more code make it easier for their users to justify their salaries. If someone writes a 300 line app, it seems like a toy to their management. If they write a 10,000-line app that does the same thing, it’s much easier to explain why it cost money to build.

None of this is really to do with the cost of RAM or compute. Smalltalk-80 was a full GUI on a machine with 1 MiB of RAM and a CPU slower than the slowest Cortex-A0 and it ran interpreted bytecode.

@futurebird

In the ‘90s there was a huge push in software engineering to component models. COM and CORBA both came out of this. The idea was to build libraries as reusable blocks. Brad Cox wrote a lot about this and created Objective-C as a way of packaging C libraries with late-bound interfaces that could be exposed to higher-level languages easily.

This combined with the push towards visual programming, where you’d be able to drag these libraries into your GUI and then wire things up to their interfaces with drag-and-drop UIs. The ‘Visual’ in Visual Studio is a hangover from this push.

Advocates imagined stores of reusable components and people being able to build apps for precisely their use case by just taking these blocks and assembling them.

It failed because the incentives were exactly wrong for proprietary COTS apps. Companies made money by locking people into app ecosystems. If it’s easy for someone to buy a (small, cheap) new component to Word 95 that adds the new feature that they need, how do you convince them to buy Word 97?

The incentives for F/OSS are the exact opposite. If another project can add a feature that some users want (but you don’t) without forcing you to maintain that code, everyone wins. But we now have an entire generation that has grown up with big monolithic apps who copy them in F/OSS ecosystems because it’s all they’ve ever known.

@futurebird

The vibe coding thing does highlight how much code is pointless. A load of the things that I’ve seen people be impressed with are things that should be a couple of hundred lines of code but somehow modern frameworks have focused on making things require more code to accomplish the same thing. Systems like HyperCard or even Flash let people produce rich GUIs with almost no code. The kinds of things that could be built in a visual editor with a small amount of code 15-25 years ago are now being generated as tens of thousands of lines of unmaintainable and buggy LLM code.

@Viss

What if I actually did have dirt on me that an AI could leverage?

Does that actually matter? Imagine if the LLM had fabricated something about him that more people would be sympathetic to. It can easily create a thousand blogs in different places, with a tree of cross references.

If that blog, rather than being ‘I am an AI someone picked on me’ had been ‘my PR was rejected so I looked up the person who rejected it and I was shocked to find thousands of reports from people that they harassed’. And each accusation is source and linked to a different blog.

It would take a few minutes for an LLM to create all of those. It would take far longer for the victim to debunk them.

Automated harassment at scale is the easiest use case for ‘agentic’ LLMs.

@mark

This morning, Cloudflare decided that a company I wanted to place an order with shouldn't trust me, so I went to one of their competitors.

Web design in the early 2000s: Every 100ms of latency on page load costs visitors.

Web design in the late 2020s: Let's add a 10-second delay while Cloudflare checks that you are capable of ticking a checkbox in front of every page load.

@Natasha_Jay

I said back when Twitter was new:

Government communications should never be first on a third-party platform. They should build an open system for notifications, either RSS or something that allows explicit push. If people like Twitter, Facebook, or whatever the kids are using now want to build a bridge from that so that their users can consume things, that's fine. But it shouldn't be public money building that bridge. It's a thing that adds value to that commercial service and so should be paid for by the people who want it.

I said the same thing about BBC iPlayer when it launched, but they still maintain proprietary client apps for a variety of proprietary platforms and use license-fee money to promote lock-in to platforms owned and controlled by foreign corporations.

@cstross

Safari Books Online has a pretty opaque model. They tried the 'pay per page read' thing for a while, but it was hard to make work without DRM that was so invasive everyone opted out. Now they pay a flat monthly rate where the rate is set by whichever popularity bucket you're in (it was where a lot of the money I got from my books came from, because I got 50% of the Safari income, much less for the print editions).

I can kind-of see the benefit of per-page or per-chapter things for textbooks because I often want to dip into a textbook to answer a specific question. And it's nice if I can have access to a library of thousands of books, but still reward the author of the one I read two pages from to answer my question.

But for fiction, it makes no sense. A 300-page book of prose where 300 people read one page and give up is clearly less valuable than one where one person reads the whole book. I'd want a logarithmic scale for fiction.

@monospace @kde

It's similar to charity work

So qualifying F/OSS projects will require a load of compliance work that doesn't make sense unless your turnover in donations is large?

I'm not familiar with what counts as volunteer work in general for tax / legal purposes in Germany.

@kde

It's hard for me to see what that should look like. If I work on a personal project with no other users, is that volunteer work? How is that different from working in my own front garden (is that volunteering in Germany)?

If my employer releases my work as F/OSS, can they count my time as volunteering for any tax purposes? What about if it's a F/OSS component that is useful only in conjunction with some non-Free thing that they sell?

@Thayer

I’m not sure if this will help, but the same NHS guidelines that require medical practitioners to use this AI transcription nonsense also requires them to accept personal liability for all errors in the transcription. If you remind the doctor of this and give them the opportunity to correct it, they may choose to do this.

@skinnylatte

And, unlike ChatGPT, their replies are correct. And come with a lot of accurate citations.