@dysfun It was. Literally. The economy benefits because third-rate sales people are able to do more cold calling (meanwhile, the first-rate ones are building trust with their customers, who then buy more things from them, something LLMs do not help with at all).

Wow, someone created a Mastodon account specifically to jump into a thread and disagree with me about 'AI' hype. His example of how LLMs are adding value to the economy? They make cold calling more efficient for salespeople. Yup, spam really is the most important use case for LLM fans.

@n_dimension @courtcan @sofiav

I can't remember why I didn't block you ages ago, but you do seem to show up and insult people all over the place. I will fix that now.

@EUCommission

Imagine what you could have done if you had ignored a hype wave pushed by grifters and scammers and instead invested that money in things that will actually improve the economy and social wellbeing.

@scalzi

I have, on my bookshelf, a copy of the novelisation of the first film, published in 1977 and written by George Lucas. As a child, the second and third were repeated on TV a lot but I never saw the first one, so I grabbed the book when I saw it.

I was confused by a lot of the uproar around the restored scenes in the remastered ones, because things like the scene with Jabba were in the novelisation.

The title of the book is:

Star Wars: From the adventures of Luke Skywalker.

@davidgerard

I wish them all of the success that Buzzfeed had from the same approach.

@blp @tante

When I joined a Linux Foundation org, they required me to provide a personal email address to join as an individual member. Their registration page kept not letting me through. It turned out, after contacting support, that ‘personal’ meant ‘with a domain from this small allow list of major providers’. Their entire infrastructure assumes that no individual would own their own domain or host their own email. I can think of nothing that better highlights how far they are from the principles of the F/OSS movement.

They are an also just incredibly bad at everything. All of their hosted infrastructure is terrible. Far worse than an6 other organisation, including ones where the IT infrastructure organisation is ‘some nerd spending an hour or two every month’.

I met my new next-door neighbour yesterday and immediately demonstrated that I knew how to break into her house without damaging anything. Which, at least, prevented the locksmith from doing some quite expensive damage to the door to let her back in (his plan at the time). I have no idea if that’s a good or bad first impression.

@harrysintonen That showed up as ‘disabled’ for me when I went to the settings page. I think it’s been there for a while, I vaguely remember turning it off a while ago.

@mkljczk @jonxion @libreoffice

It's been many years since I actually read the specifications, but I was not convinced that ODF was particularly good in this regard this when I did.

OOXML had a bunch of things like the infamous 'typeset like Word 97' entry, but they were clearly marked in OOXML as for legacy compatibility (like emoji in Unicode, until the Unicode Consortium went silly). It also has a bunch of things like assuming everyone knows how the Windows GDI drawing model works. It is an objectively terrible standard.

ODF and OOXML were both rushed through standardisation too quickly and both were bad specifications.

ODF was much shorter than OOXML and that was partly because a lot of things were underspecified, people implementing it just did what OpenOffice did and had to use OpenOffice as a reference because it was the only way to know what you needed.

It is uncontroversial to say that OOXML is terrible. But it is a logical fallacy to say 'X is bad, Y is not X, therefore Y is good.

@wwahammy

If I’m reading this PR correctly, it doesn’t comply with the California law, which requires the OS (some system component, such as systemd) to have the date of birth but provide only a 2-bit signal to the application and not their date of birth. The law is designed to provide a simple ‘user is over 18’ signal for all adults and to not permit apps to see their date of birth. There are issues if an app can poll the 2-bit signal over time, because then they can observe when it changes and infer the date of birth. But California already has a GDPR-like law that they would likely be infringing in this case (they do not have a need to that information and collecting it without consent would place them in violation).

@lproven The thing that made me not get a Facebook account 20 years ago was reading their T&Cs and seeing that I would grant them an irrevocable, sublicensable, commercial copyright license to anything that I uploaded, for them to use for any purpose. Oh, and there was also a thing that I agreed to be liable if I didn't have the rights to grant Facebook those rights.

It's amazing to me how many companies will click through this and literally give Facebook the right to use their brand for any purpose.

@leeloo @randahl

Billionaires are certainly trying. And the FPTP system makes us quite vulnerable. On the other hand, unlike the US, we have real parties on the left. Our nominally left-wing party in government has been gradually moving to the right to the point that they look like late ‘80s Conservatives now. They thought that their biggest threat was losing votes on the right, but they just came third in a by-election with the newer left-wing party winning and the far-right party coming a fairly distant second. A poll over the weekend showed that, if only men under the age of 25 voted, we’d have a majority-Green (left wing) government in the next election, which contradicts the ‘young men are all right wing’ narrative that has been driving a lot of political strategy.

So, yes, we’re currently moving in the stupid direction, but there are signs that we may be able to course correct before it’s too late. Our far-right party (Reform Ltd) has been trying to portray itself as British MAGA, but now it’s increasingly obvious what a disaster MAGA has been in the USA, that’s far less compelling even to the racists.

We have local elections in May, which will give a strong signal of the direction of travel. And we still have several years until the next election, which is hopefully enough time for the disaster that is Trump to be inescapable and for Reform to be associated in everyone’s mind with the same kleptocracy that backed him.

@gotofritz I believe this is a special case of 'You are lying about productivity gains'.

RE: https://mstdn.social/@rysiek/116226720041425679

Louder for people at the back:

If ‘AI’ gives you a 20% productivity increase, in an economic system that rewards growth at the expense of everything else, the rational thing for any company to do is use that productivity increase to expand into new markets. This may involve some redundancies because you need different skills for the new opportunities but they will be matched by increased hiring in the other areas. If you and your competitors both see a 20% increase in productivity and you use it to make people redundant and they use it to ship more products in more areas, then they will grow at your expense. Their products will be better than yours and you will lose market share.

If you are claiming that you have redundancies because ‘AI’ is increasing productivity, then one of the following is true:

• Your leadership team does not understand market economics (in which case, investors should worry that the board has not replaced obviously incompetent leadership).
• You are an unchallengeable monopoly and have already filled all adjacent markets and have literally no possibility of growth (in which case, investors should take note and set their price predictions based on today’s revenue, with no expectation of future growth, which would wipe out over 80% of Meta’s market cap).
• You are lying about productivity gains (in which case, investors should worry about what else you’re lying about and should start prodding the SEC to investigate).