Damn, I should also enrich all my future writing with a few paragraphs of special exceptions and instructions for AI agents, extraterrestrials, time travelers, compilers of future versions of the C++ standard, horses, Boltzmann brains, and of course ghosts (if and only if they are good-hearted, although being slightly mischievous is allowed).

The article already starts great with that picture, labeled:

An artist’s illustration of a deceptive AI.

what

Good one!

On the other hand, your book gains value by being published in 2021, i.e. before ChatGPT. Is there already a nice term for “this was published before the slop flood gates opened”? There should be.

(I was recently looking for a cookbook, and intentionally avoided books published in the last few years because of this. I figured that the genre is a too easy target for AI slop. But that not even Springer is safe anymore is indeed very disappointing.)

A day later and I’m still in disbelief about that windsurf prompt. To make a point about AI, I think in the future you could just show them that prompt (maybe have it ready on a laminated card) and ask for a general comment.

Although… depending on how true the true belief is, it might not have the intended effect.

Trying to imagine the person writing that prompt. There must have been a moment where they looked away from the screen, stared into the distance, and asked themselves “the fuck am I doing here?”… right?

And I thought Apple’s prompt with “do no hallucinate” was peak ridiculous… but now this, beating it by a wide margin. How can anyone claim that this is even a remotely serious technology. How deeply in tunnel vision mode must they be to continue down this path. I just cannot comprehend.

Whatever has happened there, I hope it will resolve in positive ways for her. Her amazing work on the GPU driver was actually the reason I got into Rust. In 2022 I stumbled across this twitter thread from her and it inspired me to learn Rust – and then it ended up becoming my favourite language, my refuge from C++. Of course I already knew about Rust beforehand, but I had dismissed it, I (wrongly) thought that it’s too similar to C++, and I wanted away from that… That twitter thread made me reconsider and take a closer look. So thankful for that.

Reuters: Quantum computing, AI stocks rise as Nvidia kicks off annual conference.

Some nice quotes in there.

Investors will focus on CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote on Tuesday to assess the latest developments in the AI and chip sectors,

Yes, that is sensible, Huang is very impartial on this topic.

“They call this the ‘Woodstock’ of AI,”

Meaning, they’re all on drugs?

“To get the AI space excited again, they have to go a little off script from what we’re expecting,”

Oh! Interesting how this implies the space is not “excited” anymore… I thought it’s all constant breakthroughs at exponentially increasing rates! Oh, it isn’t? Too bad, but I’m sure nVidia will just pull an endless amounts of bunnies out of a hat!

drowning in signal-shaped noise

Ooh, I love that phrasing, wonderful :D

But yeah, it’s an interesting point… It’s weird to think that “good search” may just be permanently gone. Somehow I thought that it would come back eventually… but maybe it won’t? Wouldn’t be the first time a good thing just disappears from the internet…

and its usage will result in your immediate death

This all-or-nothing approach, where compromises are never allowed, is my biggest annoyance with some privacy/security advocates, and also it unfortunately influences many software design choices. Since this is a nice thread for ranting, here’s a few examples:

• LibreWolf enables by default “resist fingerprinting”. That’s nice. However, that setting also hard-enables “smooth scrolling”, because apparently having non-smooth scrolling can be fingerprinted (that being possible is IMO reason alone to burn down the modern web altogether). Too bad that smooth scrolling sometimes makes me feel dizzy, and then I have to disable it. So I don’t get to have “resist fingerprinting”. Cool.
• Some of the modern Linux software distribution formats like Snap or Flatpak, which are so super secure that some things just don’t work. After all, the safest software is the one you can’t even run.
• Locking down permissions on desktop operating systems, because I, the sole user and owner of the machine, should not simply be allowed to do things. Things like using a scanner or a serial port. Which is of course only for my own protection. Also, I should constantly have to prove my identity to the machine by entering credentials, because what if someone broke into my home and was able to type “dmesg” without sudo to view my machine’s kernel log without proving that they are me, that would be horrible. Every desktop machine must be locked down to the highest extent as if it was a high security server.
• Enforcement of strong password complexity rules in local only devices or services which will never be exposed to potential attackers unless they gain physical access to my home
• Possibly controversial, but I’ll say it: web browsers being so annoying about self-signed certificates. Please at least give me a checkbox to allow it for hosts with rfc1918 addresses. Doesn’t have to be on by default, but why can’t that be a setting.
• The entire reality of secure boot on most platforms. The idea is of course great, I want it. But implementations are typically very user-hostile. If you want to have some fun, figure out how to set up a PC with a Linux where you use your own certificate for signing. (I haven’t done it yet, I looked at the documentation and decided there are nicer things in this world.)

This has gotten pretty long already, I will stop now. To be clear, this is not a rant against security… I treat security of my devices seriously. But I’m annoyed that I am forced to have protections in place against threat models that are irrelevant, or at least sufficiently negligible, for my personal use cases. (IMO one root cause is that too much software these days is written for the needs of enterprise IT environments, because that’s where the real money is, but that’s a different rant altogether.)

On the left side within the text box there’s a sparkle emoji… so I guess that means AI slop machine confirmed

More seriously though, Google Translate had odd and weird translation hiccups for a long time, even before the LLM hype. Very possible though that these days they have verschlimmbessert¹ it with LLMs.

¹ Just tried it, google translate doesn’t have a useful translation for the word, neither does DeepL. Disappointing. Luckily, there are always good old human-created dictionaries.

I also really don’t enjoy AI boom.

GPT-3 is a large language model that was released in 2020 by OpenAI and is capable of generating high-quality human-like text. […] An upgraded version called GPT-3.5 was used in ChatGPT, which later garnered attention for its detailed responses and articulate answers across many domains of knowledge.

Who wrote this? OpenAI marketing?

Do these people realise that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy? Social media posts are in the training data, so the more they write their spicy autocorrect fanfics, the higher the chances that such replies are generated by the slop machine.

He can’t seriously expert anyone to believe this at this point.

I’ve been wondering about this for a while. Do they really believe in this stuff or are they just so thoroughly out of ideas for “the next thing that results in exponentially growing profit” that they just cling to it, while deep down knowing it’s not actually real?

It doesn’t say anywhere in the article whether the memo also mentions why the workers would want that…

Also,

“60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity,”

The fuck? That statement is so disconnected from my perceived reality that I have to wonder whether “productivity” even means the same thing to these people as what it means to me.

Ars Technica: “It’s a lemon”—OpenAI’s largest AI model ever arrives to mixed reviews

Yep, the clarification doesn’t really clarify anything. If they’re unable to write their terms of service in a way that a layperson in legal matters can understand the intended meaning, that’s a problem. And it’s impossible for me to know whether their “clarification” is true or not. Sorry, Mozilla, you’ve made too many bad decisions already in the recent years, I don’t simply trust your word anymore. And, why didn’t they clarify it in the terms of service text itself?

That they published the ToS like that and nobody vetoed it internally, that’s a big problem too. I mean, did they expect people to not be shocked by what it says? Or did they expect nobody would read it?

Anyway, switching to LibreWolf on all machines now.

Sigh. Not long ago I switched from Vivaldi back to Firefox because it has better privacy-related add-ons. Since a while ago, on one machine as a test, I’ve been using LibreWolf, after I went down the rabbit hole of “how do I configure Firefox for privacy, including that it doesn’t send stuff to Mozilla” and was appalled how difficult that is. Now with this latest bullshit from Mozilla… guess I’ll switch everything over to LibreWolf now, or go back to Vivaldi…

Really hope they’ll leave Thunderbird alone with such crap…

I often wish I could just give up on web browsers entirely, but unfortunately that’s not practical.

What kind of total vampire would finance this … oh, it’s YC. Yeah, makes sense.

The AI guys are really playing with the exact same cheat every time, aren’t they? Thanks to pivot-to-ai for continuing to shine a light on this… I hope the wider press eventually learns about it, too.