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63··on GTA 5 actor goes nuclear on AI company that made a voice chatbot of him
It's not just one streamer doing this. There are services[0] providing tons of presumably unlicensed tts voices to any streamers who want them and I've seen them all over the place. It really bothers me how little thought people are putting into this before doing it.

[0]https://tts.monster/

63··on Twitch lays off 500 staff
35% holy shit. Regardless of whether twitch really needed all those people, it can't feel great to see 1/3 of your coworkers gone, or 1/2 compared to a year ago
63··on Men are hitting on my scheduling bot because it has a woman's name
This isn't to excuse inappropriate behavior, but I do think that we should clearly label bots whenever possible to avoid embarrassments similar to this where one party knows it's a bot and the other doesn't.
63··on The curious case of the Raspberry Pi in the network closet (2019)
From the OP on Reddit at the time:

Good points. The problem is, there are over 1000 people coming and going every day, the site has a BYOD strategy and the IT team is 4 people. We tried implementing 802.1X for LAN devices but it was soo much overhead that we dropped that.

The thing of this case is that the person was only able to place the Pi there because he had a key to the network closet. That's game over no matter how many security protocols you implement

We did change the server passwords though

63··on Debian Statement on the Cyber Resilience Act
A lot of folks seem very angry about this and are making some broad statements with no specific citations. Can someone please give me a specific quote from the bill and explain how that will for sure be detrimental to open source projects?
63··on Ask HN: Best offline LLM in case OpenAI goes rogue?
I'm having a really hard time understanding what's going on here.

> I'm moderating a subreddit with positive potential

What exactly is "positive potential" in this context? Just like... being respectful and kind? I'll assume that's what this means but it's an odd way to phrase it.

> I want to set the stage with a few bots ("bot" would be in their name and flair) having positive conversations matching the tone I want to set in the community.

You want the bots to talk to each other? What's the point? The conversations will likely not make total sense and be vague and unhelpful and fill your subreddit with spam that no one wants to read. I go to forums explicitly because I do NOT want to hear from a bot. If I want to talk to or hear from an LLM, I'll seek one out myself.

> I am concerned about the failure case of OpenAI going rogue and starting to disobey its instructions to be positive and solution-oriented.

You think... OpenAI specifically is going to reprogram its api so that its LLMs intentionally go against instructions? What could possibly give you this impression? Maybe you meant that you're worried about hallucinations that accidentally disobey which imo is a much more valid concern, but in that case I'd say you're much better off with a large, moderated, paid model exactly like what OpenAI offers rather than a tiny local one anyway. I have major issues with this premise but let's assume it makes any sense for the rest of this.

> I would like to be one step ahead of the game and set up a known-good, airgapped LLM in case OpenAI goes rogue.

We're talking about spamming a subreddit here,(presumably) not people's lives. If there's a report that your spam bots are being disrespectful, shut them down when that happens. I don't think you need to plan for this "failure case" ahead of time. Maybe focus on the failure case where all your potential community members say "I don't want to use a subreddit full of bot spam" and leave.

> I don't think it needs to engage in higher level reasoning, the ability to string together simple coherent sentences with positive sentiments would be enough as a fall-back

What exactly is the point of these bots if all they do is spew niceties without substance? If you're looking to give examples of what respectful behavior looks like, wouldn't it be better to just write up 5 or 6 examples yourself (without or without help from an LLM) and put them in a sticky post?

> I can also use it as a filter to make sure OpenAI does not begin to use negative words.

I think it's misguided to trust local LLMs more than OpenAI's LLMs in their current state.

I am tremendously baffled by this request. I don't think what you're trying to achieve is worth aiming for, nor do I think the steps you're taking to achieve it make sense, nor does your reasoning about it make sense.

Am I the one who's fundamentally misunderstanding something here? Can you give a specific example of what the bots would say and the effect you think that would have on your subreddit?

63··on Positive news from 2023
You may be working with different definitions of "technology." Certainly there are fields which are primarily negative and should slow down, just not all of them because "technology" is an infinitely broad term.
63··on How I made a 3D Modeler in C
Maybe it's standard, but to someone who's not familiar with 3d modeling tools, the idea of being able to control one with a game controller is brilliant. That makes it seem much less intimidating
63··on The Rise and Fall of the 'IBM Way'
> But ask an ordinary person under the age of 40 what exactly IBM does (or did), and the responses will be vague at best. “Something to do with computers, right?” was the best the Gen Zers I queried could come up with. If a Millennial knows anything about IBM, it’s Watson, the company’s prototype AI system that prevailed on Jeopardy in 2011.

I find this attitude to be fairly trite and disingenuous. Maybe we should ask millennials and zoomers what exactly it is that Goldman Sachs does or Dow or Cisco or any other large company that doesn't sell majority direct to consumer and see if we get a more intelligible answer. Just because a company isn't selling to you specifically doesn't mean it's a failure. I'm happy to criticize IBM, but let's do it for legitimate reasons (trend chasing, perhaps?) and not "my 16 year old doesn't know what they do so they must not be relevant"

63··on EVE Online – Down the Rabbit Hole [video]
Maybe watch the hurdy gurdy video side by side, I believe there's a filmed section of the narrator in there. He's been making these highly detailed videos for a long time and has spent years on this video alone. I highly doubt there's any AI involved.

Edit: not sure when this happened but it appears many videos of his face have been removed from both channels so maybe don't go looking since it seems he doesn't want to be found but rest assured that Fredrik Knudsen is a real person who just sounds like that

63··on Advent of Code 2023 is nigh
Oh I understand. That's a good idea. Honestly I only ever use regex for AOC so I never would've thought of using it like that. I'll keep it in mind. Thanks!
63··on Advent of Code 2023 is nigh
I'm sorry I'm not familiar with the mathematics behind regular expressions. Can you give an example of what your approach would look like?
63··on Advent of Code 2023 is nigh
Yeah I mean I did think of that but after spending all that time figuring out Regex I was decided to commit as fully as I could until it was 3am and I had to go to bed. There were lots of alternative solutions I thought of but chose to ignore out of stubborness. I'm admit, a good bit of the frustration was my own fault (but also c'mon this was way harder than any day 1 we've had before)
63··on Advent of Code 2023 is nigh
Definitely not but it was the most elegant solution that I could think of right away, so I committed to it. In hindsight, it would've been relatively easy to solve with some loops and no dependencies but hey, I wouldn't have learned so much about the rust regex ecosystem that way.
63··on Advent of Code 2023 is nigh
Ah jeez I totally missed this crate! Thanks!! I had originally gone with Onig because of a SO post you made years ago. Fancy-regex substituted right in and worked immediately. Much appreciation for all you do
63··on Advent of Code 2023 is nigh
It's more whimsical. There's a clear end with less pressure and an excited community to discuss with. At least that's what it's like for me (though I do also enjoy leetcode occasionally to be fair)
63··on Advent of Code 2023 is nigh
Day one part 2 was relatively rough. Things I learned from it: rust regex crate doesn't support look-ahead, rust onig crate is currently broken in many ways and shouldn't be used (the version in crates.io doesn't compile and the version on GitHub is failing tests and look-ahead isn't working). It was a very frustrating time for me. After 2 hours of troubleshooting the above I used the same approach in python and it took 2 minutes to write. So annoying.
63··on The dead children we must see
Same here. I know the kids are dying, some of my closest friends share pictures every day and then denounce everyone who unfollows them for being against their existence. I'm sorry. What do all the journalists and activists want me to do? Odds are I've already done it. Please stop telling me about it, I know. I'm not turning away because I don't care about the kids, I'm turning away because the more we keep this up the less I'm able to care about anything. I just need a break but they make you feel like shit for it. And maybe I should feel like shit for choosing to ignore suffering because I can't keep looking idk. I'm just so tired.

In any case, I thought the place with articles about the intricacies of pointers in C++ would be safe from the politics and dead children. Clearly I was wrong.

63··on Minosoft: Open-source Minecraft client, written from scratch
Sounds like it's only a client. Still very impressive and might be helpful for some people, but not really where the performance bottleneck is most of the time.

The same thing done for a survival server implementation would be a lot more interesting and useful.

63··on Programming as a career isn't right for me
This resonates with me a lot. During our most recent sprint planning, our team was given a task that's much larger than we've gotten before and I was asked if I thought we'd have the time for all this extra development work. My answer was yes, we have the time. We've always had the time. Not once have I been bottlenecked by a lack of my own time for writing code, it's always been because we need wait days to get permission and support to do anything.
63··on Programming as a career isn't right for me
> I aspire to settle the substantial $65,000 student loan burden that granted me the “privilege” of contributing to someone else’s vision during the conventional 9-to-5 grind.

It's crazy to me that we let people do this to themselves. There's no reason a student should have to take out that much debt for their degree and I'd bet there were probably ways for OP to avoid it if the right people were there to help. Ultimately it's a huge systemic issue in the US but it's also an issue with bad high school guidance counselors not helping students navigate the broken system

63··on Fluent Search
I'll add this to my list of essential Windows apps that should be built-in, right alongside PowerToys, Process Explorer, and Chocolatey. I wish there was a mainstream competitor that could force MS to make a decent OS again (I already use Linux, but most people don't and it sure doesn't seem to be in a strong enough position to put any pressure on MS)
63··on Nothing's iMessage app was a security catastrophe, taken down in 24 hours
iMessage is one of the primary moats keeping a lot of people on iPhone. I'm not necessarily as sure as the parent comment that the c-suite was briefed or anything, but I do think that iMessage exclusivity is pretty important to Apple
63··on I cancelled my Replit subscription
Given the author's sentiment at the end of the article I'd say that's unlikely, but even if it was that's kind of irrelevant to the point at hand.
63··on Android App Devs now require 20 people to test before publishing to Play Store
They could also start ordering search results by relevancy or quality instead of propensity to make money, but that won't happen either
63··on The Software Engineer's Guidebook
Is that even possible? I'm currently the lowest of the low code monkey with no extra responsibilities but I code for maybe 10% of my time if that. Mostly I coordinate with other people to get info about what's broken this week and when it will be fixed and how soon we can deploy the code that I wrote in 5 minutes last week and who I need to get on board for it. I kind of get it to some extent, code is a liability that's expensive to maintain, but my god it's mind numbing some days. The idea of spending 80% of my time coding is absurd. I'd settle for 25%.
63··on IBM Rebus
Lots, but very little of it faces the direct public and what little does isn't advertised as from IBM. The company is largely divided into a consulting, research, product development, and mainframes with that last one on its way out (though in all fairness it's been "on its way out" for 30+ years). As other commenters noted, a big portion of the consulting work is for governments because IBM is a trusted brand in the US and frankly is already large enough to have lots of salespeople to work on RFPs and developers who are already used to working slow. They also do a lot of B2B work though. The consulting work IBM does obviously varies per client but it's more modern than the sibling comment insinuates. Their strategy was focused on hybrid multicloud for a few years (the Redhat acquisition was a major part of this so they could push Openshift on customers) but very recently they're trying to make a hard shift to generative AI. IBM's research is even less public than their consulting projects but they love to advertise their work in quantum computing and I've heard they work on patents for chip manufacturing to sell to TSMC and others (don't quote me on this one, it's definitely not my area of expertise). Product development is responsible for maintaining all the proprietary IBM software that they promised to upkeep for god knows how long even though nobody in their right mind actually uses it anymore. At least that's my understanding. They probably do other more relevant things too. IBM does truthfully do interesting work, but they don't really sell to the public anymore so the public only knows them as "that big company that made computers in the 80s and somehow still exists." They also have a big multinational presence I've heard. Lots of expansion in India.
63··on Right turn on red? With pedestrian deaths rising, US cities are considering bans
It wasn't on my driver's exam iirc and it hasn't been that long since I took it.
63··on Discord will switch to temporary file links to block malware delivery
I can see how this could be annoying in some contexts e.g. going to some project's discord to get answers to a question, searching a channel and finding the perfect answer from awhile back but then not being able to download the file that was attached at the time. I don't think that's super likely to happen though. IME most answers I've searched for were entirely encapsulated in text anyway. The larger problem of using a discord server for such projects still exists, but I don't think this makes it all that much worse.
63··on Python Expertise Level – Self-Assessment
> Understands and uses metaclasses

In most circumstances, I feel like using metaclasses is a red flag. How many people are there on earth who understand and regularly use meta classes when they're appropriate? I always pegged metaclasses as "you should know this exists in case you ever get unlucky enough to need it but otherwise stay the hell away from it"

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