pona-a

Maybe it will just pass? Eventually maybe people will get bored of this consumerist mode of creation, of projects born with no vision or craft, made with the tastefulness of a kid smashing together their favorite toys. And when the majority finally agrees these stunts are a corrosive influence on the community, we can just approach it as a moderation problem, figure out some system of vouches and reports, or downsize and our communities until trust again becomes tractable, maybe even coming to appreciate some tactical slop as a stepping stone or a proof of concept to be eventually reverse-engineered into a maintainable human project.

Every day we are bombarded with a fresh dose of doom, on this site especially, telling us it's invalid to value programming for its own sake more than doing data-labeling for Anthropic at your own expanse. These posts are the natural counter-reaction.

The other sad thing is many people have indeed got so tangled up in the hype and superficial productivity, they have indeed temporarily forgotten they can just opt out of using a clanker, at least for their personal work and be happier, or at least find some mid-point where they aren't just burnt out meat proxies. I don't think these endless blog posts would necessarily help with that though. Like quitting an addiction, this is a very personal decision...

Or in other words, people actually have agency. They have real opinions, emotions, unique perspectives, and what not, and a robot programmer is an intellectual sex doll, ready to confirm all your previously held beliefs were always /absolutely right/.

I never queried it _automatically_, but many projects do. They might not have set out to provide that use, but what happened has happened, and breaking this implicit contract for a silly redesign is an odd choice.

I actually noticed that! I was debugging some HTTP proxy and typed out an HTTP/1.1 request by hand in netcat, and was wondering why I saw a giant blob of dynamic nonsense instead of a small bit of markup.

(This was when it had the language scroll though, I think moving the extras to JS should have resolved that issue; maybe I was misremembering the details too.)

example.com is not a user-facing service. I don't want to disparage the designer, but it's not meant to be pretty. It's meant to be small so you can copy its response to an automated test or visually verify its correctness, or just out of the bandwidth consideration you'd still be serving it to billions of requestors, even if you insist it's not meant to be used that way.

It's not even an outlandish ask. We know from say cars that physical interfaces are in some ways more efficient than LCD UIs. It's such a weird thing we don't actually have 24/7 physically staffed control rooms with such indicators and actuators alongside normal displays at large companies

Our "AI" isn't a superhuman code synthesis tool generating perfectly correct code by construction. It's an LLM wrapped in a loop, with all the context degradation it implies. Unless you also say an LLM can write a more coherent / complex story than a person, you have a much better memory of the codebase.

Despite this being a very old man take, as a young person, I think there's been a progressive deterioration of collectivist social norms. Everyone feels entitled to do as they please and become offended at the idea they, or someone else they can place their sympathy with, has to temporarily put aside their self-interest and do something for the public interest, be it some arbitrary decorum, regulation, or academic integrity. In a perverse sense of fairness, everybody will cheat their way through life, and find offense in anybody finally being prosecuted for it.

But we shouldn't use one evil to justify another, or your argument regresses to whataboutism.

This same logic applies to all the upstream education. It's convinient to have a more limited calculator in your own brain, or better yet, the ability to simply see numerical properties factors, in a way a calculator doesn't replace. It's good when you can yourself understand the physics of everyday systems, or perform useful calculations about them. And if your work is indeed tied to it, it's good to know basic semiconductor physics, even if the ordinary person has a million more immediately useful things to study.

Knowledge is not a tool for answering the absolutely minimum questions you encounter in daily life, but a way of seeing the world. Reading allows you to use language in ways you could not imagine with spoken word alone, just as math or physics or computer science enable new ways of thinking inaccessible without intense study.

Dealing with the situation would mean actually acting in your self interest instead of deferring to a cookie-cutter narrative to justify yourself as an essential meat proxy. Maybe stop feeding your data into the job destroying machine while paying for the privilege? Maybe come up with a better story for management than prompt wispersing, like at least writing your integration code yourself...

If my department ever reached a point of such disrespect for their students, I'd quit my degree on the spot. I understand what a university degree is, and wouldn't pay full tuition for this sad pantomime of one.

Okay why do we need literacy if we have such beautiful screen readers? Maybe because it's better when you actually absorb these fundamental skills rather than rely on a disability aid to relieve you of a self imposed handicap.

Idk, I think the new name sounds too corporate, like some shitty startup or wellness brand. PostmarketOS was a bit of a mouthful but it gave you some idea of what the project was. Well, if they think it's a way to reach more people, then more power to them.

If the author threw this into Claude to add some load-bearing similes to their unedited monologue, it would only make it more insufferable to anyone complaining about it now.

And there's a good reason we aren't seeing many videos edited on phones, just as programs written on iPads (RDP notwithstanding).

And what replaced it? Can you do the same tasks within that unstated "new paradigm"? Not knowing how to use a desktop computer limits you from all creative software from IDEs to video editors. That's like saying illiteracy is just a new oral paradigm.

Is it guaranteed? The most likely outcome is you get rid of both the humans to understand the research and the artificial wizard of Oz was actually just outputting nonsense, and it took killing a bunch of people to find that out.

GrapheneOS is not a cryptography project, like a secure messenger would be. It's goal is practical security, which does depend on practical considerations: without MTE, similar memory security would cost an unreasonable performance penalty, without TPM conventional authentication methods like PIN-code and fingerprint would be vulnerable to bruteforce, without secure boot users would not be able to verify if their phone was physically tampered with in a brief window they were away from it... And if you have closed-source radio chips running their own untrusted software loaded over the air, integrated in such a way they can independently wiretap you, like most phones have, you'd already failed at protecting the user before you start.

Furthermore, Android's ecosystem is structured in a way even the most basic software security concerns, like not running a comically out of date kernel, depend on the vendor's blessing, and sadly most manufacturers, including very desirable ones like Fairphone, hadn't been keeping up with such duties. Porting new kernels to old hardware is an extremely inefficient time-consuming endeavor that will take up most of volunteer time to non-satisfactory results; I can testify to that as a former member of the Ubuntu Touch project, and our standards of security were comically lax.

Again, you CAN lower your standards of security and go for the lesser evil: many people run Lineage or Ubuntu Touch despite known gaps in their security models. But to make that choice, you have to be honest about what you're compromising. If you shut your eyes and plug your ears pretending everything is fine, you'll end up with someone killed because they listened to your uncritical advise.

Also, I struggle to see how it's GrapheneOS's fault choosing the most secure hardware on the consumer market because it might be deemed suspicious to own it. GOS could have chosen the most popular budget Samsung (ignoring the aforementioned security issues) and it would have the same effect. Besides Pixels aren't an obscure unusual hackerphone made in small quantities, shipped from out of the country; it's among the most popular phone brands, advertised from huge billboards I pass on my bus route to university. If they chose something like the PinePhone like Genode, this point would be somewhat defensible.

Finally, what's up with the repeated conspiratorial insinuations about financing? I admit I hadn't looked deeply into this question, even as a one-time small donor, but what are you expecting to find? Is it serious concern about the financial health of a project, or an attempt to manufacture a hysteria around some controversial donor, similar to the Tor Project?

It is much more complex than an LLM There are thousands of human written rules to efficiently determine a fundamentally subjective ranking order, running on a uniquely large corpus.

Besides search is not a very good business: people are not inclined to pay for search, websites are averse to non-Google search crawlers, ads require an even larger over-investment in a top tier malware development, psychological manipulation, and statistics teams, while the real ad market is actually in a much more dire state than Google would like you to think.

Utter nonsense. GrapheneOS relies on explicit hardware features like MTE, TPM, and secure boot, for its threat model. Most phones don't even have that hardware, fewer still publish enough info to use it (see Samsung). You can debate if GOS is necessary for your personal needs, but the reason they are so picky is they don't want people assuming Graphene security on subpar ports.

I think few will argue it's ethically or legally fine for my website to pay by installing a keylogger through a zero-click Chromium RCE, burying it in the EULA.

That's just what a government is. The idea is you elect it democratically and bind it with a constitution.

Are people seriously routinely experiencing serious harm from social media use, comparable with alcohol or gambling addiction? The discussion may have suffered from much unnecessarily hyperbole in comparing YouTube to heroin, in how a single use guarantees unavoidable long term consequences with little redeeming qualities.

I'm a college age gen Z, and don't really think you can fix much with a social media ban alone, even ignoring all the implications if it's enforcement.

People don't get dysmorphia because some computer program told them so. The "influencers" are just other victims of a fundamentally toxic culture, or leaches on that insecurity.

You could say it used to be better before the internet, and maybe you'd be right. But all the internet enabled is just more people talking to each other about what's on their mind. As long as there are humans communicating through any medium, there will be a culture that can harbor these destructive tendencies, and the bigger more sparse that culture is, the more extreme its ideas can get.

Chronological feeds or more civic accountability for any algorithmic feeds (like forcing companies to share data with researchers to study their effects) could be a generally great initiative, but simply banning social media for anyone won't do as much as you'd hope.

Looksmaxing, the latest of these strange internet-induced mental illnesses, literally began on a phpBB forum.

Social media algorithms have increasingly promised to replace self-curation, an effort consuming higher thinking activity, with an automatic optimization of limbic responses. AI just proved to be an effective tool for stretching the base motif into an infinite series of stimulus, fulfilling that same function and winning over by volume.

Code is a human formalism that is only incidentally made executable. The elegance of code represents understanding of the problem to its most minute detail. LLM code being recognizably terrible shows it still doesn't understand what it produces to the full extent, and just as with people, it will inevitably compound to it becoming unable to efficiently work on it. And if the human abdicates that responsibility too, then there is no code, only subtly broken software.

70% seems unexpectedly high... Was there maybe some overcounting?

Yubico Authenticator https://github.com/Yubico/yubioath-flutter

I actually don't see any significant signs of AI use. There's Copilot listed in the contributor list, but I'm not seeing commits listed under it. Did they wipe it off Github?

Some seem to stamp Mostly AI based on weaker circumstantial like large init commits. Maybe it's just an artifact of human sloppiness.

Or maybe it was just the artifact of choosing these by last update, since vibe-coded apps genuinely do have an abnormal number of releases, and thus would be much more likely to show up.

The rate at which these "labs" are creating these incidents is simply staggering.

Imagine we made nuclear weapons a private industry, had CEOs bragging how they have enough warheads to blow the Earth to smithereens, and then they "accidentally" nuked three cities over a short period of time each, saying they lost control, or rather couldn't contain their semi-autonomous weapon. All somehow managing to turn the PR around from their abject incompetence and towards SciFi visions of mankind hunted by self-replicating bombs.

Yes, but does can author truly predict how they'll misread their work? Should we treat the audience as cattle to be deprived of every emotion that doesn't serve some external political goal? The author might indulge in vividly painting their setting so its more surface level reading might appear desirable, but when its evils are not even subtle but are already just actual text, can you do much more to counteract bad actors trying to sell society than same dystopia brought to life?

Re: Re: Fediverse. My point was more than indeed the Fediverse is more a technical detail than an actual cohesive platform, so it only makes sense to talk about Mastodon, whereas XMPP is more cohesive by virtue of instant messenging being a lot less opinionated.

It just so happens it splits into well-maintained projects supporting the concensus features, and dead or dying projects that don't, modulo a couple contrarians, with a couple more features floating in limbo, having finalized or draft specs that nobody really implements.

That sort of problem isn't best fixed by centralization on one client/server but just certification, which Conversations/ModernXMPP already leads.

As for apps, yes normal people aren't very conscious of what a native app is, but they do feel when their app lags on their older phone, doesn't recieve push notifications, or just looks a little odd in places, which can happen in a one size fits all app. Some of the most popular messengers, like WhatsApp or Telegram, to my knowledge use platform specific tooling, and normal people genuinely appreciate how snappy they feel.

But the issue is more so about developer time. Yes a cross platform app lets you reuse the same work everywhere, but the lead developer still has personal blind spots, and might simply not consider or be able to test things like bespoke Apple workarounds for non-iCloud/encrypted chat push.

Plus it's a communication protocol, like email; we should be expecting people reimplementing it in the weirdest of places. For software like this, the duplication of effort is what drives you to make an elegant design in the first place.