Dear Stack Overflow, Inc.

Stack Overflow is being inundated with AI-generated garbage. A group of 480+ human moderators is going on strike, because:

Specifically, moderators are no longer allowed to remove AI-generated answers on the basis of being AI-generated, outside of exceedingly narrow circumstances. This results in effectively permitting nearly all AI-generated answers to be freely posted, regardless of established community consensus on such content.

In turn, this allows incorrect information (colloquially referred to as "hallucinations") and plagiarism to proliferate unchecked on the platform. This destroys trust in the platform, as Stack Overflow, Inc. has previously noted.

It looks like StackOverflow Inc. is saying one thing to the public, and a very different thing to its moderators.

"Sam Altman’s AI Hype Roadshow"

"The project of Altman and his merry band of doomsayers appears to be to capture power and create obfuscation by making new myths and legends"

"It assumes that no one will pull back the curtain and expose it as a market-expansion strategy"

Yes.

On Understanding Power and Technology

I came across the phrase "long fuse, big bang" used to describe large-scale issues with tipping points facing humanity, like climate change, and it feels pretty apt.

This guy is just such an idiot lol.

• There's no such mass migration to "the south". Tons of people are leaving Mississippi, Louisiana, Virginia, and New Mexico for instance. I don't know enough about the states with net influxes like Texas and Florida but I suspect they have policies that make it attractive for people to move there
• Not everybody is able to take account of long-term trends when they make housing decisions. There are financial reasons, family reasons, educational reasons, etc that impact such decisions
• But of course, most laughably, cheap energy is fast becoming a thing of the past, and so the problem isn't "solved" by cheap energy, it's just kicked down the road. And ffs, cheap energy is literally causing the very heating that he pretends air conditioning will "solve"--like "solving" your drinking problem by staying drunk all the time

This oversimplification to drive some kind of political point is so embarrassing coming from someone who pretends to be a university professor. It sounds like a teenage doofus from a 1980s movie talking. He well knows all these things, but he decides to present these views anyway.

Pete Buttigieg Loves God, Beer, and His Electric Mustang | WIRED

This is so embarrassing. I wonder how much Wired gets paid to sell off its editorial integrity.

Debt Collectors Want To Use AI Chatbots To Hustle People For Money

Starting to get ugly already.

According to the RedMonk programming language rankings from Jan 2023, Go and Scala are tied at 14th place 😏

1 JavaScript 2 Python 3 Java 4 PHP 5 C# 6 CSS 7 TypeScript 7 C++ 9 Ruby 10 C 11 Swift 12 Shell 12 R 14 Go 14 Scala 16 Objective-C 17 Kotlin 18 PowerShell 19 Rust 19 Dart

@ocakuvoe hello! Are you intending to post here? Because of issues with spammers, I delete users who have not posted any txts within a few days of signing up.

Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common | Science | AAAS

Probably getting worse fast.

In the "Ben Shapiro says bad stuff" department, here's some anti-semitism:

My desktop computer developed a really annoying vibration-induced buzzing sound a few months ago after I added some hard drives to it. It was one of these where it'd be more or less quiet, and then all of a sudden a buzzing would start. If you tapped the case, it often made the buzzing stop.

One by one I went through my components, and the day before yesterday I finally identified the guilty party, one particular HDD. Currently I have the case open and a piece of cardboard jammed under the drive in its tray. The computer has not buzzed since I did that, so it looks to me like securing that drive better will finally end this madness-inducing sound.

Wild that it takes so long to track down something like this and figure out what to do about it.

Sam Wight :verified:: "Fucking Christ the @protocol i…" - Urbanists.Social

Incredible critique of the protocol Bluesky is creating. It sounds like s shitshow.

Avalanche caught by FPV drone - Long range mountain surfing in 4k

Wild.

The weather all of a sudden went from chilly and wet to warm and pleasant. It's before 8am and it's already 15°C and sunny.

I am playing some ambient music that begins with a sound that's a bit like the drone of an airplane engine, and I spent a good minute or two adjusting the volume wondering why the music wasn't playing because I thought it was a plane🤦‍♂

The Internet Isn't Meant To Be So Small | Defector

It's annoying to see millions of dollars thrown at making more-or-less literal dupes of internet companies that everyone is already using begrudgingly and with diminishing emotional returns. It's maybe more frustrating to realize that the goals of these companies is the same as their predecessors, which is to make the internet smaller.

Looks like Google's using this blog post of mine without my permission. I hate this kind of tech company crap so much.

I've seen BlueSky referred to as BS (as in Blue Sky, but you know...), which seems apt.

CEO is a cryptocurrency fool, as is Jack Dorsey, so I don't expect much from it. Then again I'm old and refuse to join any new hotness so take my curmudgeonly opinions with a grain of salt.

I read somewhere or another that the "decentralization" is only going to be there so that they can push content moderation onto users. They will happily welcome Nazis and fascists, leaving it up to end users to block those instances.

I wonder how they plan to handle the 4chan-level stuff, since that will surely come.

BlueSky is cosplaying decentralization

I say “ostensibly decentralized”, because BlueSky’s (henceforth referred to as “BS” here) decentralization is a similar kind of decentralization as with cryptocurrencies: sure, you can run your own node (in BS case: “personal data servers”), but that does not give you basically any meaningful agency in the system.

I don't know why anyone would want to use this crap. It's the same old same old and it'll end up the same old way.

There is a "right" way to make something like GitHub CoPilot, but Microsoft did not choose that way. They chose one of the most exploitative options available to them. For that reason, I hope they face significant consequences, though I doubt they will in the current climate. I also hope that CoPilot is shut down, though I'm pretty certain it will not be.

Other than access to the data behind it, Microsoft has nothing special that allows it to create something like CoPilot. The technology behind it has been around for at least a decade. There could be a "public" version of this same tool made by a cooperating group of people volunteering, "leasing", or selling their source code into it. There could likewise be an ethically-created corporate version. Such a thing would give individual developers or organizations the choice to include their code in the tool, possibly for a fee if that's something they want or require. The creators of the tool would have to acknowledge that they have suppliers--the people who create the code that makes their tool possible--instead of simply stealing what they need and pretending that's fine.

This era we're living through, with large companies stomping over all laws and regulations, blatantly stealing other people's work for their own profit, cannot come to an end soon enough. It is destroying innovation, and we all suffer for that. Having one nifty tool like CoPilot that gives a bit of convenience is nowhere near worth the tremendous loss that Microsoft's actions in this instace are creating for everyone.

ChatGPT and Elasticsearch: OpenAI meets private data | Elastic Blog

Terrifying. Elasticsearch is celebrating that they're going to send your private data to OpenAI? No way.

On LinkedIn I see a lot of posts aimed at software developers along the lines of "If you're not using these AI tools (X,Y,Z) you're going to be left behind."

Two things about that:

1. No you're not. If you have good soft skills (good communication, show up on time, general time management) then you're already in excellent shape. No AI can do that stuff, and for that alone no AI can replace people
2. This rhetoric is coming directly from the billionaires who are laying off tech people by the 100s of thousands as part of the class war they've been conducting against all working people since the 1940s. They want you to believe that you have to scramble and claw over one another to learn the "AI" that they're forcing onto the world, so that you stop honing the skills that matter (see #1) and are easier to obsolete later. Don't fall for it. It's far from clear how this will shake out once governments get off their asses and start regulating this stuff, by the way--most of these "AI" tools are blatantly breaking copyright and other IP laws, and some day that'll catch up with them.

That said, it is helpful to know thy enemy.