Just downloaded both, will give them a try - thsnks for the recommendation!

Half a byte: 4 bits

Stick them both in a bag, hit it with a stick, you’ll always hit the correct one.

The Black Panthers, founded 1966, had nothing to do with the fact that people started avoiding the malls in Nashville because of the violence that had transpired there in 1960, or the fact that four thousand people confronted the mayor about his failure to stop that violence. Violence, critically, that could not be pinned on the demonstratively nonviolent students, who then made a point of doing their penal labour with the enthusiasm of youths trying to prove that they’re not, in fact, troublemakers, but actually cooperative community members.

That violence can achieve things is hardly novel, nor do I deny it. It is a tool, and if used right, it can effect change. The trouble the US had with the insutgents in the middle east is a wonderful example of the power that well-supported and organised resistance can achieve with violence.

I simply deny the claims that it’s the only effective tool, nor that it is effective by itself.

The Panthers, for all their laudable bravery, lacked the rigorous discipline and organisation of the CORE, SNCC or SCLC. Once people flocked to their image of militant resistance, they lost their grassroots nature of feeding kids and treating the sick. They made a half-hearted attempt to stop the law against carrying loaded weapons in public, but it turns out that thirty people with guns who didn’t even know the way can’t have the same impact as a few thousand people without guns marching in stoic unity. They also lacked the political appeal: While the firefighters in Birmingham (1963) eventually refused to keep turning their fire hoses on children at the police’s behest, no such qualms were had about attacking militant insurgents.

The key with any tool is to use it correctly. If you’re gonna pick a fight with the state, make sure you’re better prepared than the Panthers. Learn from their mistakes, learn from the successes of the SNCC and SCLC and learn some military theory about targeting the will of the opponent rather than reducing war to pure bloodshed.

If you don’t want to read a book, maybe a blog post is more digestible?

Against the State – A Primer on Terrorism, Insurgency and Protest

Some

Who?

would argue that it is the opposite of being a Nazi.

If they would, I’d love to hear how membership in an organisation centered on hatred against a non-Aryan culture is the opposite of being a Nazi.

(Besides, membership in the EDL is hardly the only indictment against Robinson)

I want to not see him at all any more. I want to be able to keep up with events around the world without so much as a tired snort about him. I want him to be so unimportant, not even his death is worth reporting.

Being ignored would be the worst punishment for him, but more than that, it would be the best outcome for everyone else.

“sure yes you can hard code everything. You’d just go against basic coding conventions. The way i am being treated is making it hard staying technical. Even when the versions are being hard coded it doesnt resolve the problems with the files. But like you demand i wont say anything anymore and try magic to fix these files.”

So i wrote 2 whole things, explaining all analytical steps i took and again that i didnt say i can not connect to the files but the files cant be altered Connection: yes Query: no

From my own autistic experience, people tend to get irritated when I try to explain my reasoning or analytical steps too much. At some point, you just have to accept that they’re not gonna get it.

When I’ve had a similar situation (much less hostile, thankfully), I just implemented it as told, documented it and let it break to show them why it wasn’t working. They took me seriously after that.

But also, when you’re on the way out anyway, don’t put too much effort into doing things “right”. You don’t owe them competence. They already think you’re incompetent. If they want you to add tech debt, that’s the most legitimate way to take revenge.

I wish they’d put me on leave like i asked when i got told i get laid off.

Honestly, it’s very reckless of them to not do so. I know we had an incident where a laid-off colleague (well, contract didn’t get extended, but the result is the same) pulled some nasty shit on his last day. Management learned from that and the next time they had to fire someone, they first revoked all access, then had them surrender all company devices and wipe company data off their private devices with security watching, then put them on leave for the rest of the contract. Just safer that way.

(This is not an encouragement to take any revenge on them. That might land you in legal trouble. But you can’t get in trouble for doing exactly what they tell you to. If their instructions are stupid, that’s not your problem.)

This company, and i know it, leaves me wanting to from now on build even less friendly ties to collegues of future companies

I think the difficult part is figuring out which of your colleagues are worth building ties with. I have some that I’m friendly with, some I’m more “professional”, some I pull a face when I see their message pop up and put off reading it for as long as I can.

Some companies are shit. Not all of them are.

Ah but the thing is, the sources it finds are themselves wrong. They’re talking about different things. If it finds the right sources, the information is most likely pretty good.

That’s what I was trying to get at, yeah: The word-correlator can’t tell the difference because it can’t tell which part of the prompt is critical for the difference. It also can’t judge whether the sources themselves are accurate about the things they’re actually talking about. It find sources that seem related, then aggregates some likely response from those sources and spits it out. By its own metrics and limitations, that has to be “good enough” (but as you say, may be wildly wrong).

My suspicion is that adding more specific terms to the prompt may increase the textual “distance” between the fitting results and the irrelevant ones, thus tilting the source selection towards the more accurate match, but that requires you to know those specific terms in the first place.

It’s entirely possible that this could still be tuned somehow

With a general model? I doubt it.

A subject-specific model could probably be tweaked to recognise particular tokens and assign them more weight. Depending on the subject, you might be able to add pre-processing logic to crossreference certain keywords (like model and engine type) with some objective database (like a table describing which pumps a given motor might have, if that makes sense?).

You could also pick the training material more diligently to ensure you only have qualified, reliable sources for that subject. That would require a lot of work, since you also need enough material for the model to be representative.

And you’d have to do that for every specialised field out there.

I wouldn’t trust anything that comes out of it unless I know enough to verify the output myself, meaning it’s pretty useless to laymen (which is whom a “veracity” bot would be for)

Hit the nail on the head there. For all we know, it’ll “correct” facts by doubling down on common misconceptions.

It’s a text generator that strings together plausible word sequences. It doesn’t actually understand what an engine or a turbo is beyond the contexts and constellations in which those words frequently occur. It has no reliable way to tell which parts of the prompt are technically critical and need to match exactly.

In that way, it’s not too different from laypeople like me: I have no idea about turbos and pumps either. I still might figure out that I need to check for the specific model and engine, but without knowkng exactly what I’m dealing with, chances are I might end up trusting the same (wrong) results.

I would assume if you include the keywords BorgWarner and CP3 pump, the more specific context might bias the probability space of likely answers towards more relevant results. That makes it a potentially useful assistant for people who already have that level of expertise and are just looking for specific answers on particular cases… except you’d still have to read the actual sources to make sure.

Basically, it could serve as a more sophisticated search engine for natural language, an iteration on previous query processing and correlation technologies. If I don’t need to remember the exact wording or sender of a mail about a specific topic, a model trained on the terminology might pick out rough matches based on related words without needing to get the exact keywords right.

Frankly, I think that’s the most sensible application of LLMs: find sources, not facts. Using it for fact checking is like skating on a recently frozen lake where you can’t tell which parts are solid enough to carry you and which ones will suddenly break.

The whole thing is obviously fucked up, but one thing that stuck out to me was this:

one of the translation of the word into german is “time note”

Technical names being oriented around specific localisations are one of my pet peeves. Particularly when I’m trying to explain something to an international colleague who doesn’t speak German and can’t find the relevant, unintuitively named objects. Bonus points when the name itself is in German.

The safety things were: check that the repository exists before calling it. If not exists create it.

I could see an argument here, depending on your business context, that a missing repository shouldn’t be a “silent” fail in order to catch potential data entry errors. If the assumption is that the folder will always be there, it might be worthwhile to throw if that assumption turns out to be false.

I had a “silent” fail logic built into one of my products that ended up heavily distorting the results when it eventually turned out that the input data was heavily skewed due to sloppy human work.

Of course, given the general situation, I assume that your solution was sensible in your case. The response of “shut up” doesn’t exactly sound like “there is a good reason we want this to fail if it isn’t there”.

Before trying to send a SQL Query to the Database, check that the connection is established and open.

Uhhhhh… So, like, basic SQL connection handling? And they took issue with that?

If ever anyone brings up the stereotype of Germans being hyper-accurate to the point of being anal, I think that company is the counterexample.

I hope that Mastodon takes off and makes the Nazi platform irrelevant. For free. Independently of corporate and investor goodwill.

I called it X-twitter. I didn’t really use “tweet” though; mostly because I tend to talk about toots more than tweets.

Edit: I’ve just discovered this interesting concept called “reading the article”

Jokes aside: I think it’s great that you read the article, then went back to both acknowledge that it covered your point and admit that you didn’t before.

I should be more precise: The thing I consider harmful is the use of GenAI in producing media content.

I get that a small budget is an issue, if you can’t find volunteers helping you out. The problem is that the same method you’d resort to as a substitute for expensive human work is used to put humans out of jobs by people and companies that could afford that expensive work, but don’t want to. It cheapens the end result because it takes a shortcut around the work other people would have put in, and it harms people’s livelihood along the way.

I’ve seen endorsements of GenAI for mockups, a quick way to visualise ideas and see if that’s a direction you want to head in. Once you’ve found something to work with, using it as inspiration for human creative work is fair game. Ultimately, that’s what artists do anyway, whether they want to or not: taking inspiration from the sum of other people’s work they’ve seen and engaged with. The important part is that the result is crafted with human care and effort, and that we appreciate that effort.

That last bit is what Alive Inc. is being dragged for here: They couldn’t figure it out with human work, so they gave up and took the shortcut. And when called out, they didn’t understand that it’s not about the quality of the result alone (though that leaves a lot to be desired as well), but about the value of human creative endeavour.

Is GenAI really the only way to your vision? Sound effects have been able to achieve insane things long before GenAI became so popular. I obviously don’t know what you’re aiming for, but isn’t there some way to work with distortion, layering, pitch shifts or other sound editing methods to produce the kind of scream you want through human effort instead?

If you can’t find a human way to get that effect just the way you want it, that sucks. I get the dissatisfaction of falling short of your expectations. Note it down for a potential future update if the game nets you enough to pay someone for it or catches the eye of someone willing to contribute out of enthusiasm. Until then, as the various comments in this comment section have asserted, people will probably prefer authentic human imperfection over fake excellence.

In conclusion, the “Jihad” comparison only works if you think AI-generated content is equal to human made in value. From that position, people hating on machine work are doing so mindlessly. But that’s a difference in premises we need to be aware of: It’s not that we’re missing the mark, it’s that we’re setting the mark differently.

So if there’s a point to argue, it’s whether people are right to consider GenAI-usage for producing content harmful (and I’ll concede that my previous wording was too general; the issue is ultimately that human work is being bypassed rather than augmented).

A new and notable feature is the automated fact-checking tool, a Gemini-based “veracity engine for real-time analysis” (“Vera” for short), which runs on every tweet.

Bwahahahaa

Really? The Gemini that got Google sued and found liable for the misinformation it spread? That’s who you wanna trust to check for “veracity”?

I’m not paying a $20 entry fee into a walled garden that wastes energy and water to have a text processor guess whether my arrangement of words resembles its training material closely enough.

I’ll be happy for a free update to a game I already bought long ago. Can’t take back the purchase anyway, might as well take the freebie.

First time seeing Sxan? Þhey’e been doing þhat forever.

Some people get pissed at it because it’s bad for screen readers. I’ve never checked, but it sounds plausible. Some claim it helps confuse LLMs, poisoning training data and such. I have no idea if it works. Some find it obnoxious or weird. I feel like we have more pressing issues to worry about.

Does this actually meet the legal criteria for DDoS though?

a critique of overzealous revolutionary movements that turn into religions

Sure, but which movement are you drawing a parallel to?

The ones that promise to catapult humanity into a golden age of AI if only we turn over control to their weighted random generators, inspiring a cult of followers zealously overturning all social norms of respect and transparency, complain about attempts to protect your art from being stolen and requirements to disclose the use of AI?

Or the ones expressing their concern at the reckless fervour with which the former seek to sacrifice our future, our humanity and our lives to their silicon gods?

I see the same thing happening today with the current jihad against the machines bubbling up.

I haven’t seen any of the sceptics equate the AI used for surveillance or to rob humans of their livelihood with other types of machines. I’m sure there are some that would eliminate all forms of automation, but I don’t get the impression that the bulk of people is opposed to bots in general.

Hell, there is a significant subset of the anti-AI communities I’m in that acknowledges potential applications of LLMs. It’s when humans suffer from their abuse, paying the price for other people’s delusion and greed, that we take issue.

In this instance, the game gets hate because it’s a product of a technology we consider harmful. We don’t want to encourage use of that technology. Is that what you mean by Jihad?

Disruption and obstruction can force concessions without explicit violence.

(Edit: To clarify, I’m not claiming that violence can’t achieve anything, because we all know it can. I’m saying that nonviolence can also achieve things, because the key component isn’t the exact tool, but the strategy of using it.)

The Montgomery Bus Boycott achieved its goal without it by demonstrating the economic significance of black passengers. The Nashville Sit-ins won through the resilience of its participants without fighting back. The message in each case was “We’re going to continue being a problem until we get what we want.” The Civil Rights Movement in general achieved a lot of victories simply by being a persistent, well-coordinated nuisance.

Their discipline in staying non-violent even in the face or cruel injustice was a psychological weapon, which can win battles without firing bullets. It drew attention to that injustice, dominated news cycles until people could no longer look away. If media thrive on outrage, police violence is more effective than police suppressing terrorists.

The mistake that people make is to conflate peaceful, “polite”, lawful protest with non-violence: Protests need to be a problem. I can ignore people chanting whatever in the streets, but I can’t ignore them disrupting businesses and obstructing public places. I can try suppressing them with violence, but what if that doesn’t work, if they keep coming?

There’s a book on the topic, “Waging a good war” by Thomas E. Ricks that I found quite enlightening. The important takeaway is that there are multiple ways to win a war, and defeating the opposition’s will can work without actual violence, but the key part is still a military level of discipline and planning.