• 6 Posts
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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: January 24th, 2024

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  • (1) shouldn’t be paywalled in a way unfair to authors and reviewers – they pay the journals, not the other way around –

    Yes of course. It’s not at all relevant?

    (2) closed-source artificially intelligent word guessers make money off of content that isn’t their own, in ways that said content-makers have little agency or say, without contributing back to the sum of human knowledge by being open-source or transparent

    Yeah that’s why I’m pro-AI, not only is it very literally transparent and most models open-weight, and most libraries open-source, but it’s making knowledge massively more accessible.

    I used to teach people to Google, but there is no point, now it’s like a dark pattern, with very little reward for a lot of effort, because everything, especially YouTube is now a grift. Now I teach them how to proompt without also rotting their brain by outsourcing actual intellectual work rather than pure fact-finding.

    Yes it is a bit shit at being correct, it hallucinates, but frankly to paraphrase Turing, infallibility is not a quality of intelligence.

    And more practically if Joe Schmoe can’t think critically and has to trust unquestionably then I’d rather he trust gippity than the average Facebook schizo.

    With that in mind I see no reason not to feed it products of the scientific method, the most rigorous and highest solution to the problems of epistemology we’ve come up with thus far.

    but about the lack of self-determination and transparency

    Because frankly if you actually read the terms and conditions when you signed up to Facebook and your weird computer friends were all scoffing at the privacy invasion and if you listened to the experts then you and these artists would not feel like you were being treated unfairly, because not only did you allow it to happen, you all encouraged it. Now that it might actually be used for good, you are upset. It’s disheartening. I’m sorry, most of you signed it all away by 2006. Data is forever.

    an artist getting their style copied

    So if I go to an art gallery for inspiration I must declare this in a contract too? This is absurd. But to be fair I’m not surprised. Intellectual property is altogether an absurd notion in the digital age, and insanity like “copyrighting styles” is just the sharpest most obvious edge of it.

    I think also the fearmongering about artists is overplayed by people who are not artists. For all it’s worth I’ve never heard this vehement anti-AI take outside of like Twitter and Reddit comment sections and I know plenty of artists, and those I do actually follow e.g. on YT are actually either skeptical but positive or using it already as part of their workflow even if they do have criticisms of the industry.

    (Which I do of course too, in the sense that there should not be any industry for as long as the oppression of capital reigns supreme.)

    Actually the only prolific individual of any kind that has voiced this opinion that I’m aware of is Hbomberguy who is self-admittedly a bit of an idiot, and it is obviously a tacked on claim with no real nuance or addressing of opposing views or sources for even the basic claims (which are completely wrong) at the end of a video about a completely different topic that makes the video seem more relevant and topical than it is.


  • You can’t. You either go into work and learn to solve complex problems or pivot to something else. For me it was the latter, I’m IT brainlet now, but every time I come back to brushing up on programming there’s like no middle ground with projects, I don’t have the time or really energy to commit to building a 3D video game engine in C, and learning pointer arithmetic for multiple iterators all just to make a palindrome checker CLI feels lame.





  • No? There’s a pretty good reason every criminal used telegram. I’ve never seen any attempts at combatting anonymity much less censorship.

    Likely TG got unbanned in Russia for cooperating with LEOs there, but while awful, that doesn’t really matter if you’re a westerner, even Ukrainian armed forces used it, and for the average substance enjoyer it was still much safer to use than any Five Eyes app due to its intentional highly decentralised complexity, and unlike Signal it actually works and is pleasant to use. Now they are straight up handing data over to British cops.







  • All those people are either masters at making use of little space (if you’ve ever seen electroboom’s set in that one LTT video yk tho he ain’t euro) or they’ve got a much bigger space (e.g. house, maybe even detached) than they’re letting on. There’s a good reason lots of tech YTers are from Texas.

    There’s also ofc some folks who just live drowning in garbage from various projects, but you won’t know about them.

    The maker spaces, and more specifically in my xp in London - hackspaces are cramped kindergartens









  • Because more money buys you more time.

    If you got 7 hours and 500 bucks, you’ve got 7 hours.

    Why? Because you’ve paid people to take care of all your chores.

    If you’ve got 7 hours and 0 bucks, you’ve got 0 hours.

    Why? Well you’re taking the bus to the discount grocery store, you’re doing your laundry, cooking your meals, you’re commuting 1.5 hours each way on broken trains to work and pay £20 for the privilege, you’re looking for new jobs because you think you’ll be fired, and then you won’t be able to make rent, you’re doing 1-way AI-led recorded video job interviews and pumping out cover letters and CVs for job applications, yet never heard back, you’re comparing payday loans to pay for heat, you’re listening out for debt collectors, you’re chasing up your GP for that blood test result from 6 months ago you never got, you’re trying to find a cheaper place, you’re doom scrolling your bank account balance, wondering whether you can cut down on something, anything, maybe a thicker jumper to sleep in during the winter.

    At the end of the day, you might have a few minutes to kiss your partner, or apologize to a friend you still haven’t got back to for weeks, and not much else.

    So yes, most people cannot afford hobbies. The only thing people can risk it on is something that promises lots of money and an escape from misery, and it’s almost always a grift.

    Now there’s no such thing as a hobby coder, it confuses the average person that someone could, as an adult, just make an app for them and their friends, as just a fun thing, as art, as expression or project or whatever. I always tell my coworkers I’m studying for qualifications, but I’m really just learning active directory because it’s interesting.

    It is only a thing you either grind for to make money through and pay your dues to the tutorial grifter culture promising big bucks selling endless courses on YouTube by people who are suspiciously not themselves employed as software engineers, or you don’t do it at all.