datarama / is on Nostr

By day, I'm an embedded Linux developer at an electronics manufacturer.

By night, I make pixel art.

Last Notes

2024-06-08 14:02:38

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"Computer science is the study of self-inflicted problems."
-- my old theoretical CS prof.

2024-05-28 18:15:49

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If I'm being brutally honest with myself here, I can't imagine the coincidence that "the heyday of the internet" happened to coincide with me being 18, and the awful enshittified internet happens to coincide with me being increasingly old, tired and bitter.
I think things *are* worse ... but I also remember how awful the 2000 Slashdot commentariat (and a large chunk of Usenet) was.

2024-05-22 16:06:37

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Sorry for the latency. Perhaps ironically, I had a long and tough day at work.
I'm not *at all* arguing against unions. I'm a member of one and have been so for my entire working life. There are many, many important things unions do (and, in countries where they've historically been strong, they've played a part in creating legislation that protects workers, too).

2024-05-22 06:00:13

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Right. But the WGA *wasn't* operating under conditions where their labour had lost all value (and neither were those game devs). Counterexamples include the garment workers in that very book (which is so far my favourite book for the year) - and, in more recent times, typesetters. Typesetters here had a *very* strong union (they had the power to literally stop the presses and not start them again!) - but when their work was rendered valueless, they were screwed nonetheless.

2024-05-22 05:29:49

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I'm a union member and a software developer. *Lots* of developers (and engineers in pretty much every engineering discipline) in my country are.
Unions are a defense against all sorts of labour abuse and every worker should be in one, but if full-on replacement actually becomes possible, I don't get why people think the union can protect them. The union can threaten to withhold labour, but what good is that if that labour has just been rendered valueless?

2024-05-21 21:15:55

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*Of course* it won't be kept local. Same with the "we'll listen in on your phone calls to check for scammers!" features Google is hawking.
"We're running out of high quality language data!" ... "It's a total coincidence that we've made this decision right now, but we've decided to listen in on every phone call / watch every software interaction anybody ever makes ever again".
They're after more training data.

2024-05-21 20:19:31

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Also, does anybody *really* believe that they're not going to extract whatever they deem valuable from data and use for more AI training?
"We're running out of high-quality language data" -> "It's a total coincidence, but from now on we're going to be listening in on every phone call and watching every desktop software interaction anybody ever makes ever again".

2024-05-21 20:17:03

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I think we can be absolutely sure that they extract whatever they can use as training data from it.
That is, without a shadow of a doubt, what this is *for*: Gathering more AI training data.

2024-05-15 15:12:56

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I'm Danish and although I don't actually speak Swedish, just by the bits of Swedish I've picked up by cultural osmosis I can tell that's bad.
(I know that "stylish" is actually "stiligt", so I'm guessing "styltigt" is actually "stilted"?)

2024-04-14 11:36:07

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Aside: I don't speak Icelandic, so I also don't know what a skógarÞröstur is. And now that Google Translate can't translate it, I'd be screwed.
But I *do* speak Danish and a bit of Swedish. So my guess (without looking it up on Google) is that skógar = forest and Þröstur = thrush.
Am I wronger than Google Translate?

2024-04-14 11:26:46

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Long before LLMs, I saw a Danish subtitle where, I shit you not, "carbon dating" had been translated to "gå på stævnemøde med kulstof" ("going on a date with carbon").

2024-03-31 12:54:53

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Or, given the space we're talking about: That they thought their robot god would have made all regulation irrelevant in 36 months.

2024-03-22 23:48:15

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A thought I had, a while back. Everybody who's worked in this field for a while knows that for all our methodology, practices and programming tricks, for programming in the large it always turns out that Conway's Law is the only law. A large software system reproduces the organizational structure of the organization that created it.
Are we making poor software because we haven't yet come up with the kind of social structure capable of consistently making good software?

2024-03-22 23:44:10

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Another problem with many of the discussions about the usefulness of LLMs is that there's actually two discussions going on, hiding inside each other. One is "are LLMs useful?", and the other is "can I be replaced with an LLM?" - largely because that's how they're pushed.
And so, accepting the one easily comes to feel like accepting the other.