For those people who consider #AI a major helper when #programming, I don't know ... Today's experience, caused by me being too lazy to look up the APIs myself: Me: How do I do X? Chatgpt: yadda yadda max_redirect(0). Me: It doesn't have a max_redirect(). Chatgpt: Sorry, yes, it doesn't have it, use requests_redirectable() instead. Me: It doesn't have a requests_redirectable() either. Chatgpt: Sorry, you are right, it doesn't have that either. Should I go on?

Sorry for the link to the hell site, but … I have never seen a video about a serious presidential candidate that was even remotely like this.

X (formerly Twitter)

ryan (@ryanlong03) on X

why did I stay up till 3am making a von dutch brat coconut tree edit featuring kamala harris and why can’t I stop watching it on repeat

I wonder whether the cyber warriors in armed forced around the world sit on a bunch of Crowdstrike-like “opportunities” and in case of war, waltz into Crowdstrike-like companies and order them to deploy the bad file. For them, that’s sort of the ideal scenario, no?

In all the hoopla about #AI you’d sort of think people would be debating strong vs weak AI vs the limits of “thinking” by any kind of machine as it has been debated for centuries. Like the Chinese Room thought experiment.

Chinese room - Wikipedia

But I see nothing of that. Why is that? Do we simply now assume these issues have been resolved in favor of unlimited machine intelligence and all the doubters have been convinced?

Getting a laptop with 32G RAM was a really good idea. No memory pressure ever, in spite of running VMs, sometimes more than one. Been a long time since my first computer that had 64kB, and where I recall I had to implement a custom swap-the-middle-portion-of-the-program-from-disk for something I wrote. In BASIC.

Have there been any protocol-level #attacks against the #Fediverse so far? Malformed ActivityPub messages, subtly crafted HTTP signatures, that kind of thing? (If not, there sure will be!!) And more interestingly: if you were on team red, what would you do? 🙂 (On second thought, maybe we should have that conversation outside of the public eye, so DM.) Is there something we ought to do with feditest.org to test implementations for resistance against attacks? #testing

Somebody recently used the term "permissionless" to describe the innovation that is possible in the open social network called the #Fediverse. (I forgot who, sadly.) That term might be borrowed from the crypto crowd, but it appears applicable. Any thoughts on adopting this term for the Fediverse, too? I'd like to, I think it's apt.

Pondering the today's "AI" and this famous saying: "If after ten minutes at the poker table you do not know who the patsy is—you are the patsy." Given the amounts of money involved, #AI looks like the biggest poker game of all times.

I participated in a geek meetup earlier this week where people jointly try to learn about a new technical subject every couple of weeks. This week: ActivityPub. It's always fascinating what kind of information about this topic people came across, what kinds of questions that produces, and misconceptions. I think I was able to address some of those. And every time the refrain: this could be big! Why aren't more people talking about this?? I don't actually have an answer for that one.

There is bullshit. Then there is really bad bullshit. And then there is #AI bullshit. Apropos nothing in particular.

#AI as a topic is a marketer’s dream. Great promise! Great peril! Ban it! No, invest more in it! Everybody will be fired! No, we will all be gods! No, the new gods will exterminate us! The Americans / Chinese / … / but not us will use this to take over the world! Everybody can have an opinion. Headline topic in every governmental meeting and board room and the pub at the corner. Even the pope gets quoted. With almost nobody having any idea what they are actually talking about.

If I type "Tell me the history of the Roman empire" into an #AI chat bot like #ChatGPT and hit return, it HTTP POSTs that to one of their web servers, and then ... what? How many computers are involved in producing my response? What are their responsibilities? How is the response assembled from those parts? It's a bit like the old interview question: if I type "cnn.com into a browser, what exactly happens?" I can answer that one, but I'm unclear on the AI chat version. Anybody know?

Enshittified Instagram is now forcing you to spend at least one ad worth of time in shit. No stepping around it allowed!

The Verge

Instagram is testing “unskippable” ads that you can’t scroll past

You can’t keep scrolling until you finish watching the ad.

Nice video explanation of the fediverse.

Nothing is as practical as a good theory. I don't know who said it first, but they were right.

Imagine two identical #3social #networks with mainstream users. Same number of users, same connectedness of the social graph, same demographics etc. Social network A only has an algorithmic feed. Social network B only has a chronological people-I-follow feed. What would the usage numbers look like in comparison? Numbers of posts, numbers of likes/replies/boosts, growth trajectory, etc? I would expect somebody has done some research on this. Anybody know of any public results?

What an amazing opportunity to do the opposite of the shiny new thing called “AI”. Let’s go.

Gemini is the new Google+ – Computerworld

The #Fediverse is like a startup in many ways. Some days you are totally elated about all the amazing things that are becoming possible and within reach. We are changing the world! Some other days you are in the depth of despair that this is never going to work and how could you possibly ever have thought otherwise. This week definitely is the former. A movement is forming, good people are coming out of hiding and are getting excited and involved. So glad to be part of it!!

Silly (or maybe not) question: So what exactly is social media for? For some, it is a way to sell ads into an addicted audience. But we are trying to get away from that with the #Fediverse. So if it's not that, what is it for, exactly? And for you personally: if you didn't have social media, what exactly would you miss in your life? Which needs do you have that would be unmet? I'd love a broad variety of responses. Reshare?

The best #tech #support of any company I've ever interacted with comes from Prusa, the Czech #3D #printer maker. Consistently, they listen to what you have to say, and right away have a good answer. No how-are-you-doing-you-are-so-important-to-us bs that only aggravates everybody, but straight answers to each question, always backed up with links, sometimes with more background info than you had any reason to supposed might exist.