Maybe I’m missing something, but has anyone actually justified this sort of “reasoning” by LLMs? Like, is there actually anything meaningfully different going on? Because it doesn’t seem to be distinguishable from asking a regular LLM to generate 20 paragraphs of ai fanfic pretending to reason about the original question, and the final result seems about as useful.

Possibly I’m the last to hear about this one, but seeing as proton mail has come up here a few times before: the founder and ceo Andy Yen is apparently a Trump fan.

Great pick by @realDonaldTrump. 10 years ago, Republicans were the party of big business and Dems stood for the little guys, but today the tables have completely turned. People forget that the current antitrust actions against Big Tech were started under the first Trump admin.

(from the beginning of december, on the nomination of trump staffer Gail Slater to antitrust post at the doj)

https://xcancel.com/andyyen/status/1864436449942110660

Apparently, the OpenMandriva folk (the inheritors of the venerable mandrake/mandriva Linux distro) are now best buddies with Bryan Lunduke (right wing tech grifter and q-anon fan) are decrying the left wing bias of Linux projects with a hilarious “wokeOS shell”

Archive of openmandriva forum post: https://archive.is/2025.01.11-001057/https://forum.openmandriva.org/t/came-here-from-lunduke/5516/1

Lovely juxtaposition of “let’s stick it to the gay fags” and “we’re accepting of everyone and there’s no hate here”. Seems like a classy community all round. It’s a little sad to see how mandrake ended up, but there you go.

WokeOS here: https://web.archive.org/web/20250110234818/https://lindev.ch/wokeos.cpp

It’s pretty tedious and unimaginative. No idea who lindev are.

(eta: wasn’t me who originally found this, but I’m never quite sure whether it’s ok to include sources for this sort of thing given the subject. on the other hand, the op has it as public post that’s been boosted a bunch of times, so here it is: https://tech.lgbt/@GeopJr/113807022917800887)

A real ceo does everything. Delegation is for losers who can’t cope. Can’t move fast enough and break enough things if you’re constantly waiting for your lackeys to catch up.

If those numbers people were cleverer than the ceo, they’d be the ones in charge, and they aren’t. Checkmate. Do you even read Ayn Rand, bro?

Remember that actual physicists can fall into the same trap, and believe themselves to be very smart too. Plenty suffer an irresistible urge to fix every other field that’s doing it wrong.

As an alternative to the various xkcds on the subject, have an smbc instead.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21

If it were merely a search engine, it risks not being ai enough. We already have search engines, and no one is gonna invest in that old garbage. So instead, it finds something that you might want that’s been predigested for ease of ai consumption (Retrieval), dumps it into the context window alongside your original question (Augmentation) and then bullshits about it (Generation).

Think of it as exactly the same stuff that the LLM folk have already tried to sell you, trying to work around limitations of training and data availability by providing “cut and paste as a service” to generate ever more complex prompts for you, in the hopes that this time you’ll pay more for it than it costs to run.

And, whilst I’m here, a post from someone who tried using copilot to help with software dev for a year.

I think my favourite bit was

Don’t use LLMs for autocomplete, use them for dialogues about the code.

Tried that. It’s worse than a rubber duck, which at least knows to stay silent when it doesn’t know what it’s talking about.

https://infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/113690087142854474

(and also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging for those who haven’t come across it)

Interesting article about netflix. I hadn’t really thought about the scale of their shitty forgettable movie generation, but there are apparently hundreds and hundreds of these things with big names attached and no-one watches them and no-one has heard of them and apparently Netflix doesn’t care about this because they can pitch magic numbers to their shareholders and everyone is happy.

“What are these movies?” the Hollywood producer asked me. “Are they successful movies? Are they not? They have famous people in them. They get put out by major studios. And yet because we don’t have any reliable numbers from the streamers, we actually don’t know how many people have watched them. So what are they? If no one knows about them, if no one saw them, are they just something that people who are in them can talk about in meetings to get other jobs? Are we all just trying to keep the ball rolling so we’re just getting paid and having jobs, but no one’s really watching any of this stuff? When does the bubble burst? No one has any fucking clue.”

What a colossal waste of money, brains, time and talent. I can see who the market for stuff like sora is, now.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-49/essays/casual-viewing/

For VPNs, at least, I can offer some suggestions. If you wanted to securely access a specific box or network of yours, tailscale is pretty great and very painless to use. If you wanted to do stuff without various folk noticing then that’s a bit trickier but I’ve been happy using mullvad… they’re not the cheapest, though they have some splendid anonymous payment mechanisms (you can literally mail them a wad of banknotes with a magic code on a bit of paper… you don’t even need to muck about with bitcoin).

In further bluesky news, the team have a bit of an elon moment and forget how public they made everything.

https://bsky.app/profile/miriambo.bsky.social/post/3ldq2c7lu6c25 (only readable if you are logged in to bluesky)

Bluesky’s approach to using domain names to mean identity is now showing cracks that everyone can see: https://tedium.co/2024/12/17/bluesky-impersonation-risks/

(it was always shaky, but mostly only shown by infosec folks who signed up as amazon s3, etc)

TL;DR: scammer buys .com domain for journalist’s name, registers it on bluesky, demands money to hand it over or face reputational damage, uses other fake accounts with plausible names and backgrounds to encourage the mark to pay up. Fun stuff. The best bit is when the sockpuppets got one of the real people they were pretending to be banned from bluesky.

Nvidia doing their part to help consumers associate AI with unwanted useless bloatware that’s foisted upon them.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/12/the-new-nvidia-app-is-probably-hurting-your-pc-gaming-performance/

I will find someone who I consider better than me in relevant ways,

Lemme guess, rich, white, asshole? (now I write this, I realise it could be about the author of the blog post too, and not just the bull he’s seeking).

These people continue to be so utterly delusional about the nature of success. The desperate need to believe that genetics is destiny, and that the ultra-wealthy got that way because they are also ultra-competent instead of merely being ultra-lucky and/or ultra-rapacious.

I guess the future is a race to see what comes first… the ultra-wealthy habsburging themselves into oblivion, the oceans boiling, or a resurgence in the construction of hand-built artisanal tumbrels.

Funny how right-wing types reaaaaaly love unborn kids. They’re the best focus group for almost any policy!

What’s a hard quality of life indicator?

I thought the era of scaling was over. We’re in the era of ??? now. Presumably profit comes later.

I’m aware he isn’t there now, but it bears remembering that he was there at the beginning when these goals were being shaped, and as we have seen with twitter there’s nothing to stop him coming back, even if nostr is his new best friend for now.

I read that posts on BlueSky are permanently stored in a blockchain,

So, this is complex and hard to find concrete information on, but:

1. Bluesky use a merkle tree based things. Don’t call em blockchain… that’s the sort of thing cryptocurrency boosters want so as to present their technologies are useful.
2. Posts are stored in a merkle search tree, but attachments are stored separately. Attached blobs (like images) can be (and are) deleted independently of the tree nodes which reference them.
3. The merkle trees are independent and can be modified without having to rewrite the whole history of every post on bluesky, because there isn’t one central official ledger of all posts.

From bluesky’s own (non technical) blurb on the subject,

it takes a bit longer for the text content of a post to be fully deleted in storage. The text content is stored in a non-readable form, but it is possible to query the data via the API. We will periodically perform back-end deletes to entirely wipe this data.

The merkle trees are per-user, which makes history-modifying operations like rebasing practical… this facility apparently landed last summer, eg. Intention to remove repository history. Flagging tree nodes as deleted, and then actually destroying them in a series of later operations (rebase, then garbage collection) would explain the front end respecting deletions but lower-level protocols showing older state for a little while.

no Gen 1 crypto

Just one more gen, bro. I swear it will fulfil all the promises this time.

Interesting post and corresponding mastodon thread on the non-decentralised-ness of bluesky by cwebber.

https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

https://social.coop/@cwebber/113527462572885698

The author is keen about this particular “vision statement”:

Preparing for the organization as a future adversary.

The assumption being, stuff gets enshittified and how might you guard your product against the future stupid and awful whims of management and investors?

Of course, they don’t consider that it cuts both ways, and Jack Dorsey’s personal grumbles about Twitter. The risk from his point of view was the company he founded doing evil unthinkable things like, uh, banning nazis. He’s keen for that sort of thing to never happen again on his platforms.

It’s a long read, but a good one (though not a nice one).

• learn about how all the people who actually make decisions in c++ world are complete assholes!
• liking go (the programming language) correlated with brain damage!
• in c++ world, it is ok to throw an arbitrary number of highly competent non-bros out of the window in order to keep a bro on board, even if said bro drugged and raped a minor!
• the c++ module system is like a gunshot wound to the ass!
• c++ leadership is delusional about memory safety!
• even more assholes!

Someone on mastodon (can’t remember who right now) joked that they were expecting the c++ committee to publicly support trump, in the hopes he would retract the usg memory safety requirements. I can now believe that they might have considered that, and are probably hoping he’ll come down in their favour now that he’s coming in.