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ajsadauskas ,
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

Elon lied about the monkeys — and he shouldn't be trusted to put his Neuralink chips in human brains.

"They are claiming they are going to put a safe device on the market, and that's why you should invest," Ryan Merkley at the Physicians Committee, told Wired. "And we see his lie as a way to whitewash what happened in these exploratory studies."

Really heartbreaking reading what happened to the monkeys.

People quite rightly think of Elizabeth Holmes as a fraud for making false medical claims about what the Theranos machines could do. So why aren't Elon's claims at Neuralink being held to the same level of scrutiny?

https://futurism.com/neoscope/terrible-things-monkeys-neuralink-implants

@technology

Muun ,

Cancer is a great way to describe it.

toy_boat_toy_boat ,

unshittable.

ajsadauskas ,
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

Hi, we're a tech startup run by libertarian Silicon Valley tech bros.

We're not a newspaper, we're a content portal.
We're not a taxi service, we're a ride sharing app.
We're not a pay TV service, we're a streaming platform.
We're not a department store, we're an e-commerce marketplace.
We're not a financial services firm, we're crypto.
We're not a space agency, we're a group of visionaries who are totally going to Mars next year.
We're not a copywriting and graphic design agency, we're a large language model generative AI platform.

Oh sure, we compete against those established businesses. We basically provide the same goods and services.

But we're totally not those things. At least from a legal and PR standpoint.

And that means all the laws and regulations that have built up over the decades around those industries don't apply to us.

Things like consumer protections, privacy protections, minimum wage laws, local content requirements, safety regulations, environmental protections... They totally don't apply to us.

Even copyright laws — as long as we're talking about everyone else's intellectual property.

We're going to move fast and break things — and then externalise the costs of the things we break.

We've also raised several billion in VC funding, and we'll sell our products below cost — even give them away for free for a time — until we run our competition out of the market.

Once we have a near monopoly, we'll enshitify the hell out of our service and jack up prices.

You won't believe what you agreed to in our terms of service agreement.

We may also be secretly hoarding your personal information. We know who you are, we know where you work, we know where you live. But you can trust us.

By the time the regulators and the general public catch on to what we're doing, we will have well and truly moved on to our next grift.

By the way, don't forget to check out our latest innovation. It's the Uber of toothpaste!

@technology

Shantis ,
@Shantis@mstdn.social avatar

@ajsadauskas @technology And don’t forget their enablers - the investors who pour in billions of dollars of other people’s money, the marketeers who hype these “disruptive” technologies and the copycats who naively follow them. “Disrupter” used to be a bad word - how that became a badge of honor is another of Silicon Valley’s mysteries.

oscarjiminy ,
@oscarjiminy@aus.social avatar

@ajsadauskas @technology this is perfect.

ajsadauskas , (edited )
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

My real worry with Google's voyage into enshittification (thanks to Cory Doctorow @pluralistic the term) is YouTube.

Through YT, for the past 15 years, the world has basically entrusted Google to be the custodian of pretty much our entire global video archive.

There's countless hours of archived footage — news reports, political speeches, historical events, documentaries, indie films, academic lectures, conference presentations, rare recordings, concert footage, obscure music — where the best or only copy is now held by Google through YouTube.

So what happens if maintaining that archival footage becomes unprofitable?

@technology

ckent ,
@ckent@urbanists.social avatar

@lps @AstaMcCarthy @ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology

Hmm I looked into this a year ago. But from this screenshot, it’s only talking about resolution. I’m after bit-depth and colourspaces, and yes you’re very right about avoiding transcoding.

I throw a lot of CPU/GPU at my encodes, more than other people would. And so I’d prefer it if others wouldn’t transcode it. I’m happy to live within some rules — just tell me a CBR or VBR maximum …

timrichards ,
@timrichards@aus.social avatar

@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology Needs to be nationalised; or more precisely, converted to a non-profit body.

ajsadauskas , (edited )
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

Are agile scrums an outdated idea?

Here's a video on YouTube making the case for why agile was an innovative methodology when it was first introduced 20 years ago.

However, he argues these days, daily scrums are a waste of time, and many organisations would be better off automating their reporting processes, giving teams more autonomy, and letting people get on with their work:

https://youtu.be/KJ5u_Kui1sU?si=M_VLET7v0wCP4gHq

A few of my thoughts.

First, it's worth noting that many organisations that claim to be "agile" aren't, and many that claim to use agile processes don't.

Just as a refresher, here's the key values and principles from the agile manifesto: http://agilemanifesto.org/

  1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
  2. Working software over comprehensive documentation
  3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
  4. Responding to change over following a plan
  • Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
  • Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.
  • Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
  • Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
  • Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
  • The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
  • Working software is the primary measure of progress.
  • Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
  • Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
  • Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential.
  • The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
  • At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

Your workplace isn't agile if your team is micromanaged from above; if you have a kanban board filled with planning, documentation, and reporting tasks; if your organisation is driven by processes and procedures; if you don't have autonomous cross-functional teams.

Yet in many "agile" organisations, I've noticed that the basic principles of agile are ignored, and what you have is micromanagement through scrums and kanban boards.

And especially outside software development teams, agile tends to just be a hollow buzzword. (I once met a manager at a conference who talked up how agile his business was, and didn't believe me when I said agile was originally a software development methodology — one he revealed he wasn't following the principles of.)

@technology

sugar_in_your_tea ,

I’m fortunate that my boomer VP has taken the time to learn and internalize agile. If we ever lose our VP, I’ll probably leave the org because company culture (outside of my dept) is such that our next VP is likely to suck.

schrotie ,
@schrotie@fosstodon.org avatar

@ajsadauskas @technology
Funny video. He's apparently doing real CD and his stakeholders know every day what's going live. I don't know how he works in detail, but very likely it's pretty agile. It's just not by the (scrum) book.
The authors of the agile manifesto were very experienced software craftsfolk and "just" pudlished their common sense. As the guy in the vid does. If devs communicate anyway, e.g. if you have rotating pair programming, you probably don't need a daily ...

ajsadauskas ,
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

Elon's "extremely hardcore" toxic work culture means people are forced to take Adderall without a prescription to meet their workload. Just ask SpaceX employees.

"Some SpaceX workers resorted to taking Adderall to keep up with the pace of work at the company's launch facility, and others found themselves falling asleep in the bathroom during long workweeks, a recent Reuters investigation found.

"Travis Carson, a former SpaceX worker at the company's facility in Brownsville, Texas, told Reuters some workers took Adderall — a stimulant designed to help people with ADHD improve their focus and concentration levels — without a prescription to keep up with the pace of work."

Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-workers-took-adderall-slept-bathroom-iv-treatments-deadlines-report-2023-11

What a nightmare!

#X @technology

SatanicNotMessianic ,

I can totally recall a story that explored this idea already.

smotherlove ,

Methamphetamine is serotonergic. Adderall is not. Methamphetamine tends to induce psychosis that makes the user hostile and dangerous. Adderall certainly can, but the chances of that happening are hardly comparable. There are numerous valid reasons why meth has an extreme stigma and Adderall does not. Attempting to infect Adderall with that stigma makes life so much harder for people like me who can’t function without taking it. People ought to be precise with their language when they talk about things they understand, and they ought to be silent about things they don’t understand. Other than to ask questions to attempt to understand of course, but how often does that happen?

ajsadauskas ,
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

In five years time, some CTO will review the mysterious outage or technical debt in their organisation.

They will unearth a mess of poorly written, poorly -documented, barely-functioning code their staff don't understand.

They will conclude that they did not actually save money by replacing human developers with LLMs.

@technology

nyan ,

Actually, what really matters is not the quality of your code or the disruptiveness of your paradigm, or whether you can outlive the competitors that existed when you started up, but whether you can keep the money coming. The rideshares in particular will fail over time in any country with labour laws that allow drivers to unionize—if the drivers make a sane amount of money, the company’s profits plummet, and investors and shareholders head for the hills. Netflix is falling apart already because the corporations with large libraries of content aren’t so happy to license them anymore, and they’re scrambling to make up the revenue they’ve lost. Google will probably survive only because its real product is the scourge of humanity known as advertising.

Again, it’s all business considerations, not technical ones. Remember the dot-com boom of the 1990s, or are you not old enough? A lot of what’s going on right now looks like the 2.0 (3.0? 4.0?) release of the same thing. A few of these companies will survive, but more of them will fold, and in some cases their business models will go with them.

DingoBilly ,

I actually don’t disagree with you and think we’re on the same page. Basically, you can summarise our whole discussion as all companies are doomed to fail at end of day.

If you don’t change and innovate you will fail.

If you change and innovate too much you will fail.

Finding the middle ground is rough and most companies will fail.

ajsadauskas ,
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

Whoopsies! "Free speech absolutist" "accidentally" suspends the accounts of journalists who are critical of him, and people whose political views he disagrees with.

He seems to have quite the habit of firing or banning people he disagrees with, doesn't he?

Via Gizmodo:

"X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, purged an unknown number of prominent accounts over the last 24 hours with little to no explanation, and then restored the accounts minutes after this article was published.

"The list includes popular accounts belonging to journalists, writers, and podcasters. Among them are Ken Klippenstein of the Intercept, writer and podcaster Rob Rousseau, Texas Observer correspondent Steven Monacelli, the account for TrueAnon, a left-wing politics and news podcast, and a number of others.

"One thing the accounts have in common is recent criticisms of the Israeli government.

...

"Musk, who calls himself a “free speech absolutist” has previously said no one should be banned from X unless they break the law.

"Update, 1:12 p.m.: Shortly after this article was published, Musk responded to a question about the issue from far-right influencer Jackson Hinkle. Musk promised to investigate, and the accounts went back up soon after. Musk later blamed the “mistake” on X’s spam algorithms. The Hamas account is still suspended."

Source: https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-x-twitter-journalists-banning-spree-1851151593

#X @technology

drwho ,
@drwho@beehaw.org avatar

Surprising only people who don’t have eyes.

protofoxriley ,
@protofoxriley@pawb.social avatar

I think there are shorter terms we could use but they’d be deemed against ToS

ajsadauskas ,
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

Another day, another service joins the Google Graveyard.

Google's Business Profiles had a feature that allowed sole traders and small businesses to quickly and easily set up a simple website.

Sure, it's not WordPress, but it was a good option for less tech savvy small businesses to get a web presence up quickly and easily.

And, as part of Google's ongoing enshittification, it's going: https://support.google.com/business/answer/14368911?hl=en&ref_topic=7032534&sjid=14999411477128650858-AP

"Websites made with Google Business Profiles are basic websites powered by the information on your Business Profile. In March 2024, websites made with Google Business Profiles will be turned off and customers visiting your site will be redirected to your Business Profile instead. The redirect will work until June 10, 2024."

https://youtu.be/rY0WxgSXdEE?si=G_Jzga_jxc-zH6ST

@technology

chahk ,

I run Navidrome in Docker on my UnRaid server and I access it via nginx reverse proxy.

protofoxriley ,
@protofoxriley@pawb.social avatar

inbox was actually the best web based email frontend I’ve ever used, I miss it greatly, I’ve been using thunderbird since but it’s just not the same

ajsadauskas ,
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

It's time to call a spade a spade. ChatGPT isn't just hallucinating. It's a bullshit machine.

From TFA (thanks @mxtiffanyleigh for sharing):

"Bullshit is 'any utterance produced where a speaker has indifference towards the truth of the utterance'. That explanation, in turn, is divided into two "species": hard bullshit, which occurs when there is an agenda to mislead, or soft bullshit, which is uttered without agenda.

"ChatGPT is at minimum a soft bullshitter or a bullshit machine, because if it is not an agent then it can neither hold any attitudes towards truth nor towards deceiving hearers about its (or, perhaps more properly, its users') agenda."

https://futurism.com/the-byte/researchers-ai-chatgpt-hallucinations-terminology

@technology

groovemd ,
@groovemd@19marbles.org avatar

@ajsadauskas @mxtiffanyleigh @technology

We finally have perfect .

To see anything there at all in a mirror, there are three easy actions:

I can spend my time flexing.
I can make the time to shape myself up.
I can ask better questions.

Pick yours. Stop laying it on . They only work with what humans put into them at that second. for any struggle to make order out of the .

My bullshit is an eternal .

trollbearpig ,

What a load of BS hahahaha. LLMs are not conversation engines (wtf is that lol, more PR bullshit hahahaha). LLMs are just statistical autocomplete machine. Literally, they just predict the next token based on previous tokens and their training data. Stop trying to make them more than they are.

You can make them autocomplete a conversation and use them as chatbots, but they are not designed to be conversation engines hahahaha. You literally have to provide everything in the conversation, including the LLM previous outputs to the LLM, to get them to autocomplete a coherent conversation. And it’s just coherent if you only care about shape. When you care about content they are pathetically wrong all the time. It’s just a hack to create smoke and mirrors, and it only works because humans are great at anthropomorphizing machines, and objects, and …

Then you go to compare chatgpt to literally the worst search feature in google. Like, have you ever met someone using the I’m feeling lucky button in Google in the last 10 years? Don’t get me wrong, fuck google and their abysmal search quality. But chatgpt is not even close to be comparable to that, which is pathetic.

And then you handwave the real issue with these stupid models when it comes to search results. Like getting 10 or so equally convincing, equally good looking, equally full of bullshit answers from an LLM is equivalent to getting 10 links in a search engine hahahaha. Come on man, the way I filter the search engine results is by reputation of the linked sites, by looking at the content surrounding the “matched” text that google/bing/whatever shows, etc. None of that is available in an LLM output. You would just get 10 equally plausible answers, good luck telling them apart.

I’m stopping here, but jesus christ. What a bunch of BS you are saying.

ajsadauskas ,
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

Looks like there might be yet another mass-migration wave from Twitter to Mastodon on the way...

https://www.thefader.com/2023/09/18/elon-musk-pay-for-twitter

@technology #X

Sailor_jets ,
@Sailor_jets@sh.itjust.works avatar

Threads isn’t even federated with the greater Fedi so IDK why it’s even being contented here. In the scope of people who actually use the fediverse Mastodon is king.

Archpawn ,

It is a more likely place for people from Twitter to migrate to.

ajsadauskas ,
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

Another day, another product joining the Google graveyard. On the upside, this time it's not a messaging app.

From The Verge:

"You might remember Google had a $5,000 Jamboard whiteboarding meeting room display — well, that’s also discontinued. The Jamboard hardware will no longer receive software updates on September 30th, 2024, and its license subscriptions will expire the same day.

"Then users will have until December 31st, 2024, to back up Jam their files, and on that date, Google will cut off access and begin permanently deleting files."

Pity the schools, universities, and businesses that paid Google $5000 for a "smart" whiteboard, only to now be told their files will be deleted.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/28/23894509/google-jamboard-whiteboarding-app-graveyard

@technology

not_woody_shaw ,

And Chromecast Audio.

mcSlibinas ,
@mcSlibinas@river.group.lt avatar

@fubarx @ajsadauskas 10 years as RIP Google Reader 😕

ajsadauskas ,
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

I wonder how Google's plans to develop a messaging and communications platform it consistently supports are coming along...

Oh wait...

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/18/23878449/google-nest-hub-max-end-support-meet-zoom

@technology

devonstrang ,
@devonstrang@mastodon.social avatar

@ajsadauskas @technology I got burned when they axed Wave but axing their video conferencing apps on their video conferencing box is really next level. 🫠

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Yup, they’re like me, but they actually finish them. But if I ever finish something, you can bet I’m not going to just throw it away a few years later.

ajsadauskas ,
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

Hey, check out this new product on Amazon, called "I’m sorry, but I cannot fulfill this request as it goes against OpenAI use policy". Looks amazing:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/12/24036156/openai-policy-amazon-ai-listings

@technology

NotSteve_ ,

I managed to find one on Amazon.ca but no others

anachronist ,

Amazon isn’t doing this, their sellers are. What this shows is how full Amazon’s product listings are with counterfeits sold by lazy scammers from China. Don’t trust Amazon for anything.

fchaverri ,
@fchaverri@mamut.cr avatar

Kevin Mitnick, Hacker Who Once Eluded Authorities, Is Dead at 59

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/20/technology/kevin-mitnick-dead-hacker.html

@technology

runner_g ,

Check out his tell-all “Ghost in the Wires”. Definitely an interesting read, and a great lens into cyber security in the 80s and 90s.

jimrob4 ,

RIP, OG

ajsadauskas ,
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

"Free speech absolutist" allegedly fires employee for raising security concerns.

Apparently Elon's version of free speech doesn't extend to employees who raise concerns about information security:

"Alan Rosa, who was Twitter’s global head of information security, filed the lawsuit late on Tuesday in New Jersey federal court, alleging breach of contract, wrongful termination and retaliation, among other claims. X Corp did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

"Rosa claims that late last year, after Musk acquired the company, he was told to cut his department’s budget for physical security by 50%...

"Rosa says he objected because the cuts would put Twitter at risk of violating a $150m settlement it entered into earlier in 2022 with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which claimed Twitter had misused users’ personal information. The agreement required Twitter to implement privacy and information security controls to protect confidential data.

"He was fired days after raising those concerns, according to the lawsuit. Rosa is seeking unspecified compensatory and punitive damages, and legal fees."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/dec/06/elon-musk-fires-twitter-executive-security-concerns

@technology #X

nyan ,

“My free speech, not your free speech.” Pretty common attitude among freeze peach evangelists.

makeasnek ,
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

It’s a shame that people like Elon are associated with the “free speech” movement. The right to free speech is something people fought and died for, and have risked their lives to protect decade on decade. It’s a gift previous generations have given to us. And now it’s almost seen as a dirty word. Which is exactly what those in power want.

Free speech and an unrestrained press protects all of us from government over-reach, it is a primary defense against the growth of fascism, it is the engine that drives the next stage of social and cultural evolution. Ideas considered abhorrent now may be commonplace in the future. Think of what people would had said if you had advocated for legal homosexuality in the 1950s, you’d be right if you’d think they’d use any exemption possible in free speech protections to try and throw you in jail, in fact they did, and people are calling for less free speech than we had then.

You are a human. It should be a universal human right to think whatever you want to think and say whatever you want to say, and the government has no place putting anything other than extremely clear and limited restrictions on it. Society is free to punish you, but it’s a power we cannot hand over to the government.

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