"You don't dance to get to the end of the... to get to the other side of the room. That's not why we dance, we dance to go around in a circle." Jacob Collier in the Switched on Pop interview.
You don't dance to get to the end of Dan Lyke / comment 0
"You don't dance to get to the end of the... to get to the other side of the room. That's not why we dance, we dance to go around in a circle." Jacob Collier in the Switched on Pop interview.
Journalist gotten by trusting LLMs Dan Lyke / comment 0
In twenty fucking twenty six, someone is "trusting [LLMs] were accurate"? Mediahaus (publisher of the Irish Independent and Sunday Independent) suspends senior journalist for using fabricated quotes produced by AI
Peter Vandermeersch said he relied on summaries produced by LLMs, ‘trusting they were accurate’.
But it's clear that he still doesn't get it. His mea culpa on Substack:
Even I—with all my years of experience and knowledge—fell into the trap of hallucinations. I summarised reports using AI tools and worked from those summaries, trusting they were accurate. In doing so, I wrongly put words into people’s mouths, when I should have presented them as paraphrases. In some cases, it reflected my interpretation of their words. That was not just careless—it was wrong.
Emphasis is mine, because, no, even if the LLM tells you it's a paraphrase, we know damned well that LLMs do not summarize, at best they elide.
Via.
Spam from Levi's with the subject line Dan Lyke / comment 0
Spam from Levi's with the subject line "Get the leg opening inspired by cowboys", and frankly, dudes, if I'm gonna spread my legs I don't need cowboys for inspiration...
Mostly.
No Free Labor for Authoritarians Dan Lyke / comment 0
A good read on working to avoid self-censorship under regimes which don't outright ban dissent, but build systems that make people complicit in their own silence. No Free Labor for Authoritarians: Censorship and Dissent in Singapore by Kirsten Han
Technically, activists and dissidents like me aren’t harassed in Singapore. According to the government, we’re the ones who force the state’s hand: by organizing illegal assemblies (as defined by legislation introduced by the ruling People’s Action Party), by publishing “false statements of fact” online (as determined by government ministers), by wanting to mount “misleading” exhibitions (as evaluated by state regulators). Electric fences have been erected around the pen of public discourse; if activists wander up to the boundaries and get electrocuted, can the state really be accused of harassment and oppression? Technically speaking?
are the straits okay? Dan Lyke / comment 0
Tina, demon child of the stars @TransTina@translunar.academy
I don’t see the gay of Hormuz causing any trouble
COBOL is the asbestos of programming languages Dan Lyke / comment 2
Interesting take: Wired: COBOL is the asbestos of programming languages. I don't think it's super necessary to read the article, because the author summarized it really nicely on the Fediverse: Zeb Larson @zeblarson@hcommons.social
I published this for Wired today and I'm really happy with it. You might think that I have a categorical dislike of COBOL, but actually I don't. I think instead that it's really important to think carefully about the computing systems you build, because changing them can be *really* painful. I wrote this thinking in no small part about vibe- coding and how we'll be stuck with systems that nobody really understands, and if they get large enough they will be incredibly difficult to unravel.
That thing about "the value of your code is how easy it is to modify it" is landing pretty hard these days. And with LLM assisted coding, I kinda feel like we're in some of the same spaces as large Perl codebases, yes, you can argue that it's quick and easy to just re- implement it, but if you're working with something that deeply encodes decades of contractual meaning then what goes on around that code, how you keep the history, how you verify that your best customer isn't suddenly gonna be super pissed off (or, worse, pissed off a year later after they figure out that you started billing them wrong), there's a whole lot of process that needs to get wrapped around that that's super expensive to unpack.
March 18 is Lemon Pound Cake Freedom Day Dan Lyke / comment 0
A bunch of random links to celebrate Afroman wins in lawsuit from Ohio deputies over music videos: ‘We did it America … freedom of speech!’
Some links from Defector's post, which requires creating an account, by way of Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social
I would like to personally award Afroman the Bluesky Medal of Valor for Exemplary Service in Bringing Back Shame
Previously Flutterby January 6, 2023, and March 24, 2023.
Went to a talk on the preSpanish Dan Lyke / comment 0
Went to a talk on the pre-Spanish indigenous presence in Petaluma, and it left me uneasy. Like "these peoples 20 miles apart north-south had completely different languages and yet roamed 40 miles east-west" conflated with a "peacefully in harmony with nature and each other" vibe.
And now I'm side-tracked from my other interests for readings on "noble savage" mythologies and trying to better understand why this sort of discourse makes me so uneasy.