Bistable multivibrator
Non-state actor
Tabs for AI indentation, spaces for AI alignment
410,757,864,530 DEAD COMPUTERS

  • 2 Posts
  • 234 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • Yes he is. It’s not copyright maximalism to be angry that the enforcement of copyright protects and does not bind large corporations with huge financial backing and binds yet fails to protect artists and other producers of creative work who do not have a net worth of millions, billions or trillions of dollars.

    Cantrill’s equivocation between cleanroom implementation of an API and sucking up every piece of code on the internet to be cleanroom-washed by the statistical text regurgitator is not the own he thinks it is. It’s also a really hypocritical look given his previous righteous fury over Oracle re-proprietarizing Sun’s open source work. Actually it’s fine when open source code is turned proprietary, we just pulled it out of this black box that filed the serial numbers off first.



  • He’s already managed to remain untouched through the tariff farce so I’m not holding my breath.

    But even if something crazy does happen, a major financial crisis should not conjure images of the economy running off a cliff and hovering in the air for a few seconds making running motions with its legs before noticing its mistake and promptly falling in the canyon and making a hole shaped perfectly like its spread out silhouette. A financial crisis is a serious matter completely unlike an enormous ACME brand anvil falling down the same hole and a crude white flag of surrender feebly popping out of it.













  • What the fuck would an “AI browser” even be, let alone a modern one. I know what a web browser is, basically a combined HTTP client and HTML renderer. An AI browser is not something that has a commonly understood meaning, so to claim Firefox or anything else will be one without elaboration is just wankery.

    I can’t help but do their dirty work for them and try to imagine what the hell an AI browser would be. Maybe you develop a standard protocol for prompting chatbots and a markup format for displaying responses and an AI browser is a client for that? Or maybe you just put an LLM in the search bar so Mozilla’s bullshit machine can give you wrong answers before pressing the return key and having Google’s bullshit machine give you wrong answers. Maybe there’s an about:chatbot page. I think all of these are bad bullshit ideas, but at least they’re ideas and not just “what if we added <latest fad> into <product>”.

    AI Browsers. Metaverse fast food. Blockchain sneakers. Gigwork apartments. Cloud toilets. Big Data headphones. AR chairs. Military grade pianos. 3D books. App drugs. Dotcom condoms. Cyberspace bicycles. Wireless jump ropes. Video silverware. WYSIWYG carpets. Transistor fanny packs. Electromechanical ladders. Atomic flooring. Radio saunas. Horseless glue. Steam pens. Water powered masturbation.

    I assume some mesolithic asshole said shit like “we are transforming our hunter-gatherer settlement to a ‘cave painting first’ society” and neighboring community leaders gave that guy like a hundred animal skins each for his insight.




  • Rewatched Dr. Geoff Lindsey’s video about deaccenting in English language and how “AI” speech synthesizers and youtubers tend to get it wrong. In the case of latter, it’s usually due to reading from a script or being an L2 English speaker whose native language doesn’t use destressing.

    It reminded me of a particular line in Portal

    spoilers for Portal (2007 puzzle game)

    GLaDOS: (with a deeper, more seductive, slightly less monotone voice than unti now) “Good news: I figured out what that thing you just incinerated did. It was a morality core they installed after I flooded the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin to make me stop flooding the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin.”

    The words “the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin” are spoken with the exact same intonation both times, which helps maintain the robotic affect in GLaDOS’s voice even after it shifts to be slightly more expressive.

    Now I’m wondering if people whose native language lacks deaccenting even find the line funny. To me it’s hilarious to repeat a part of a sentence without changing its stress because in English and Finnish it’s unusual to repeat a part of a sentence without changing its stress.

    It is not lost on me that the fictional evil AI was written with a quirk in its speech to make it sound more alien and unsettling, and real life computer speech has the same quirk, which makes it sound more alien and unsettling.


  • The fucking hypocrisy of it all stings. Years of everyone being told not to copy that floppy or Lars Ulrich takes your girlfriend because you wouldn’t download a car, would you? Turns out when Microsoft and Softbank bankroll you for billions to download all the warez the internet has to offer, Mickey will not only let you off scot free but gives you a warm sloppy pat on the back as a bonus. With enough doubloons you’re not a pirate anymore, you’re the navy.