MajorHavoc

joined 10 months ago
1
The Cult of Microsoft (www.wheresyoured.at)
submitted 1 minute ago* (last edited 34 seconds ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

Kind of an inflammatory title, but I like to let it match for accessibility.

I've been enjoying Ed Zitron's articles lately, because they call out CEOs who aren't doing their jobs.

I'm sharing this partly because I'm honestly surprised to see criticism of Satya Nadella's leadership. I think Satya has been good for Microsoft, overall, compared to previous leaders. And I was as convinced as anyone else when the "growth mindset" first hit the news cycle. It sounds fine, after all.

TL;DR:

  • Satya has baked "growth mindset deeply into the culture at Microsoft"
  • Folks outside of the original study authors have generally failed to reproduce evidence of any value in "growth mindset"
  • Microsoft is, of course "all in" on their own brand of AI tools, and their AI tools are doing the usual harmful barf, eat the barf, barf grosser barf, re-eat that barf data corruption cycle.
  • Some interesting speculation that none of the AI code flaunted by Microsoft and Google is probably high value. Which is a speculation I confidently share, but still, I think, speculation. (Lines-of-code is a bat shit insane way to measure engineer productivity, but some folks think it's okay when an AI is doing it.)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 12 minutes ago* (last edited 12 minutes ago)

I don't believe that you can use traditional algorithms to teach the car street driving, because there are to many different variations... Even if your autopilot is 99% correct and you drive 20000km a year, you still drive wrong 200km of it.

Exactly!

And this is why, if the problem is solveable, it must be solved by learning models shepherded by expert engineers. The LLMs can take care of the long boring stretches, freeing skilled engineer time to fine-tune an LLM algorithm hybrid for the tricky bits.

I'm inclined to believe the problem is solveable, but since I'm not selling anything, I'm allowed to say "if". Heh.

 

You might recognize me from such comments as "All AI hucksters are scammers.", and "AI is just an excuse to enshitify while laying off real engineers.", and "I actually use current generation LLMs for a bunch of things and it can be pretty great."

In this article science fiction author and futurist Cory Doctorow is on my favorite AI soap box, and raises some interesting points.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

Talking about Kevin Comroys masterful delivery reminded me of a very different, but equally amazing line delivery by Adam West.

"Those patriotic porpoises sacrificed their lives to save me."

Also, after answering the a phone line just introduced as being only available to the president, with a voice full of shock and awe:

"Robin... It's the President".

[–] [email protected] 0 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah. There's too many great Kevin Conroy lines t for me to pick a favorite.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

I love this comics page so much

For anyone not in on the joke, the gold lasso is magically enforcing total honesty as they introduce themselves to each-other.

It forces Superman to admit to both of his private names given to him by each of his sets of parents.

And for the Batman, "Bruce Wayne" is just a lie he tells people in between doing Batman stuff, so he just reintroduces himself as Batman.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

Yeah. I gotta admit I laughed at Ellen's (completely unrelatable) "relatable" jokes about being ultra wealthy.

I dunno if she counts for this request?

I guess she's more conservative than many comedians, but I'm guessing her wife makes sure she still votes in favor of civil liberties like marriage rights.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

That makes sense. But then I would feel like I was wasting all this cool media equipment I already have set up.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

Yeah. Current generation learning models can do impressive things in the hands of a skilled engineer, but Elon is leading a round of class warfare against skilled engineers right now.

Shareholders need to decide which they really want to bet on to win.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 14 hours ago

Makes sense. I'm not picky about which exact risks our entitled overconfident billionaires opt to take.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

Also xmas trees are giant cocks. Yep. Huge phallic symbols.

Today I learned!

I'm going to enjoy Christmas trees even more with this knowledge. Thank you.

Though, when looking for a source for others to enjoy, it also turns out it's complicated.

Edit: Caesar Borgia. Unsubstantiated...except by pretty much anyone who, you know, has a quick look at the various portraits of him.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 18 hours ago

It can also be fun to pick a random "legal@..." address outside their organization and include a "cc" to it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 19 hours ago

Any necessary shenanigans to hire Alan Rickman was probably the right call.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

around 270 million. There are 334 million people in the US, so that's probably just about everyone.

Yeah.

Including past breaches, it's unclear if any adult American's private information remains unbreached.

There's an ongoing arm chair discussion happening among Cybersecurity folks of how many living adult humans with social security numbers haven't been breached.

Are there eleven? Are there a thousand? Are there any? We don't know. We do know it's not many.

The good(?) news is that new adults are turning 18 every day, and entering their private information into the same systems, soon to be breached in the same ways. So that's something? I don't know. Maybe it's nothing, honestly.

1
PSA - MineTest on SteamDeck (blog.rubenwardy.com)
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

MineTest on a SteamDeck is so fun, y'all.

(Edit: MineTest is a free and open source game engine that started as a clone of Minecraft, and has grown to be that, and much more.)

I would have tried it sooner, if someone had mentioned it to me, so I'm mentioning it to you.

Edit: Disclaimer, I'm not the author of this blog. It's the walkthrough I followed to start playing.

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