@MalReynolds@slrpnk.net
member since 25 Jun 2023 15:39
posts
comments
- on ‘I miss old Google’: readers tell us how they search the internet in the age of AI in c/technology@lemmy.world · 13h ago
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on ‘I miss old Google’: readers tell us how they search the internet in the age of AI in c/technology@lemmy.world · 19h ago
Damn I miss quotes being respected.
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on ‘I miss old Google’: readers tell us how they search the internet in the age of AI in c/technology@lemmy.world · 19h ago
Happy local user for a couple of years now, you can pipe it through a VPN with gluetun for extra fun. Super lightweight, run it on my T580 laptop. Doesn’t fix the enshittified web, but at least you can blacklist the worst of it, along with many other tricks.
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on OpenAI hacked Medicare portal, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says in c/technology@lemmy.world · 22h ago
The scary thing to me is that it was claimed to be the ‘AI crawler’ that did the breach. Those fuckers have been driving up the cost of running every website, have zero respect for a robots.txt file and just keep hammering the internet in general.
Now it appears they also have some sort of breaching capability, or the Medicare statistics site and others have a bad hole that allowed the crawler to walk its way in. I hope it’s the latter, bad as that is, because the former indicates they’re hooking up red team (hacking) agents to their fucking web crawler. Greedy, data hoovering, assholes.
ETA: The Guardian article reports Albanese as saying
the agent had accessed “public and non-public files within the portal” and, in order to do this, “engaged in writing files as well to the internal server”.
which is not crawler behaviour, it’s definitely breaching.
That should be straight up criminal behaviour, at the very least criminal negligence, probably significantly worse, whatever hacking for hire is in the targeted country. As is scarily becoming usual ‘an agent did it’ is being treated as a get out of jail free card, freeing them of responsibility. Those who control it need to be criminally accountable. Even if it is an OpenAI client (person) deliberately breaching their guardrails (Barbossa: “The code is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules.”), the company is an accomplice.
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on ‘Doom Loop’: OpenAI and Microsoft Admits LLMs Are Destroying the Web and Built on Theft in c/technology@lemmy.world · 2d ago
Nah, it’s in the name, Large Language Models, what gets marketed as ‘AI’, are trained on text. That’s why they’re ripping up secondhand books (and copyright law, but that never stopped them) at the moment. No one has really cracked Large Vision Model yet, although there are some primitive versions being attempted in robotics, mostly they translate to text, which is why general purpose robots aren’t a thing yet.
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on EU’s new social media child protection rules to require all social media accounts to produce state ID - Leaked documents suggest that some existing accounts will also be subject to identification che… in c/technology@beehaw.org · 4d ago
And the anonymous internet gets another nail in the coffin. Endgame is every comment identifiable and legally (unlike state intelligence agencies) actionable against you, and the chilling effect that will have on free speech, communication, and organization.
Hail the rise of techno fascism, the entire internet will be facebook.
Can they not palm it off on the corpos to do for them? The states already have the identification apparatus, they should step up and provide age verification services. Meta and Steam do not need my photo ID, just that I’m over 18. If we can’t have freedom, at least minimize the harm.
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on Pistorius: F-35 deal does not make Germany more dependent on US in c/europe@feddit.org · 5d ago
Yes, but also No.
Good post.
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on ‘Doom Loop’: OpenAI and Microsoft Admits LLMs Are Destroying the Web and Built on Theft in c/technology@lemmy.world · 6d ago
Flock does pattern recognition, a quite old piece of machine learning. Nothing to do with training a large language model or other ‘AI’ model.
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on How Three Brothers Built an AI Slop Empire by Buying Legitimate News Sites and Turning Them Into Zombie Content Farms That They Say Get 50 Million Page Views per Month in c/technology@beehaw.org · 6d ago
Fair cop.
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on ‘Doom Loop’: OpenAI and Microsoft Admits LLMs Are Destroying the Web and Built on Theft in c/technology@lemmy.world · 6d ago
Pretty sure they mostly use the pre-AI internet (that they scraped and kept) and synthetic data currently. Probably trying (and failing so far or we’d have heard) to adapt to using video as training material at the moment, but developments there will likely apply to robotics at some point. Here’s hoping the current chuds have crashed and burned before then and that some sanity has taken over from unfettered capitalist oligarchs dreams of computer slavery.
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on ‘Doom Loop’: OpenAI and Microsoft Admits LLMs Are Destroying the Web and Built on Theft in c/technology@lemmy.world · 6d ago
Nah, shitting where you eat.
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on How Three Brothers Built an AI Slop Empire by Buying Legitimate News Sites and Turning Them Into Zombie Content Farms That They Say Get 50 Million Page Views per Month in c/technology@beehaw.org · 6d ago
It’s a joke based on my username. Said by Shepard Book in the TV show Firefly.
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on Everybody's Lost Their Minds in c/technology@lemmy.world · 6d ago
Been there, burned the TShirt…
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on How Three Brothers Built an AI Slop Empire by Buying Legitimate News Sites and Turning Them Into Zombie Content Farms That They Say Get 50 Million Page Views per Month in c/technology@beehaw.org · 6d ago
There’s a special hell for these sorts.
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on Everybody's Lost Their Minds in c/technology@lemmy.world · 6d ago
You know what’s harder than debugging? Maintenance, especially of someone else’s code, keeping up to date with security exploits, revamping UX etc. which is why github is full of write only (as in never read, never changed) slop projects. That’s a critical part of a software project with any lifespan.
And then there’s integrating new functionality.
Without a solid architecture (which AI sucks at), strict code readability standards (ditto, but improving) and nuanced reviewing of potential additions to the codebase (ditto) what you get is a spagettified mess. It ends up costing more to maintain and improve than just starting fresh.
The promise of the AI bros was that by the time you needed to maintain or extend, you could just get the next version of Claude or whatever to do it, as it’s capabilities would have improved. That was a lie, and LLMs have hit a logarithmic wall where throwing more compute and bigger training sets at it produces diminishing returns. No AGI for you (unless some genius finds a new architecture). Frameworks / harnesses are still improving, but there’s only so far that can go.
The amount of technical debt that has been racked up by the last two years of AI coding is staggering to contemplate, and the industry will be dealing the fallout for years. Companies will collapse, and god help you if you’ve used it liberally in a codebase as large as an OS - looking at you Microslop.
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on Your Computer Might Demand Your Age Soon, No Matter Where You Live in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 17 Sep 2026
And nothing of value was lost.
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on Your Computer Might Demand Your Age Soon, No Matter Where You Live in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 17 Sep 2026
a step towards building an infrastructure to track any user
I’m inclined to believe that infrastructure already exists (both state intelligence services and corpos like Meta), this is about being able to use it in the legal system and getting people to self censor.
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on Yeah use AI.. luddite in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 15 Sep 2026
Hard agree on Prussian-style education (which had similar goals of wage slavery when it was introduced). Unfortunately the pessimist in me thinks reform will likely have to wait until after this round of fascism has run its course, but it absolutely need to be a high priority when the time comes. Best time to plant a seed is twenty years ago…
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on Yeah use AI.. luddite in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 15 Sep 2026
The number of Chesterton’s fences getting bulldozed right now is scary to contemplate.
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on Yeah use AI.. luddite in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 15 Sep 2026
Understanding the layers of abstraction down to the metal is still a useful way of developing an instinct for how compilers, interpreters, languages, and algorithms etc. work and what is possible. If you ever truly need to optimize something you’ll end up descending those layers, it’s why C has inline assembly and with RAMageddon upon us optimization may well return to being a valued skill.
Which is to say you don’t need to know what you don’t need to know, until you do, and you’ll be better anyway if you can.
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on Yeah use AI.. luddite in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 15 Sep 2026
we were talking about the need for radical education reform over a decade ago
Education, and especially critical thinking, has been systematically gutted by conservative governments for at least 4 decades in the Western world. The goal is the absolute minimum knowledge and thinking skills (preferably without learning skills) necessary to complete the wage slavery tasks.
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on Dramatic insider warnings over AI fall flat with some in Silicon Valley in c/technology@lemmy.world · 13 Sep 2026
It’s been obvious for a while that scaling has hit diminishing returns (‘let’s voluntarily slow down’ like they can actually go faster) and the ‘just one more datacenter bro’ has stopped working.
Much smaller models have proven adequate for what the technology does well and the only thing stopping people moving to them wholesale is (probably illegal) market cornering. There is no moat but what they make.
At least it’s looking like there’s a good chance they won’t get to IPO and steal pension funds and crash economies as badly as they might have. SpaceX actually has worthwhile technology mixed in but xAI still managed to drag it down. Anthropic and OpenAI would go over like a lead balloon now and it’s only going to get worse as they continue to bring nothing new to the table.
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on Wait, there's books and classes on linux? in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 13 Sep 2026
Guess you learned, but the rules of backup are 3-2-1 with at least one offline (I count offline HDD as a different media type for 2, tape one day, maybe, seems painful), it’s not a real backup until you’ve restored from it and, RAID is not a backup.
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on Backflip: Apple now wants to train AI models with user data after all in c/technology@lemmy.world · 13 Sep 2026
Or they just do it anyway, easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, after all it’s only a .001% revenue fine if caught.
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on World-first biological data center packs 16 mn living human neurons in c/technology@lemmy.world · 12 Sep 2026
Yay, torment nexus, and if it isn’t yet, it will be soon.
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on Anthropic disrupts Russian, Chinese AI campaigns targeting its Claude models in c/technology@lemmy.world · 11 Sep 2026
At the end of the day, they’re selling call and response, maybe you can ‘disrupt’ things a bit, but it’s inherently leaky. No moat here.
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on Unraid 8 Moves to Fedora in c/selfhosted@lemmy.world · 8 Sep 2026
I like the analogy of Arch is bleeding edge, fedora cutting edge. Did the Arch thing (and recommend it to learn, still use archwiki) now happy with ublue after a year or two of fedora. Guess I like stuff that just works.
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on Official 25th Anniversary Poster for ‘Cowboy Bebop: The Movie’ in c/anime@ani.social · 6 Sep 2026
Still sitting pretty with a pistol in hand.
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on Paradox in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 2 Sep 2026
Claire’s (likely) a good programmer, knows there’s always edge cases and is super pedantic.
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on The Creator of Git and Linux in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 2 Sep 2026
Their work mostly takes place in their minds, the computer is a glorified text editor.
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on New compression technique in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 2 Sep 2026
Trying to find it funny, but in 2026 it’s way too close to the bone and just makes me sad.
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on infested rule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2 Sep 2026
More stupid than usual?
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on Your smartwatch is lying to you about how many calories you burned, Study finds in c/technology@lemmy.world · 2 Sep 2026
Yup, best you can hope for is consistent. That can be useful in a ‘am I good, should I try more, less’ way.
I mean calories themselves are what happens if you burn the food in a bomb calorimeter, which bears little resemblance to what happens biochemically in your body anyway.
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on OpenAI Hoarding Tens Of Thousands Of Apple Mac mini And Mac Studio Devices, As ASUS And MSI Burn Through Their Entire First Batch Of NVIDIA RTX Spark Chip And Beg For More. in c/technology@lemmy.world · 31 Aug 2026
Yeah, I’ve had the thought. ‘What are we going to do with all that compute now that AI as worker replacement is a bust? Why not run panopticon and get rid of that pesky general compute in the hands of the masses?’
Centralizing compute has been tried again and again, initially mainframes, then the home PC, thin client / server, cloud compute, arguably phones (as apps processing in the cloud), Geforce Now, AI. So far it’s always gone back to the edge for most of the population, except for niche cases (or not in the case of phones, but they turned into general, if locked down, compute), good chance it won’t stick this time either.
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on Swiss Politician Who Blamed Immigrants for Sex Crimes Indicted for Sexually Abusing Foreign Teenager in c/europe@feddit.org · 31 Aug 2026
Projection, ‘they must do it because I would’.
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on OpenAI Hoarding Tens Of Thousands Of Apple Mac mini And Mac Studio Devices, As ASUS And MSI Burn Through Their Entire First Batch Of NVIDIA RTX Spark Chip And Beg For More. in c/technology@lemmy.world · 31 Aug 2026
Smells like 'Open’AI is digging another moat where there is none, like it did with the memory wafer deal that started RAMageddon. Heaven forbid people actually being able to run local models, can’t run local models if 'Open’AI has bought all the capable smaller machines, taps head. Fuck SamA and his market cornering with a rusty chainsaw. I guess they think all they have to do is keep that moat somehow until IPO and then it’s somebody else’s problem, they and their investors cash out. Dear Goddess I hope it blows up in their faces.
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on So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe in c/technology@lemmy.world · 29 Aug 2026
Hmffh, anti-copyright. After all, every view is a copy to your machine. Just information being free.
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on GrapheneOS not supporting Pixel 11s? in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 29 Aug 2026
Potential loss of profit from data sucking. Corporate fleets with something to lose will pay more, but in a cheap thing for the masses? Sell their data / habits/ souls…
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on What is your cloud backup solution? in c/selfhosted@lemmy.world · 29 Aug 2026
Don’t understand the downvotes here, even just burying a HDD in a waterproof container in the backyard is way better than 99.9% of users with unencrypted files in OneDrive or iWhateverTheyCallIt. Offline backups are critical against accidental deletion among other things. Part of my 3-2-1 (not buried, just offline), I like old laptops with big SSDs, makes it self sufficient.
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on What is your cloud backup solution? in c/selfhosted@lemmy.world · 29 Aug 2026
Yup, once you encrypt at home just chose the cheapest / most reliable (or use multiple) depending on taste off site storage. Trust is no longer an issue.
I’d like to see some sort of MergerFS for multiple offsites with varying redundancy levels, instead of my shell script.
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on World's first GPS-free quantum navigation trial succeeds at sea in c/technology@lemmy.world · 29 Aug 2026
I was going to say something about the scale of gravity changes needed, but your take is way better. Cheers.
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on World's first GPS-free quantum navigation trial succeeds at sea in c/technology@lemmy.world · 29 Aug 2026
Cue magnetic mines, but where are you getting the gravitic mines from?
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on World's first GPS-free quantum navigation trial succeeds at sea in c/technology@lemmy.world · 29 Aug 2026
Eh, boat or submarine drones can be as big as you want, and the device will only get smaller (and better).
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on Teen Boys Are Using Meta Glasses to Terrorize Girls at High Schools and Middle Schools in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 22 Aug 2026
I want to see a huge culture shift. Where we have huge peer pressure against ever u/l’ing somebody without their consent. Ever.
Hard agree, but it’s the same as just taking photos with a phone without consent of third parties, but on your face.
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on Teen Boys Are Using Meta Glasses to Terrorize Girls at High Schools and Middle Schools in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 22 Aug 2026
We need better laws.
In spades, there used to be, in common law, a requirement for third party consent to be photographed if profit ensued, Mayhap that needs resurrection.
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on 80% of developers find AI coding more addictive than helpful in c/technology@lemmy.world · 22 Aug 2026
Absolutely correct and well said. Until you give it a tool to call a websearch (in my case SearxNG), I occasionally break it out (local 27B model) when a search is pulling lots of AI slop, Spy vs Spy style. I make it give me references and it usually indicates a bad search (XY problem)
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on There arule way better books out there in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 22 Aug 2026
The correct answer IMO, the world is never going to not need a hero like Sir Terry Pratchett. He provides wisdom and hope. GNU Terry.
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on AI companies destroy physical books — let’s scan rare books before it’s too late in c/technology@lemmy.world · 21 Aug 2026
Yah, exclusive content, or just rats watching the ship go down while burning books. FU AI bros playing the largest scam in history…
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on AI companies destroy physical books — let’s scan rare books before it’s too late in c/technology@lemmy.world · 21 Aug 2026
Damn that’s a lot of waiting. There was another device that just MRI’d books where they were, but no, ‘AI’ companies need to rip books apart to scan them. FU.
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on Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence in c/technology@lemmy.world · 21 Aug 2026
expensive lawyers
Image is 270MB, under 1MB in its volume.