@balsoft@lemmy.ml
member since 10 Jun 2024 17:57
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- on even their own economic rules tell them why it will fail 🙄 in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2d ago
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on even their own economic rules tell them why it will fail 🙄 in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2d ago
It’s not really the wages they are after. Paying a wage on one end and getting paid market rates on the other end is how they generate profit, no matter how much automation advances.
It’s those pesky labor rights they want to get rid of. AI helps in two ways: take away power from workers by threatening replacement, and automate data gathering and surveillance to physically control those who try to oppose capitalism.
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on Putin casts online vote using unlicensed Windows on an American Dell PC in c/technology@lemmy.world · 3d ago
Contributions from russians make up a sizeable portion of Linux and GNU tooling. A myriad of foundational software, from nginx to strace, were created and are currently maintained by russian citizens.
While there has been a lot of brain drain (hello), russia is still a country of 140 million people and the remains of great soviet theoretical education. In such conditions there will be both a bunch computer science geniuses and a small army of half-competent coders which would allow you to roll your own OS, let alone a distro, if the efforts were organized enough.
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on Putin casts online vote using unlicensed Windows on an American Dell PC in c/technology@lemmy.world · 3d ago
Baikal went bankrupt in 2023 because they used TSMC for chip production.
Elbrus is barely hanging on but it’s helplessly far behind, you can’t really run a modern DE and browse modern web on anything but their flagship Elbrus-16C, but that’s made for servers, AFAIK there are no “desktop” form-factor motherboards for it at all, and it’s exceptionally pricy compared to competition.
I think a more likely outcome is that russia starts bulk-purchasing chinese CPUs soon.
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on South Korea gives 400 stalking victims app to track their stalkers in real time in c/technology@lemmy.world · 16 Sep 2026
I think you’re joking, but in case you’re not… This is just like the paradox of tolerance, everyone has a right to privacy and freedom but if they violate other’s rights, society will in exchange take away theirs. We don’t (generally) call imprisoned criminals “victims of kidnapping” either.
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on C shark shark in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 15 Sep 2026
doo-doo doo doo-doo-doo?
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on Programming languages are unconvincing (atleast C++, Java and its ilk, Smalltalk, Lisp) in c/programming@beehaw.org · 15 Sep 2026
fail to illustrate what a programmer in even one target domain gains from using it.
I think the main illustration for almost all languages is pretty clear (for most situations) - it’s easier and faster than writing assembly by hand.
The rest comes down to trade-offs, technical (compiled/interpreted, strong/week typing, high/low level, optimization), ecosystem (are there libraries targeting your domain, is it likely to be maintained for the duration of your project), personal (how familiar you are with the language, how well do you understand its paradigm), business (how easy it is to hire for it, how good is the developer collaboration story, are there certifications).
All the languages you list have some weak points and some strong points. Because they are all popular and received a lot of development over the years, they are now all a good fit for at least some situations.
Although to be clear, even assembly has its benefits and will be the right fit occasionally.
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on Programming languages are unconvincing (atleast C++, Java and its ilk, Smalltalk, Lisp) in c/programming@beehaw.org · 15 Sep 2026
Fun fact, you can totally do functional programming in C++ too. Actually, it is in the top-right of the λ-cube, making it (in a specific sense) a more functional-programming language than Haskell or LISP :D
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on Yeah use AI.. luddite in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 15 Sep 2026
The main problem with AI is that it’s pretending to understand more than it actually does right now. It can’t do software architecture. It can’t really write maintainable code without a lot of re-prompting and corrections. And yet it will happily make a bunch of those decisions for you when you ask it to write you an app.
Compilers are well-defined tools. “Human-readable” code goes in, “machine-readable” code comes out, according to some spec somewhere. Yes, compilers can be nondeterministic and they do a lot of weird stuff sometimes and they choose the wrong approach often, so some developers still need to understand assembly and CPU cache and SIMD and other features of the hardware our code runs on. At the very least every developer needs to understand the performance tradeoffs they’re making, or we end up with a JS-based start menu in Win11. But at least compilers have a well-defined class of inputs and outputs.
For AI these issues are amplified a lot. They are non-deterministic and unbounded in what layer of software they operate on or produce. I’d argue every developer who uses AI needs to understand software architecture, approaches to software development, and actually read and understand the code that the AI produced, at a minimum. Otherwise the whole industry will become saturated with and built on top of code no-one understands or can maintain, and it will literally collapse in on itself at some point. Carefully reviewed, selected, maintained code has always been precious, it will become a golden nugget in a sea of pig manure.
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on The Wirule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 11 Sep 2026
BTW rejecting cars is also something that intelligent and rational people can/should do.
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on ‘The People Building AI Earnestly Believe That It Could Kill Us All’: Anthropic Researcher Quits Dramatically in c/technology@lemmy.world · 10 Sep 2026
If you just pipe an LLM straight into a feedback loop with a console, it is going to destroy things rather soon, depending on the context window and other factors. All the agentic fluff is basically the workaround for LLMs going off the rails.
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on ‘The People Building AI Earnestly Believe That It Could Kill Us All’: Anthropic Researcher Quits Dramatically in c/technology@lemmy.world · 9 Sep 2026
Pipe it into
rooton your laptop for a couple days and see how it fares. -
on ‘The People Building AI Earnestly Believe That It Could Kill Us All’: Anthropic Researcher Quits Dramatically in c/technology@lemmy.world · 9 Sep 2026
Nah, LLMs are pretty useful for a wide range of tasks. I would grant them the status of “locally intelligent for text manipulation”. They can find patterns, transform, compress, and even generate text pretty well if you formulate the prompt correctly.
The problem with them is two-fold:
- There is no actual grounded intelligence involved and yet they are used for all sorts of tasks where it is required, like research or decision-making or software architecture or creative writing.
- They also captured human emotional states really well, which makes them scarily addictive for people looking for human connection (see all the “companion” chatbots) and terrifyingly useful for pushing propaganda, misinfo, and scams. This also multiplies the first problem tenfold because LLMs are trained to come off as confident which means they will “pretend” to be good at things they really are not, and if you don’t know how the underlying tech works you can be lulled into believing its confidently incorrect research results or execute a totally insane decision it makes.
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on ‘The People Building AI Earnestly Believe That It Could Kill Us All’: Anthropic Researcher Quits Dramatically in c/technology@lemmy.world · 9 Sep 2026
Wars in the Middle East start sounding more and more like statistics that no one really wants to hear about
Has this not been the case for the past 25 years already? No real need for “AI” when you already have an obedient and trigger-happy military with plenty of remote-controlled toys and your populace is brainwashed to believe “brown person = terrorist”.
way less soldiers to choose to disregard unlawful orders
What is the last known case of a US soldier disregarding an unlawful order? If anything, the military is full of assholes who are happy to kill for fun. See: Graham Platner
Will AI make it easier and/or cheaper? Probably, sadly. But it won’t be a qualitative change.
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on ‘The People Building AI Earnestly Believe That It Could Kill Us All’: Anthropic Researcher Quits Dramatically in c/technology@lemmy.world · 9 Sep 2026
five minutes earlier: “hey dude, marketing here. if you quit and post this dramatic text about the inevitability of AGI on your X account you’ll get a huge golden parachute”.
Seriously, how can competent people look at the current state of LLMs and think that it’s anywhere near AGI material?
Sure, it is already making civilizational changes for the worse. Not because it’s good, rather because it makes us lazy and dumb, has decimated creative jobs, and is used relentlessly for propaganda and misinformation and scams. And it’s much better at using the scaffolding of existing structure to make chaos, than it is at making new structure, making it a weapon more easily yielded by the evil than by the good. A few more software vulnerabilities discovered along the way will not be such a big deal in comparison.
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on DLSS 5 comes with a massive 50-60% performance hit, so I hope you like lower frame rates with your dose of AI image enhancement in c/games@lemmy.world · 7 Sep 2026
Imperial China has you covered: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_binding (the horrors never cease)
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on Microsoft workers in Czechia win first collective agreement in c/technology@lemmy.world · 31 Aug 2026
They’d have to effectively close down the Czech branch of the company.
Yeah, I think that’s basically what they’re going to do.
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on Microsoft workers in Czechia win first collective agreement in c/technology@lemmy.world · 31 Aug 2026
Sadly they can, there is no law stopping a company from shutting down offices. They’ll have to pay people who are laid off a few months’ salary with no work performed but it might be a better deal to MS compared to paying higher wages forever.
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on Canada's PM Carney: "This fall we will begin intense discussions with the European Union, the world's second-largest economy, to build a much stronger and deeper economic and security partnership" in c/europe@feddit.org · 28 Aug 2026
the second largest country on the planet
You do know that the literal largest country on the planet (also very cold and snowy) is criss-crossed by rail and has excellent public transit in many cities? Most Moscow/St Petersburg dwellers I know don’t have/need/want a car, don’t even have a driver’s license, and some of them travel around the country regularly. There is also a growing number of bike lane networks in cities, especially in the south of the country (on comparable latitudes to GTA, BTW). If russia can pull it off so can you, stop falling for car propaganda.
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on U.S. Citizen Who Deleted Phone’s Data Says His Prosecution Puts Privacy at Risk in c/technology@beehaw.org · 27 Aug 2026
Honestly yeah, that’s the best solution if you want to do something like this.
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on U.S. Citizen Who Deleted Phone’s Data Says His Prosecution Puts Privacy at Risk in c/technology@beehaw.org · 27 Aug 2026
Data contained on the phone is very much the property which they wanted to take into custody or control, and it was wiped.
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on The whole world is watching as Canada stands up to Trump in c/europe@feddit.org · 26 Aug 2026
Sánchez told trump to fuck off from Spanish airspace at least. That was a good start. France, Spain and Germany are also in the process to migrate away from US IT service dependence, which is another step in the right direction. More is urgently needed to un-vassalize the economies and the militaries.
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on U.S. Citizen Who Deleted Phone’s Data Says His Prosecution Puts Privacy at Risk in c/technology@beehaw.org · 26 Aug 2026
I think stuff like that would be up to the jury to decide. If I was on that jury I definitely wouldn’t consider just having a duress password to imply intent of “knowingly preventing the Government to take property into its custody”, especially since GrapheneOS doesn’t really mention state actors in its FAQ. It would be reasonable for him to claim that he enabled this feature to protect himself from illegal searches or kidnapping, and accidentally gave the wrong answer to the cops.
But reading the OP interview it seems to me that he is almost admitting that he wiped the phone intentionally, tipping the scales significantly. Is it “beyond reasonable doubt” that he intentionally gave the duress password now? Maybe.
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on U.S. Citizen Who Deleted Phone’s Data Says His Prosecution Puts Privacy at Risk in c/technology@beehaw.org · 26 Aug 2026
Nah, it doesn’t change anything. The statute says
Whoever, before, during, or after any search for or seizure of property by any person authorized to make such search or seizure, knowingly destroys, damages, wastes, disposes of, transfers, or otherwise takes any action, or knowingly attempts to destroy, damage, waste, dispose of, transfer, or otherwise take any action, for the purpose of preventing or impairing the Government’s lawful authority to take such property into its custody or control or to continue holding such property under its lawful custody and control, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.
It’s clear that if he intended to wipe the phone and told the officer a password which would erase the contents, he “knowingly took an action for the purpose of preventing the Government’s lawful authority to take such property into its custody”.
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on U.S. Citizen Who Deleted Phone’s Data Says His Prosecution Puts Privacy at Risk in c/technology@beehaw.org · 26 Aug 2026
Yeah and it’s even more stupid for him to be giving out interviews right now defending his actions. If I was him I would shut up in public and tell prosecutors that I was under extreme stress and pressure of the detainment and accidentally mixed up the real password with the duress password. The government can easily prove all elements for obstruction of justice “destruction or removal of property to prevent seizure” here, except for intent.
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on Linux users switching back to Linux after 10 minutes of using Windows in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 26 Aug 2026
C’mon, she even held up her hair perfectly for a photoshoot, it’s transparently performative.
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on Db admin, cloud admin, printers, more for $110k. in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 19 Aug 2026
I don’t get it. Everyone in IT is screaming about the employment crisis. I have a friend who can’t even get a job that pays 40k € with a Bachelor’s in CS and two years of semi-relevant experience. Are things really that much better in the US that you can get paid over 200k for a job similar to the one in the OP?
Like, I have a similar amount of responsibilities to the OP and closing in on a decade of experience, get paid in your “jira pencil pusher” range and yet consider myself lucky compared to my friends in IT. Granted this is remote work in europe with interesting technical work and open-source aspects, but still…
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on LMAO in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 17 Aug 2026
No, in fact the entire Google Docs suite stores the underlying docs/slides/spreadsheets in OpenDocument formats (odt/odp/ods). Apple is just being Apple.
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on How AI text watermarking works: a visual guide in c/technology@lemmy.world · 16 Aug 2026
Yeah, still, I wouldn’t claim “as no human would end up falling into that”, given that it may not be that unlikely to find at least one human who displays similar writing the more humans you involve.
No, it is actually statistically impossible for a human to replicate this on sufficiently long runs of text.
This is not about replicating writing like a model. This is basically about guessing which words to pick from the list of suitable words based on a rule that you don’t know (because the key is secret).
To reduce this to the simplest possible example, imagine you are writing a “text” from just two letters: “a” and “b”. Let’s say for convenience that the text is supposed to be random. So the text would look something like “ababaaabbababbbabababaabbbabaababbaaabbabaabbaaaaabaaabbbaabaabababbabbbbbbbbabbabaabbbbbbbaabbabaab”
(generated with
‘’'.join(random.choice([‘a’, ‘b’]) for i in range(0, 50)))The watermarking works as follows: the model owner holds a key, and then uses that key to influence the random choices between “a” and “b” somehow, in a context-dependent way. The actual algorithm is quite complicated, but for simplicity let’s just say we have a secret pattern which biases the random choice towards it. In order to see the exaggerated results, let’s say the secret key is “aaaabbbb” (of course this is a bad secret key, once again just an example), and that the bias is strong (let’s say 80%). So this would mean that the first four letters in our text are more likely to be “a”, the next four letters are more likely to be “b”, then the next four letters are more likely to be “a”, and so on.
Then the text would look something like “aaaabaabaabaabbbabaaaabbaaaababbbaaaabbbabaabbbbaaabaabbaaaaabbbabababbaaaaabbbbaaabbbbbaaaaababaaba”.
(generated with
‘’.join(random.choice([‘a’, ‘b’] + ([key[i % len(key)]] * 3)) for i in range(0, 100)))You can see visually that the secret key has affected the text. Of course in this example even if you didn’t know the secret key you could probably figure it out, in reality the algorithm is way more complicated than that, relying on cryptography, so you wouldn’t be able to know the secret key or see that the string has been biased at all.
If the text is long enough, and you know the secret key, you can guarantee that the text was generated with it. In our examples, the letters in the text match our key 77% of the time. The probability of an actual random algorithm generating a text like that is already very low, despite the base entropy being only 100 bits. If my math is correct, for our example the p-value is 2.7 * 10⁻⁸, or about 0.00000027%. I would bet a hungy that the text was generated by our watermarking algorithm, with odds like these!
Of course we did exaggerate the bias and our base algorithm was random. In reality the bias is smaller, the algorithm for determining the likelihoods of possible next tokens is very complicated (it’s the LLM itself), and the algorithm for determining which token to bias is also way more complicated (involving cryptography and real secret keys). That said, hopefully it should help you understand why, for sufficiently long texts, this fingerprinting is just not possible to be replicated by humans.
That’s not how (non-speculative) profit works under capitalism.
All profits that a capitalist accrues are eventually extracted from a laborer who puts in more work than what they are paid, where
The profit is the difference between the labor power expanded in a working day and the wage (the labor power necessary to maintain a “supply of labor”).
If you remove the wage, and therefore the laborer, you are left with no profit. Capitalists understand that intuitively. Some will speculate on the amount of labor power to manipulate the perceived value of their company (hence the hiring/layoffs cycle), but a sustainable business requires a steady supply of labor for which (at least under capitalism) they must pay a wage.
If, by some miracles, capitalists manage to produce & gain control of an AGI (I strongly doubt this will happen with LLMs), and manage to force us to bootstrap a fully automated supply chain without overthrowing capitalism, we will indeed enter into another economic system entirely, and it won’t be good for most of humanity.