Hmm, I didn’t say anything about AI (although you’re right that, like most people in the fedi, I don’t like it) and I’m not anti-Chinese. It’s the crypto connection which raises trust issues. They list Binance as a partner and supporter, whose founder was convicted of fraud and pardoned by Trump because his sons are in on the crypto grift.

I don’t think I’ll be trying this app out, even though it sounds interesting, unless some trustworthy party audits the code. But hey, you do you.

While this app seems sensible, I checked out the github developer account DimensionDev and it looks like their primary product is something called Mask which is something about “Web 3” crypto/NFT integration … looks like they’re a libertarian crypto grifter cult to me. They also have a gaudy, nonfunctional company page whose copyright notice reveals that is owned by a Chinese parent company with it’s own stale, uninformative web page.

It’s open source, and yeah, maybe they thought they’d make something actually useful … but the source is full of red flags.

I recently asked ChatGPT to generate some boilerplate code in C to use libsndfile to write out a WAV file with samples from a function I would fill in. The code it generated casted the double samples from the placeholder function it wrote to floats to use sf_writef_float to write to the file. Having coded with libsndfile over a decade ago, I knew that sf_writef_double existed and would write my calculated sample values with no loss of precision. It probably wouldn’t have made any audible difference to my finished result but it was still obviously stupidly inferior code for no reason.

This is the kind of stupid shit LLMs do all the time. I know I’ve also realized months later that some LLM-generated code I used was doing something in a stupid way, but I can’t remember the details now.

LLMs can get you started and generate boilerplate, but if you’re asking it to write code in a domain you’re not familiar with, you have to understand that — if the code even works — it’s highly likely that it’s doing something in a boneheaded way.

At least when I’m cleaning up after shit devs who used Stack Overflow, I can usually search using a fragment of their code and find where they swiped it from and get some clue what the hell they were thinking. Now that they’re all using AI chatbots, there’s no trace.

Beehiiv is an option.

I’m thinking about getting the new FairPhone 6 when it comes out and running /e/ OS, but I’m so reliant on Google Maps and Gmail (my email account, not necessarily the app … but I do rely on the app).

I’m afraid that I’ll either install Google apps and end up with a phone just as compromised as a stock Android install, or if I don’t it will be too much of a pain in the ass to use.

While we don’t all know he cheated, we do all know he totally would if he thought he could get away with it, and there are some troubling irregularities in the vote counts.

I only use Windows because I have to work with a corporation’s IT helpdesk staff to get on their VPN if I want to do contract work for them. They are not likely to help me get connected from Linux; they’ll just find another contract dev. Once in, I do everything in Linux because my code will ultimately run in a Linux cloud container of some sort. WSL works well enough for me to do this. I’d rather have Linux on bare metal, but whatever. I’m in; I’m coding; I’m getting paid. I’ll put up with a little bit of suck.

AppImage is the no-nonsense universal package format.

I once saw a headline that someone (I forgot who) said that “AI is weird”. All I could think was, well yeah, he’s been called “Weird Al” all of his professional life …

My bad, the illustration was supposed to be of Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, who has been accused of trafficking fentanyl. On the one hand, it seems encouraging that they had to find someone who could more credibly be presented as criminal – hopefully an indication that their claims about the pro-Palestinian students and Argentinians with tattoos they’ve disappeared were not deemed credible enough by the general public.

Still, we only have the allegation of this administration against this person, so it’s quite possible she’s entirely innocent. It’s not like they give a fuck about actual crimes or making our country safer. They just want to be seen as badasses.

You got a link for that? I’m not finding anything online linking Rumeysa Ozturk to anything related to drugs

Upvoting for the concise summary of what the article is about (thanks!); not for the opinion expressed (which appears to conflate Russian developers with the actions of the Russian government – something I find problematic at best).

CLI is being able to speak a language to tell your computer what to do; GUI is only being able to point and grunt.

As far as I can tell from the article, the definition of “smarter” was left to the respondents, and “answers as if it knows many things that I don’t know” is certainly a reasonable definition – even if you understand that, technically speaking, an LLM doesn’t know anything.

As an example, I used ChatGPT just now to help me compose this post, and the answer it gave me seemed pretty “smart”:

what’s a good word to describe the people in a poll who answer the questions? I didn’t want to use “subjects” because that could get confused with the topics covered in the poll.

“Respondents” is a good choice. It clearly refers to the people answering the questions without ambiguity.

The poll is interesting for the other stats it provides, but all the snark about these people being dumber than LLMs is just silly.

The data at downforeveryoneorjustme make it appear that “only lasted for about half an hour” is BS. In fact, they appear to be having problems again this morning.

This cartoon reminds me of this song

Something about https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1 , or at least that’s the model that everyone’s been talking about recently. It looks like it’d be half a terabyte to clone the entire repo though, and I don’t know how to use it either …

Something like if (stupid_bool & 0x01) should work for those.

I would really like to thank the Arch community for maintaining such a wonderful wiki; it’s great that your nuts-and-bolts approach naturally generates the best documentation. That said, Debian will always be my distro of choice.