IHeartBadCode

When the blind guy does the routing on the PCB.

you could never have a place that full of screens without ads being everywhere

I audibly laughed.

Remember those ads long ago from Microsoft where everything was a to the edge display? And your taxi cab window was also a display? And the sidewalk was a display? And some random piece of plastic was also a display? And your fucking desk, surprise, is also a display but also one you type on! And so on…

Good times.

I mean all of that looked cool I’m sure at the time, but all of that would be horrible to use, structurally unsound, and require device interactions unheard of.

Unfortunately, this patent is likely just an echo of a project that will never see the light of day

This patent is likely a “we would love to use this to sue someone remotely trying anything that might look like this, but isn’t someone who has a legal team that could convince a judge to send us home with our tails between our legs.” This kind of shit gets pulled by Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, et al all of the time. It’s to ensure their continued ability to keep new entries in the industry away.

Oracle is just adopting the mafia mentality

What do you mean “just”? This has always been Oracle.

I had my fun with Copilot before I decided that it was making me stupider - it’s impressive, but not actually suitable for anything more than churning out boilerplate.

This. Many of these tools are good at incredibly basic boilerplate that’s just a hint outside of say a wizard. But to hear some of these AI grifters talk, this stuff is going to render programmers obsolete.

There’s a reality to these tools. That reality is they’re helpful at times, but they are hardly transformative at the levels the grifters go on about.

Tech vendors have also been falling over each other to tell the world how they are including GenAI in their offerings as the leading AI companies attract feverish attention from investors.

Because you can’t hype it up for investors if you call it what it actually is. Fancy auto complete. And don’t get me wrong, I love me some of the tools out there. But this stuff is being absolutely way over hyped.

It’s good to go into this stuff with realistic views. Will it do all your work? Absolutely not. But what it will do is do a lot of heavy lifting for you so that you can get more things that require your specific attention done.

The level of “sky is falling and we’re all going to be enslaved by AI” is literal bullshit to sell more stocks and create a bubble that will absolutely pop.

AI-generated artwork is detrimental to the creative industry and should be discouraged

Man you wouldn’t guess how airbrush artist felt when Photoshop came around.

Just a reminder that the last of the tax cuts under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 for citizens ends in 2025. The flat 21% rate for businesses tax cut will continue long after that point.

The Republicans are the ones who passed the TCJA with the whole point being that they would run on this plank hard in 2024. The reason the income tax on people are ending in 2025 was because the House and Senate (both controlled by Republicans at the time) couldn’t agree on a unified measure and decided to instead use reconciliation to move the TCJA through. And they’re planning exactly this same tactic if they win in November.

Because they don’t want a solution, they want a never ending problem.

Psss… Let me let you in on a secret. It’s not just this guy.

Say no to SaaS as much as you can

I love GIMP and I will die on that hill (yes, fully aware of the things it lacks, thank you). But for those who use Adobe products, from what I can tell, the answer is that they have no choice in the matter. Adobe is just that ubiquitous in that industry that you either use it or you don’t work in that profession.

With Adobe dipping into AI stuff, I have an underlying fear they’re going to become as ubiquitous in that domain as well, that people trying to compete with them just won’t be able to. And then we will have the same problem in AI with Adobe as we have with Digital Image Editors and Adobe.

Man, the edited video is just extending a few frames and letting it go on longer than the actual video. Yeah, Biden goes to sit down first, and is doing a little squat while the person is welcomed to the stage, but the video on Reddit’s Conservative subreddit is just cut right at the point he sits down and the last few frames are extended a bit.

But you know I’m going to give them benefit of the doubt (I know, I’m going to hear it from you all). They saw something on Xitter, ran with it before fact checking, and now they have egg on face. Happens to the best of us sometimes. But in the age of AI, all of us are going to need to be on our toes about things. This is just a simple edit on a video clip, AI going to allow us to straight up do all kinds of crazy shit.

We’re all in this together and there’s a ton of NOT AMERICANS that want us at each other’s throat. We are either going to help each other get through AI or we’re all going to be falling for made up shit.

Honest question. How does their service “replace” an open source LLM? If I’ve got locallama on my machine, how does using their service replace my local install?

From Cara:

We do not agree with generative AI tools in their current unethical form, and we won’t host AI-generated portfolios unless the rampant ethical and data privacy issues around datasets are resolved via regulation

Okay I wanted to talk real quick about this aspect. Lot’s of folks want AI to require things only held in copyright. And fine, let’s just run with that for sake of brevity. Disney owns everything. If you stick AI to only models which the person holds copyright, only Disney will generate AI for the near future.

I’m just going to tell you. The biggest players out there are the one who stand to profit the most from regulation of AI. And likely, they’ll be the one’s tasked by Congress to write drafts of the regulation.

In the event that legislation is passed to clearly protect artists, we believe that AI-generated content should always be clearly labeled, because the public should always be able to search for human-made art and media easily

And the thing is, is Photoshop even “human-made art”? I mean that was the debate back in the 90s, when a ton of airbrush artist lost their jobs. And a large amount of Photoshop that was done, was so bad back then we had the whole Ralph Lauren, Filippa Hamilton thing go down.

So I don’t disagree with safe from AI places. But the justification of Cara’s existence, is literally every argument that was leveled at Photoshop back in the 90s by airbrush artist who were looking to protect their jobs and failed because they focused way too heavily on being anti-Photoshop that the times changed without them. When they could have started learning Photoshop and kept having a job.

I think AI presents a unique tool for artist to use to become more creative than they have ever been. But I think that some of them are too caught up in how CEOs will eventually use that tool as justification to fire them. And there’s a lot of propensity to blame AI when it’s the CEO’s writing the pink slips, just like the airbrush artists blamed Photoshop, when it was newspapers, the magazines, and so on that were writing the pink slips.

I just feel like a lot of people are about to yet again get caught with their pants down on this. And it’s easy to diss on AI right now, because it’s so early. Just like bad Photoshop back in the 90s led to the funny Snickers ad.

Like I get that people building models from other people’s stuff is bad. No argument there. But, open models, things built from a community of their own images, are things too but that’s all based on the community and people who decide to be in a collaborative effort to provide a community model. And I think folks are getting so hung up on being anti-AI, that it’s going to hurt their long term prospects, just like the airbrush folks who started picking up Photoshop way too late.

There’s not a stopping Disney and the media companies from using AI, they’re going to, and if you enjoy getting a paycheck, having some skill in the thing they use is going to be required. But for regular people to provide a competitor, to fight on equal footing, the everyday person needs access to free tools. Imagine if we had no GIMP, no Kitra, no Inkscape. Imagine if it was just Adobe and nothing else and that was enforced by regulation because only Adobe could be “trusted”.

I mean this comes from the House led by GOP who have spent so much time in committee that they have past:

checks notes

64 laws, most related to renaming post offices.

As a comparison, the 117th Congress (the last one) which was led by Democrats passed 463 laws including the CHIPS law, the Inflation Reduction law, the Infrastructure bill…

In fact, the 118th is on track to be the least productive Congress in modern history. And it’s not just because of all of the inquires that have gone nowhere the GOP have lead, though that has eaten about 60% of their time on the Hill. The GOP has dealt with massive infighting that prevents even themselves from getting things done.

“too little too late”

Man they could have centuries of time on their hands and wouldn’t even do basic things like pass a budget. The GOP has demonstrated quite well that they don’t have the ability to enact their platform. And mostly because they’re too damn busy posing in front of cameras and trying to score sound bites. Like just the other day Comer was talking about how he’d like to arrest Fauci and the thing is, Comer has a degree in Agriculture and mostly majored in those aspects. He doesn’t even have the functional knowledge to actually indict anyone, much less the ability to maintain the massive amount of litigation.

Like he can say that, but the odds of any kind of successful indictment is slim to none. I mean for fucks sake, he sits on the Oversight Committee ex officio, shit he likely doesn’t even know what that means.

A large part of the modern GOP are people who are horrible at their job and have very little understanding of how Government works. MTG just a few weeks ago was talking about some sort of “law” and what it really was, was a regulatory hearing on review of rule making. Not even new rules or regulatory processes, just the usual self audit. Lady doesn’t know the different between slip, law, bill, and rule. But she’ll be the first one to open her mouth about who is and is not a doctor.

A lot of them are very poorly educated in how anything works. And they objectively demonstrate that lack of knowledge on a fairly regular basis. And they’re pretty unabashed about it too.

So yeah, that “too little too late” that’s some rich bull. You know my Grandfather used to say: “If you are ever worried about professional politicians, just you wait till the amateurs get here.” He made that in reference to a Governor of Tennessee Ray Blanton, but fuck if it doesn’t apply here.

Tagged: WIP

Maduro has little to do with previous meddling from the United States. He’s directly from Chávez who was the one who attempted a Coup on Carlos Andrés Pérez, likely what we could consider the last US friendly leader.

Chávez was the Venezuelan answer to US meddling and when he came to power. At some point we have to accept that the people and their elected government are at the wheel. Venezuela made a call to put way too many of their chips into the oil markets, no one forced them to bank so heavily on oil, they made that call themselves.

With next to nothing as a follow up, they’re suffering from economic missteps. Additionally, any international help that’s been extended, Venezuela has turned it down. Maybe for the best as they’re worried that the international help is more foreign meddling. But again, that’s Venezuela to make that choice.

What the US did is understandable to be angry about, but at some point it is less about meddling that the US did and poor economic choices and corrupt government rule that has brought about where they are today. I know a lot of people want to seriously blame the US and there’s some rationale behind that. But where the Venezuelan economy sits today, that’s squarely on the elected officials of Venezuela.

Now does that mean that the current situation there should make us turn everyone away? Absolutely not. At least in my opinion. I think that’s where me and @dragontamer@lemmy.world will disagree. What’s happening is horrible and we should not lose our humanity towards others just because it is slightly inconvenient. But that’s on Congress in the United States to address as they’re the ones that can approve new asylum programs.

Many countries have offered to help including the US. Venezuela doesn’t want it. Again, maybe the paranoia we instilled is what causes that denial, maybe the US just makes a good effigy. But we have to accept the answer Venezuela gives about other people trying to help, that’s how we demonstrate that our determination to actually stop meddling with countries south of the border. Because given the current situation there, it wouldn’t be incredibly difficult for the US to setup partisans and begin an effort to overthrow the government, if they so wanted to.

As horrible the situation is, as much as we shouldn’t close our border, this mess is very much Venezuela’s making.

Forgot the final bullet points

• US Government does jack shit in terms of legal ramifications for breaking law.
• Musk pledges to break US law once again.

This court is absolutely raring to go on major questions. In the past, when Congress left things wide open, the High Court usually gave deference to the agency to handle the details. Examples are things like:

• Congress: “Protect endangered animals” - Executive: “I’ve created a list of what I think is endangered.”
• Congress: “Build a highway between Chicago and the Mexican border in Texas” - Executive: “I’ve come up with a way to string already existing roads and upgrade them to create this road.”
• Congress: “Ensure that companies pay the full cost of environmental damage” - Executive: “I’ll will bill them for CO₂ released into the air”

Congress doesn’t list in massive detail every single possible permutation that’s possible in law. That would create thousand page laws. But as EPA vs WV has shown us, the Supreme Court wants incredible detail. So we get the over 300 pages of new law that indicate six gases, fifteen different levels of municipality, and over ten thousand different industries plus all the various ways those three things interact with each other, to address what was “missing” from the original grant of authority for the EPA.

And the thing is, Republicans will bemoan these large tomes of text, saying “how can we know what’s in it?” That’s them breaks. If the Supreme Court say “a government agency can not do XYZ because it doesn’t say XYZ in the law” then that means we have to be very detailed about what’s in the law. That’s how we get thousands of pages per law. That’s kind of the reason why prior Courts didn’t harp on this stuff. The President changes every four to eight years, regulation can change at that rate too. Law change very infrequently. So that whole EPA vs WV result, CO₂ regulation was something that basically bounced every time we swapped parties, NOW it’s in law and it’s going to be there for decades.

The ISPs are getting ready to shoot themselves in the foot here. Because if NN is enshrined in law, NN is here to stay. As long as it’s a regulatory process, it can change President to President. But push come to shove, if Congress really wants to, they can enshrine Net Neutrality into law. And it only took the Democratically led Congress in 2021, three weeks after the SCOTUS case to pass the new 300+ page law giving the EPA those new powers explicitly.

That’s the thing, the Republicans in the 118th Congress have shown they can not get anything done. They’ve pass 64 laws so far, most of them are renaming Post Offices and reupping funding to VA hospitals. They’ve spent almost 65% of the time in committee investigating various impeachment hearings. It’s so weird how they’ve had a majority in the House, could have worked on budget related things, and they’ve barely talked about the impending tax increase that’s coming once the tax cut act of 2017 runs out next year. They literally had planned to run on that sole thing back in 2017, that’s why they set it up to expire during an election year, and not a peep from them this year on it.

Meanwhile the Democrats in the 117th Congress passed 362 laws, with bangers like the CHIPs act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the whole turn about is fair play with the whole EPA vs WV case. Because they took the majority they had and got things done.

So ISPs better hope Republicans can keep the mayhem up forever, because if Democrats do get into power in the House/Senate/and President. This whole stunt with the Supreme Court they’re pulling could massively backfire on them. Because if NN gets into law, well then it’s way harder to undo that.