Mauve 👁💜 @mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe

So pocket is shutting down. It's fatiguing to have your digital life depend on so many externalities that you don't control.

If I have food in my fridge, I can eat. If I have clothes in my closet I can get dressed and go outside. It won't all disappear at a moment's notice because some decision was made somewhere.

In the digital world, permanence is a mirage. You can't really depend on anything being there, unless you control it all from the hardware to the software.

yahoo! https://xrsh.isvery.ninja/#RemoteStorage

XR shell (xrsh) now supports saving & restoring VM-snapshots.
Afaik the first (famous last words) in-WebXR linux distro which can persist state over https://remotestorage.io

If someone were to invest development resources into the Open Source ecosystem right now, improvements to which area would benefit the user experience across all device form factors (desktop, laptop, mobile etc.) the most? You can name both individual applications, libraries and subsystems as well as broader topics like e.g. "messaging".

#linuxmobile #linuxdesktop #opensource #mobilelinux #linux

Do NOT judge me but that is literally so sexy of her.

Few programs out there that both deserve my respect AND command me onto my knees begging

Thesis: ChatGPT is destroying education, students keep using it to cheat on homework and exams.
Antithesis: ChatGPT has no understanding of facts or semantics.

Synthesis: Homework and exams don't measure understanding of facts or semantics, and can be fooled by plausible-sounding bullshit.

Jesus fuck, this hit like a tonne of bricks.

from https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

#Google putting wrong medical advice in their #AI Overviews.

This is not funny. It is not acceptable. Today I saw someone who had asked a health-related question to Google Search. The AI Overview presented mixed-up, wrong information. I urged the person to ignore the AI Overview and use the regular site links.

They didn't know there were any regular site links, because the AI Overview filled essentially their entire window and they didn't know to scroll down. This is a common situation with busy, nontechie users.

They have depended on Google to point them at accurate information for so many years, and now Google Search spews out convincing looking AI garbage. This is not an anomaly.

Google's AI Overviews are full of wrong, partially wrong (even more dangerous!), and just plain misinformation. Answers that are completely reversed from supposed source pages because the AI didn't understand the wording. Measurements wrong. Math wrong.

It doesn't matter how often AI Overviews are correct, because you NEVER KNOW when they're going to be wrong, either completely or partly (again, mixing true with false -- like contaminating a well).

And now Google is trying to convince users to use "AI Search" instead -- "Hey Ma', no more list of blue links!" -- making it even harder to see that so many of their answers are, if you'll excuse the expression, bulls*it, sometimes dangerous as well.

This is unconscionable. Frankly, whether Google understands this or not, this behavior is uncaring and evil. Apparently Google's leadership no longer feels any shame at all. Disgusting.

If only I could see what the connection was

nice and clean via Explicit Resource Management 🥳

https://v8.dev/features/explicit-resource-management

TP-Link

@mauve The Master replied: "That programmer has mastered the Tao. They've gone beyond the need for design; they do not become angry when the system crashes, but accept the universe without concern. They have gone beyond the need for documentation; they no longer cares if anyone else sees their code. They've gone beyond the need for testing; each of their programs are perfect within themselves, serene and elegant, their purpose self-evident. Truly, they have entered the mystery of Tao."

My webserver is hosting and sending itself roughly 1GB of emails every day.

Those emails contain completely random nonsense generated by a markov-chain bot that was fed two scientific papers about black holes, the Bee Movie script, the Binle in English and German, the entire literature of Shakespeare and an English dictionary, including all definitions, three times.

The bot pre-generated roughly 900GB of text, stored in 2GB chunks, each chunk as a standalone SQLite database with each sentence as one row, on a small external SSD attached to a Raspberry Pi.

The Pi runs a script every hour that takes a handful (between 3 and 10) of rows from a database, incrementally. It then uses those sentences to compose an email and sends that email to myself. The Pi then repeats the process 50 more times, before stopping and waiting for the cron job to run again the following hour.

The emails are then downloaded to my iPhone through the default Mail app, where they are automatically filtered to not be treated as spam but also to not notify me upon receipt.

This is where the purpose of this is finally revealed.

Apple uses synthetic data to train its AI models. This data is generated and then a second set of data is generated from that as variants of the original text. The variants ate then sent to iPhones and other Apple devices to be compared locally against the corpus of emails stored on the iPhone and a score is calculated for how realistic the content of the AI generated variant may be.

I will never poison the training, especially alone in this endeavor, but it is satisfying enough to know that if I can't decide what the CPU I paid for does when my phone is asleep, then Apple can't do that either.

Every time I read that another tech CEO wants to make his company into an Everything App with passport-rigorous real-world ID of users, I think of how much I hate it when people try to send me actual important communication via Facebook messenger.

Every tech CEO thinks he's going to be dictator of his own little corporate state, but really we're just all going to be more isolated because all our family members chose (or got hired by) different walled gardens and never just send an email.