[-] d0ntpan1c 28 points 1 week ago

I'm not entirely against LLMs as a tool, but I especially despise the image-based LLMs. They are certainly neat for some fun things. I've used them a little bit here and there for a dumb profile picture or a "I'm kinda thinking about this..." Brainstorm, but even in those cases I noticed the capabilities of the LLM and its tendencies quite literally pidgeon hole my artistic vision and push me in other directions that felt less and less creative. (Sidenote: I feel the same way about coding LLM tools. The longer I use them at any given time, the less creative I feel and it has a noticeable impact on my interest in the code I'm writing. So I don't really use them much. Also I consistently manage to point out coding LLM code in PR reviews because it's always kinda funky)

I've avoided using AI art tools for a while now. I'll consider some limited use if the cost, billionaire ownership, blatant theft of real IP without compensation, and environmental impact problems are solved. (No, an "open source" model doesn't solve all of these problems, especially since nearly all open source models are not truly open source and are almost always benefiting from upstream theft)

You know what I do like about AI art? I like the older Google machine learning art experiments from the mid-2010s. They invoked a strange existential curiosity. But those weren't done with LLM's.

Outside of LLMs, I like that there are some newer tools for editing that can do a better "lasso" select, that can mix and match into brushes as an alternative to something more algorithmic, the audio plugin that uses a RNN to simplify or expand upon an audio technique. Things that are tools that can be chosen or avoided and have nothing to do with LLMs.

I honestly cannot wait for this bubble to burst and for these tools to return to a cost that they'd need to be for these companies to turn a profit. A higher cost would eliminate all this casual use that is making people worse at research, critical thinking, and creativity, as well as make the art tools less competitive to just paying artists, even for scumbags wanting to cut the artists out. And it'd incentivize non-LLM, non-insanely costly ML techniques again instead of the current "LLMs for everything" nonsense right now.

[-] d0ntpan1c 37 points 2 months ago

It's absolutely been worse here lately. I don't know that I'd call it worse than reddit, but Lemmy is definitely trending more toxic. I'm certainly not a heavy user by any means. Idk if the more reasonable voices have just become less active or if more toxic voices have arrived or what, but where as 6+ months ago things tended to be more discussion prone than antagonistic, it's now mostly antagonistic, especially in the more popular communities.

I will say, I've left many of the lemmy.ml communities in favor of similar communities on other servers and that's helped as far as making my feed of posts less toxic to boot (and less spammy).

I haven't done much of my own moderation in blocking so I'm running mostly based on the server moderation.

[-] d0ntpan1c 60 points 2 months ago

Kickstarter coming sometime soon to get some more resources going for it and related projects. will be interesting to see if it's effective.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pixelfed/pixelfed-foundation-2024-real-ethical-social-networks

Dan tends to work on too many things simultaneously (which isn't bad per say, and he thrives doing so) which means things get stalled and its a little hectic. Hoping more funds and community excitement will help spread the work out more and allow him to keep working as he does without other projects being on pause in the meantime.

[-] d0ntpan1c 49 points 2 months ago

Wild that people are concerned when Bazzite has a completely different underlying toolset vs SteamOS.

Want arch? SteamOS Want fedora? Bazzite

Tbh Bazzite has an important role going forward: pointing out any bad decisions by valve and offering an off-ramp if valve enshittifies.

[-] d0ntpan1c 34 points 2 months ago

The rednote move is mostly a form of protest. People are fully aware its a dumb idea for privacy.

[-] d0ntpan1c 42 points 3 months ago

Speaking as an engineer doing a lot of web dev, I think people underestimate how much work Mozilla does in standards and low-level shared API's via w3c and others, and how important it is that google isn't the only one in there making decisions. Most w3c standards decisions are made with google, Mozilla, Microsoft, and apple representatives in committees, and as we know, two of those are much more aligned in their own best interests these days, while one kinda wishes mobile web browsing didn't exist.

Would we have a better browser with less Mozilla baggage? Possibly.

Would the web standards that make everything work be better off without Mozilla? No, absolutely not.

Safari's team does what they can within Apple's bullshit intentional deprioritization of anything that could compete with the App Store, Edge's team has brought some sanity to the chromium side and toned back some of Google's wilder standards proposals and intentions. The fact that there are now 0 legitimate reasons for a website to "only work in chrome" (aside from some mobile safari things still) nowadays is all the stuff behind the scenes that matters. Even google is doing less FAFO shipping features and not caring about what other browsers need.

That said, maybe a disruptions is needed to a new paradigm could step in. Maybe a Mozilla Foundation placed under other ownership with a narrowed focus.

In the Linux space, the massive investments that GNOME, KDE, and others have been able to garner the last few years from governments and interested organizations is promising. There could be a similar interest in a web-focused org that could champion things without the Mozilla baggage and intent to avoid the same fate.

[-] d0ntpan1c 38 points 4 months ago

Forgejo is already working on federation https://forgefed.org/

[-] d0ntpan1c 46 points 6 months ago

Y'all realize a random employee performing the add-on store review process isn't representing Mozilla's or the Firefox teams entire position yeah? This kind of stuff happens all the time with all stores that have review processes.

Firefox Addons store prob needs to improve its process, gorhill is justified in being mad, and I understand if he needs a punching bag between this and google, but, as someone who also develops extensions.... These things happen. It's just a part of building browser extensions.

[-] d0ntpan1c 34 points 6 months ago

Personal experience bias in mind: I feel like owners and managers are less interested in resolving tech debt now vs even 5 years ago.. Business owners want to grow sales and customer base, they don't want to hear about how the bad decisions made 3 years ago are making us slow, or how the short-term solution we compromised on last month means we can't just magically scale the product tomorrow. They also don't want to give us time to resolve those problems in order to move fast. It becomes a double-edged sword, and they try to use the "oh well when we hit this milestone we can hire more people to solve the tech debt"... But it doesn't really work that way.

Its also possible I'm more sensitive to the problem now that I'm in them lead/principal roles rather than senior roles. I put my foot down on tech debt a lot, but sometimes I can't. Its a vicious cycle and it'll only get worse the longer the tech sector is stuck in this investor-fueled forever-growth mindset.

Too much "move fast and break things" from non-technical people, not enough "let's build a solid foundation now to reap rewards later". Its a prioritization of short term profits. And that means we, the engineers, often get stuck holding the bag of problems to solve. And if you care about your work, it becomes a point of frustration even if you try to view the job as just a job.

[-] d0ntpan1c 33 points 7 months ago

Honestly, I'm not mad if AI fully defeats captchas to the point they go away. They almost always fail to be usable via accessibility tools. These things might block some automated systems, but they also block people with disabilities.

[-] d0ntpan1c 37 points 1 year ago

Roku was such an easy recommendation for a long time... Non-complex UI, long support for updates, not owned by google or amazon... Far cheaper than LG and Samsung... (Not that Samsung's UI is anywhere near as easy as roku)

But now I guess thats done. Unless an alternate firmware exists or this doesn't hit older TVs I guess I'll be looking for a new TV... Which is a shame because my current 4 year old roku TV is more than capable.

[-] d0ntpan1c 31 points 2 years ago

That's how Microsoft markets their "safe links" in Outlook, which is more or less the same behavior of wrapping all links with a redirect. Whether they actually do anything with that to save you from phishing attempts or whatever... who knows. Even if there is a safety feature, it's still an easy way to mine url query params for data or learn about the user for other purposes (which they may or may not be doing)

IMO if you can't turn it off, there's a secondary motive to the feature. Especially when the feature is marketed from a place of fear rather than aid.

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d0ntpan1c

joined 2 years ago