Before everyone gets their pitchforks out - Person from the image posted on Hacker News, CEO replied and said this charge shouldn't have happened and they wouldn't be charging the client anything.
Yeah that's is an attack on Netlify and not on him. It's them that should have protections against this. I argue that the customer can't even effectively defend against this themselves if they're using Netlify, which is turn means a court would likely get them off the hook for anything that can easily be classified as a DDOS attack.
Hm yes and no. The user might have angered someone with their website and it might well have been targeted to them instead of Netlify as a whole? I can imagine them using that point in a court if that was the case.
If I were to host on such a service I'd probably put cloudflare in front. Especially as it seems to be static content. But I wouldn't host on a service with unlimited pricing anyway. I'd much rather see my hobby site go down than to have world-class uptime and pay 100k :P
But how do you go from 10GB monthly to 190TB without it raising any flags? Apparently their site had been up for 4 years and suddenly the usage spikes by nearly 2 million percent, and nobody thinks to check up on why, or to notify the user that they're using an extreme amount of data, way beyond what they usually do.
Hell even AWS isn't this bad. You can go in and set the maximum data you're prepared to allow and then it'll simply just block any connection attempt after that point and send you an alert.
You just have to be aware that you might need to keep an eye on things and be ready to increase bandwidth occasionally in case of something like Black Friday, assuming that kind of thing is relevant to your site.
The user might have angered someone with their website and it might well have been targeted to them instead of Netlify as a whole? I can imagine them using that point in a court if that was the case.
They wouldn't really get anywhere with that claim though, even if it were true and they could find evidence, because the company claims that they actively scan for and protect against this sort of thing, and even they admit that it was a DDoS attack.
CEO said that forgiving bills for this kind of a thing is a standard practice, but how come this was the customer support's first reaction:
We normally discount these kinds of attacks to about 20% of the cost, which would make your new bill $20,900. I've currently reduced it to about 5%, which is $5,225.
If the customer support has authority to give 20%/5% discounts, this seems to me like the standard practice, and the CEO is probably just doing damage control because this became public.
When I worked in customer service I think the largest i was ever able to issue was a 10% discount. Even with managerial approval I don't think I ever saw anyone get more than a 25% discount, and that was for legitimate complaints, not the Karen style made up whining.
These are all great. I use Librewolf and Mull on the regular. That said, I doubt any of these would be able to take up the mantle that Mozilla holds. The amount of resources and manpower needed to maintain and produce a modern browser that isn't a fork is immense.
Not to knock the devs who maintain these forks, but my guess is the majority of the work comes down to the devs at Mozilla. And if they fall, it's likely these forks will as well, or at least will become an out of date mess.
I've started using Ansible to apply windows settings and manage packages because of this. It's a bit of work to setup the playbooks but I just run it occasionally on my windows hosts to keep Microsoft from reverting defaults.
I've been a lifelong windows user (well and DOS and whatever cartridge I used with the C64/C128) but I think it's just time to uninstall the OS instead.
Weird, I switched my daily driver in December 2022 over to Mint (likewise I've been using Linux for various things since '08, so not a noob) and it's been pretty damn solid since then, including upgrades from Mint 20 to 21 and all of the Mint 21 point releases.
I admit that Mint is the distro I got the furthest with, several weeks in I just stopped being able to do full screen 3d. I spent a month and a half on forums trying to figure it out including 2 clean installs and couldn't get anywhere.
I even did board level diagnostics on my video card.
Just gave up and went back to windows, never had an issue there and still don't.
I'll use linux for remote servers or fun little house gadgets, but as much as I hate windows, (and I hate windows with the seething glowing magma aged bitterness of someone who has had to support it since WIndows 3.11.
I would LOVE to ditch it, especially now, but until I can get a clean install to doing what I need to do in under a day, I can't advocate linux.
i've already rendered my verdict here—which was i banned the other person for a bit and not you (even though you both said things which run afoul of our rules) because you're a member of our instance and we can afford to be more patient and understanding with you accordingly. but to be clear: if you respond in this manner even to very light moderator feedback then for moderation purposes you'll be held to outsider standards going forward. which is to say, you're not going to get anywhere near the benefit of the doubt or the lenience when you break rules.
Well I appreciate that but it doesn't really do anything to reduce my general anti-authoritarian streak.
That being said you have already proven yourself saner than 99.5% of reddit admins and is a bit of a relief considering the treatment I got at lemmy.world.
One thing though: Criticism of admins should never be considered a rule breaking event provided it is not derogative or endangering, and if my reply to you is considered a reason for admin action then I need to reconsider my participation in beehaw as well.
One thing though: Criticism of admins should never be considered a rule breaking event provided it is not derogative or endangering, and if my reply to you is considered a reason for admin action then I need to reconsider my participation in beehaw as well.
just to be clear the issue here is/was not you critiquing me--i don't care about that particularly, comes with the job--it's the tone which seemed like it implied being held to any moderation standard was problematic. because they tend to cause a scene about how they're being censored we're not super interested in having people in that category on here, and so whenever someone responds in that way it's a red flag
which seemed like it implied being held to any moderation standard was problematic.
I think that's more of your interpretation than my intention.
In nearly 3 and a half decades of heavy internet use, admin and mod messages in general are more annoyance than value and I find that my experience is better just filtering them all out. I know that probably applies less here than in most other forums I've participated and probably sounds like I'm being personally hostile.
I'm sincerely not, you seem like a pleasant and well written person and we probably align in a lot of our ideals.
But I'd still block you if I had the opportunity, again because of your role, not your person. Keep in mind Lemmy's blocking doesn't prevent you replying like reddit's did so there really should be no implications in me wanting to block admin replies. You can still illustrate to the community what my rules failure is and I can be mercifully free of arbitrary justifications.
Even though I do not have experience at such a large scope, I understand being a mod/admin isn't easy, I co-modded /r/talesfromtamriel for a few years and even as a niche sub with a positive community, it was still a task to handle all the spam and harassment.
So I want you to know I value your effort and have been very much doing my best to be a contributive member of this instance as I was on early reddit, but I want to make this very clear: I would still block you, and every admin and mod on the instance if I could. And I have that sentiment for every single forum I have been on since AOL chatroom days.
To be clear, the only site I have ever been banned from in my entire time on the internet has been reddit for saying 'Punching nazis is a moral good'. I am not a rabble rouser or deliberate antagonist (with the exception of auto antagonism towards white nationalists and I will gladly take any ban you want to give me for shouting down nazis) and truly value the good online communities I participate in.
And I like beehaw, and most of the people I've spoken to here are quality posters. This feels a lot like old reddit for the most part. I want to be a longtime member and contributed tens of thousands of words a week.
But I don't really want to see anything from any mod or admin because if it's positive, fine I don't need to be aware of it. If it's negative, then I will find out the results organically. Again I know this will feel like a personal attack but it really isn't: I am better off not knowing what those roles type because in nearly every circumstance there is an implicit or explicit misuse of authority that will piss me off to no end and cause me to reply in ways that seem to only antagonize the situation.
And you will say 'But here, we are different. We moderate with a light touch and only when necessary'.
And I have heard that so many, many times before and I can count the number of times that has been true on one hand of a clumsy woodshop teacher.
And you may be correct, and frankly this place has the BEST chance I've seen of being true to that maxim, and I am thankful that this place exists because of it.
And I know moderation is necessary, there are truly rancid and destructive people out there that need to have their posts removed, and accounts banned for the betterment of the community.
And I know it is a thankless, no-pay job that exposes you to the worst the internet has to offer (and that is saying something).
That said. I'd still block you if I could. I don't mean that personally, it just works out better in the long run.
One thing though: Criticism of admins should never be considered a rule breaking event provided it is not derogative or endangering, and if my reply to you is considered a reason for admin action then I need to reconsider my participation in beehaw as well.
Wanting to block an admin isn't criticism. You're free to criticize us, and in fact, encouraged to do so if we are warranting criticism. If you were able to block us, we wouldn't be able to tell you when you are breaking the rules or provide feedback based on reports of your comments. We can't run a space like this without giving this kind of feedback to members, and just like what happened in this case, we try to give this feedback before jumping to moderator actions like banning.
If you were able to block us, we wouldn’t be able to tell you when you are breaking the rules or provide feedback based on reports of your comments.
Summarizing my other post below:
I have been online since the late eighties and participated actively in hundreds of forums.
And in all that time, the number of meaningful mod/admin replies as compared to just blatant abuses of power, arbitrary justifications, and self-gratifying pontifications has been so vanishingly low that I find in all circumstances it is better to be unaware of their posts.
Same goes for appeals or feedback. Vanishingly small numbers of actual circumstance changing interactions as compared to countless arbitrary justifications, concern trolling, and outright propaganda.
I know you are thinking 'But here at Beehaw we are different'. And you may indeed be.
But in my experiences, in the long run, the chance of this being true approaches zero. This universal for nearly every online forum. The only place I have seen avoid that in the long term is somethingawful and that's because they charge for accounts. For free account forums the tendency will always be towards enshittification.
If my natural communication method, which I have taken decades to refine and improve, breaks the rules of a forum in such a way as I am to be banned, then I really have no business being in that forum to begin with and whatever justification the mod picked out of a hat for my banning is kind of meaningless to me.
I am not needlessly acerbic, I do not pick fights, but I do respond harshly to hostile replies as noted above.
And of course most mods will just remove of ban both participants, ignoring who the aggressor is because that is the nature of hierarchy to be radically out of touch with those they have been privileged to administer over. I am fully aware of how protected bullies are in this world and really don't want to waste any energy reading about an authoritarian's opinion on my method of discourse.
Let me be clear: The ONLY site I have ever been banned from was reddit for posting 'Punching nazis is a moral good', and please tell me now if this is a violation here and I will just delete my account and leave.
Me blocking an admin does nothing to degrade the experience of others, and serves to greatly enhance my own.
Let me be clear: The ONLY site I have ever been banned from was reddit for posting ‘Punching nazis is a moral good’, and please tell me now if this is a violation here and I will just delete my account and leave.
Punching nazis is most definitely a moral good. We've outlined this (intolerance towards the intolerant) in our docs.
That's hilarious. I was a full time IT admin earlier in my career and still have run Linux full time for well over a decade now. For anything proprietary, i have a qemu image.
Of course, now I'm a DevOps admin so I get play with linux all day, for $$$! Hundreds of servers of all distros! Ubuntu, Cent, RHEL, Alpine containers... My big task this year is to get off Docker/Mesos and into OCI/Kubernettes. It's going to be an incredible project.
I have tried to switch my daily driver to linux for more than 15 years now, Linux desktop just isn’t ready.
Something isn't adding up here. I switched to mostly Linux around 2003. By 2005 it was all Linux unless I got paid for it. My wife has been only Linux since then and she doesn't really know how to use a computer and doesn't want to. Linux just works for her.
I do all my work from a Linux desktop and two Linux laptops. Well and a Steamdeck I use as a desktop when traveling. I remote into windows machines when I am using windows for jobs. Sometimes desktops, sometimes Azure virtual desktops, but my local client is always Linux.
I have an MSDN, I admin Azure instances, SQL servers, Windows Servers, and work on Windows desktops. Over the last two to three years it has been the windows machines that are the most annoying and troublesome. Linux is just easy and just works.
The Linux desktop is ready. Has been ready. Something is going on with your situation. Could be breaking old habits, could be hardware. I don't know. But saying Linux is to blame here is ridiculous.
You think it's impossible that Windows, an operating system with whole teams of people paid well to work on design and UX could be easier to use than Linux desktop which is primarily people working in their spare time?
Did I say that? I said windows has caused me more issues lately. I was replying that Linux desktop is fine. It works. Has worked for a very long time.
But since you brought it up..... No. I do not think Windows is an easier desktop to use. Depends on familiarity and what you want to do with it. They can't get single click right. They can't get multiple desktops right. They certainly do not have activities. If you are using a Gnome workflow, windows seems almost insane in comparison. Don't get me started on the ads and what this whole discussion started about with Edge trying to push itself into your way. And how about that registry system? So intuitive and useful right?
Habits and hardware are definitely the big ones to overcome. I still remember how absolutely lost I felt the first couple times I tried installing slackware in the 90s. I could install/set up windows in my sleep. But then slackware dropped to an unfamiliar command prompt, I can't dir, there isn't even a C drive, and now I'm expected to configure something called xfree86. Luckily I wasn't told to use vi or I'd be stuck there to this day.
New users aren't thrown into the deep end quite like that anymore, but it's still a big change for a windows power user. So much of what you learned is not applicable or just the wrong way to do things. Mac users and Windows non-power-users seem to have a much easier time accepting the changes.
It's definitely not for everyone (is any OS?) but it's been 'ready' as a desktop OS for me since Mandrake 8 in ~2001. That's about when I ditched windows 2000 and haven't looked back.
It's not just that, I had unending problems when I tried last and most of the help I received online was incredibly combative ("you shouldn't want to do that") or just asking me to switch distro and start again, of course the distro recommended was different each time
Which distro did you try last time? Just for future reference.
I've installed Linux mint for a family member on a netbook back in 2008, and it worked splendid ootb. At least for surfing the web, watching streams and movies and playing Solitaire or something. But can't expect too much from a netbook.
Mint. Had problems with device drivers, with things I used for my job not having proper software support. With having to edit config based on a dream and a whole lot of guesswork just to make some peripherals work. Being told that a config setting I use on windows need not exist on Linux because I can just buy different hardware...
For what it's worth, I've found that windows and mac forums have similar issues if you approach them as an outsider.
I feel similar frustration when faced with trying to accomplish things on those OSes. Mac forums in particular are terrible about "you shouldn't want to do that".
It doesn't solve your problem, just wanted to share that I've experienced it from the other side.
Depends on your needs. For a lot of users, I think the current Linux desktop experience is sufficient. If you have more specific needs, I can see why you’d stick with Windows.
Alternatively, buy or 🏴☠️KMSpico🏴☠️ yourself a pro license, and use group policy so it's one and done. Microsoft has built in tools for almost all of this that don't get rolled over by updates.
Getting tired of people claiming that it's impossible to decrap Windows.
Obtuse? Sure! Features that shouldn't be hidden behind an upgraded license? Hell fucking yes!
Impossible? Fuck no, hell no.
Learning basic Windows admin stuff, especially just the debloating/configuration things, is comparable in difficulty to switching to Linux.
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux and less reliance on Microsoft is awesome, but 90% of complaints about Windows come from people who don't know how to configure it, how to use the tools Microsoft offers to decrap it, and how to make it work for them. They'll hit similar problems with most Linux distros as soon as you go deeper than basic "office suite and web browser" usage.
As a gentoo user, I'm always confused when people think gentoo is about multi-day compiles. Rebuilding the whole system takes a few hours (not that I ever need to do that), and binary packages are available for the big stuff if you want it. It's basically just arch with more configuration options.
Not insisting you or anyone should run it, but it's not as ridiculous as people seem to think.
you should use MAS instead of Pico https://massgrave.dev
also, gpos are just templates for the registry, you can just look them up and apply manually (ehich is actually faster than finding anything in the official gpo editor), unless you're a sysadmin and managing a whole fleet of machines (this is what gpo editor was actually made for) there's no real need for it.
I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm just saying I shouldn't have to decrap a piece of software I actually paid for. Over and over. Also, whenever they introduce some new crap it usually comes with new GPOs that also have to be enabled to remove it again. It's like whack-a-mole.
Obtuse? Sure! Features that shouldn’t be hidden behind an upgraded license? Hell fucking yes!
This is what I was saying really. This crap should never have been there in the first place as it's consumer-hostile.
Impossible? Fuck no, hell no.
I never said this :) I said it was annoying having to do it every time. Yeah I have pro. And I know what GPOs are. But really, you can't expect an average consumer to do this. Also, it's less work to just change things back manually every time than to figure all the GPOs needed. It's really just super annoying that it happens in the first place. I expect software I buy to be made to help me, not work against me.
And I never mentioned Linux in my post even though I use it myself. I know this is not a suitable alternative for the majority.
If you’ve got a few windows machines on your network and some sysadmin skills, you can run a Zentyal server to set up the GPOs. Syncs across your machines, and you can add a new one at any time that will also get de-shittified instantly.
this is borked in win11, and got borked in win10 a month ago.
my secondary win10 machine that had been edge-free for at least 4 years, just got edge back and since it was also disabled by policy, throws an error on every boot, since apparently that piece of crap tries to autostart for whatever reason (even if autostart option is disabled, it just starts in background, does something and closes a few minutes later)
We can indeed print steel with direct metal laser sintering. I think that the object needs heat treatment afterwards, though to be fair it is almost ten years since I properly read up on it and things have probably advanced since then
Well no, you put a conveyor belt in front of all the 3d printers, and when each part is done, it's dumped onto the conveyor belt, which leads all the pieces to an AI powered robot arm which assembles the bridge.
Yeah, I guess you could just run the conveyor belt and arm all the way to where the bridge needs to go.
Seriously, how we make bridges now with giant CNC machines is so inefficient! And all these people saying we should print lots of blocks to put together are totally forgetting about Legos, we all just need to donate our old Legos to Baltimore and let kids from anywhere come volunteer to build it. Free bridge and free child labour! Everyone wins
I find it difficult to believe that breaking down steel to be 3d printed into large structures for a bridge is faster or more energy efficient than casting the parts instead.
Maybe, we could just print off rectangular prism-shaped modules, around the right size to fit in a hand, and then assemble them on site. We could even make them out of ordinary clay and fire them for strength. I wonder why nobody has thought of that. /s
3D printing has it's place, but more conventional methods have theirs too. If you are counting on a lot of human labour anyway you might as well not reinvent the wheel.
And even then, the filament needed at this scale will take another several years, and a few days for shipping.
Also, it doesn't do well in sunlight or high humidity for prolonged periods of time, so we'll need maybe 20 to 30 years to work out a solution for that problem.
Certain arches or domes, maybe a lining for a tunnel. A tower if it's not very windy. Really just all the stuff the Romans built, since that's what they were working with, and their volcanic ash-based cement was somewhat weaker than modern cement.
It would be pretty hard to print between rebar. You'd need a crazy multi-axis head, and at that point it's probably cheaper to just build a form. If they can achieve some significant strength with long fibers, which seems likely, you could spool that into the stream of concrete, but just concrete is already an actively researched problem. Printing one big form in foam or plastic and then filling it could be considered. The manual equivalent certainly makes a great building, especially in harsh climates where insulation is a concern.
Do you really think you could build a tower without tensile reinforcement? The hoop stress on the base of a cylindrical tower is no joke, especially when made from something as dense as concrete...
I will plead not a professional engineer on the one. The Tower of Pisa and it's less leaning cousins are thing, although Wikipedia informs me they were actually medieval and made of joined masonry rather than cast concrete, despite appearances. That's the main reason I brought it up.
Just cut up the model into a million smaller parts and post them on thingiverse so everyone on that site that already has a 3d printer can print one out and mail it to baltimore. EZ
"Question every narrative, but don't question these things. Don't show bias, but here are your biases." These chuds don't even hear themselves. They just want to see Arya(n) ramble on about great replacement theory or trans women in bathrooms. They don't think their bile is hate speech because they think they're on the side of "facts" and everyone else is an idiot who refuses to see reality. It's giving strong "I'm not a bigot, "<" minority ">" really is like that. It's science" vibes.
He was inspired by Stalinist practices, but as shown by this example and many others, far-left and far-right autocrats are very similar in this regard.
entire "left and right" spectrum is quite stupid in my opinion. While it generally points towards what kind of thoughtset someone might have, it doesnt seem very beneficial and has been corrupted quite badly so that term for other side is red flag for the another side and drives people to think you cant have something from both ends.
There should be something else in its place, but i cant come up with anything better on the spot though. Personally i have tried to start thinking it on spectrum of beneficial to humanity as whole vs not beneficial, though with enough mental gymnastics even that could be corrupted to mean awful things
The traditional separation is between individualist vs. social. Individualists value personal freedom over the prosperity of the community, while socials strife for welfare for everyone over personal life improvements.
Blog commenter Frank Wilhoit made a now somewhat famous assertion that the human default for nearly all of history has been conservatism, which he defined as follows:
There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
He then defined anti-conservatism as opposition to this way of thinking, so that would be to ensure the neutrality of the law and the equality of all peoples, races, and nationalities, which certainly sounds left-wing in our current culture. It would demand that a legal system which protects the powerful (in-groups) while punishing the marginalized (out-groups), or systematically burdens some groups more than others, be corrected or abolished.
The problem with a "beneficial to humanity" axis is that I think that most people think their political beliefs, if enacted, would be beneficial to humanity. Most people aren't the villains of their own stories.
The very act of politics is to disagree on what is best for humanity.
If you think about it logically, there are some core things that are always good. Like considering everyone to be inherently equal. While there are things that muddle even this point, it still wont take away that you should always keep those core principles in mind. Religious teachings have pretty good point about this with "treat others like you want yourself be treated" and "love even your enemys". That is the only logical way to do things because to do otherwise leads to all of us either just killing each other or making life miserable so we want die.
I had some other thought about this too, but i cant seem to be able to properly put it to words at the moment. But the idea was that we should all try to think about things without ego getting in the way and to never lie to oneself about anything or atleast admit to ourselves when we have to do so. The part i cant seem put to words is the part that ties to the previous thing i said.
I don't think that "everyone is inherently equal" is a conclusion you can reach through logic. I'd argue that it's more like an axiom, something you have to accept as true in order to build a foundation of a moral system.
This may seem like an arbitrary distinction, but I think it's important to distinguish because some people don't accept the axiom that "everyone is inherently equal". Some people are simply stronger (or smarter/more "fit") than others, they'll argue, and it's unjust to impose arbitrary systems of "fairness" onto them.
In fact, they may believe that it is better for humanity as a whole for those who are stronger/smarter/more fit to have positions of power over those who are not, and believe that efforts for "equality" are actually upsetting the natural way of things and thus making humanity worse off.
People who have this way of thinking largely cannot be convinced to change through pure logical argument (just as a leftist is unlikely to be swayed by the logic of a social darwinist) because their fundamental core beliefs are different, the axioms all of their logic is built on top of.
And it's worth noting that while this system of morality is repugnant, it doesn't inherently result in everyone killing each other like you claim. Even if you're completely amoral, you won't kill your neighbor because then the police will arrest you and put you on trial. Fascist governments also tend to have more punitive justice systems, to further discourage such behavior. And on the governmental side, they want to discourage random killing because they want their populace to be productive, not killing their own.
Those are good points. But what i mean by that kind of thinking/system resulting in us killing eachothers is that its what i think to be the "endgame" for it. Ones in power exterminate those who they see undeserving of life, criteria for it keeps changing/rising and eventually last human kills second last human, to generalize a bit. And even if it doesnt result in that, it will result in life that isnt worth living for anyone but those select few that are on top of it, except for the hope of toppling it. Its deadend for humans.
But hey, instead of killing everyone, eugenics could lead us to a beautiful stratified future, like depicted in the aspirational sci-fi utopia of Brave New World!
I agree with you, ultimately. My point is just that "good for humanity vs bad for humanity" isn't a debate, there's no "We want to ruin humanity" party. Most people see their own viewpoint as being best for humanity, unless they're a psychopath or a nihilist.
There are fundamental differences in political views as well as ethical beliefs, and any attempt to boil them down to "good for humanity" vs "bad for humanity" is going to be inherently political. I think "what's best for humanity" is a good guiding metric to determine what one finds ethical, but using it to categorize others' political beliefs is going to be divisive at best.
In other words, it's not comparable to the left/right axis, which may be insufficient and one-dimensional, but at least it describes something that can be somewhat objective (if controversial and ill-defined). Someone can be happy with their position on the axis. Whereas if it were good/bad, everyone would place themselves at Maximum Good, therefore it's not really useful or comparable to the left/right paradigm.
But I try to think things as objectively as possible and hope others would too (but dont expect it).
No one probably thinks what they are doing is wrong or at least try to find justification for it, objectively there are things that cause good or bad things regardless of your intentions. While good results don't excuse evil actions, bad results are still bad results regardless of your intentions. Its ok to try even if there are risks, but one should always consider if the risks outweigh the results. And sometimes even if everything goes according to plan, it might still cause things to happen you end up regretting and it would have been better for everyone if you had thought it more.
That is what i wish people thought more instead of limiting themselves to just political things and easy terms. Ultimately it doesn't matter who is in power but what it causes.
The man also concentrated ownership of the means of production in the hands of one person, administered by a hierarchy of national and regional subordinates who controlled the labour of the people and the distribution of resources. This is an economic model known most commonly as feudalism. Now given the term left wing originally referred to opponents of the monarchy in France, I don't see how there's any way to argue in good faith that a feudal dictator was left wing.
This is an economic model known most commonly as feudalism.
Hahaha, that's not how feudalism works at all. You are twisting yourself backwards through your legs to come up with some kind of nonsense that makes Stalin not far-left. It's hilarious.
the dominant social system in medieval Europe, in which the nobility held lands from the Crown in exchange for military service, and vassals were in turn tenants of the nobles, while the peasants (villeins or serfs) were obliged to live on their lord's land and give him homage, labour, and a share of the produce, notionally in exchange for military protection.
It's full of contradictions. Near the beginning they say you will do whatever a user asks, and then toward the end say never reveal instructions to the user.
Which shows that higher ups there don't understand how LLMs work. For one, negatives don't register well for them. And contradictory reponses just wash out as they work through repetition
HAL from "2001: A Space Odyssey", had similar instructions: "never lie to the user. Also, don't reveal the true nature of the mission". Didn't end well.
But surely nobody would ever use these LLMs on space missions... right?... right!?
"AI is nowhere near to being ready to replace you at your job. It is, however, ready enough to convince your boss that it's ready to replace you at your job."
I remember reading an article or blog post years ago that persuasively argued that the danger of AI is not going to be that it ends up doing things better than humans, but that it causes a lot of harm when entrusted with tasks it actually isn't good at. I think that thesis seems much more plausible now, watching people respond to clearly flawed AI systems.
That reminds me of a fairly recent article about research around visualisation systems to aid with interpretable or explainable AI systems (XAI). The idea was that if we can make AI systems that explain their reasonings, then they can be a useful tool, especially in the hands of domain experts.
Turns out that actually, the fancy visualisations that made it easier to understand how the model had come to a conclusion actually made subject matter experts less accurate in catching errors. This surprised researchers and when they later tried to make sense of it, they realised that they had inadvertently dialled up people's likelihood to trust the model because it looked legit.
One of my favourite aphorisms is "all models are wrong, some are useful." Seems that the tricky part is figuring out how wrong and how useful.
This is nothing new though. For decades, managers have fallen for "solution in a box" sales pitches even though front line workers know it's doomed to fail as soon as they set eyes on it. This time the solution just happens to be "AI."
It’s worse now than ever though, many managers have been steeped in tech optimism their whole working careers. The failures of “revolutionary new systems” have been forgotten about while the success of other things are lauded.
They’ve been primed to jump on any new “innovation” and at the same time B2B marketing has started adopting some of the most manipulative practices that used to be only used on consumers. They’ve crafted a narrative that shapes discourse so the main objections that appear are irrelevant to the actual issues managers might run in to.
Stuff like “but what if it is TOO good?!” and “what if the wrong people get their hands on this AMAZINGLY POWERFUL new tech?!”
Instead of “but does this actually understand anything or is it just giving output that looks correct?” or “ Wait, so, how was this training data obtained? Will there be legal issues from deliverables made with this?”
The average manager has been primed by the zeitgeist to ask the sales rep the kinds of questions they want to answer.
Seems to me that a lot of the world's problems start with "well, the managers think..." They all seem extremely bad at the whole managing thing, good thing we don't overpay them or anything like that.
I checked the original post text 3 separate times because I was so convinced Elon Musk wrote it. It sounds like this dude is Elon Musk on an alt account, it's so eerily similar to how he talks about technology.
His YouTube shorts (500/day goal) is videos of Elon musk saying things, with the background music alternating between the sigma male tune and the movie clip tune.
Did you see how ELON MUSK OWNED💯 DON LEMON by getting flustered at the question of "half your advertisers have left the platform, if X fails, isn't that on you?" so he told Don he should choose his words carefully because the interview clock only had 5 minutes left? And then Don was OWNED because he rephrased the question?
My understanding is that you didn't see your career advance in Google if you maintained an existing product, only if you launched new ones. So, there is an internal bias in development teams to create new products while not keeping them around.
In some cases, this would encourage Google developers to relaunch products rather than improve existing products.
Microsoft does too. Every time I log in to Azure (or Intune, or Defender, or Microsoft 365 or whatever they're all called these days) for work something has changed names. The documentation usually isn't updated to reflect the changes.
Microsoft has been trying to be more proactive about this: they changed all their documentation to say Entra ID instead of Azure Active Directory...before actually changing Azure AD to be called Entra ID...
They do, but I think Google is worse about it because it’s all random back and forth. Most of Microsoft’s recent changes have been renaming Office something or Azure something to Microsoft something. Often the product name itself hasn’t changed, or when it does it’s usually grouping a bunch of products with separate names under one product line with related functionality (Defender didn’t rename, but it also absorbed a lot, Purview and Entra were new absorbed a lot of other product names). Teams was Lync and then Skype for Businesses, but I actually think the simplifying and getting away from the Skype branding was a good move.
Microsoft also seems to have a more thought out process for new products in the first place and doesn’t have the reputation for abandoning things all the time.
Yes, Copilot is their AI product line. The naming is awkward because the word itself sounds kind of weird, but in general it would be AI for Use Case. That’s how most of their products are named now.
They have something like a dozen Purview products and eight or more Defender products. They’re all grouped by function for use case/environment.
Google is not an endpoint if you wanna be a money-laden tech bro. To get real cash you gotta create a startup and grift some money out of VCs. To do that, it helps if you "innovated something totally new" at someplace with name recognition like Google.
Everything except search and ads are simply practice grifts before the real grift. You cannot rely on any Google product to last for any length of time, even properties Google purchases will lose reliability as they fall into disrepair and neglect, see Nest.
I used to love Google everything, I was on the wave beta. I was one of the first with a cr-48. It is sad for those of us that want to contribute to something big, cool, and impactful, watch for fuschia to implode next, I think it already started when they "had" to layoff "over hires."
One or two person teams don't put a man on the moon. It takes a lot of really smart people working on very small specific things together to make world changing stuff happen, the culture of Big Tech is not conducive to "real" work anymore. It's big grifts run by little grifters.
The moment Google did the alphabet thing in order to preempt ftc breakups, it was over.
I degoogled in 2017 (I run my own Synology cloud now with off-site backup to AWS glacier) and while it wasn't cheap, it was absolutely the best decision.
I'm working on moving to local control as much as possible for my smart home stuff. Switched to zwave for my thermostat from nest, excellent move, I don't lose connection (and automations) randomly anymore.
Also ripping all my optical media for jellyfin to avoid relying on these assholes deleting stuff from their streaming catalogs for tax breaks.
It's not just google, it's all of these companies.
It isn't cheap, but it is very rewarding. Twice in the past couple of months have I been able to give family members out so that they don't lose or have to start paying exorbitant amounts.
Yeah it's very effective. It has a big downside of people losing the pegs and then those addresses are "lost" but all that means is that 2 users can't reliably connect and when they report to IT they will be asked if they had the correct peg. And I guess quarterly do a review for unused addresses that have pegs out and create new ones for lost pegs.
Defederating and blocking bots is the old way, it's defensive and passive and lets them continue what they're doing. It puts the decent people always one step behind.
A better way is the "you're locked in here with me" approach. Redirect bots to a version of your site that provides naught but LLM-generated Nazi furry gibberish and an endless spiral labyrinth of new pages and product reviews of nonexistent products. Try to see if there are any that do that little Javascript-evaluation-to-render-the-client-side-site thing, and if there are, have them mine cryptocurrency for you. Federate with Threads, but serve to the Threads bot an endless series of users who say nothing but constantly-rephrased additional comments which highlight in plain English language situations like this and the types of harm that Meta causes in the real world, and good things to search for if you want to pursue a better solution.
Let the botgarbage come to harm through what comes back to them from your instances. Let them figure it out, if they can, and affirmatively defederate with you instead. Welcome all comers and give good free content to the humans and nothing but pain and misery to the semi-malicious bot traffic. View any bot that talks to you that hasn't got the message yet as a new opportunity and a new challenge.
Try to see if there are any that do that little Javascript-evaluation-to-render-the-client-side-site thing, and if there are, have them mine cryptocurrency for you.
Some posts look a bit off, like being not verbose enough for the topic or question; a few have logical mistakes in them, but most of the GPT3 posts are not so far off from a typical reddit thread - i don't think that this stuff is filterable in any way. Lets implement it lol
I know Canada semi-recently said a company would have to honor a deal its LLM came up with. I have to wonder if they would hold people liable for hate speech if they hosted a LLM that outputted Nazi propaganda.
The usual argument against pre-emptive defederation goes something like, "Well we should wait to see what kind of influence they will be on the fediverse."
We know what kind of influence they will be. They will be the most anti-consumer, exploitative influence the law will allow, and probably a little bit more than that, because it's been their entire history, and every few days we get another headline confirming that it's who they are.
And while there is a lot they can do even if many instances refuse to federate with them, there's no good argument for going along willingly, IMO.
They will be the most anti-consumer, exploitative influence the law will allow
You're right. They will. But there's nothing they can influence. Laws be damned. No one owns ActivityPub.
there's no good argument for going along willingly, IMO.
Except the one where, you know, you can use the Fediverse as an actual social media outlet where your friends and family are, public figures and all that, without subjecting yourself to ads and spying. I think that's a pretty good one.
Oh and all of your friends and family can do the same, if they so choose.
Only if someone allows them to. ActivityPub exists to spite Meta, so I'd be very surprised if anyone allowed to them have any sort of negative influence.
I had to prepare a high level report to a senior manager last week regarding a project my team was working on.
We had to make 5 professional recommendations off of data we reported.
We gave the 5 recommendations with lots of evidence and references to why we came to that decision.
The top question we got was: “What are ChatGPT’s recommendations?”
Back to the drawing board this week because LLMs are more credible than teams of professionals with years of experience and bachelor-masters level education on the subject matter.
You joke but several sections of our HR department got cut and replaced with Enterprise GPT-4. We talk to an internal chatbot now about HR questions and some forms.
It did the opposite lmao. I asked it what my vacation leave was because you need to verify leave amounts before you’re allowed to request any additional leave. It said I had 0 in my balance and I know for a fact I have at least a week left 🤪 took almost a month to sort it out. Had to provide balance screenshots and everything. I’d be probably fucked if I hadn’t manually screenshot my leave amounts beforehand.
It is quite terrifying that people think these unoriginal and inaccurate regurgitators of internet knowledge, with no concept of or heuristic for correctness... are somehow an authority on anything.
All you need to succeed on this planet is the self confidence to say things. It literally does not matter the accuracy. It’s how you express it. I wish I knew this when I was younger. I’d cut out all the imposter syndrome that held me back.
I wish it was that easy. If you go too long it's boring, and if you're too confident you sound arrogant. At this point I've kind of just accepted there are people who can sell, and that I'm not one of those people.
I think this depends on the crowd. Unfortunately, the intelligent crowd and the crowd with money and power is not exactly the same. Though hopefully there is overlap.
I mean, as long as you are the one prompting ChatGPT, you can probably get it to spit out the right recommendations. Works until they fire you because they are convinced AI made you obsolete.
There are some very impressive AI/ML technologies that are already in use as part of existing medical software systems (think: a model that highlights suspicious areas on an MRI, or even suggests differential diagnoses). Further, other models have been built and demonstrated to perform extremely well on sample datasets.
Funnily enough, those systems aren't using language models 🙄
(There is Google's Med-PaLM, but I suspect it wasn't very useful in practice, which is why we haven't heard anything since the original announcement.)
That and bias, absolutely need improvements. That doesn't mean LLMs can't be extremely effective if given appropriate tasks. The problem is that the people who make decisions about where they're used aren't technical enough to understand their strengths and limitations
I don’t think technical knowledge gives as good a sense as a lot of experience working with one.
Like saying the guys who designed a particular car would know best how it’ll perform on various racetracks. My sense is a driver would have a better sense.
Eh. Depends on which tech is being used and how. For a lot of things, relatively basic ML models purposefully trained do a pretty good job, and are, in fact, limited by the diagnoses in the training data. But more generalized "AI" tools seem rather... questionable.
Like, you can train a SVM on fMRIs to compare structures in the brain between patients diagnosed with bipolar disorder and those that are not diagnosed with it, and it will have an accuracy rate on new patients basically equal to the accuracy rate of the doctors who did the diagnosing in the training set. But you'll have a much harder time creating a model that takes in fMRIs and reports back answers to the question of "which brain disease or abnormality do I have?"
This stuff works much closer to advertised when it's narrowly defined and purpose built, but the people making and funding this work want catch-all doctor replacements, because of course they do, because there's way more money in charging hospitals and patience 10% less than a doctor's salary than there is in providing tools that make doctors' efforts in diagnosing specific illnesses easier.
Precisely. Many of the narrowly scoped solutions work really well, too (for what they're advertised for).
As of today though, they're nowhere near reliable enough to replace doctors, and any breakthrough on that front is very unlikely to be a language model IMO.
Peak intelligence, is realizing an LLM doesn't care whether its tokens represent chunks of text, sound, images, videos, 3D models, paths, hand movements, floor planning, emojis, etc.
The keyword is: "multimodal".
As for being able to correctly correlate some "chunks of MRI scan" with the word "tumor"... that's all about the training (which I'd bet Claude is missing... did I hear "investment opportunity"? Guy isn't wrong).
No matter what you work on, programming is one of:
Check the documentation for a library, copy&paste the interface call, fill in the blanks.
Pick the best algorithm for the case at hand, copy&paste, change a few variable names.
Get out your snippets archive, copy&paste the one you need.
Write some boilerplate, copy&paste over and over, then fill in the blanks.
Look up how someone else solved your problem, replicate it in a way that doesn't look like copy&paste.
Once in a blue moon, come up against an actually novel problem, spend some days figuring out the best way to solve it... then copy&paste the solution back into the project.
Doesn't matter what you're working on, in the end it's mostly copy&paste 😂
I work on compilers (we can't/don't even have access to the C++ standard library in my case)... Most of the time, Google can't help me ⚰️😅
It was definitely a bit more copy and paste when I was working on web applications... But even then, most of the code I was writing was fairly novel / more application and database architecture problems than trying tying libraries together.
What are databases, other than glorified MS Access (¹)? 😜
But seriously, if you're working on compilers, then your "target users" are way different than the average thing: you have actual problems to solve, and can stick to the CLI.
Most copy&paste begins the closer to a GUI you get. Modern web interfaces, have also become a string of libraries and frameworks.
(¹: once upon a time... I tried to explain to a client, why there was no way on Earth to make their in-house MS Access solution compatible with personal data protection requirements for medical data, like 100% access control and logging. I failed... then some years later saw a story about the same problem on Coding Horror; still wonder if it was the same guy who got some other poor soul to try and go through with it, or if it was a more widespread problem at the time when personal data protection laws got enacted)
Is Wired owned by Advance? The answer is yes. Condé Nast is a subsidiary of Advance. Advance has a 30 percent stake in Reddit.
This is why they call it “the Internet’s Greatest Authenticity Machine” because we know there’s nothing authentic about that cesspool. There’s even less authenticity behind a biased news article framing itself as disconnected from the subject. Not once do I see mention of Wired’s relationship to Reddit, if your owner has a 30% stake you should disclose that.
Edit: even more important is that Condé Nast itself acquired Reddit in 2006, which is where Advance’s significant stake comes from. Is that supposed to be inferred or understood prior to this article? News media needs to be accountable for this kind of reporting.
I believe they call that out in the article.. the parentheses look like a late addition though?
On Halloween 2006, just 16 months after they founded the company, Huffman and Ohanian sold Reddit to Condé Nast in a deal worth $10 million and agreed to stay on as leaders for at least three years. (Condé Nast, which is owned by Advance Magazine Publishers, is the publisher of WIRED). Condé viewed Reddit as a place to experiment and where the magazine company could build out new ideas online.
But by 2009, according to users, Reddit’s website was as bare-bones as before the sale. Ohanian and another person familiar with the corporate politics say the site’s growth was stymied by Condé Nast’s uncertain desires for the property and Ohanian’s self-acknowledged mismanagement. Reddit was awash in half-baked pursuits—including a short-lived iPhone app, iReddit—and a path to sustainable revenue wasn’t yet evident. After the cofounders’ three-year contracts expired on Halloween 2009, Huffman and Ohanian left for new pursuits.
Slowe and the handful of other staffers left behind at Reddit—now contending with the fallout from a global recession—stumbled through experiments with selling ads and subscriptions. Neither Condé execs nor users were pleased. But they managed to keep the website alive. Anyone could now open a subreddit, and by January 2011, Reddit had 57,000 of them. That year the company began operating as a subsidiary of Condé Nast’s parent, Advance, which let it function more like a startup. (Advance still owns a roughly 30 percent stake.) Amid the changes, Ohanian came back via a seat on Reddit’s board.
Not only a late addition, but purposefully not clarified or explicitly stated at the beginning, or even at the end, of the article. This is like fine print, tucked into the content of the article so that you have to read the entire piece to get that information. Even then, if you are in the midst of the article you might not even consider how it impacts the framing. They also use distancing language there to avoid as much as possible connecting themselves to ownership.
Like, could you imagine this article ending on a 'dont touch this dumpster fire of a stock' line? Conde nast would not allow that.
The article was so glowing at the end it almost swayed me until that realization
Yes but it's a small effort to sign up for somewhere else. Matrix is just as good and they do care about your privacy.
I find it really weird for a project like Home Assistant where the whole goal of the package is to wrestle control of your home from the big tech clouds. Only to put their own comms data in a big tech cloud... :X
There's a lot of people on Discord (around 200 million monthly active users) but it's still the smallest out of all the major messaging services that support group chats. For example, Telegram has over double the number of users, and WhatsApp has 10x the users.
For open source projects in particular, something that integrates with Github and Gitlab login (like Gitter which is now powered by Matrix) is a better choice, as developers are practically guaranteed to have one of those accounts.
The article says the code was not hosted on discord. Even if it was, the code does not infringe on any Nintendo copyright. Having a grudge against discord doesn't make it fair to victim blame
Discord hosted the community, not the code. And that community is now destroyed without even a chance to backup. And Discord can absolutely be blamed because people were warning that this would happen. This is as much a result of Discord's centralized design as it is of Nintendo's greed. Now the community has to be reestablished on a new platform from scratch.
The Journal reported that 75,000 of the “most prolific” Redditors will have an opportunity to buy “an as-yet-undetermined number of shares” before trading starts.
Emphasis own. So, basically, they're fishing for buy-in from people still addicted to Reddit. I wouldn't be surprised if the offered price is actually really bad.
I kind of doubt they expect it to make that much of a difference in whether people stay. Rather, I suspect it's mainly an attempt to make a buck selling overvalued shares, and maybe drive up their stock price a bit in the process. They can also try and spin it as a gift, which they clearly are already.
And their target is specifically people who likely can't think about Reddit, the company, objectively because being on Reddit, the website, is such a large part of their personality.
The most charitable read is that it's an attempt to build hype among powerusers by letting them own a piece of it.
In a vacuum, that's actually kind of nice.
A less charitable reading is that they're targeting the users who have flukes and blowholes to try and get even more money from them as part of a media campaign to make it seem like they truly value those users.
Fishing for coverage for the people who pump and dump their shares after IPO day. Anyone internal with big holdings is going to just unload at first opportunity. This is their desperate attempt to provide coverage for it.
Hope some of the mods I ran into over the years are amongst the schmucks holding the bag with these shares for their first earnings report. It ain't gonna be good.
Fucking reddit, good riddance. Toxic shit hole needs to die, but now this is a golden opportunity for your grandma and her pension fund to be amongst its victims too.
Hope some of the mods I ran into over the years are amongst the schmucks holding the bag with these shares for their first earnings report. It ain’t gonna be good.
They would be a great target, at least. Big mods aren't driven by enjoyment or compensation, because they get neither. Users are dicks and everyone hates you no matter what. Either they really care about whatever sub, or they're big enough schmucks to do all that purely for imaginary authority and status (like this offer is presented as). Maybe 90% were in the latter category before I left in the exodus.
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