@mcc@mastodon.social cover
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

mcc

@mcc@mastodon.social

glitch girl

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. For a complete list of posts, browse on the original instance.

mcc , to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

quietly under breath but in text i hate unity i hate unity i hate unity i hate unity i hate unity i hate unity i hate unity i hate unity i hate unity i hate unity i hate unity i hate unity i hate unity i hate unity i hate unity i hate unity

mcc , to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

I think that you should read this article:

https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

Read it carefully.

Note: This article is based substantially on anonymous sources verified by 972mag. Anyone who has done a lot of reading on Israel-Palestine has probably accumulated a list of sources they've decided not to trust; if 972 is on your mistrust list, consider this article by the Guardian, who independently reviewed the article's accounts and effectively cosigns the sources' validity.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes

mcc , to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

2008, me: I love the idea of cryptocurrency

BITCOIN: The word "cryptocurrency" now means "financial scams based on inefficient write-only ledgers"

2018, me: I love the idea of the metaverse

FACEBOOK: The word "metaverse" now means "proprietary 3D chat programs with no soul"

2022, me: I love the idea of procedurally generated content

OPENAI: From now on people will associate that only with big corporations plagiarizing small artists and turning their work into ugly content slurry

mcc OP ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

RONALD LACEY: Again we see, Ms. McClure, there is nothing you can possess which I cannot take away.

mcc OP ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

I'm really concerned about the effect "generative AI" is going to have on the attempt to build a copyleft/commons.

As artists/coders, we saw that copyright constrains us. So we decided to make a fenced-off area where we could make copyright work for us in a limited way, with permissions for derivative works within the commons according to clear rules set out in licenses.

Now OpenAI has made a world where rules and licenses don't apply to any company with a valuation over $N billion dollars.

mcc OP ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

(The exact value of "N" is not known yet; I assume it will be solidly fixed by some upcoming court case.)

mcc OP ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

In a world where copyleft licenses turn out to restrict only the small actors they were meant to empower, and don't apply to big bad-actor "AI" companies, what is the incentive to put your work out under a license that will only serve to make it a target for "AI" scraping?

With NFTs, we saw people taking their work private because putting something behind a clickwall/paywall was the only way to not be stolen for NFTs. I assume the same process will accelerate in an "AI" world.

mcc OP ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Did you see this? The whole thing with "the stack".

https://post.lurk.org/@emenel/112111014479288871

Some jerks did mass scraping of open source projects, putting them in a collection called "the stack" which they specifically recommend other people use as machine learning sources. If you look at their "Github opt-out repository" you'll find just page after page of people asking to have their stuff removed:

https://github.com/bigcode-project/opt-out-v2/issues

(1/2)

mcc OP ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

…but wait! If you look at what they actually did (correct me if I'm wrong), they aren't actually doing any machine learning in the "stack" repo itself. The "stack" just collects zillions of repos in one place. Mirroring my content as part of a corpus of open source software, torrenting it, putting it on microfilm in a seedbank is the kind of thing I want to encourage. The problem becomes that they then suggest people create derivative works of those repos in contravention of the license. (2/2)

mcc OP ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

So… what is happening here? All these people are opting out of having their content recorded as part of a corpus of open source code. And I'll probably do the same, because "The Stack" is falsely implying people have permission to use it for ML training. But this means "The Stack" has put a knife in the heart of publicly archiving open source code at all. Future attempts to preserve OSS code will, if they base themselves on "the stack", not have any of those opted-out repositories to draw from.

mcc OP ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Like, heck, how am I supposed to rely on my code getting preserved after I lose interest, I die, BitBucket deletes every bit of Mercurial-hosted content it ever hosted, etc? Am I supposed to rely on Microsoft to responsibly preserve my work? Holy crud no.

We want people to want their code widely mirrored and distributed. That was the reason for the licenses. That was the social contract. But if machine learning means the social contract is dead, why would people want their code mirrored?

mcc OP ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@mark @gsuberland In my opinion, a trapdoor like "okay, well if copyright doesn't apply to the training data you stole, your model isn't copyrightable either" is no good. The US Gov has already said GenAI images and text are not copyrightable. It doesn't help. The thing about generative AI is it inherently takes heavy computational resources (disk space, CPU time, often-unacknowledged low-wage tagging work). Therefore, as a tool, it is inherently biased toward capital and away from individuals.

mcc OP ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@mark @gsuberland If we say "AI is a new class of thing that is outside the copyright regime entirely", that is not a level playing field. The tool is designed in a way it inherently serves the powerful. "Machine learning models are inherently open" is the exact model I am afraid of— a world where copyright is something that applies to actors who have less than some specific amount of money, and anyone with more than that specific amount of money is liberated from it.

mcc , to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

How many months/years are they going to keep showing me this popup

mcc , to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

It is called the "fitted sheet" and yet whenever I try to put one on a bed I am left with the impression that it could not fit the mattress more poorly if it were designed that way

mcc , to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

As part of their aggressive attempt to get people to replace their old headsets, Facebook's Quest 1 headsets, released in 2019, will be barred from purchasing any app on the Quest store released after April 30, even if that app would have supported the Quest 1 when sideloaded.

The aggressive deprecation schedule really makes me baffled why anyone would trust Facebook with their money here. This is a novelty/nice-to-have device, not something you upgrade every 2 years.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewwilliams/2024/03/29/meta-issues-warning-that-impacts-many-quest-headset-users/?sh=42b7afa66306

mcc , to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

I have been for some time frustrated with a project which practically speaking must use .cargo/config.toml, a Rust "feature of last resort" that the Rust devs seem to almost be leaving intentionally poorly supported to disusade you from using it. Just now I found a way to solve a serious and fundamental problem .cargo/config.toml normally causes, and I'm split between feeling very satisfied and really annoyed because oh my god this solution is so ugly

https://github.com/mcclure/pocket-riscv-rs-bug/commit/a369e1f185c729056a5886ef608d8225854f0915

mcc OP ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

If you look at that patch and don't understand what's happening in it: That's a normal reaction

mcc OP ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Now, this solution to the problem actually introduces another problem. But that second problem turns out to be fixable by using an "unstable" feature in Rust nightly. Unfortunately, the "unstable" feature in Rust nightly introduces a third problem. I will not be elaborating on this post.

mcc OP ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

UPDATE: So someone on Mastodon reads my posts here, looks at what I did, and says "why don't you just use [X]?". So I look in the docs, and realize [X] is indeed a far superior solution which is clean and does not introduce additional problems. So I try doing [X]. Long story short, it's now nearly half an hour later and after a series of tests I believe I've found a bug in the Rust compiler and I'm setting up to file a bug on Cargo

futurebird , to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

I wonder what would happen if one ran a LLM on data representing analog TV or radio signals for a type of video or music... then generated an analog signal and played it on a TV?

Would it make any difference in the texture, look sound of the resulting output?

mcc ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@jakemiller @futurebird Back before OpenAI poisoned the space I was wondering if you could use something based on "hidden markov models" (which work on continuous inputs/outputs) to generate continuous outputs such as waveforms.

However, tokenizing as hattifattener recommends is probably the smarter idea because it probably fits closer to how human brains actually interpret things like soundwaves. We don't hear waveforms, we hear frequency breakdowns.

mcc , to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Anyway the takeaway you should have from the xz debacle is that none of these problems would have happened if everyone had simply listened to my proposal to rewrite all existing software in Lazy K ( https://tromp.github.io/cl/lazy-k.html ). This is because if we were writing our software in Lazy K, we would be so busy trying to figure out how to get Lazy K to work we would not have any time to write backdoors.

mcc , to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

So you may have heard that a Boeing whistleblower died of what local police described as a "self-inflicted" gunshot wound right in the middle of his depositions, a timing which… well, lots of things happen, but if someone were going to act on suicidal impulses that is not the timing I would expect them to do it with.

Have you been wondering what exactly it was he was saying in those depositions? Cuz here's an American Prospect article largely based on his testimony:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-03-28-suicide-mission-boeing/

mjg59 , to random
@mjg59@nondeterministic.computer avatar

Being less flippant about this - the xz backdoor relied on a line that was present in the tarball release, but not in the git repo. Do we have any infrastructure for validating this kind of thing? (It's expected that the tarball would contain things that aren't in git - for example, the configure script doesn't exist in git, but is expected to be in the release. The problem is that extra code was injected into the configure script after it was generated)

mcc ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@mjg59 It seems like one problem is it would be legitimately difficult to validate this without introducing some sort of uniform build/packaging process to audit in the first place.

(I guess you could look at effects, and specifically test whether the tarball/thing in package repo is different from the source, and compare against an approved list of intentional, inspected late patches for the cases where you want behavior like this?)

mcc ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@mjg59 Like I look at this and the problem I see is not "you can use M4 to inject code into a tarball from github" but rather "our entire supply chain is a hodgepodge of dissimilar parts awkwardly gasketed together, and someone found one of the many parts of that supply chain that is out-of-sight/confusing enough that a Bad patch could be put there without anyone noticing for quite some time"

mcc , to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Homebrew and Macports users read this now.

https://mastodon.lawprofs.org/@SteveBellovin/112180311536275381

This is about the xz supply chain attack I boosted earlier. (The oss-security post [EDIT: that's https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2024/03/29/4] is clear, informative and horrifying; you should read it. The entire open source ecosystem is funded on trusting that something like this would never happen.)

EDIT: Correction. Homebrew believes they're immune https://github.com/orgs/Homebrew/discussions/5243#discussioncomment-8954951 But recommends removing the "untrustworthy" version anyway to be safe.

mcc , to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

So was there a study over the last couple months showing evidence that the strength of dark energy is not consistently isotropic/homogeneous in space and time?

And if this study happened… how reliable/definitive is it?

I saw a popular press article that seemed to be saying this, but it was a popular press article and those mangle physics studies all the time.

mcc OP ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

The chaos gremlin part of me is rooting for dark energy to turn out to be inconsistent in strength over space and time because last I looked into that the leading way of modeling that was something called "Quintessence", and I think it would be frickin hilarious to have serious physicists and physics vloggers and so forth having to go to the press and public and say "Quintessence" with a straight face

mcc OP ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

NASA Astrophysics division sheepishly having to hand one to Aristotle

futurebird , to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

Interesting. Can anyone test if this is a fluke.

The other day I was complaining about youTube shorts until @mcc reminded me that I could replace

/shorts/

with

/watch?v=

and avoid it on my own videos. Since then I have uploaded videos and only ever looked at or shared the "/watch?v=" links. Now all of a sudden it's not forcing my short videos to be shorts anymore. It's just putting them in the normal list!

Like they noticed the other links were not being used? A glimmer of hope?

mcc ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@futurebird You mean the videos it's recommending to you, or the videos you're uploading? Either way that's really weird!

mcc ,
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

@futurebird Okay, yeah, weird. Just checking, I don't guess the last couple short videos you uploaded just happen to be landscape rather than portrait orientation? I think only portrait videos are eligible for Shorting

vampiress , to random
@vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    mcc ,
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    @vampiress Oh no

    futurebird , to random
    @futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

    YouTube "shorts" is terrible in every way. It breaks everything. Videos won't embed on message boards. Systems used for a decade to save video IDs break. And YouTube FORCES any short video to be a short with these less useful, less shareable. URLs.

    I'm not excited about using open source video servers. I'm very lazy and do not want to do any new things today. But, this is inspiring me.

    mcc ,
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    @futurebird Apologies if I'm telling you something you already know:

    You can turn any "short" into a regular video by editing its URL such that

    /shorts/

    becomes

    /watch?v=

    But this is annoying and fiddly and it's hard to do on mobile and I keep forgetting the exact sequence of characters, and I wish I could just flip a switch and say "disable shorts 100%, always show me the regular video"! :(

    flexghost , to random
    @flexghost@mastodon.social avatar

    Prepare to marvel at the pinnacle of human engineering as the Boeing CEO’s Golden Parachute deploys without a hitch

    mcc ,
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    @flexghost In other visual metaphor news, check out this glass cliff

    mcc , to random
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    Fantasy world where they have been breeding dragons to be smaller and smaller until they have little toy dragons that can sit in your lap and are popular among noble ladies and if you leave them unattended in a home they will gather up all the low denomination change under dressers and such and push them into a corner to make a tiny $4.78 hoard to sit on

    mcc OP ,
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    Imagine opening up your closet door and there in the back of your closet is your lap dragon, sitting on a rudimentary hoard of six nickels and 17 pennies. "Graaaak!", it says, as it spreads its wings wide (span 2ft 3in). The threat display is made somewhat less terrifying by its head getting caught in the underside of a coat, causing it to flap around briefly

    vampiress , to random
    @vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

    [Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    mcc ,
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    @vampiress ooh ooh turn the "squelch" knob and see what happens

    mcc , to random
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    It took me like 80% into this post before I realized it wasn't just an allegory for England https://gamedev.lgbt/@typeswitch/112130763130217767

    mcc , to random
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    A weird fact about Facebook is you're not allowed to block Mark Zuckerberg. The site simply won't let you. The Threads integration means that, on Fediverse, I have now finally had the experience of blocking Mark Zuckerberg, but this sorta feels like a "one step forward, one step back" sort of thing.

    lowqualityfacts , to random
    @lowqualityfacts@mstdn.social avatar

    Me: The pain is unbearable. I need more morphine.

    AI Nurse: Morphine does not exist. There are no medications that start with an M.

    Me: That is wrong. Please give me something to help relieve the pain.

    AI Nurse: Of course! You are a 185 pound male. An adult, male kangaroo weighs up to 190 pounds. Therefore, I will administer kangaroo medicine.

    mcc ,
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    @lowqualityfacts Thinking But how can the user be a kangaroo when Australia isn't real https://www.techspot.com/news/100946-microsoft-bing-search-engine-claims-australia-doesnt-exist.html

    mcc , to random
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    If UNICEF is so great then when are we going to get MULTICEF

    vampiress , to random
    @vampiress@eigenmagic.net avatar

    [Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    mcc ,
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    @vampiress if you encountered a wine named "wine crimes" would you drink it

    mcc , to random
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    Opinion: The automatic line ending translation in git is a very, very, very bad feature that has only ever made the world a worse place

    mcc OP ,
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    git is like black mold in the walls of software programming

    mcc , to random
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    Today is my birthday!

    If you'd like to do something for me for my birthday, would you please reply to this with—or by other means send me— something with colors you liked? Like an image or a video or a link. Music would also be acceptable if it gives you a strong synesthesiac association with color.

    If this request confuses you, here are some examples of images with colors I found striking [Artists: Laurie Barmore, Vian Borchert, Erica Aurahack]. But your reply can be whatever colors you like.

    Abstract art by Vian Borchert
    Abstract art by Vian Borchert
    Portrait by Aurahack

    mcc OP ,
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    ( PS here is the source for the Aurahack image: https://cohost.org/aurahack/post/4359814-sup-hq-on-patreon )

    mcc OP ,
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    I am 41 now. What the heck. That is not even a real number.

    mcc , to random
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    I am in a terrible mood and I will tell you why: C++

    mcc OP ,
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    [[Clang, lounging on a velvet couch, its top two shirt buttons unbuttoned, smoking a cigar]] "When I see a program counter, I increment it. There's literally never a situation where that would be the wrong thing to do."

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • test
  • worldmews
  • mews
  • All magazines
    •