- 3 Posts
- 117 Comments
LukeZaz@beehaw.orgto
Technology@beehaw.org•'Architects of AI' named Time Magazine's Person of the YearEnglish
7·3 days agoDoesn’t really matter if they say it’s praise or not. The reality is that it’s free press, and hardly could be said to be negative. It benefits them.
LukeZaz@beehaw.orgto
Technology@beehaw.org•Grok Says It Would Kill Every Jewish Person on the Planet to Save Elon MuskEnglish
11·11 days agoIf I’m being honest, I don’t think Grok posts deserve attention here. This isn’t news; we already know Grok is shit because LLMs are shit and Elon is extremely shit. We really don’t need reminders.
All this does is draw people’s attention to more slop and hate, same as they’ve been seeing all year. That’s not just unimportant, it’s unhealthy.
LukeZaz@beehaw.orgto
Technology@beehaw.org•Hey that OS alot of people care about righ now is hiring, please consider & share to otherEnglish
61·13 days agoFUD
What is this, a crypto forum? You make it sound like they’re trying to single-handedly tear down GrapheneOS or something.
LukeZaz@beehaw.orgto
Technology@beehaw.org•Thank Mozilla for Killing Localization on Support Mozilla (And Replacing Human Contributions With AI Bots)English
291·17 days agoAs time goes ever onward, I find myself increasingly in the position of using Firefox solely because it isn’t Chromium, rather than because of any inherent good quality.
Which is not to say that Firefox isn’t still at least fine as a browser. But this is what Mozilla is now, and if there’s anything the leaders of that organization are doing, it is that they are committing corporate suicide because none of those idiots know their foot from their mouth. Firefox can’t stay decent with money-men at the helm.
I swear, getting a business major should be considered self-harm.
LukeZaz@beehaw.orgto
Free and Open Source Software@beehaw.org•FFmpeg to Google: Fund Us or Stop Sending BugsEnglish
6·1 month agoAlright, lemme try to explain this:
- You stated you don’t care about FFmpeg.
- Someone asked why and stated it was useful.
- You brought up “bad journalism” in response, implying your lack of care for FFmpeg was due to the article not describing why it was useful.
- To refute your accusation of bad journalism, I pointed out the first paragraph of the article, which directly makes a case for FFmpeg and which you seemed to have missed.
- You somehow seem to think I’m defending FFmpeg in some fashion, thus missing my point. (Also, you seem to be calling FFmpeg a “format,” presumably because it has “mpeg” in the name? FFmpeg handles a litany of formats.)
The author has not done bad journalism. You just missed stuff while reading. That’s fine so long as you address it. I would ask you not insult me for pointing this out, though.
LukeZaz@beehaw.orgto
Free and Open Source Software@beehaw.org•FFmpeg to Google: Fund Us or Stop Sending BugsEnglish
4·1 month agoYou seem to be under the impression that AI is a good tool for finding undiscovered security bugs. It’s not. It’s a crapshoot that requires a ton of extra effort to verify. Using it to find bugs wastes time and has a high risk of side-effects, given that AI has no understanding and thus cannot know if an issue is important, if fixing it has unwanted implications, or if there even is one at all. And if you’re going to try to solve that with human supervision, then you may as well just have the human do the review to begin with and leave the AI out of it.
LukeZaz@beehaw.orgto
Free and Open Source Software@beehaw.org•FFmpeg to Google: Fund Us or Stop Sending BugsEnglish
18·1 month agoBad journalism has nothing to do with this. Literal first paragraph of the article:
You may never have heard of FFmpeg, but you’ve used it. This open source program’s robust multimedia framework is used to process video and audio media files and streams across numerous platforms and devices. It provides tools and libraries for format conversion, aka transcoding, playback, editing, streaming, and post-production effects for both audio and video media.
If you weren’t paying attention until someone pointed out your error, just say that. We won’t crucify you.
LukeZaz@beehaw.orgto
Free and Open Source Software@beehaw.org•FFmpeg to Google: Fund Us or Stop Sending BugsEnglish
321·1 month agoBetter suggestion: Stop using AI to do any of this shit. Security research and vulnerability patching should not be reliant upon de facto black-box random number generators.
LukeZaz@beehaw.orgto
Free and Open Source Software@beehaw.org•Are OpenShot and/or Shotcut good video editors?English
2·3 months agoI’ve used Shotcut and Kdenlive. The former felt pretty limited, but okay enough. Kdenlive felt a lot more developed while still working perfectly well. I should note though that I don’t edit very much at all, so I’ve little knowledge on how either program works for anything that isn’t a simple, short one-off thing.
LukeZaz@beehaw.orgto
Technology@beehaw.org•Hundreds of Google AI Workers Were Fired Amid Fight Over Working ConditionsEnglish
4·3 months agoWell that’s a non-sequitur if I’ve ever seen one.
LukeZaz@beehaw.orgto
Technology@beehaw.org•Artists are losing work, wages, and hope as bosses and clients embrace AIEnglish
3·3 months agoThe fundamental issue is and has always been that automation is being used to replace people, when it should be used to free up their time. Productivity increases could’ve meant shorter work weeks. But that didn’t generate as much money for the shareholders, so it didn’t get pursued. And now we’ve got LLMs and generative AI, which could’ve been a (admittedly rather shitty and niche) tool, but for the same reasons as before, companies would rather throw people under the bus instead.
Artists aren’t telling you that people washing dishes don’t matter. They’re telling you they might be getting fired just like those dishwashers were. If you care about either, I suggest standing up for the artists here. And once that’s done, they can stand up for everyone else right back. I think you’ll find they’d be happy to return the favor.
LukeZaz@beehaw.orgto
Technology@beehaw.org•An AI Social Coach Is Teaching Empathy to People with AutismEnglish
2·3 months agoYou were the only one here suggesting this required an explanation.
Alright, I think you’re being deliberately antagonistic now. Bye!
LukeZaz@beehaw.orgto
Technology@beehaw.org•An AI Social Coach Is Teaching Empathy to People with AutismEnglish
2·3 months agoI was suggesting that no one else needs it explained to them either.
You’d hope so! But alas, some idiots exist. And when a title like this appears, it becomes difficult to tell if such an idiot wrote it at first glance, and more to point, a title like that tends to create more idiots (and it’s also just kinda offensive). That’s why it’s important not to write headlines like this.
Sidenote: If you want people to not take things personally, avoid personal pronouns. “Is that something that you need explained?” → “Is that something that people need explained?” It makes a world of difference and I’m confident I’ve avoided several arguments that could’ve spawned from my own posts thanks to making that kind of change. Not foolproof, sure – we are on the internet – but it helps.
LukeZaz@beehaw.orgto
Technology@beehaw.org•An AI Social Coach Is Teaching Empathy to People with AutismEnglish
2·3 months agoYou didn’t stop reading? Then it’s a bit weird that you’d think I don’t know autistic people have empathy, unless you decided to arbitrarily take the most bad faith reading you could’ve done. If that’s the case, I recommend taking breathers before posting so that you don’t do that.
LukeZaz@beehaw.orgto
Technology@beehaw.org•An AI Social Coach Is Teaching Empathy to People with AutismEnglish
2·3 months agoDid you stop reading the rest of the post when you saw that? Because it really looks like you did.
LukeZaz@beehaw.orgto
Technology@beehaw.org•An AI Social Coach Is Teaching Empathy to People with AutismEnglish
5·3 months agoYou can read that from the article text, but a) the text doesn’t appear to actually suggest autistic people do have empathy, which is a problem since b) the title absolutely implies they don’t.
At best, this is a terrible headline. But if I’m being honest, I don’t have much respect for an article that seems to be all too eager to tout the erstwhile benefits of an LLM, let alone one that is in all likelihood teaching people how to act more like an LLM. So I’m not inclined to take a charitable interpretation.
LukeZaz@beehaw.orgto
Technology@beehaw.org•FFmpeg 8 can subtitle your videos on the fly with WhisperEnglish
64·4 months agoThe changelog lists 30 significant changes, of which the top new feature is integrating Whisper. This means whisper.cpp, which is Georgi Gerganov’s entirely local and offline version of OpenAI’s Whisper automatic speech recognition model. The bottom line is that FFmpeg can now automatically subtitle videos for you.
Yeah hey, can anyone chime in if this is at all based off LLMs? Because my problems with the incorrect plagiarism machine don’t end just because it’s now the offline incorrect plagiarism machine. Making OpenAI’s garbage hockey open source doesn’t make it okay. Or should I just start calling this shit FOSSwashing?
I dug around for a bit and couldn’t find much of anything, but judging by a look at the Github pages for both versions of Whisper, it’s looking very related. If that’s the case, fuck right off. I don’t want AI in FFmpeg, either.
LukeZaz@beehaw.orgto
Technology@beehaw.org•Proton shifts out of Switzerland over snooping law fearsEnglish
4·4 months agoI do avoid LLMs on principle. I find the technology and the manner in which it is used repugnant for a variety of reasons, most but not all of which I’ve already elaborated on here. At this point, I hate it even in the very niche scenario where it is useful, precisely because I think it does too much harm to be deserving of acceptance in any field at all. The most I can say for it is that I might be willing to slowly change that stance once this horrid bubble pops and the world stops getting set aflame for the sake of stock options.
Given your befuddlement at my stance though, I feel I should highlight and restate the following:
Almost nobody actually wanted Proton to make this. They just went and did it to chase a trend, ignoring the many people who hate it all the while. The last thing I need is for the the company that my email depends on to start getting dragged around by tech bros. If they’re willing to make a decision as rash and irresponsible as that, it is a clear indicator that worse is to come.
The presence of an LLM on a site is indicative to me of the character of those running it. It speaks to trend-following, a lack of understanding, and disdain for the intricacies of human work. If they weren’t trend-followers, they’d understand that LLMs have utterly failed to prove themselves as actually useful and would hold off to see if they ever do before using them. If they understood what was going on, they’d know that what LLMs actually do is typically irrelevant to most businesses. If they had any respect for the depths of creativity or effort, they’d know that what modern-day “AI” creates is a hollow imitation; a series of black-boxes that vaguely approximate a thing without having the capacity to understand anything that makes it up. And they’d know that in so doing such software creates something broken that serves only to devalue the efforts of real artists and writers, both in how it convinces studios to ignorantly fire them to improve a number at the expense of quality, and in how its rampant use as a cheating tool engenders environments of serious distrust.
If someone’s got an LLM on their site, or if they’ve decided to offer an LLM of their own through their business, they communicate to me a serious deficit in their understanding of the world at large. That the only thing they’re interested in is a graph someone showed them at a marketing meeting. They want metrics for investors, not a good product—and if that’s the kind of goals they’ve got, what reason have I to believe they won’t step on me to accomplish them?
Proton is making an LLM, and from that I know that their leadership is failing and that their future is likely bleak. I can’t trust my email in those hands.
LukeZaz@beehaw.orgto
Technology@beehaw.org•Proton shifts out of Switzerland over snooping law fearsEnglish
30·4 months agoBecause companies that chase LLMs tend not to give me a choice, that’s why. They inject it into everything they touch because they think it’s the Future™, and therefore I must obviously want it around every second of my life, every day, consequences be damned. The earth can burn, my privacy can erode, misinformation can run rampant, and the copyright of small artists can die, all for the sake of an overused, scarcely-functional “tool” that a bunch of MBAs think I can’t so much as breathe without.
Almost nobody actually wanted Proton to make this. They just went and did it to chase a trend, ignoring the many people who hate it all the while. The last thing I need is for the the company that my email depends on to start getting dragged around by tech bros. If they’re willing to make a decision as rash and irresponsible as that, it is a clear indicator that worse is to come.



It is a blogging site, but it’s also notable for being in favor of free-speech absolutism, to the point of allowing Nazis on the platform. From Wikipedia: