

deleted by creator
I wrangle code, play bad music, and write things. You might find some of it here.
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I looked this up because I thought it was a nickname for something, but no, Cursor seems to have a setting thatās officially called YOLO mode. As per their docs:
With Yolo Mode, the agent can auto-run terminal commands
So this guy explicitly ticked the box that allowed the bullshit generator to execute arbitrary code on his machine. Why would you ever use that? Whatās someoneās rationale for enabling a setting like that? They even name it YOLO mode. Itās like the fucking red button in the movie that says, donāt push the red button, and promptfans are still like, yes, that sounds like a good idea!
That was one wild read even worse than I was expecting. Holy sexism Batman, the incel to tech pipeline is real.
āIn college, you donāt learn the building skills that you need for a startup,ā Tan says of his decision. āYouāre learning computer science theory and stuff like that. Itās just not as helpful if you want to go into the workforce.ā
I remember when a large part of the university experience was about meeting people, experiencing freedom from home for the first time before being forced into the 9-5 world, and broadening your horizon in general. But maybe thatās just the European perspective.
In any case, these people are so fucking startup-brained that it hurts to think about.
Now 25, Guild dropped out of high school in the 10th grade to continue building a Minecraft server he says generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit.
Serious question: how? Isnāt Minecraft free to play and you can just host servers yourself on your computer? I tried to search up āhow to make money off a Minecraft serverā and was (of course) met with an endless list of results of LLM slop I could not bear to read more than one paragraph of.
Amid political upheaval and global conflict, Palantir applicants are questioning whether college still serves the democratic values it claims to champion, York says. āThe success of Western civilization,ā she argues, ādoes not seem to be what our educational institutions are tuned towards right now.ā
Yes, because Palantir is such a beacon of defending democratic values and not a techfash shithouse at all.
I sometimes feel that I, as someone who also likes retro computing and even deliberately uses old software because it feels familiar and cozy to me, and because itās often easier to hack and tweak (in the same way that someone would prefer a vintage car they can maintenance themselves, I guess), I get thrown in with these people ā and yes, I also find it super hard to put a finger on it.
I also feel theyāre very prominent in the Vim community for the exact same reasons you mentioned. I like Vim, I use it daily and itās my favorite editor because itās what I am used to and I know how to tweak it, and I canāt be bothered to use anything else (except Emacs, but only with evil-mode), but fuck me if Vim evangelists arenāt some of the most obnoxious people online.
New Zitron dropped, and, fuck, I feel this one in my bones.
Pretty good summary of why Alex Karp is as much a horrible fucking shithead as Thiel.
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/alex-karp-palantir-tech-republic/tnamp/
Klarna is one company that boggles my mind. Here in Germany itās against literally every bankās TOS to hand out your login data to other people, they can (and do) terminate your account for that. And yet Klarna works by asking for your login data, including a fucking transaction token, to do their thing.
You literally type your bank login data including an MFA token into a legalized phishing site so they can log into your account and make a transaction for you. And the banks are fine with it. I donāt get it.
The German Supreme Court even deemed this whole shit as unsafe all the way back in 2016 and said that websites arenāt allowed to offer Klarna as the only payment option because itās an āunacceptable riskā for the customer, lol.
Oh, and they of course also scan your account activity while theyāre in there, because whoād give up all that sweet data, which we only know because theyāve been slapped with a GDPR violation a few years back for not telling people about it.
Yet for some reason it is super popular.
I tried to find that out but it doesnāt seem to be mentioned in any of the articles. However, searching for the names associated with it (wife, brother-in-law, and the third business partner) brings up āKadima Venturesā from Arizona, which has these three names listed as management. However, information about that company beyond some weird mentions and a LinkedIn profile seems to be scarce (and the AZ business registry is either down right now or not accessible from where I am).
I looked again and found a 404 article on the whole story thatās better and has more info than the one I linked before, though. Iām adding that to the original post.
Road rage victim āspeaksā via AI at his killerās sentencing [Archive]
I fucking canāt right now.
[Judge] Lang allowed Pelkeyās loved ones to play an AI-generated version of the victim ā his face and body and a lifelike voice that appeared to ask the judge for leniency.
āTo Gabriel Horcasitas, the man who shot me: It is a shame we encountered each other that day in those circumstances," the artificial version of Pelkey said. āIn another life, we probably could have been friends. I believe in forgiveness.ā
Marc Andreessen claims his own jobās the only one that canāt be replaced by a small shell script.
āA lot of it is psychological analysis, like, āWho are these people?ā āHow do they react under pressure?ā āHow do you keep them from falling apart?ā āHow do you keep them from going crazy?ā āHow do you keep from going crazy yourself?ā You know, you end up being a psychologist half the time.ā
Along the same lines of LLMs ruining language stuff: I just learned the acronym MTPE (Machine Translation Post Edit) in the context of excuses to pay translators less and thanks I hate it.
Not-so-fun fact: thatās a marketing term for what amounts to basically a scam to pay people less.
I used to work for a large translation company when this first came up. Admittedly, that was almost ten years ago, but I assume this shit is even more common nowadays. The usual procedure was to have one translator translate the stuff (commonly using whatās called a TM or Translation Memory, basically a user dictionary so the wording stays consistent), and then another translator to do an editing pass to catch errors. For very high-impact translations, there could be more editing passes after that.
MTPE is now basically omitting the first translator and feeding it through a customized version of what amounts to Google Translate or DeepL that can access the customerās TM data, and then handing it off to a translator for the editing pass. The catch now is that freelance translators have two rates: one for translating, depending on the language pair between $0.09 and $0.5 per word, and one for editing, which is significantly less. $0.01 to $0.12 or so per word, from what I remember. The translation rate applies for complete translations, i.e. when a word is not in the customerās TM. If it is in the TM, the editing rate applies (or, if the translator has negotiated a clever rate for themselves, there might be a third rate). With MTPE, you now essentially feed the machine heaps of content to bloat up the TM as much as possible, then flag everything as pre-translated and only for editing, and boom, you can force the cheapest rates to apply to what is essentially more work because the quality of what comes out of these machines is complete horseshit compared to a human-translated piece.
For the customers, however, MTPE wasnāt even that much cheaper. The biggest difference was in the profit margin for the translation company, to no oneās surprise.
Back when I worked there, and those were the early days, a lot of freelance translators flat-out refused to do MTPE because of this. They said, if the customer wants this, they can find another translator, and because a lot of customers wanted to keep the translators theyād had for a long time, there was some leverage there.
I have no idea how the situation is today, but infinitely worse I assume.
Shit, I actually like Hank Green his brother John. Theyāre two internet personalities I actually have something like respect for, mainly because of their activism, Johnās campaign to get medical care to countries who desperately need it, and his fight to raise awareness of and improve the conditions around treatment for tuberculosis. And Iāve been semi-regularly watching their stuff (mostly vlogbrothers though, but I do enjoy the occasional SciShow episode too) for over a decade now.
At least Hank isnāt afraid to admit when heās wrong. Heās done this multiple times in the past, making a video where he says he changed his mind/got stuff wrong. So, Iām willing to give him the benefit of the doubt here and hope he comes around.
Still, fuck.
Christ on a stick, they found a way to remove the black person from the āIām not racist, one of my friends is blackā dogwhistle.
I fucking canāt.
Fair points, but I still take cleaning up someoneās own bad Node.JS code over cleaning up LLM Node.JS slop because the optimist in me hopes that the human who wrote bad code can at least learn something and become better over time. After all we all have started with writing garbage, I know that I have.
On the other hand, I guess I should find a job where I donāt have to touch web development with a ten-foot pole because itās probably not getting better.
Our company is currently looking for a new programmer and weāve interviewed a few so far. I donāt want to generalize but it really seems that a non-negligible part of the younger ones at least tries to use LLMs to make up for a lack or experience, and that really shows.
I normally donāt like doing programming challenges during an interview because they have little to no real-world connections, but Iāve been throwing small questions around lately just to see what people do, and how they approach them, and thereās a subset of people who will say, āI would ask ChatGPT nowā in those scenarios.
I havenāt met a vibe-coder in real life yet, but Iām afraid itās only a matter of time.
I am fairly certain that their stupid AI stance at least played a role. Iām part of a largish writing community, where at least several hundred people did NaNo each year, a good part of them donated too. Last year, no one partook, instead we did our own internal thing.
If this happened across other communities too, and I wouldnāt be surprised if it did, they must have felt it financially.
Can confirm. Our C-suite approved a large amount of money last year so we could implement chatbots into all kinds of processes. Now that the chatbots have been implemented, no one is using them past the initial trying-out phase and questionable image generation tasks for presentations. Even the suits themselves donāt.
I told them this would happen. They didnāt listen.
I hate it so fucking much that a non-trivial number of FOSS communities have become hostile nazi bars in the last years (or maybe they always have been and Iāve just not noticed it before).
Why would anyone shit on Lina of all people? Sheās such a nice and wholesome person and her work is exceptional.
Fuck these asshats.
Also, from that one Lemmy thread:
What fascists are ruining OSS?
LOL! Lmao even. Just input Linux into the YT search bar and you have roughly a 50% chance of getting fascist content.
If I had to judge Razerās software quality based on what little I know about them, Iād probably raise my eyebrows because they ship some insane 600+ MiB driver with a significant memory impact with their mice and keyboards thatās needed to use basic features like DPI buttons and LED settings, when the alternative to that is a 900 kiB open source driver which provides essentially the same functionality.
And now their answer to optimization is to staple a chatbot onto their software? I think I pass.
Thereās something Iāve been wondering about: is the management (of not just Microsoft but really any company whoās pivoting to AI this hard, so also Duolingo and Klarna, &c.) really convinced that thereās going to be a foom event soon and the chatbots become capable enough to actually do the work they attribute to them? Or do Nadella and friends know this is all bullshit and just play along until they canāt anymore and leave the sinking ship?
I honestly canāt tell anymore.