Yes, I can confirm this is true. Homeopathy is really accepted here and is even covered by most health insurances.
There is even a passage in the pharmaceutical law that specifically excludes homeopathic shit from having to prove its effectiveness (they only have to prove it’s not hurting anyone, and the rules for that are much laxer than for other medicine). It’s absolutely baffling.
Wow, I’ve been saying for years that this extension is shady as fuck. Nice to see that it’s getting some attention.
I didn’t expect it to steal affiliate cookies, but that they let you control which codes it “finds” isn’t even a secret, and I thought people know this. But every time I mentioned this on Reddit I was downvoted and called a liar.
Oh look, YouTube managed to circumvent uBlock for like two hours again before someone figured out a fix, lol.
Seriously, I wanna know how much funds Google allocates to fight ad blockers just to come up with a working solution every odd month that then gets fixed by the uBlock community in hours. There’s no way this is profitable for them or gets a sizable number of uBlock users to buy their subscription.
They have a CLI app though which you can hook up to dmenu or rofi or whatever to get global shortcuts.
https://github.com/firecat53/bitwarden-menu
Their desktop app is a bit shit anyway. I just use the CLI and the Firefox extension and it’s working solid.
I use Posteo for mail and calendar now (they’re not encrypted between users like Proton but you can just hook it up to any mail client and PGP your shit) .Mail is IMAPS, calendar is CalDAV, contacts are CardDAV, etc. Depending on where you fall on the security-convenience sliding scale, that might be an option. I’ve decided that I care more about portability and standards than super-thick encryption which made me choose them over Tuta, because Tuta offers no way to access the mail over IMAP whatsoever, not even an optional bridge like Proton, and that was a total dealbreaker for me. Posteo also claim they’re 100% green energy which is a nice bonus.
For drive I use Filen.io now. They’re relatively new so I can’t make any assumptions about how long they’ll be around but the price is fair and they offer lifetime payments too. Also their Linux client is pretty solid and doesn’t fucking eat my RAM for breakfast. They’re also in the process of adding support for rclone as per a GitHub issue I’m following.
VPN I pretty much don’t use because I’ve never felt I needed it, so no recommendations there from me.
I’m a senior software engineer
Nice, me too, and whenever some tech-brained C-suite bozo tries to mansplain to me why LLMs will make me more efficient, I smile, nod politely, and move on, because at this point I don't think I can make the case that pasting AI slop into prod is objectively a worse idea than pasting Stack Overflow answers into prod.
At the end of the day, if I want to insert a snippet (which I don't have to double-check, mind you), auto-format my code, or organize my imports, which are all things I might use ChatGPT for if I didn't mind all the other baggage that comes along with it, Emacs (or Vim, if you swing that way) does this just fine and has done so for over 20 years.
I empirically work quicker with it than without and the engineers I know who are still avoiding it work noticeably slower.
If LOC/min or a similar metric is used to measure efficiency at your company, I am genuinely sorry.
Let's be real here: when people hear the word AI or LLM they don't think of any of the applications of ML that you might slap the label "potentially useful" on (notwithstanding the fact that many of them also are in a all-that-glitters-is-not-gold--kinda situation). The first thing that comes to mind for almost everyone is shitty autoplag like ChatGPT which is also what the author explicitly mentions.
That's gotta be one of my favorite Zitron piece to date. Ed managed to articulate some points which have been floating around in my mind for a while which I did not have the words to explain. Especially how using any form of out-of-the-box computer these days is just a completely user-hostile pile of steaming horseshit, and why I am anal-retentive about what software gets installed on my devices and how exactly my window manager has to work, &c.
I mean, it's probably because I'm an obsessive nerd, but the fact that it makes me feel in control when I can rip shit of the source code that bugs me (or put shit in that I miss) is a major factor, too.
Jfc, when I saw the headline I thought this would be a case of the city being too cheap to hire an actual artist and instead use autoplag, but no. And the guy they commissioned isn't even some tech-brain LARP'ing as an artist, he has 20+ years of experience and a pretty huge portfolio, which somehow makes this worse on so many levels.
[...] placed in environments that incentivize scheming.
If this turns out to be another case of "research" where they told the model exactly what to do beforehand and then go all surprised Pikachu when it does, I'm gonna be shocked ...
... because it's been a while since they've tried that.
That conversation reads like from a variation of Mafia/Werewolf where you have to figure out who in your circle of rationalists is secretly e/acc and wants to build the torment nexus.
Promptfondlers too lazy to even fondle prompts anymore. I’m sure this is the prime target demographic for Elon’s brain chips.
I'd say lol but I'm like 72% sure this is straight out of the video game industry's playbook and very much intentional to create hype because everyone has forgotten this shit even exists.
Also, I'm still waiting for just one use case for video-generating autoplag that is, even in theory, not either morally reprehensible or outright criminal.
So there's apparently a memecoin site with the not-at-all suspicious name pump.fun and Coffeezilla made a video about it on his second channel.
Also: Epilepsy warning for that site. It's full of flashing colors and moving elements like late 90s Geocities.
I have no idea what the fuck is even going on there, but apparently people threaten to kill themselves or their animals if you don't invest in their shitcoin there, or run actual cockfights where they murder the chickens live on stream if the line doesn't go up.
This is fucked even without the hallucinating Clippy in the backend.
If your desktop is idle for more than 30-60 seconds (no "meaningful" mouse & keyboard movement), you get a red flag
People getting flogged flagged for being lazy for a few seconds reminds me of something …
That was a great read.
The point of all of this is to say: the tech utopia fantasy is truly dead to me. The image of the cool, hippie, leftist Silicon Valley tech is wrong.
I feel this in my soul, because I was that leftist hippie who got into tech because he believed all this shit and getting disillusioned over time was just fucking painful and made me hate those goons with a passion.
The straw I have left is that I’m not alone and that more people realize this and we make our own communities again that don’t suck. There’s still a long way to go, and Fedi has its own problems, especially when it comes to kick out the racists, sexists, and other bigots, but I try to stay positive that we’ll get there. At least to a degree.
(I mean, we have Awful and it’s an example that you can keep the bar nazi-free if you want to.)
Seems like they've actually done this now. There's a preface note now.
This topic was chosen based on the technical merit of the project before we were aware of its author's political views and controversies. Our coverage of technical projects is never an endorsement of the developers' political views. The moderation of comments here is not meant to defend, or defame, anybody, but is in keeping with our longstanding policy against personal attacks. We could certainly have handled both topic selection and moderation better, and will endeavor to do so going forward.
Which is better than nothing, I guess, but still feels like a cheap cop-out.
Side-note: I can actually believe that they didn't know about Justine being a fucking nazi when publishing this, because I remember stumbling across some of her projects and actually being impressed by it, and then I found out what an absolute rabbit hole of weird shit this person is. So I kinda get seeing the portable executables project, thinking, wow, this is actually neat, and running with it.
Not that this is an excuse, because when you write articles for a website that should come with a bit of research about the people and topic you choose to cover and you have a bit more responsibility than someone who's just browsing around, but what do I know.
So, ethics and legality are strategic liabilities? Jesus fucking Christ, that’s not even sneer-worthy. This guy is completely fucking insane.
Such meme. Much wow. I see we’re continuing with giving dumb names to everything the Muskrat is involved in. Glad that hasn’t changed.
Note: In my last newsletter, I said that my next post would be the second part of my Facebook autopsy. Don’t worry, that’s still coming, but given the recent drama between Sam Altman, OpenAI, and Scarlett Johansson, I felt the need to write something. Don’t worry, I
Wake up honey, new Zitron just dropped.
Looks like Sammy boy has a crush on Scarlett Johansson and wanted to model his sexy chatbot after her role in the movie Her. The damage control is actually hilarious.
> Altman subsequently claimed that the actress for Sky was cast before the company reached out to Johansson.
“Yeah, I don’t want to go out with you anyway. Also, I already have a girlfriend but she goes to a different school, so you wouldn’t know her. And no, I won’t tell you who it is!”
I mean, we all knew that OpenAI is a fucking clown show of a company run by wannabe nerd frat boys with way too much money, but I didn’t think we’d get high school level relationship drama this season.
This AI hype cycle has dramatically distorted society's views of what's possible with image upscalers.
It was honestly only a matter of time before someone thought we could try that thing where they identify a license plate from a reflection in some dude’s pupil for realsies.
> Puloka’s lawyers reportedly used an “expert” in creative video production who’d never worked on a criminal case before to “enhance” the video. The AI tool this unnamed expert used was developed by Texas-based Topaz Labs, which is available to anyone with an internet connection.
You wouldn’t know this expert though. He goes to a different school.
> Large language models like ChatGPT have convinced otherwise intelligent people that these chatbots are capable of complex reasoning when that’s simply not what’s happening under the hood.
And at least the judge here had more than five brain cells and shut that circus down. Let’s hope this sets a precedent.
SXSW audiences all day booed a festival video (played Tuesday in front of screenings) featuring tech pundits touting their enthusiasm for AI.
It seems like in the proceeds of building their alleged Star Trek utopia with robots and holodecks, tech bros have discovered that they’d rather be the Borg than Starfleet and have begun shilling the pros of getting yourself assimilated at SXSW of all places.
> “I actually think that AI fundamentally makes us more human.”
I think it makes us more brain damaged, with this guy being exhibit A, but I guess you could argue that’s a fundamental human property (unless you count hallucinating LLMs).
> Those folks sure seem bullish on artificial intelligence, and the audiences at the Paramount — many of whom are likely writers and actors who just spent much of 2023 on the picket line trying to reign in the potentially destructive power of AI — decided to boo the video. Loudly. And frequently.
Stop resisting the tech utopia they’re trying to build for you, or you’re literally doomers. Never mind that the people building said tech utopia are also doomers, but that’s different, because they worry about the real dangers like acausal robot basilisks torturing them for all eternity and not about petty shit like unemployment and poverty.
Speaking of stopping resisting, another, more critical article about this conference has some real bangers they left out in the other one -- I wonder why. It has some sneers, too.
> […] tech journo Kara Swisher—saying stuff like “you need to stop resisting and starting learning” about AI […].
Yep, that's an actual quote. I'm filing that one under examples of being completely tone-deaf alongside "Do you guys not have phones?".
> […] every company will use AI to “figure out how” to become “more efficient.”
I’m sure the toxic productivity community on YouTube will gobble that shit up. It reminds me of that clown who made a video on how to consume media more efficiently by watching anime on 2x speed and skipping the "boring parts". I guess when we eliminate all human value from entertainment products, that might become a valid strategy.
Mii @awful.systems I wrangle code, draw pictures, and write things. You might find some of it here.