!codecels

!chuds

In a new TOS change in Section 12, they added this line: “You hereby grant to Vultr a non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully paid-up, worldwide license (including the right to sublicense through multiple tiers) to use, reproduce, process, adapt, publicly perform, publicly display, modify, prepare derivative works, publish, transmit and distribute each of your User Content, or any portion thereof, in any form, medium or distribution method now known or hereafter existing, known or developed, and otherwise use and commercialize the User Content in any way that Vultr deems appropriate, without any further consent, notice and/or compensation to you or to any third parties, for purposes of providing the Services to you.”

This line has sparked outrage among Hacker News & Reddit, who are not pleased and are cancelling their subscription over this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39836495

https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1bouuv7/warning_vultr_a_major_cloud_provider_is_now/?sort=controversial

!chuds my website (TBC - prob never) needs to be moved to a new host.

!nonchuds late stage capitalism

Back in the day I used to do Mechanical Turk like work assessing search engine quality. There were very detailed guidelines about what made a search engine good, compiled into a like 250 page document Google had been curating and updating over the course of years.

One of the key concepts was the idea of a "vital" result for a user request. If a user had a specific request, the search engine had to deliver that content first. For example, simpson.com at the time was a malicious website. With this in mind, if the user searched for "simpson.com", the first result had to be simpson.com, even if the search engine is returning a malicious page. It's specifically what the user requested. We aren't supposed to question what the user wants. The results that followed after could provide suggestions of what else the user may be looking for, like the official Simpsons website.

I would love to see whatever shreds of this document is left at this point, and I'd love to know at what point the entire thing was thrown into the trash and rewritten. I assume somewhere around the year 2016 or 2020. I know this is nothing shocking to a lot of people, but it really does amaze me just how bad things have gotten. I've stuck to the major search engines because despite peoples bitching, for a long time they consistently outperformed the smaller competitors, but they are genuinely without hyperbole almost unusable now.

Example: I wanted to find the recent Tucker Carlson - Vladimir Putin interview. It's a newsworthy interview with a world leader and a current event. There is a very specific video I'm looking for, the published, official video of sitting down and asking questions.

Here is what google returns in a private window:

The very first piece of content - the "vital result" - is clickbait youtube cute twinkry from Time What are the keeraZIEST moments from the interview?!?

The rest of the results are a cascade of editorialized garbage, opinionated news articles reporting on the requested content. God forbid a careless user actually be exposed to a primary source.

The closest result to what I'm looking for is about over 10 pieces of content deep - the transcript of the interview from Russia's state website. Likely this is an oversight.

Here is Bing:

There's been some meme going around that "no really guys, Bing is actually kinda good now believe it or not".

This is even more nonsense than Google. The most prominently featured content is, of course, more editorialized bullshit with the interview itself nowhere to be found. But also half of the content is just completely irrelevant crap I didn't ask for. Why is the entire right half of the page a massive infobox about Tucker and his books and quotes? Why am I seeing something about Game of Thrones?

Brave:

You get the point. More useless crap. It gets half a point for its AI accidentally revealing that tuckercarlson.com is where the interview is located, but this doesn't count. The actual search results are all garbage. Thanks Brave for showing me all the latest reddit discussions

Yandex:

Was that really so fricking hard? Result #1 - the interview from Tucker Carlson. Past the interview are news articles and images - things of waning utility that other users may be interested in. But the vital result is at the top of the page. That's fricking it. This would have been the required order for the page on Google ten years ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39687755

https://old.reddit.com/r/cars/comments/1bdbzr4/audi_is_making_dual_zone_climate_a_subscription/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1bdfctr/the_new_audi_a3_is_amess_with_incar_subscriptions/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1bdhuma/the_new_audi_a3_is_amess_with_incar_subscriptions/?sort=controversial

The Audi A3 is a survivor. The compact luxury car has been around in one form or another since 1996, and an updated version is coming to the US for the 2025 model year. But it's loaded with annoying in-car subscriptions.

At first glance, this new A3 looks a lot like the car it replaces. The hexagonal Singleframe grille—in line with Audi's latest designs—is its biggest change, joined by bigger air intakes at the base of the bumper, an Audi logo high on the nose, and refreshed LED and matrix LED headlights with four customizable daytime lighting signatures. The rear bumper design, inspired by the RS3, has a new LED taillight treatment, a black accent piece, and a mesh insert at the base.

Inside is where things get interesting. The same 10.1-inch touchscreen and 12.3-inch digital instrument cluster from last year carry over, but now you'll have to pay an in-car subscription fee for basic features like high-beam assist, dual-zone climate control, adaptive cruise control, and smartphone integration.

Only by upgrading to the MMI navigation system do you get access to the app store. From there, Audi forces you into add-ons like adaptive cruise control or Apple CarPlay and Android Auto for a one-month, six-month, one-year, or three-year subscription. Or you can just purchase any of those features permanently—although Audi doesn't say for how much.

It should be noted that this subscriptions-for-features model applies to the European-spec A3. An Audi spokesperson declined to comment on whether these in-car subscriptions will also make it to the US when the car goes on sale for 2025.

Visually, the cabin looks mostly the same, but there are some subtle changes. The already-tiny gear shifter from the previous A3 is now slimmer and blends into the center console, new fabric inserts with lightning elements cover the door panels, and the decorative cabin lighting now has 30 color options.

Audi doesn't offer specifics on engines for the US market, but the base Audi A3 in Europe will come with a 1.5-liter four-cylinder mild-hybrid engine making 148 horsepower with either a seven-speed automatic or a six-speed manual transmission. A 35 TDI diesel model will have the same 148 hp, and a plug-in-hybrid model will be available at the end of the year.

Also for Europe is a nifty new trim called the A3 Allstreet. Meant to look like a crossover, the five-door hatchback comes with a matte black grille, front and rear grooves mimicking skid plates, and plastic trim around the wheel wells. The Allstreet is 1.2 inches higher than the standard A3 and has a softer ride. A set of 17-inch wheels come standard, but 18- and 19-inch shoes are also available.

Both the Allstreet and the standard A3 Sportback have 13.4 cubic feet of space behind the rear seats, with up to 42.4 cubes of space with the rear seats folded flat. An electric tailgate is available as an option.

Audi hasn't released A3 pricing for the US, but the Sportback starts at €35,650 (around $39,000) and the sedan is an extra €800 ($875). The funky new A3 Allstreet costs €37,450 ( $41,000).

!fellas !oldstrags you better hang on that shitbox.

The change

SO are going to let any registered user vote on content. Until now that "privilege" has required 100 points, a near-impossible task for a new user these days because no one ever upvotes questions and powerusers rush to answer all easy questions before anyone else can get to them (and will flag/close any other question as being off-topic).

The reasoning behind this change makes sense:

It's been a while since we last talked about the one-reputation voting change. We are still pursuing this because stagnating participation on the network is a concern for all of us, and we want to think about ways to grow the active community on the network. We have, by design, utilized rep as a threshold to award privileges and prevent bad behavior. While this has been effective in creating the current status quo, it has made participating on the network in some of the most basic ways difficult.

The response

But the post is on -143. Let's see what SO's (unpaid) jannies have to say.

Zoe (before you ask, yes she is):

The company has already been made aware of the many ways this can be abused, and the significant workload increase this will lead to when people notice, and that the tooling we have is nowhere close to capable of dealing with the kinds and volume of abuse this will cause. They have not responded to our concerns, and many mods (including multiple SO mods) have objected to the change from allowing sites to volunteer for the test to shoving it on SO. They did not care about the objections.

This response is ridiculous because:

• Jannies are always welcome to not do it for free and let SO pay someone to do it. No one is giving you more work - you're unpaid, you don't have to do anything.

• Oh and did I mention that Zoe's username is "Zoe is on strike"? That's right, a striking janny is still actually doing it for free and even giving feedback on new features. Good strike!

Someone else (who used to work for SO, left and yet still comments says:

Fraud: your approach is "disable association bonus and hope for the best?" Seriously? Im an r-slur but you've never done fraud before. Go out and sin, and come back when you know how to recognize it.

And a current non-striking mod says:

We did not volunteer for this experiment. It has been opposed by the SO moderators and other sites did step up to volunteer.

You're literally all volunteers lmao

Tooling does not scale for the concerns we have. It's mentioned that this is launching with new tooling, but they aren't being shared "at this junction". For moderators, that means the tooling does not exist at this point then.

Maybe if you were a paid employee then you'd be able to see this tooling.

CM [community manager] time is limited, and with focus split on new initiatives, AI content, and now this, the time they have to allocate to investigate vote fraud will decrease.

Maybe leave fraud investigations up to paid employees, like every other company.

By the way the three users who I've quoted here - all powerusers - haven't answered a single SO question between them in three years.

Stuff like this infuriates me because SO's powerusers and jannies are completely detached from the core purpose of the site yet they spend all their time stinking the place up and squabbling about meta shit. Stack Overflow is almost entirely self-moderating, these people aren't needed. If I worked for SO and had to interact with these idiots every day then I'd . SO needs to start just doing things and stop cucking themselves to the jannies.

Let's end with an r-slurred Jeff Atwood tweet:

Nope, the goal of SO is to answer my question.

Torn because he would be like omg ai

https://mastodon.social/@AndresFreundTec/112180083704606941

linuxbros.. how will we recover?? i think its time to admit that windows is superior

@lain @LinuxShill idk who else to ping but I'm starting to learn these things and she'd absolutely wipe the floor with me. She even mentions bloat, at this rate I wonder if she shitposts on /g/ in between making tutorials

https://old.reddit.com/r/groomercordapp/comments/1brxqrp/groomercord_to_start_showing_ads_for_g?sort=controversial*mers_to_boost/

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1brxt4u/groomercord_to_start_showing_ads_for_g?sort=controversial*mers_to_boost/

https://lemmy.world/post/13762503?scrollToComments=true

archive

This is a recording from an official conference/workshop/whatever for xorg- something that is used by most Linux distributions for their desktop environment, so it's not some small or unknown project by any means.

I won't mention anything else, just skip around the video and tell me if you notice anything

Respawn and EA have postponed the North American Finals in the wake of the “competitive integrity” of the game being compromised. This involved a wild situation where someone was giving the pros hacks like aimbots and wallhacks as they were playing in the Finals event, effectively ruining the entire thing without anyone actually attempting to cheat. Here's what that looked like (warning: language):

This has led to a mass of complaints about Apex's anti-cheat systems, which clearly failed in a massive way for this situation. But it also speaks to just how advanced cheats have become as this is a private lobby for pros playing in an esports final.

Not that this is necessarily related, but Respawn was just hit days ago with 23 layoffs including Apex Legends developers, some of whom were longtime veterans. Though if anything, this shows that EA needs to beef up Apex's security team to some extent as something like this requires all hands, or more hands, on deck than they currently have now, it seems.

Should have learned to code better

Easy Anti-Cheat's response- It wasn't me

Kiwis discuss

We are committed to Open Models @StabilityAI

We have given over 20 million A100 hours in grants to open AI research & projects across communities.

Stable Diffusion 3 will have an open release.

Same with video, language, code, 3D, audio etc.

Open collaboration is the way 🚀

— Emad (@EMostaque) February 27, 2024

MOAR FREE CODESHIT FRICK YEA

The recently-enacted European Digital Services Act (DSA) gives the Dublin-based body substantial enforcement powers over social media and video platforms in the area of policing illegal and hateful content.

The Irish regulator has been seeking to recruit trusted flaggers on three-year terms, with specific conditions and rules against conflicts of interest attached. It says that while experience in reporting hateful and illegal content is an advantage, it's not a pre-requisite.

“Approved Trusted Flaggers will have a fast lane when reporting suspected illegal content, where online platforms will be legally obliged to give their notices priority, and to process and decide on these reports without undue delay,” the regulator says on its ‘flaggers' application form

Areas to be policed include illegal speech such as discrimination and hate speech, non-consensual behaviour, online bullying and “negative effects on civic discourse or elections”. It also includes scams, offences to minors, sexual-based abuse, incitement to self-harm and other topics.

Any tips on getting a job right now?

Could you hire me?

Orange Site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39705788

No drama (yet), reposting for posterity.

Very little on orange site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39596491

Archive: https://archive.is/HfRvZ

Google's Culture of Fear

inside the DEI hivemind that led to Gemini's disaster

Mike Solana, Mar 4, 2024

• Following interviews with concerned employees throughout the company, a portrait of a leaderless Google in total disarray, making it “impossible to ship good products at Google”

• Revealing the complicated diversity architecture underpinning Gemini's tool for generating art, which led to its disastrous results

• Google knew their Gemini model's DEI worldview compromised its performance ahead of launch

• Pervasive and clownish DEI culture, from micro-management of benign language (“ninja”) and bizarre pronoun expectations to forcing the Greyglers, an affinity group for Googlers over 40, to change their name on account of not all people over 40 have grey hair

• No apparent sense of the existential challenge facing the company for the first time in its history, let alone a path to victory

Last week, following Google's Gemini disaster, it quickly became clear the $1.7 trillion-dollar giant had bigger problems than its hotly anticipated generative AI tool erasing white people from human history. Separate from the mortifying clownishness of this specific and egregious breach of public trust, Gemini was obviously — at its absolute best — still grossly inferior to its largest competitors. This failure signaled, for the first time in Google's life, real vulnerability to its core business, and terrified investors fled, shaving over $70 billion off the kraken's market cap. Now, the industry is left with a startling question: how is it even possible for an initiative so important, at a company so dominant, to fail so completely?

This is Google, an invincible search monopoly printing $80 billion a year in net income, sitting on something like $120 billion in cash, employing over 150,000 people, with close to 30,000 engineers. Could the story really be so simple as out-of-control DEI-brained management? To a certain extent, and on a few teams far more than most, this does appear to be true. But on closer examination it seems woke lunacy is only a symptom of the company's far greater problems. First, Google is now facing the classic Innovator's Dilemma, in which the development of a new and important technology well within its capability undermines its present business model. Second, and probably more importantly, nobody's in charge.

Over the last week, in communication with a flood of Googlers eager to speak on the issues facing their company — from management on almost every major product, to engineering, sales, trust and safety, publicity, and marketing — employees painted a far bleaker portrait of the company than is often reported: Google is a runaway, cash-printing search monopoly with no vision, no leadership, and, due to its incredibly siloed culture, no real sense of what is going on from team to team. The only thing connecting employees is a powerful, sprawling HR bureaucracy that, yes, is totally obsessed with left-wing political dogma. But the company's zealots are only capable of thriving because no other fount of power asserts, or even attempts to assert, any kind of meaningful influence. The phrase “culture of fear” was used by almost everyone I spoke with, and not only to explain the dearth of resistance to the company's craziest DEI excesses, but to explain the dearth of innovation from what might be the highest concentration of talented technologists in the world. Employees, at every level, and for almost every reason, are afraid to challenge the many processes which have crippled the company — and outside of promotion season, most are afraid to be noticed. In the words of one senior engineer, “I think it's impossible to ship good products at Google.” Now, with the company's core product threatened by a new technology release they just botched on a global stage, that failure to innovate places the company's existence at risk.

As we take a closer look at Google's brokenness, from its anodyne, impotent leadership to the deeply unserious culture that facilitated an encroachment on the company's core product development from its lunatic DEI architecture, it's helpful to begin with Gemini's specific failure, which I can report here in some detail to the public for the first time.

First, according to people close to the project, the team responsible for Gemini was not only warned about its “overdiversification” problem before launch (the technical term for erasing white people from human history), but understood the nebulous DEI architecture — separate from causing offense — dramatically eroded the quality of even its most benign search results.

Roughly, the “safety” architecture designed around image generation (slightly different than text) looks like this: a user makes a request for an image in the chat interface, which Gemini — once it realizes it's being asked for a picture — sends on to a smaller LLM that exists specifically for rewriting prompts in keeping with the company's thorough “diversity” mandates. This smaller LLM is trained with LoRa on synthetic data generated by another (third) LLM that uses Google's full, pages-long diversity “preamble.” The second LLM then rephrases the question (say, “show me an auto mechanic” becomes “show me an Asian auto mechanic in overalls laughing, an African American female auto mechanic holding a wrench, a Native American auto mechanic with a hard hat” etc.), and sends it on to the diffusion model. The diffusion model checks to make sure the prompts don't violate standard safety policy (things like self-harm, anything with children, images of real people), generates the images, checks the images again for violations of safety policy, and returns them to the user.

“Three entire models all kind of designed for adding diversity,” I asked one person close to the safety architecture. “It seems like that — diversity — is a huge, maybe even central part of the product. Like, in a way it is the product?”

“Yes,” he said, “we spend probably half of our engineering hours on this.”

The inordinately cumbersome architecture is embraced throughout product, but really championed by the Responsible AI team (RAI), and to a far greater extent than Trust and Safety, which was described by the people I spoke with closest to the project as pragmatic. That said, the Trust and Safety team working on generation is distinct from the rest of the company, and didn't anchor on policy long-established by the Search team — which is presently as frustrated with Gemini's highly-public failure as the rest of the company.

In sum, thousands of people working on various pieces of a larger puzzle, at various times, and rarely with each other. In the moments cross-team collaborators did attempt to assist Gemini, such attempts were either lost or ignored. Resources wasted, accountability impossible.

Why is Google like this?

The ungodly sums of money generated by one of history's greatest monopoly products has naturally resulted in Google's famously unique culture. Even now, priorities at the company skew towards the absurd rather than the practical, and it's worth noting a majority of employees do seem happy. On Blind, Google ranks above most tech companies in terms of satisfaction, but reasons cited mostly include things like work-life balance and great free food. “People will apologize for meetings at 9:30 in the morning,” one product manager explained, laughing. But among more driven technologists and professionals looking to make an impact — in other words, the only kind of employee Google now needs — the soft culture evokes a mix of reactions from laughter to contempt. Then, in terms of the kind of leadership capable of focusing a giant so sclerotic, the company is confused from the very top.

A strange kind of dance between Google's Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company's Board, and CEO Sundar Pichai leaves most employees with no real sense of who is actually in charge. Uncertainty is a familiar theme throughout the company, surrounding everything from product direction to requirements for promotion (sales, where comp decisions are a bit clearer, appears to be an outlier). In this culture of uncertainty, timidity has naturally taken root, and with it a practice of saying nothing — at length. This was plainly evident in Sundar's response to Gemini's catastrophe (which Pirate Wires revealed in full last week), a startling display of cowardice in which the man could not even describe, in any kind of detail, what specifically violated the public's trust before guaranteeing he would once again secure it in the future.

“Just look at the OKRs from 2024,” one engineer said, visibly upset. Indeed, with nothing sentiments like “improve knowledge” and “build a Google that's extraordinary,” with no product initiative, let alone any coherent sense of strategy, Sundar's public non-response was perfectly ordinary. The man hasn't messaged anything of value in years.

“Sundar is the Ballmer of Google,” one engineer explained. “All these products that aren't working, sprawl, overhiring. It all happened on his watch.”

Among higher performers I spoke with, a desire to fire more people was both surprising after a year of massive layoffs, and universal. “You could cut the headcount by 50%,” one engineer said, “and nothing would change.” At Google, it's exceedingly difficult to get rid of underperformers, taking something like a year, and that's only if, at the final moment, a low performer doesn't take advantage of the company's famously liberal (and chronically abused) medical leave policy with a bullshit claim. This, along with an onslaught of work from HR that has nothing to do with actual work, layers tremendous friction into the daily task of producing anything of value. But then, speaking of the “People” people —

One of the more fascinating things I learned about Google was the unique degree to which it's siloed off, which has dramatically increased the influence of HR, one of the only teams connecting the entire company. And that team? Baseline far crazier than any other team.

Before the pernicious or the insidious, we of course begin with the deeply, hilariously stupid: from screenshots I've obtained, an insistence engineers no longer use phrases like “build ninja” (cultural appropriation), “nuke the old cache” (military metaphor), “sanity check” (disparages mental illness), or “dummy variable” (disparages disabilities). One engineer was “strongly encouraged” to use one of 15 different crazed pronoun combinations on his corporate bio (including “zie/hir,” “ey/em,” “xe/xem,” and “ve/vir”), which he did against his wishes for fear of retribution. Per a January 9 email, the Greyglers, an affinity group for people over 40, is changing its name because not all people over 40 have gray hair, thus constituting lack of “inclusivity” (Google has hired an external consultant to rename the group). There's no shortage of DEI groups, of course, or affinity groups, including any number of working groups populated by radical political zealots with whom product managers are meant to consult on new tools and products. But then we come to more important issues.

Among everyone I spoke with, there was broad agreement race and gender greatly factor into hiring and promotion at Google in a manner considered both problematic (“is this legal?”) and disorienting. “We're going to focus on people of color,” a manager told one employee with whom I spoke, who was up for a promotion. “Sounds great,” he said, for fear of retaliation. Later, that same manager told him he should have gotten it. Three different people shared their own version of a story like this, all echoing the charge just shared publicly by former Google Venture investor Shaun Maguire:

https://twitter.com/shaunmmaguire/status/1760872265892458792

Every manager I spoke with shared stories of pushback on promotions or hires when their preferred candidates were male and white, even when clearly far more qualified. Every person I spoke with had a story about a promotion that happened for reasons other than merit, and every person I spoke with shared stories of inappropriate admonitions of one race over some other by a manager. Politics are, of course, a total no go — for people right of center only. “I'm right leaning myself,” one product manager explained, “but I've got a career.” Yet politics more generally considered left wing have been embraced to the point they permeate the whole environment, and shape the culture in a manner that would be considered unfathomable in most workplaces. One employee I spoke with, a veteran, was casually told over drinks by a flirty leader of a team he tried to join that he was great, and would have been permitted to switch, but she “just couldn't do the ‘military thing.'”

The overt discrimination here is not only totally repugnant, but illuminating. Google scaled to global dominance in just a few years, ushering in a period of unprecedented corporate abundance. What is Google but a company that has only ever known peace? These are people who have never needed to fight, and thus have no conception of its value in either the literal sense, or the metaphorical. Of course, this has also been a major aspect of the company for years.

Let's be honest, Google hasn't won a new product category since Gmail. They lost Cloud infrastructure to AWS and Azure, which was the biggest internet-scale TAM since the 90s, and close to 14 years after launching X, Google's Moonshot Factory, the “secret crazy technology development” strategy appears to pretty much be fake. It lost social (R.I.P. Google+). It lost augmented reality (R.I.P. Glass). But who cares? Google didn't need to win social or AR. It does, however, need to win AI. Here, Google acquired DeepMind, an absolutely brilliant team, thereby securing an enormous head start in the machine god arms race, which it promptly threw away to not only one, but several upstarts, and that was all before last week's Gemini fiasco.

In terms of Gemini, nobody I spoke with was able to finger a specific person responsible for the mortifying failure. But it does seem people on the team have fallen into agreement on precisely the wrong thing: Gemini's problem was not its embarrassingly poor answer quality or disorienting omission of white people from human history, but the introduction of black and asian Nazis (again, because white people were erased from human history), which was considered offensive to people of color. According to multiple people I spoke with on the matter, the team adopted this perspective from the tech-loathing press they all read, which has been determined to obscure the overt anti-white racism all week. With no accurate sense of why their product launch was actually disastrous, we can only expect further clownery and failure to come. All of this, again, reveals the nature of the company: poor incentive alignment, poor internal collaboration, poor sense of direction, misguided priorities, and a complete lack of accountability from leadership. Therefore, we're left with the position of Sundar, increasingly unpopular at the company, where posts mocking his leadership routinely top Memegen, the internal forum where folks share dank (but generally neutered) memes.

Google's only hope is vision now, in the form of a talented and ferocious manager. Typically, we would expect salvation for a troubled company in the heroic return of a founder, and my sense is Sergey will likely soon step up. This would evoke tremendous excitement, and for good reason. Sergey is a man of vision. But can he win a war?

Google is sitting on an enormous amount of cash, but if the company does lose AI, and AI in turn eats search, it will lose its core function, and become obsolete. Talent will leave, and Google will be reduced to a giant, slowly shrinking pile of cash. A new kind of bank, maybe, run by a dogmatic class of extremist HR priestesses? That's interesting, I guess. But it's not a technology company.

-SOLANA

For my last post on this see "You turned Stack Overflow into a nuclear test site" - StackOverflow opens up voting to all registered users; jannies revolt (again).

Basically the SO staff announced that they were going to let all users be able to vote, in order to reverse the site's participation issues and problems with engaging new users. The jannies (many of whom are still on strike) hated this and downvoted the shit out of the announcement.

Today the staff announced that the decision has been reversed and the trial won't be rolled out.

I acknowledge the feedback shared by community members and by moderators. We felt that this experiment was important because it allowed users to participate and engage in a low-effort core action on the site. We believe a healthy community involves encouraging participation from new and existing users, among other aspects. We understand there are ways to engage with new users and to further de-risk the experiment other than how it is currently designed.

also

we would like to apologize for the concern, stress, and tension caused by this experiment

lol

The SO powerusers and jannies still shit on the wagies anyway:

However, I am a bit disappointed that it has been paused only after the general disagreement from the community on Meta, and not after all the moderators told you how terrible of an idea this is.

and a particularly enormous post from Catija who used to work as an employeed SO employee and has hung around just to shit on her former colleagues. I'll not even paste 10% of her screed but it includes subtitles and subsubtitles.

It's unclear to me (and to many others, it seems) what you actually want from SO—and SE. What are the goals of this or any other change?

Subtitles include:

Content Quality as a KPI

Step 2—Review and reward curation of old content

Voting as the key activity metric

Activity as a KPI

Someone makes the mistake of saying they wished that the trial would go ahead, and they end up on -4:

I support having experiments like this, even I don't like them. I share the gratitude shown on comments by some people so far. I'm glad to know that what I thought will happen regarding the user experience when the experiment was shared privately with Stack Exchange Network moderators and when volunteer sites were required, was right.

Official announcement by their r-slurred admins

Another LW thread

lemmy piracy thread

https://lemm.ee/post/27249633

I haven't made an effort post in forever so here is me being about Apple.

I asked ChatGPT to give me the top 20 complaints about Apple and I went through and collated a list from there

Apple is expensive

Models

In general I find the price discussion a weird "gotcha" when discussing iPhones in particular. You can find a smartphone to match just about every price bracket you want to and the iPhone is no exception with the current gen SE as low as $429 or the a max spec'd iPhone Pro Max going for $1600. Of course these numbers aren't through a cell provider which offer discounts for a ton of models. This is also excluding used phones which are always a great idea in $CURRENT_YEAR if you're not a huge smartphone person or just want to get a deal.

Laptop-wise I feel the M1 MacBook Air is still an excellent choice at it's $650-$700 price point - clearly not a bargain laptop but the experience of using it is very solid and a great gateway into the Mac ecosystem.

The M2 Mac Mini is a very easy sell at $599 to for an ultra-slim desktops.

Storage and Memory upgrades

This is my biggest complaint with Macs.

The storage and memory upgrades are highway robbery. It's clearly a tool in their "price ladder" strategy and simply used to get you to work your way up to the next highest model.

While I feel like the base model M1 MacBook Air is an excellent machine for a lot of people, it's crazy they're shipping much higher priced models with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.

The copium you hear from Mac fanboys about macOS running fine 8GB RAM because the "storage is so fast" makes no technical sense - NAND used in storage is measured in microseconds and DRAM is measured in nanoseconds. The latency differences we are talking about here are an order of magnitude different.

Privacy / Security Concerns

Privacy and security inspire the most religious fervor out of any IT topic. It's extremely hard to have discussions about privacy and security in a logical manner with nerds because they'll often see glowies that aren't there and ignore the glowies in front of them.

The most important question to ask for any security question is what is your threat model?

Are you trying to avoid nation state actors? Good news, you can stop worrying because they will win! Stop using computers for anything that will get Israel after you, they have an unlimited budget and carte blanche to ignore the law.

If you are expecting the glowies to lack the ability to infiltrate GrapheneOS or Tails supply chain, I have a bridge to sell you.

If your threat model is "I don't want my smartphone data to be cracked in a few minutes", good news - both Android and iOS are fully encrypted and your data is safe. The most important thing there is choosing good passwords (passphrases).

If your threat model is more privacy focused I think there's a better case to be made for custom Android ROMs but if you're anything approaching normie I think it's self-explanatory why Apple is easier than a custom ROM more trustworthy than an advertising company.

Apple is lacking repairability front

Planned Obsolescence

The planned obsolescence take is easily taken down by the fact of Apple's software support on iOS devices. Apple released the iPhone SE (1st Gen) in March 2016 and released a security update last month.

"Battery Gate"

The entire saga of battery gate I think I've argued about on here multiple times so I'll recount what I've argued before:

Lithium ion batteries degrade over time, they also are reduced in performance if they're too hot or too cold.

If old enough or cold enough lithium ion batteries can reach levels where they won't supply enough power for your device to function at all.

To support this let me quote, not Apple, but Sammy:

If you're experiencing frequent shutdowns, visit your nearest service center.

It may be time for a battery check-up, as batteries are consumables, which naturally wear out over time.

https://www.samsung.com/us/support/galaxy-battery/care-and-maintenance/

Apple of course outlines this on their own page too

https://support.apple.com/en-us/101575

The takeaway then is your can either 1.) let a phone shutdown when it can't get enough juice or 2.) reduce the amount of juice being used.

Apple chose to do two and, clearly communicated this poorly hence the lawsuit , but the act itself is the obvious correct choice. This is due to the nature of lithium ion batteries not the jews of planned obsolesce.

Overheating

Overheating was an issue of MacBooks in the past, my theory is that Apple simply believed Intel's roadmap which had them getting past the 14nm process much sooner than they ever did. I also think this was what finally pushed them to go Apple Silicon as the headache of transitioning to an entirely new architecture would be worth it if they could get chips that actually worked at their listed thermal specs.

I think that Apple Silicon has been a resounding success in this regard.

Self-Taught Optimizer (STOP): Recursively Self-Improving Code Generation

This is the repo for the paper: Self-Taught Optimizer (STOP): Recursively Self-Improving Code Generation

@article{zelikman2023self, title={Self-Taught Optimizer (STOP): Recursively Self-Improving Code Generation}, author={Eric Zelikman, Eliana Lorch, Lester Mackey, Adam Tauman Kalai}, journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.02304}, year={2023} }

Abstract: Several recent advances in AI systems (e.g., Tree-of-Thoughts and Program-Aided Language Models) solve problems by providing a "scaffolding" program that structures multiple calls to language models to generate better outputs. A scaffolding program is written in a programming language such as Python. In this work, we use a language-model-infused scaffolding program to improve itself. We start with a seed "improver" that improves an input program according to a given utility function by querying a language model several times and returning the best solution. We then run this seed improver to improve itself. Across a small set of downstream tasks, the resulting improved improver generates programs with significantly better performance than its seed improver. Afterward, we analyze the variety of self-improvement strategies proposed by the language model, including beam search, genetic algorithms, and simulated annealing. Since the language models themselves are not altered, this is not full recursive self-improvement. Nonetheless, it demonstrates that a modern language model, GPT-4 in our proof-of-concept experiments, is capable of writing code that can call itself to improve itself. We critically consider concerns around the development of self-improving technologies and evaluate the frequency with which the generated code bypasses a sandbox.

4chan explains it better

!nooticers you need to nootice harder