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.

• For large screens, centres text so it's not way over on the left (some subs have custom html styles, hence the two sections)
• Expands images automatically
• Hides the image hiphopcirclejerk stuck over their sub (thx j cole drama)

// ==UserScript==
// @name         old_reddit_improver
// @namespace    http://tampermonkey.net/
// @version      2024-01-26
// @description  Make old.reddit.com more usable
// @author       You
// @match        https://old.reddit.com/*
// @icon         https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?sz=64&domain=reddit.com
// @grant        none
// ==/UserScript==

(function() {
    'use strict';
    console.log('---- tampermonkey initiated ----');

    // Remove hhcj pic.
    let earl = document.querySelector('a[href="#EARL"]');
    if (earl) {
        earl.style.display = 'none';
    }

    // Centre page body.
    let body1 = document.querySelector('div[id="siteTable"]');
    if (body1) {
        body1.style = 'width: 70%; margin: auto;';
        console.log('body1:', body1);
    }
    let body2 = document.querySelector('div[class="commentarea"]');
    if (body2) {
        body2.style = 'width: 70%; margin: auto;';
        console.log('body2:', body2);
    }
    console.log('ran centre aligner');

    // Expand images.
    let xpath = "//a[text()='<image>']";
    let iter = document.evaluate(xpath, document, null, XPathResult.ORDERED_NODE_ITERATOR_TYPE, null);
    let array = [];
    let text_elem = iter.iterateNext();
    while (text_elem) {
        array.push(text_elem);
        text_elem = iter.iterateNext();
    }
    array.forEach(i => {
        let img_tag = new Image();
        img_tag.src = i.href;
        img_tag.style.maxWidth = '500px';
        i.parentElement.appendChild(img_tag);
        i.parentElement.removeChild(i);
    })
    console.log('---- tampermonkey complete ----');
})();

This whole thread is so peak HN, it even has a couple of idiots arguing "Bayesian priors" over whether another HNcel is a genuine chomo or not

I know some of you make music, I've even heard some OC that was posted here.

Anyways, I'm trying to get into all kinds of synth stuff as a hobby and I'm not about to spend 2000$ on plugins, so instead I found this. You input the name of a particular synth or plugin VST, and it checks several whitelisted sites to see if any uploads match your query. Supposedly it's reliable, but like any pirated software- use it at your own risk.

Neither can I tbh

Edit:

https://old.reddit.com/r/AsianMasculinity/comments/1bvbk5q/metas_ai_image_generator_cant_imagine_an_asian/?sort=controversial

Some azn nerd wrote a longpost about this phenomenon in DALL-E and it's hilarious

you think you hate journalists enough etc https://t.co/pneREBsh6P

— eigenrobot (@eigenrobot) April 4, 2024

andres freund: genius programmer responsible for one of the most widely used pieces of software in the world, just single-handedly stopped a huge attack from happening. nyt journalist: 'i am too fucking stupid to understand his work and won't even try but it's very boring!!!' pic.twitter.com/eOw54Kzshb

— anton (𝔴𝔞𝔯𝔱𝔦𝔪𝔢) (@atroyn) April 4, 2024

Personally, I fail to see where the issue with this image is. This is clearly an Asian man with his Caucasian (Kalmykian) wife.

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.

@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

source for that is https://www.theinformation.com/articles/how-amazons-big-bet-on-just-walk-out-stumbled, which I cannot bypass the paywall on

4chan explains it better

!nooticers you need to nootice harder

Do you we think Zuck paid for this article to counter his awkward UFC experience?

https://www.mensjournal.com/news/mark-zuckerberg-ufc-meme

Zuck bought astroturf from - 17 votes

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.

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

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