Imagine two glasses, both 8 oz. One is titled usability and the other titled security.

And one is the dumpster fire that is Windows 11.

I feel like these security arguments are overblown. Linux is still pretty damn secure, and the Linux community is still tough on fixing security bugs.

Would you rather be using a UNIX-based secure OS, or Windows update-and-crash 11?

I don’t see any open-source forks of a BSD spinoff (only proprietary ones like what runs on the PS5)

I wonder why. Maybe if they were GPL, they wouldn’t have that problem.

Depends on what you mean by “fanboys”. No, the hype isn’t as real as these rich assholes make it out to be. LLMs aren’t going to replace all human workforce everywhere ever, like some of these techbro dipshits quickly find out.

But, I’m still going to use technology that produce a tool in two minutes what would have normally taken me two hours to do. Sure, I have to code review it, but that doesn’t take nearly as long as the work itself.

Slop that produces inaccurate results and then tells you it did no such thing.

I use Claude at work and local LLMs at home, and they all produce good code. The Kagi agents work pretty well at searching for information that would have taken me 30-60 minutes to find. Although, I generally favor thinking models because they are good at edge cases.

You have to know how to provide good context for the situation, like examples, prior art, documentation, etc. Many people have a hard time even expressing an idea to a group of humans. Imagine your (pointy-haired) boss shows your department a picture in the next meeting:

B: “Go make this thing!”

D: “What thing?”

B: “Here. This thing. Make something just like it for our company!”

D: “Well, we can’t just copy it outright. What color should it be? What do we want to improve on? How do we tie it to our existing software?”

B: “I don’t know. That’s your job to figure out, right?”

That’s how most people treat LLMs. Garbage in, garbage out.

People seem to forget that, 15-20 years ago, 95% of email was spam. It’s gone down since then, but only because email isn’t that important of a communication platform nowadays.

Bad actors attack with the tools they’ve got. If it’s not protected, it’s exploitable until it is.

No mob is good at nuance, which is frustrating. Black and white mentality bullshit.

Yes, the sociopath, narcissist and billionaires have taken over. There is no more democracy. There is no more rule of law.

And what do you do to those sociopaths, narcissists, and billionaires? Talk to them to death? Your words have no meaning to them. You can’t expect empathy from sociopaths. That’s literally in the definition of the word.

There is probably no way, at this point, to end the corruption peacefully. Possibly no way at all.

No, there isn’t. We were past that about 10-20 years ago.

You’re going to have a pretty tough time with DB0. I don’t think any of us want AI bots posting fake posts or lazy slop bullshit, but many of us just see LLMs as a tool. It’s not the technology’s fault that a bunch of rich assholes want to drive the economy to the ground over it.

How have you been able to manage the issue of unreliability with the volumes of data you’re dealing with? Is the kind of data which you’re dealing with less likely to be unreliable since it is of a kind the LLM is more likely to process correctly?

The same way for any other information resource like Wikipedia or some random Reddit post: trust but verify. Always review the code, point out mistakes, call out potential edge cases. Especially with newer thinking models, the hallucinations are minimal. It’s mostly just miscommunication in the request, which you can detect in the Thinking stream, stop, and re-correct. Rubberducking makes you better at communicating ideas in general, and providing enough context for the request is everything.

A lot of it has to do with the type of model you’re using, too, and having a decent global rules file tailored to how you want it to respond. If you don’t like how the model is responding, try out another one. If it’s some repeat mistake it makes, put it in a global rules file, or ask it to make a permanent memory.

Claude Opus does well at work, but is rather expensive for home use. I use Kimi reasoning models in Kagi for searching questions, and Qwen/GLM hybrid models for local use. It takes a bit of setup and tweaking to get the local stuff working, but LLMs are good at knowing how their own models work, so I just had Kimi help me out with some of the harder troubleshooting.

Holy shit… I finally found one of the screenshots for these loaders:

You could load up a disk full of games and tie it to a boot loader menu like this.

I mean, that’s how we ultimately got them. We must have had most of the popular ATARI XL games in two wooden floppy boxes.

But, you gotta respect the networked distribution even back then. Pirates would create their disk packs, upload it to some national BBS. It gets picked up by more local BBSs, and tech-saavy modem users would download it to floppies. All the while sneakernet would carry it down the last mile to fill in the gaps. Some of this shit even went international, as long as somebody dealt with the long-distance fees (or phreaked their way out of them).

EDIT: Just to give you an idea of the network we were dealing with.

There was a pirate scene even in the 80s, during the 8-bit computer era. Transferring games to floppy from a 300 baud modem.

Parents had a good friend of theirs that gave us a ton of games every time he visited. Most of them were game selection startup menus, because the uploaders wanted to use up all of the space on the floppy, so they crammed it up with 6-8 games each. You can still find these disk copies on certain C64/ATARI XL game torrents.

All the while SPA was still pushing anti-piracy commercials on PBS channels. “Don’t copy that floppy” was always their silly tagline.

And yea, once Napster turned into a household name, piracy was mainstream.

but is that something we can expect will ever revolutionize the economy? Can we replace the labor force with a technology which can’t do work but can convince the most credulous people that it can?

LLMs are a tool. You and I use tools. They are not a replacement for humans, and rich CEOs that say otherwise are greedy fucking morons.

It’s also untrue that it “can’t do work”. I literally just had several conversations with LLMs at work today to work through some programming tasks and troubleshooting issues. They can pour through details, logs, search results, code way faster that I can. I would be working a helluva lot slower if I didn’t have LLMs running tasks in the background while I go do other things, or review code it wrote, or talk through other support issues. I’ve been doing this shit for 20+ years, and I’ve never seen a technological leap this significant since the Internet.

Don’t use blockchain, crypto, metaverse, or “VR goggles” as comparison points. This is not something that is going to just magically go away.

This one just came out from Jamrock Hobo, one of the main Disco Elysium channels. I think he has been working on this for several months. To say that it explains everything is an understatement.

Oh, huh, this noclip one is recent, too. PMG’s second video did a really good breakdown of the ZA/UM drama. (A helluva lot better than their first attempt. PMG basically apologized for the tone and structure of that video.)

This is a technology community. LLMs are technology. If calling LLMs useful is considered glazing, then I’m not sure if you’ve eaten a proper doughnut.

LLMs are more like vr goggles with the force of the entire plutocracy pumping up the bubble.

The existence of a bubble doesn’t not mean the technology is useless. The internet had its own bubble 25 years ago. That doesn’t mean it was useless, just that people were investing in anything even remotely related to the Internet, including stupid websites and wasteful ideas.

A junior developer is fundamentally untrustworthy. That’s why you don’t give them access to the fucking prod database and backups.

AI is non-deterministic, sure, but selling these services with such a wide possibility space between “deterministic” and “random” behaviors is unethical and immoral.

We don’t know what the prompt and past input was. Maybe it wasn’t as “random” as you make it out to be. A company stupid enough to let LLMs touch their prod database is going to include a bunch of other stupid inputs.

You’re approaching this from the perspective of “all LLMs are bad so don’t use them”, which is its own version of unethical and immoral. A company that isn’t using LLMs is like a company not using the Internet.

LLMs are useful, everybody should use them to some capacity, and understanding a technology is far far better than spouting off ignorant bullshit like this.

Do yourself a favor: download a free model on HuggingFace, learn how they work, experiment with the technology on your own video card. It doesn’t have to be some super-powered video card. You can get models that fit in a 8GB card just fine.

This week, players are being asked to pay $25 for early access to Masters of Albion, a god game throwback that legendary designer Peter Molyneux (Populous, Dungeon Keeper, Black and White) says will be the last game he ever works on.

Also, Curiosity and Godus. Let’s not forgot about those “legendary” games.

Anna’s Archive should hire this same lawyer.

Well, I can wait for those games’ developers to stop losing their mind and remove the cancer from their game. They aren’t getting one cent from me, otherwise.