rlamacraft @rlamacraft@social.cleverlibre.org

REMINDER: ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and other large trained neural models are NOT "artificial intelligence", they're just stochastic parrots, remixing and regurgitating what they've been fed. There's no theory-of-mind involved, so no understanding: there's no "there" there. (A real live parrot exhibits more intelligence than this.)

Don't call it AI; call it parrot-tech. That way you'll have a better perspective on what it can (and can't) do.

What does the #solarpunk #degrowth version of that magic moment look like?

Imagine for a minute that, instead of sitting in a centuries old building that has been converted in to an overpriced burger joint, I was sharing a meal with friends and strangers in a community kitchen.

Imagine, instead of a Spaceship owned by a billionaire, it was a high altitude weather balloon launched by local hobbiests.

Maybe, instead of real time high resolution video, we have to make do with high resolution photos or low-res video, until the high resolution footage can be recovered. Maybe we just have to wait until the footage is recovered.

Maybe, instead of a brand new pocket super computer I'm watching the transmissions trickle in over ad-hoc wireless connections on recycled and repurposed hardware.

Would it have been any less magical without the rent seeking? Without the ocean boiling?

It's my general belief that when a book goes out of print and new copies are unavailable, the book should fall into the public domain.

If the publisher is no longer selling the book, then the publisher and author are no longer receiving income from it. There is really nothing left to protect, no benefit to the public in protecting a work that is unavailable. Don't want your book to fall into the PD? Make an ebook available perpetually.

(No, it's not practical. But it's nice to dream.)

I understand that sending texts in meticulously capitalized and punctuated complete sentences makes me An Old and the thing is I am 100% fine with that.

IDEs reduce code complexity much in the same way that a highway reduces traffic.

Reading newspaper stories and various other media, it's pretty clear that Musk didn't rename "Twitter" to "X". He renamed it "X, formerly known as Twitter."

We curse the one benighted chap /
Who felled the sycamore at the gap /
but tolerate those richer guys /
who burn whole forests, seas and skies.

Simon Heywood, 2023

Was introduced to Herrington Darkholme’s `ast-grep` tool and my god it’s so useful. Think Babel, but since it’s built on tree-sitter, it works for *so many* languages out of the box.

Here I am adding methods to structs in C for a side project: https://bit.ly/3PQ02uv

Powerful