The results look pretty damned impressive for it’s time (and small file size).

Stop whatever it is you think you’re doing.

Is this AGI in the room with us now?

Okay, okay. I’ll admit it: Occasionally it’s 2.3KHz. It depends on what I’m doing with resonant all-pass filters at the time.

1.4KHz.

Because of course he did.

When it comes to GIS, I’ve mainly done consultancy work with Bentley’s products over the years, but QGIS is really, really good and getting better which is great for everyone. Competition is great, open source collaboration is even better.

I had torrents in mind. You could host them directly I suppose, but discoverability would be an issue.

Linux installer ISO images. Perfectly legal, and very helpful.

Quite possibly one of the best things that ever came out of IBM, and one my my favorite products of 1979 (along with “Alien”). Of course, Weisenbaum had a thing or two to say about the ELIZA Effect previously in 1966. As usual, nobody listened.

Excellent. Now let’s see all those juicy copyright violations.

I’ve got to be honest here: That’s not as hot as I thought it would be :(

I don’t see the problem. It’s not threatening - barring exceptionally poor personal hygiene perhaps.

No, I’d missed that one, so thank you very much for the link. It was - as is typical of Doctorow’s musings - a very good read, which I can wholeheartedly recommend to anyone else who’re interested.

598,524 rentable humans

Yeah. I’m done. If anybody needs me, I’ll be over here writing open source code in my spare time without externalizing my cognitive capability. I guess I’ll seek out a new career in public sanitation to pay the rent. At least that way, I’ll know I’m making an unambiguous positive contribution to society.

Quite apart from all other considerations, my problem with all this is: LLMs are no longer tools assisting us. We are tools assisting them. I don’t want to spend my life as an “LLM output checker”.

How long is that going to even work assuming you can find people willing to do it? Right now it occasionally does, but at what point will the group of people with the skills required to do so have shrunk and their abilities degraded to the point where everything devolves into a blind leading the blind scenario? LLMs have been trained on our code. Now we’re being trained on theirs, and it’s not going to end well.

Cool, and this is an admittedly completely OT gripe not specific to this particular site, but:

I had to allow scripts from code.angularjs.org, ajax.googleapis.com, cdn.jsdelivr.net and unpkg.com… To load a bit of text on the front page that might as well have been, oh, i don’t know, HTML. It’s just a non-interactive website for goodness sake. Links, text, images. 228Kb javascript in total adding 0.5s to the page load time, for no apparent reason.

This is a really good read, and I highly recommend it.

In practice, this means anyone under 18 isn’t supposed to create a computer account on their own.

Most System76 employees installed operating systems and created accounts on their computer when they were under 18. They did this out of curiosity. Many started writing software.

I started programming in BASIC on a C64 when I was six, moved on to MOS 6502 assembly when I was seven, then onward through ANSI C, C++, and numerous other languages over the years. If, back then, my introduction to “computing” had been to simply consume the software of others on a locked down smartphone that I could neither truly control nor understand, well… I would have ended up somewhere very different, and not, I think, better.

And it’s worrying me. Knowing at least something about the inner workings of the machines and software upon which so much of our lives now depend is more then merely empowering - it’s liberating. Now it seems like we’re all going to be mindless consumers of vibe-coded software on platforms we can only use but aren’t allowed to learn how to control. That future disgusts me. It’s not just personally repulsive, it’s incredibly dangerous.

Because the logical opposite of liberation… is slavery.

I guess age restrictions for a goddamned text editor is what you get when you build it for “collaboration with AI”.

And implanting them all over the place, apparently.