My advice is, that under no circumstances should you look for a video called fleshlight + exhaust. Don't look for it. Don't share it. However, I'm not your mom ๐
Best Duck Army Compilation ever! Movies, songs, cartoons and much more! ยฟWhere can I get one of those? Video sources:https://vine.co/v/eIXejbQ2utMhttps://vin...
a high quality fact for you - gen. Tadeusz Koลciuszko, when in the states has shown the sigil of the Sandomierz county, and thatโs how the flag was made.
Are those ham bills piling up? Well the internet once again can come to the rescue. Order internet ham now and it will be emailed to you. Simply download and...
@krishean I never liked the laptop cup holders, they were so flimsy and spilled my drink way too often. I wish they made 'em as sturdy as the desktop computer cup holders!
this is why they need to bring back disk drives in laptops, you either put a dvd with analog horror burned to it if you're feeling evil, or you leave a cookie or stroopwafel if you're feeling nice
definitely one of the greats of all time, alongside Freddy mercuryโs vocal exercises and Ozzy Osborneโs pulling down of stage lights in hopes of finding bats fleeing the disturbance so he can catch them and eat on stage.
As I continue to enjoy your posts, there are two questions that are repeatedly raised; are low quality facts "fake news"? And separately, what are your sources? I find these posts so intriguing, and I would call them anything but low quality! ๐๐๐ซก
I have a tote full of potting soil in my carport from last fall when we cleared out our potato grow bags. To my astonishment a potato started growing in it recently, despite not watering or touching it at all.
I think I just figured out who has been fertilizing the potato...
โ๏ธ New Blog Post: Your Boarding Pass Is a Skeleton Key. Frontier Airlines Doesn't Care.
Frontier's mobile API returns full passport numbers, home addresses, children's DOB, credit card details, and KTNs for any booking. The only auth? A PNR and last name. Printed on every boarding pass.
Reported March 3rd. 105 days later, still live. They fixed the least important vuln and ghosted me on the rest. They also updated the website code and somehow made the leaks worse.
How I found that anyone with a boarding pass photo can pull full passport numbers, home addresses, children's dates of birth, credit card details, and Known Traveler Numbers for every passenger on a Frontier Airlines booking. Reported March 3rd.
Whoa. I sorta thought most airlines would have addressed the massive info leaks in their boarding passes, but I guess not. Looks like my advice from years past -- shred your boarding pass and don't post them on social media -- is still sound.
An October 2015 piece published here about the potential dangers of tossing out or posting online your airline boarding pass remains one of the most-read stories on this site. One reason may be that the advice remains timely and relevant:โฆ
I continue to track research and am concerned we're taking infections much too lightly. There is a growing body of evidence about all viral infections, including COVID, and its relationship to cancer.
โResearchers caution the evidence is preliminary but say the findings underscore a familiar message for cancer survivors and others at risk: avoid severe viral infections, using vaccines and other reasonable precautions.โ
The pandemic has left some evidence that viral infection may play a role in reawakening dormant cancer cells already present in a patientโs body before infection.
It takes years or decades to uncover the impact of a viral infection and cancer, but early research on COVID is concerning. Data from the UK Biobank showed cancer survivors who contracted COVID in 2020 were significantly more likely to die of recurring cancer. A different analysis of a US breast cancer database found that breast cancer patients in remission who got COVID were significantly more likely to develop metastatic lung tumors than patients who did not contract the virus. 2/3
โWe think that these virus infections can be almost like fuel for the fire.โ
No doctor will tell you that your cancer is due to your past COVID or other viral infections. Nevertheless, we'd be wise to take those โminorโ little colds with a lot more care. Get vaccinated. Take some care during winter when respiratory infections are high. Stay home when you're sick.
The answer isn't fear or isolation; it's knowledge and common sense. 3/3
The pandemic has left some evidence that viral infection may play a role in reawakening dormant cancer cells already present in a patientโs body before infection.
Coincidentally, the very next research study I read after posting this suggests that viral infections are a trigger or accelerant for Alzheimer's Disease. "Converging epidemiological, mechanistic, and translational evidence supports a conceptual framework in which infections act as upstream triggers of neuroinflammatory cascades that may accelerate AD pathology."
A cold is not just a cold. COVID is not "just the flu." And influenza isn't just an acute illness.
Were those cancer cells โdormantโ or kept from multiplying to critically hazardous levels by the immune system? An immune system now overtaxed by other threats.
that's very true. "Opposite" sides do not exist, they're the same sides reflected in symmetry just like we in mirrors. So why there bigger numbers? Because of commercial mass media, exagerate and make money on drama.
Mais bien sรปr, it would be impossible to have six side and not also have three sides. That is a bit obvious. You are losing your touch as this is a high quality fact !
I'll continue to believe this until someone shows me a cube with more than three sides. Just rotate it? Look, you can't prove to me that sides continue to exist after being rotated out of view.
Just masked for 7 hours in a jury assembly room and courtroom. So, why mask when I keep posting how #COVID19 is near record lows?
1) It's not just about COVID but other viral threats.
2) In a situation like this, the cost/benefit assessment is damn easy. I'm sitting silently in a crowded roomโthe cost to wear a mask in that situation is negligible. I just ask myself, โIf I get sick from this, was it worth it?โ Clearly, sitting silently in a roomful of strangers would NOT be worth an illness.
SUPER HANDY when flying stupid long flights. I recently wore mine for 30 hours, because i had to fly home from sweden, and united fucked up the flights and i got stuck at sfo for 4 hours inbetween legs.
these things were designed to be worn by medical staff who pull 12 hours shifts, so theyre made to be super comfy, and have replaceable filters :D
Get advanced respiratory protection with the Envoยฎ Pro N95 Respirator Kitโfeaturing a reusable design, secure fit, and NIOSH-approved N95 filtration.
Sorry if youโve covered this, but Iโve always had issues masking with glasses, as they constantly fog up. Is that an issue youโve faced / solved?
@rasterweb I tested a lot of masks early on and have found that masks with the metal nose strip work to prevent glasses from fogging. Even then, I found some masks with metal strips were too weak.
I would recommend a mask, but I'm still using masks we purchased when we were in Europe. Best I can suggest is to test a couple of brands. The 3M Aura 9210 gets a lot of recommendations for people with glasses:
Thanks. I'll take a look at that one. I do fine with a 3M respirator for sanding and painting, but still have not found a mask (even with metal nose strips) that works for me. I might just be an overly heavy breather.
@rasterweb You might try one with a valve. Early in COVID, people opposed masks with valves, since they tended to protect the wearer and not others. Nowadays, with risks lower and almost no one taking care, I don't think wearing a mask with a valve is problematic. That might help to prevent your glass-fogging problem.
There is little reason for adults to be concerned about BA.3.2, but the same isn't true for kids.
STUDY: "We found that both cohorts of children had lower geometric mean titers against BA.3.2.2 than adults, even though all tested age groups had similar titers against dominant strains NB.1.8.1 and XFG."
Kids are undervaccinated and have been infected by different variants than adults. As of May, just 10% of US children had been jabbed in 2025โ26. Get your kids vaxxed!
Question for the #fediverse #admin community. I have a few tiny instances -- #pixelfed, #friendica, and #peertube -- mostly for friends and family, but I've let a few random strangers join (mostly before I started getting lots of obvious spam accounts). I've noticed that these accounts have no posts, no activity, but don't have the obvious hallmarks of spam accounts (no get-rich-quick links in their bio).
Is there another angle here that I should be aware of? I'd hate to find out a year from now that there's some common scam or attack vector that I'm enabling that I'm not aware of.
Music from Australia and New Zealand in the year 1981:Outline's promo-video for the single 'The Cicada That Ate Five Dock' (April, 1981), taken from the 1981...
depends on your definition of noisy I guess :P I really like the whirring and clicking of old IBM PC/AT era machines and their peripherals..
.. but I promise you that the datacenter I work in is quite a bit louder. Nvidia in their infinite wisdom for example is using like multiple kilowatts worth fans to cool their HGX trays; absolutely ear-splitting loud and reaching well above 100dB+ in many cases. We're approaching the point normal hearing protection is not enough
a) I feel like LLMs have helped me learn some programming things that were hard for me to learn previously b) I'm tired of LLMs being relentlessly pushed on us and do not want to participate in that by talking about my positive experiences c) there are also lots of hazards associated with using LLMs to generate code that are not that easy to avoid
I think people with mixed feelings are posting less than the people who are really upset, which makes it look like everyone is really upset. I've definitely got mixed feelings about all this.
@mistersql There are not a lot of ratio-worthy topics on Mastodon/fedi but AI makes up the top five. That's why I mostly stay quiet about it in general.
@vees @mistersql yeah, weird how a social network with a lot of people that work in a particular field might have a negative reaction to something putting people in that field out of work en masse. Tides come in, tides go out, itโs just a mystery ๐
@mistersql I got the mixed feelings. I just used Kiro Dev to build a PlayWright test suite for a new feature, but it didn't go completely smooth. The tests didn't run clean at first. And after they did run clean, they still didn't completely test the cases--some tests passed that should have failed. I still think it net saved me time over starting from scratch myself, but that is not always the case using AI.
@mistersql Depends if youโre on LinkedIn or Mastodon ๐
Some people in software Fediverse want to draw battle lines of humanity versus AI. Meanwhile, at work, being open about your reservations about AI will risk your job
IMO itโs not that the correct position lies in the middle. Itโs that we donโt talk about a third thing, the factors that make us vulnerable to hype cycles.
I think there is a shortage of good writups about progmatic use, like how to use it for really good outcomes the way you would feel proud of getting out.
i think simon willison's blog simonwillison.net/ does a good job of covering the practical perspective
though personally I find managing all the various LLM hazards to be very hard and sometimes not worth it and I don't know if I've seen as much about that
@ripienaar I've seen two positive stories from what I think are respectable sources: Chris Wellons who I know from r/C_Programming nullprogram.com/blog/2026/03/2โฆ and @adafruit whose blog is sadly down because of a C&D letter over reporting of a *negative* aspect, see their profile.
Yeah completely in the same boat as you. They have recently massively helped me deal with quite major illness; Because they are so fast, they give you enough activation energy to explore approaches and ideas you otherwise wouldn't; I hate the inevitability that this is going to make inequality worse; I am very fearful of the impending recession they're going to cause; I viscerally hate the politics and views of those who run these companies.
I'm starting to think that now is the perfect time to start a new search engine. Maybe with the recent EU souvereignity funding, this is possible. The vlc of search engines
I think posting stuff that works is important, there are still people who think it's completely useless. You will get pushback but be honest what works and what doesn't
@penguin42 i don't have any interest in convincing anyone to use LLMs or convincing anyone that it's useful, I think it's cool that many people don't use LLMs and I'd much rather they didn't start if they don't want to
Of course, people should use what they want - but it's the same that people who are using LLMs and finding them useful being shouted down by people who don't understand they can be used sanely if people take care.
@penguin42 personally I sometimes see LLM use that the LLM user says is fine but that does not feel fine to me (like it's not something I would be comfortable doing)
and also sometimes I use an LLM in a way that I think is fine but then it turns out to not be as ok as I thought
I'm not shouting at anyone about it but I guess I understand the skepticism and I feel like we don't have a good shared understanding of what it means to "take care"
Sure; we're still figuring that out; and there's a big continuum, of what people feel happy with doing with it. But the way to figure it out is for people to share experiences of what works and especially where it breaks unexpectedly.
@penguin42 I think you can sidestep the issue I'm critical/cautious of LLM code generation and absolutely hate the company hype. On the other hand, I run llama (well, ollama & opencode now) with local models as assistants. Not for coding in the main but to spot stuff I miss, answer api questions. Like grep and less, there is no need to defend use of a tool. Just the cautions and maybe the advocacy for open models and tools.
I sometimes wonder if there's an possible future where we can somehow make search _better_ instead of _worse_ with LLM technology, like making it easier to find relevant things that humans wrote and discover new cool people and learn from them instead of hiding everything behind a wall of AI summaries that are often wrong
i've been trying duckduckgo and kagi but it has not been a great experience for me
(please don't tell me that you can ask generative LLMs to do searches)
I think there might be. The maths behind searching is creating a matrix of occurrences of words and compressing that matrix (Latent Semantic Indexing).
In a very simplified way, LSI is like an LLM with a context of 0.
So I guess LLMs which are also only matrices might be used in a similar wayโฆ
(I am not very deep into the maths and theory of LLMs, but arenโt embeddings something in the direction you are looking for?)
@tom yeah, my team made this at a prior company. The audience was lawyers and government professionals in a fairly specific, though complicated, compliance vertical. The first result of our user testing was 'we refuse to believe any generated results without links back to source law'. A multiphase approach using RAG and then a large context window yielded incredible results, but it was definitely heavy and costly.
How do you (with a computer program) decide what was written by a human? Google has had a problem for a while that even their search results mostly lead to autogenerated crap. Internet search is harder than ever if youโre trying to find the humans or find true knowledge.
Marginalia is the best attempt Iโve seen at a โfind human informationโ search
A bit tangential, but thatโs disappointing to hear that kagi hasnโt been a great experience. That was one of the top Google alternatives I was considering.
as someone who works in a library, there's so much that LLM's could help with on search (building queries, finding alternate terms, auto suggestions, subject grouping) but all the vendors are pushing for llm solutions that only work on their products and try to handle the entire search instead of helping the user understand and build their queries.
It's very frustrating. I hope we can build better solutions soon! (We're working on it!)
what bugs me is that one thing these things /could/ be good for is fact checking. Never going to be 100% accurate, but it's the kind of thing they are OK at. It turns out no one is interested in fact checking though.
> (please don't tell me that you can ask generative LLMs to do searches)
I wonโt tell you butโฆ now I am curious about why ๐ Is it because you already do it? Or because you donโt want to use them this way? And if you donโt want to, why is that?
I wouldnโt ask Claude. But I like using open weights models to help me find material, links between things, and provide me with URLs and whatever extra info I need. And I found a combo of pi, local models and SearXNG to be pretty good at this.
I feel you re: mixed feeling. Even when everything works great, I see how many searches ran automatically and I wonder how sustainable that can be in the long termโฆ
Feeding search results into a model is def just another type of RAG, what I like though is that agents autonomously evaluate and delve deeper if needed (or call other tools like here: pi.dev/session/#60456692bce68aโฆ).
Direct embedding search (like #BYOTA) is also cool, but depends on what you can/want to index (fun challenge tho๐)
one thing I love of SearXNG is how you can configure different search engines per task. If I had to bet on some new cool agentic search, it would be on something that makes use of similar metadata to automatically run searches on sets of custom, ad-hoc engines.
And oh yes, thereโs knowledge graphs too: wikidata has recently shared an MCP server / API Iโd love to play with (wd-mcp.wmcloud.org/ )๐
It's one thing to use a tool but it's another thing to have it shoved to your face I think seeing a summary of things instead of actually seeing the things you want is always annoying, LLM or not. It doesn't matter if it's a LLM summary or if it's a hard advertisement, it's just annoying when the first thing that pops up in a search isn't a search result. Same goes to everything else. It's just annoying when something that *isn't* what you're looking for pretends it is. No matter if it's an ad, a clickbait, or some generated nonsense. It's not about the AI, it's about how people are using it to shove shit to people's face but people keep saying it's an AI problem. AI is a tool that has a lot of potential and the most obvious one is that it makes shoving shits to people way easier than before. But the problem is still people shoving shits to your face, not the tool.
I donโt like LLMs, but Iโve used Gemini for fuzzy searches that would be very difficult with traditional Google semantics. For example, โfind articles discussing obscure law X that also mention potential caveats Y and Z.โ Itโs not a panacea but Iโve found leads that I would have definitely otherwise missed.
Iโm personally excited for a future where tiny but hyper specialized models you can run on your own computer are available. I donโt think I ever need these generally-โgoodโ-at-everything style models. But something tiny thatโs really good at React? Or testing strategies? Or finding articles written by people? I think Iโd love that
one of the really sad things about this moment is that it seems like LLMs work best (fsvo "work" and "best") when interfacing between a person and a predictable/reliable/deterministic thing (such as a programming language type system for example) but instead people seem to be trying to replace all the predictable/reliable/deterministic things in our world with LLMs (which are not predictable, reliable, or deterministic). i feel this is especially true for search engines.
sometimes when my keyword searches don't lead me to the results I'm looking for, asking an LLM is actually an option and sometimes yields useful links that I wasn't able to find before.
So maybe if we skipped the summaries part and just provide the "sources" the LLM claims to have used, and validate them so they aren't some 404 page, it could allow to make conventional search better.
it's particularly ironic because LLMs came out of search (specifically, the attention mechanism from Google), but Google seems to be less on the ball about actual search quality than they used to be. Some of this is improvements in the content-generation tooling from folks looking to make a buck off content ads (and maybe some conflict-of-interest in that), but it feels like Google used to be more effective at surfacing the high-quality content.
Phrasing it in this way, I wonder whether the cost of producing good content has risen above the revenue stream of content ads, so the "free" internet content is being subsumed by either paywalled resources or slop.
yeah it's technologically possible to use AI to link to source material. But (a) the vendors' strategy is focused on lock-in because their costs are so high they need captive customers, (b) LLMs are not an AI suited for linking to sources since they have that tendency to make up "sources" and/or URLs, and (c) model collapse means workarounds such as local models aren't sustainable either.
So there's maybe a hypothetical yes to your question, but if there is one I don't think it can get backing under current financial conditions.
Honestly, what was wrong with conventional search? Does it need AI? If so. does AI add so much value that it's worth the environmental impact compared to conventional search? If yes, how do we deal with climate change while we are hurtling toward the precipice with our foot on the gas? I just don't see a scenario where it's viable, important, and sane to pursue for whatever marginal improvement search might get from it.
@emma we also need a sustainable supply of new knowledge to be generated by real writers, researchers, artists, analysts, etc. Archive and search reach a tipping point of uselessness eventually (not that far off) when the preponderance of what they've indexed is manipulation or slop.
yeah one of my biggest issues with search is definitely that the search results are full of slop
and yeah I find RAG hard to get on board with because of how generative AI "search" makes up sources (or, more often for me, cites real sources but then the source doesn't actually say what the LLM says it did)
My initial, half-baked thought goes towards "Stack Overflow, but people post the answers they ask LLMs instead of questions". They answers need to be backed up with actual sources, and the person posting could edit the answer to include additional gotchas/add their own two cents, leading to a hybrid of human-LLM responses.
@pjg1 yeah I've thought about this before and I think there's something so cool about this idea?? like it might be incredibly chaotic but it would be super interesting if we could have access to all the code questions people are asking LLMs and whether they thought the answer was useful, and be able to use that data ourselves instead of it being locked up in the AI companies
what has been your experience with Kagi and DuckDuckGo? I have enjoyed Kagi for its UX and unremarkable search results. I appreciate conceptually that they have Kagi Small Web and SlopStop.
@emilsit with Kagi i find that its local search is extremely bad, like if I search for the name of a restaurant it sometimes doesn't list the restaurant's website or instagram or anything at all in the first 2 pages at all, only like random newspaper articles about the restaurant
i end up having to switch to google to find things more than I would like
@emilsit with Kagi i find that its local search is extremely bad, like if I search for the name of a restaurant it sometimes doesn't list the restaurant's website or instagram or anything at all in the first 2 pages at all, only like random newspaper articles about the restaurant
i end up having to switch to google to find things more than I would like
Pattern recognition is what the tools are (theoretically) good for. Augmented search should be great. Maybe they'll even figure out when the sites are all same site in a dozen SEO trenchcoats.
But that's not the problem. The forced intermediation is the issue.
the interesting thing is you can use a technology similar to LLMs to improve search, only it's specifically one that *isn't* generative. the same vectorisation of linguistic components can actually be surprisingly useful, because you can also use it on the query. of course, doing something like that would require them to actually make their product good, as well as agreeing to let customers click on links, both of which hurt their bottom lines.
@kaced it's super interesting to hear Kagi is working well for you, I've been using it for a year and I find especially its local search is incredibly bad, like I'll search for a restaurant and it'll be literally impossible to find the restaurant's website in the Kagi search results, like it won't appear anywhere in the first 2 pages of results.
More and more I find myself just going to Google because I can't find stuff with Kagi which is disappointing
@sigkill @ripienaar yeah, easy to verify and/or low stakes are the cases where Iโm finding it works to apply it, which Iโm unfortunately being required to do as well. Thatโs sort of where Iโm expecting weโll settle out in 5 years once the hype drops off. Itโll be useful for some things, not others, weโll figure it out.
In the mean time, if you still want to search for web pages like a normal person, Kagi is great, cannot recommend enough
I'm curious about (a); my impression (as someone determined to stay in the control group) is that LLM-assisted "learning" usually isn't, but your overall approach to learning is so unique that I'm willing to take your assertion at face value :)
1) one of my favourite ways to discover new tools or techniques is to try to imagine in my head the thing I would invent, and then to search to try to find if the thing already exists. LLMs are pretty good at this kind of search, and in my experience it can be hard to do with google if I don't know the right terms
for example recently I was trying to find the answer to this question and found it in the CSS spec with some LLM help social.jvns.ca/@b0rk/116612391โฆ
i kind of wish there was a way with @scope in CSS to say โinside this selector, turn off all other CSS rules except my base styles that iโve tagged somehow that should stay onโ developer.mozilla.org/en-US/doโฆ
havenโt thought through this, just thinking out loud about what might help me
(basically disabling the cascade i guess except for a few specific things)
The @scope CSS at-rule enables you to select elements in specific DOM subtrees, targeting elements precisely without writing overly-specific selectors that are hard to override, and without coupling your selectors too tightly to the DOM structure.
@geeksam another thing related to 1) is sometimes I have a specific piece of code I've written that feels "wrong" to me. If I ask the LLM if there's a "more idiomatic" way to write it, sometimes it'll tell me about a very useful feature of the library that I'm using that I wasn't aware and didn't know the word for
2) It can help me find the terms when I'm totally at a loss for where to start looking, like if I ask an LLM what "[?1049h[33;1H[?1h" means, the answer it gives me may not be true but it means I can get some potential terms to look up to find an actual document that contains the answer to my questions instead of just having literally no idea what to do
3) this one has a LOT more pitfalls but like recently I've been using Django, and django just has a lot of moving pieces and it's been too overwhelming for me to learn in the past
Using the LLM to generate some parts of the app so that I can focus on learning how one part of django works at a time is something that IMO has really helped me. Like it means I can postpone learning the ORM language while I learn how to use Django's migration system & other Django features for example
i do think 3) is very tricky because it's VERY easy to forget to go back to the LLM code and make sure you understand it later, and there are no tools I'm aware of for keeping track of which code is "tainted" by LLMs and needs to be learned and which code is "okay", but reading tutorials has never worked for me because they never answer my questions. This lets me approach the framework by learning things in the order I choose.
very, thank you! I'm starting to branch out from my comfort zone of "all Ruby all the time" and get bogged down on things like "what does Python call <thing I'm used to>?" Thanks for sharing your strategies for getting past that!
@geeksam Excellent nuance, there are so many issues that shouldnโt be ignored but also there is measurable benefit in certain areas, and the interactivity you mention is absolutely one of them.
Earmarking code to revisit is difficult when it gets voluminous, but it isnโt intractable.
I hope things improve, we get renewable and safe energy to run large systems, and that small ones become good enough to help do many of these things locally.
@kaced I used to have this problem when I tried to switch to an alternative search engine around 10 years ago. I solved it by using a map application (Google Maps back then, and Mapy.cz now) to search for places and normal search engine for the rest.
Nowadays this has become so much of a habit that I don't realize most people search for places in generic search engines.
I've been having to use these things at work lately, and boy do I feel this. Setting aside the various systemic/ethical/externality issues with LLMs (and they are MANY), I think there's some utility to using them carefully and conscientiously as a tool. But all the incentives built into them (and the systems around them) guide you to... not do that.
I agree on this. I've used LLMs to understand complex libraries and how to use them, but i usually do most coding by hand on the basis of what I learn.
I feel that. Literally once in a blue moon I come across an interesting technical look at LLMs that isn't just a glorified press release, and doesn't shy away from the shortcomings. But I think strictly technical reviews are incomplete without the bigger picture of social and ecological costs, and I tire of technical discussions that leave that out.
I think there's bound to be interesting technical things happening with LLMs, I just wish more of those conversations included the context of all the actual costs instead of pretending the text on our screens magically appears out of nowhere. These datacenters will wreck our ecosystems, are driving up prices for electricity and computer parts, are displacing people in the communities they're forced onto, and reliance on LLMs for coding just hands over our ability to "do software" to like 3 billionaires. Tech workers at least could unionize to make themselves harder to fire, but I digress.
The crop of datacenter-reliant LLMs just aren't worth it, despite whatever they may do.
(This is a general rant, not directed at anything in particular you have/haven't done)
I so agree with you. My productivity (personal hobby projects) is through the roof since using LLM aids means I can start something where previously the friction of having to _learn yet another thing_ was in the way. I then learn the thing from actively working _with_ the LLM on it (not full vibe-coding).
And then, when 80% is done, I need to get very hands on to get the quality to the level where I feel confident in what has been produced.
However talking this way about LLMs brings out the anti vaxxe^H^H^H^H^Hanti-AI people on Mastodon and their hatred knows no limits.
Argh, this. Sure, I admit that "yeah the LLM found things in code review that I wouldn't have thought of" and now it's their turn to admit that LLMs are entirely pants for generating code.
yeah I think about this all the time -- do I really have to ask an LLM here? Could I ask a person instead? often the LLM answers are very lacking.
but I write code alone and sometimes I don't have anyone to ask who knows the answer
for example I tried to ask this on Mastodon thinking "I'm going to ask humans this time! i'm not going to resort to the LLM!" social.jvns.ca/@b0rk/116612391โฆ but then it didn't work and the LLM found me the answer I wanted (the answer was in the CSS specification)
i kind of wish there was a way with @scope in CSS to say โinside this selector, turn off all other CSS rules except my base styles that iโve tagged somehow that should stay onโ developer.mozilla.org/en-US/doโฆ
havenโt thought through this, just thinking out loud about what might help me
(basically disabling the cascade i guess except for a few specific things)
The @scope CSS at-rule enables you to select elements in specific DOM subtrees, targeting elements precisely without writing overly-specific selectors that are hard to override, and without coupling your selectors too tightly to the DOM structure.
I totally get how LLM are convenient, they are always available. I guess at one point there was IRC channels you could have popped in with that kind of question but I'm not sure and I doubt it theses days.
@gkrnours yeah I don't know. I had too many bad experiences on IRC and other public help forums like that to ever feel comfortable going there to ask a question except if I absolutely could not avoid it, I'd just give up on learning whatever it was instead. it's messy.
my general thoughts on this are that all the "good" uses of llms could also be accomplished by taking the annotated training data and releasing it publically. like yeah if i had billions of lines of sample code sorted by language and task i would probably learn stuff too.
Occasionally I get useful answers from the bot spam at the top of Google. I still scroll down until I find the source it stole from, and click on that, because fuck Google and fuck AI slop being forced on us.
I was quite surprised at the general hostility of the Fediverse against AI.
I understand the arguments and the idea not to give credibility and fuel to the AI machine but to outright reject that there are uses for it seems dishonest to me.
I personally find it quite useful for learning new things and generating boilerplate code or one time scripts.
i spend a lot of time trying to track down sources written by humans for the things that the LLM tells me, and I try to spend a lot more time reading those websites than inside the LLM, so I very much hope that people still keep writing things that I can read (and I've been continuing to write about my own computer experiences!)
but it's tough out there. i think the time when you could monetize a blog with ads ended before I started blogging in 2013.
@drahardja I've done things like this, then realize that using the LLM to answer the question directly, while easier, has completely destroyed the business model that built the (mostly) free web we have today. In the last ~3 years, I've thought a few times about starting a blog of things I've figured out how to do with Python or similar, and every time, I stall out on "what is the point, when most likely all I'll be doing is making food for LLMs?"
Even so, using it is gross and icky, for the usual reasons why LLMs are gross and icky, and in a small way Iโm validating the business models of all the scummy and creepy people running the show these days, so I donโt really want to use it even then.
On the one hand, using AI definitely raises big ethical issues to me. I'm just not an absolutist. For example, I despise Meta but I use WhatsApp because that's where most of my family and friends are.
Regarding AI in particular, I'm a freelance part-time programmer. I don't have a team to rely on nor to learn from, so my knowledge is both deep (I know all nooks and corners of my projects, and a great deal about the frameworks they're built in) and narrow (I do things my way, and often miss on better alternatives).
It feels like I'm exactly the kind of person who would benefit the most from AI, and I have to begrudgingly admit it has.
Soโฆ Yeah. Claude's been helping a lot, and I avoid AI as much as I can everywhere else.
Agree on all points. In regards to your first point specifically, I use LLMs as a kind of Hail Mary when I'm unable to find a solution any other way and with mixed results that've tended to be broken code revealing clever tricks that have proven useful and that can be followed up on.
You won't get people like me to listen to and engage with a conversation about corporate hype and using LLMs to do something useful until the technology (not the companies, but the fundamental operation of the technology as an extremely inefficient token generator) stops being a literal existential threat to life on earth because of the real environmental and human costs
with similar experiences, I've worried about b) too. I'd *like* to think that "how to carefully use LLMs to boost learning" is so different from "how to gleefully subcontract your job to a robot with minimal supervision" that it would actually moderate the hype rather than supporting it. But that depends on people appreciating nuance.
For all the noise, and despite results varying wildly based on *how* you use the tool, I've still not seen much consensus emerging around best practices. So I think there's plenty of room for that sort of conversation.
Dear, dear person. Learn. To Write. Code. Yourself.
Really. I know, it will break, it will fail, you will write stupid inelegant rubbish. But you will learn and get better. Better, perhaps enough that you end up teaching other people how to do this magical thing.
No machine or 'LLM' or whatever could ever do that.
@spockrocket thanks for sharing this, that's awful and I do feel worried for the programming industry in the same way. I don't know what's going to happen and I definitely have friends who are switching careers out of tech.
It does work well, itโs been really good considering my really short patience, I donโt have to wade through like 100s of stackoverlfow posts. When it gets serious (eg I need to explain it my project), I just switch/escalate to a coding agent so it can compile/run things within the project. It gets better the more context it has.
bump. Having begun experimenting for some days with LLM code generation I am torn between awe, ridicule and anger. It's like talking to s.o. switching between a helpful know-all and an unruly retard cheating on you. Fighting to get my specs observed ... that's what's called l "Prompt engineering"?
Relatable to myself. Except I have been mainly using special trained chatbots for research questions and the security risks preclude my using their code.
Honestly this is a nuanced position that so many folks are are uncomfortable with.
โ Generative AI seems useful in a way technology often doesnโt โ Iโm terribly worried about the ethics and societal/environmental impacts of this technology โ These two things canโt be reconciled and yet, for me, theyโre both true
@kaced @ripienaar I think we canโt really say that this is going to be a steady state in 5 years. Well, I have no reason to believe that it will. And I think a lot of people here specifically are asleep at the wheel and do their future selves a disservice not keeping a finger on the pulse.
@kaced @sigkill @ripienaar My opinion is that good documentation, samples and project templates cover the vast majority of low-stakes ground Iโd even consider letting an LLM anywhere near, and we should be investing in those sorts of things instead.
I once had to drop an emergency dook in the Utah desert, realizing I hadnโt restocked my dude wipes in my go bag, and had to wipe with sagebrush. Thatโs something to do.
The character was literally falling out my butt. The sagebrush felt nice. This was right off of I-15, in the literal barren no services 100 mile stretch
I spent a few months in Salt Lake City (visiting the university) and it was weird, but surprisingly enjoyable. The people were very friendly, some were borderline creepy (please join our religion, look how nice we are!) but a lot were just genuinely nice people. I missed the skiing season, but some things I remember:
The library had just won the 'best library in the USA' award a year or so earlier. Absolutely amazing place and there was a fantastic coffee place next door (not sure if it's still open).
This place had the biggest beer list of any place I'd visited (I have since been to Delirium Tremens in Brussels, which has a bit more). Fantastic selection of beer. Their FAQ on the licensing law is fun. Their 50/50 sweet potato fries were great. Deep fried Twinkies are a thing.
The university also had the most successful catering I've seen. They made businesses (a mix of chains and local providers) bit on what they could deliver for $5. The winning bids got space in the food court for free. I ate better food for about half the price of anything in my home institution.
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New, by me: A number of high-profile and/or valuable Instagram accounts, including those of the Obama White House and the Chief Master Sergeant for the U.S. Space Force, got hacked and defaced with pro-Iran messaging in the past 24h after people figured out that Meta's AI support assistant could be tricked into resetting account passwords.
From the story:
"A video released on Telegram by pro-Iran hackers claimed to document a remarkably simple exploit that appears to have involved using a VPN connection with an IP address that is in or near the target's usual hometown, requesting a password reset for the account, and then choosing to chat with Meta's AI support assistant. From there, the video shows the attacker told the bot to link the account in question to a new email address, after which the bot dutifully sent that address a one-time code that allowed a password reset."
The Instagram accounts for the Obama White House and the Chief Master Sergeant of the U.S. Space Force were briefly defaced with pro-Iranian images and messages over the weekend, after instructions began circulating on Telegram showing how to trick Mโฆ
Hmm, the "VPN" aspect of this makes me think this isn't entirely an "AI" (note quotes) related story, except in the sense that "Agentic AI" is 95% just workflows offloaded into MCP scripts. On the third hand, a lot of *those* are vibe coded garbage and so the circle is complete.
Meta is the epitome...the quintessential ... the embodiment of "enshittification". There is absolutely nothing meritorious about their websites... (I'll stop here.)
So, flaws are not surprising.
I still say the Iranians should release the Epstein files...or all the dirt they have. I find it hard to believe they don't have at least some of it. They are probably thinking that they don't want to try to out-crazy a crazy person.
that was probably israel or the US itself, lol. This ship of propaganda sailed years ago, and the whole world can see the genocidal israeli state attempting to use america against Iran, over and over. Its entirely out in the open now, and companies like facebook would make this sort of thing easier, not harder.
I complained on #reddit / #cybersecurity about Google logins post-apple-upgrade caring about whether I was near the home Iโd never consented to them recording. Reddit bros thought I was a fool, but this is the flip side of that.
Am I the only one who can't understand why some sites only send the "we've gotten a request to change your email" message to the _NEW_ address?? Just did a bunch of changing of emails and this was surprisingly common. Best procedure used was: ask the old email if you requested a change, then verify the new one, then make the change. Worse, send the message to both emails. But this...ยฏ\_(ใ)_/ยฏ
The U.S. FDA has approved XOCOVAยฎ (ensitrelvir), an oral antiviral, for post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) of #COVID19 in adults and adolescents 12 years of age and older following contact with an individual who has COVID-19. XOCOVA significantly reduced the risk of symptomatic COVID-19 by 67% in uninfected individuals following exposure to an infected individual through Day 10 compared with placebo.
STUDY: Among people with Long #COVID19: "The pooled prevalence of brain fog was 30%, while cognitive impairment was 25%). Unvaccinated individuals had a greater burden than vaccinated ones. Temporal analyses indicated that prevalence increased with longer follow-up, suggesting symptom persistence or late manifestation."
!
I'm critical/cautious of LLM code generation and absolutely hate the company hype. On the other hand, I run llama (well, ollama & opencode now) with local models as assistants. Not for coding in the main but to spot stuff I miss, answer api questions. Like grep and less, there is no need to defend use of a tool. Just the cautions and maybe the advocacy for open models and tools.
Kofi Loves Efia
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in reply to โฎFurbland's Very Backwards Accountโข • • •till you run out of cake
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calx
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Brahvim
in reply to โฎFurbland's Very Backwards Accountโข • • •<Portal Menu Screen with Cake and Radio.>
Lasse Beyer
in reply to Kofi Loves Efia • • •kwayk42
in reply to Cat ๐๐ฅ (D.Burch) • • •they should put these on all EV's so deaf people can hear them coming.
Also because science reasons?
lp0 on fire
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in reply to Cat ๐๐ฅ (D.Burch) • • •ฦงฦฟัฆฯษโัฆเจนัคส
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Dud and Forgotten.
in reply to Cat ๐๐ฅ (D.Burch) • • •Zalasur ๐ธ๐บ๐ฆ
in reply to Cat ๐๐ฅ (D.Burch) • • •"Do you know why I pulled you over?"
*blank stare* "No, officer."
John Maxwell
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I reckon they would be terrible as mud tyres.
#Jimny
dasparadoxon
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