#Tech Tools for Programmers

[deargravity]

one of the many things that bothers me about goku luck is the fact that they have kenta (a minor) in a penitentiary full of adult convicts. where was the juvenile welfare officer and why are they not doing their job. hope they’re fired

[nomizblog]

World first app, which is built by using chatGPT

This is an android app called “Oceans of AI” that is written in kotlin by using chatGPT prompts. this article will tell you the story about it and also provide the link to a full video of chatGPT prompts, so you can see how it's built

How it’s started:

After the launch of chatGPT, everyone is afraid about their jobs, especially in the world of programmers. As a junior developer, it scared me a lot because This AI chatbot is actually doing work very well. off course, there are lots of programmers saying that it’s giving outdated code and performance voice it’s not that great and it’s true for now but the thing is this AI tool is just the beginning, not the end it will be perfect in the next few months

How I created the whole app by using ChatGPT:

Idea: I was looking for an idea that will be useful, according to trends, and easy to build. And because ai tools are trending and I wanted to build an app by using Artificial intelligence so I thought maybe I should build an app that contains lots of ai tools that people can use to do their job fast by using Artificial intelligence tools

chatGPT work: Like other people, I just go and say my idea to see if it can create but we can’t create a full app like that because of chatGPT limits this is not the right approach to follow. so I tried to build it like developers. so I started following a step-by-step process to build this. I started with creating fragments and like that one by one, I build every other feature and complete the whole app. you can see all the prompts and code provided by chatGPT in this video

Ok, so what about Backend?

Yes. This is also created by using chatGPT

The app is available on the Google Play Store, and a full video of the implementation is available on Youtube

Thank You for reading. I hope it will help developers, how they can build their projects fast and understand the power of AI.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

What kind of bubble is AI?

My latest column for Locus Magazine is "What Kind of Bubble is AI?" All economic bubbles are hugely destructive, but some of them leave behind wreckage that can be salvaged for useful purposes, while others leave nothing behind but ashes:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Think about some 21st century bubbles. The dotcom bubble was a terrible tragedy, one that drained the coffers of pension funds and other institutional investors and wiped out retail investors who were gulled by Superbowl Ads. But there was a lot left behind after the dotcoms were wiped out: cheap servers, office furniture and space, but far more importantly, a generation of young people who'd been trained as web makers, leaving nontechnical degree programs to learn HTML, perl and python. This created a whole cohort of technologists from non-technical backgrounds, a first in technological history. Many of these people became the vanguard of a more inclusive and humane tech development movement, and they were able to make interesting and useful services and products in an environment where raw materials – compute, bandwidth, space and talent – were available at firesale prices.

Contrast this with the crypto bubble. It, too, destroyed the fortunes of institutional and individual investors through fraud and Superbowl Ads. It, too, lured in nontechnical people to learn esoteric disciplines at investor expense. But apart from a smattering of Rust programmers, the main residue of crypto is bad digital art and worse Austrian economics.

Or think of Worldcom vs Enron. Both bubbles were built on pure fraud, but Enron's fraud left nothing behind but a string of suspicious deaths. By contrast, Worldcom's fraud was a Big Store con that required laying a ton of fiber that is still in the ground to this day, and is being bought and used at pennies on the dollar.

AI is definitely a bubble. As I write in the column, if you fly into SFO and rent a car and drive north to San Francisco or south to Silicon Valley, every single billboard is advertising an "AI" startup, many of which are not even using anything that can be remotely characterized as AI. That's amazing, considering what a meaningless buzzword AI already is.

So which kind of bubble is AI? When it pops, will something useful be left behind, or will it go away altogether? To be sure, there's a legion of technologists who are learning Tensorflow and Pytorch. These nominally open source tools are bound, respectively, to Google and Facebook's AI environments:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means

But if those environments go away, those programming skills become a lot less useful. Live, large-scale Big Tech AI projects are shockingly expensive to run. Some of their costs are fixed – collecting, labeling and processing training data – but the running costs for each query are prodigious. There's a massive primary energy bill for the servers, a nearly as large energy bill for the chillers, and a titanic wage bill for the specialized technical staff involved.

Once investor subsidies dry up, will the real-world, non-hyperbolic applications for AI be enough to cover these running costs? AI applications can be plotted on a 2X2 grid whose axes are "value" (how much customers will pay for them) and "risk tolerance" (how perfect the product needs to be).

Charging teenaged D&D players $10 month for an image generator that creates epic illustrations of their characters fighting monsters is low value and very risk tolerant (teenagers aren't overly worried about six-fingered swordspeople with three pupils in each eye). Charging scammy spamfarms $500/month for a text generator that spits out dull, search-algorithm-pleasing narratives to appear over recipes is likewise low-value and highly risk tolerant (your customer doesn't care if the text is nonsense). Charging visually impaired people $100 month for an app that plays a text-to-speech description of anything they point their cameras at is low-value and moderately risk tolerant ("that's your blue shirt" when it's green is not a big deal, while "the street is safe to cross" when it's not is a much bigger one).

Morganstanley doesn't talk about the trillions the AI industry will be worth some day because of these applications. These are just spinoffs from the main event, a collection of extremely high-value applications. Think of self-driving cars or radiology bots that analyze chest x-rays and characterize masses as cancerous or noncancerous.

These are high value – but only if they are also risk-tolerant. The pitch for self-driving cars is "fire most drivers and replace them with 'humans in the loop' who intervene at critical junctures." That's the risk-tolerant version of self-driving cars, and it's a failure. More than $100b has been incinerated chasing self-driving cars, and cars are nowhere near driving themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Quite the reverse, in fact. Cruise was just forced to quit the field after one of their cars maimed a woman – a pedestrian who had not opted into being part of a high-risk AI experiment – and dragged her body 20 feet through the streets of San Francisco. Afterwards, it emerged that Cruise had replaced the single low-waged driver who would normally be paid to operate a taxi with 1.5 high-waged skilled technicians who remotely oversaw each of its vehicles:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/cruise-general-motors-self-driving-cars.html

The self-driving pitch isn't that your car will correct your own human errors (like an alarm that sounds when you activate your turn signal while someone is in your blind-spot). Self-driving isn't about using automation to augment human skill – it's about replacing humans. There's no business case for spending hundreds of billions on better safety systems for cars (there's a human case for it, though!). The only way the price-tag justifies itself is if paid drivers can be fired and replaced with software that costs less than their wages.

What about radiologists? Radiologists certainly make mistakes from time to time, and if there's a computer vision system that makes different mistakes than the sort that humans make, they could be a cheap way of generating second opinions that trigger re-examination by a human radiologist. But no AI investor thinks their return will come from selling hospitals that reduce the number of X-rays each radiologist processes every day, as a second-opinion-generating system would. Rather, the value of AI radiologists comes from firing most of your human radiologists and replacing them with software whose judgments are cursorily double-checked by a human whose "automation blindness" will turn them into an OK-button-mashing automaton:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop

The profit-generating pitch for high-value AI applications lies in creating "reverse centaurs": humans who serve as appendages for automation that operates at a speed and scale that is unrelated to the capacity or needs of the worker:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

But unless these high-value applications are intrinsically risk-tolerant, they are poor candidates for automation. Cruise was able to nonconsensually enlist the population of San Francisco in an experimental murderbot development program thanks to the vast sums of money sloshing around the industry. Some of this money funds the inevitabilist narrative that self-driving cars are coming, it's only a matter of when, not if, and so SF had better get in the autonomous vehicle or get run over by the forces of history.

Once the bubble pops (all bubbles pop), AI applications will have to rise or fall on their actual merits, not their promise. The odds are stacked against the long-term survival of high-value, risk-intolerant AI applications.

The problem for AI is that while there are a lot of risk-tolerant applications, they're almost all low-value; while nearly all the high-value applications are risk-intolerant. Once AI has to be profitable – once investors withdraw their subsidies from money-losing ventures – the risk-tolerant applications need to be sufficient to run those tremendously expensive servers in those brutally expensive data-centers tended by exceptionally expensive technical workers.

If they aren't, then the business case for running those servers goes away, and so do the servers – and so do all those risk-tolerant, low-value applications. It doesn't matter if helping blind people make sense of their surroundings is socially beneficial. It doesn't matter if teenaged gamers love their epic character art. It doesn't even matter how horny scammers are for generating AI nonsense SEO websites:

https://twitter.com/jakezward/status/1728032634037567509

These applications are all riding on the coattails of the big AI models that are being built and operated at a loss in order to be profitable. If they remain unprofitable long enough, the private sector will no longer pay to operate them.

Now, there are smaller models, models that stand alone and run on commodity hardware. These would persist even after the AI bubble bursts, because most of their costs are setup costs that have already been borne by the well-funded companies who created them. These models are limited, of course, though the communities that have formed around them have pushed those limits in surprising ways, far beyond their original manufacturers' beliefs about their capacity. These communities will continue to push those limits for as long as they find the models useful.

These standalone, "toy" models are derived from the big models, though. When the AI bubble bursts and the private sector no longer subsidizes mass-scale model creation, it will cease to spin out more sophisticated models that run on commodity hardware (it's possible that Federated learning and other techniques for spreading out the work of making large-scale models will fill the gap).

So what kind of bubble is the AI bubble? What will we salvage from its wreckage? Perhaps the communities who've invested in becoming experts in Pytorch and Tensorflow will wrestle them away from their corporate masters and make them generally useful. Certainly, a lot of people will have gained skills in applying statistical techniques.

But there will also be a lot of unsalvageable wreckage. As big AI models get integrated into the processes of the productive economy, AI becomes a source of systemic risk. The only thing worse than having an automated process that is rendered dangerous or erratic based on AI integration is to have that process fail entirely because the AI suddenly disappeared, a collapse that is too precipitous for former AI customers to engineer a soft landing for their systems.

This is a blind spot in our policymakers debates about AI. The smart policymakers are asking questions about fairness, algorithmic bias, and fraud. The foolish policymakers are ensnared in fantasies about "AI safety," AKA "Will the chatbot become a superintelligence that turns the whole human race into paperclips?"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space

But no one is asking, "What will we do if" – when – "the AI bubble pops and most of this stuff disappears overnight?"

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

tom_bullock (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/tombullock/25173469495/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[coffeenonsense]

I rarely post personal stuff on here but irl I'm a writer whose work covers tech and AI quite a bit and with the WGA strike ongoing, I really want to stress that the reason Hollywood execs and higher-ups think they can just replace writers with chatgpt or have someone come and edit AI generated text is because they already think writing is that easy.

these people look at their shows, movies, etc as marketable (re, profitable) content so all they are watching for is "okay this show performed badly" and "this movie performed well" and I can promise you in a boardroom the quality, the time and effort that went into the actual writing is NEVER discussed as a contributing factor when it comes to the difference between those two things.

That's also the reason tools like chatgpt seem like magic to these people, because they've devalued the act of creation and everything that goes into making something that resonates with its audience, so naturally something that can scrape the entire digital world and spit something out that falls in line with what you asked seems like a wizard's spell, because they ALREADY think of writing as an afterthought, something where they just go "I need a show that appeals to the 16-24 age range" and writers can just fill in the blanks and they won't have to PAY PEOPLE for that.

There's a vast difference between art and content, and if you want to see more of the former, you should be furious they're trying to replace writers with what is essentially a programmable template generator. Pay your writers.

[askablindperson]

In what way does alt text serve as an accessibility tool for blind people? Do you use text to speech? I'm having trouble imagining that. I suppose I'm in general not understanding how a blind person might use Tumblr, but I'm particularly interested in the function of alt text.

In short, yes. We use text to speech (among other access technology like braille displays) very frequently to navigate online spaces. Text to speech software specifically designed for blind people are called screen readers, and when use on computers, they enable us to navigate the entire interface using the keyboard instead of the mouse And hear everything on screen, as long as those things are accessible. The same applies for touchscreens on smart phones and tablets, just instead of using keyboard commands, it alters the way touch affect the screen so we hear what we touch before anything actually gets activated. That part is hard to explain via text, but you should be able to find many videos online of blind people demonstrating how they use their phones.

As you may be able to guess, images are not exactly going to be accessible for text to speech software. Blindness screen readers are getting better and better at incorporating OCR (optical character recognition) software to help pick up text in images, and rudimentary AI driven Image descriptions, but they are still nowhere near enough for us to get an accurate understanding of what is in an image the majority of the time without a human made description.

Now I’m not exactly a programmer so the terminology I use might get kind of wonky here, but when you use the alt text feature, the text you write as an image description effectively gets sort of embedded onto the image itself. That way, when a screen reader lands on that image, Instead of having to employ artificial intelligences to make mediocre guesses, it will read out exactly the text you wrote in the alt text section.

Not only that, but the majority of blind people are not completely blind, and usually still have at least some amount of residual vision. So there are many blind people who may not have access to a screen reader, but who may struggle to visually interpret what is in an image without being able to click the alt text button and read a description. Plus, it benefits folks with visual processing disorders as well, where their visual acuity might be fine, but their brain’s ability to interpret what they are seeing is not. Being able to click the alt text icon in the corner of an image and read a text description Can help that person better interpret what they are seeing in the image, too.

Granted, in most cases, typing out an image description in the body of the post instead of in the alt text section often works just as well, so that is also an option. But there are many other posts in my image descriptions tag that go over the pros and cons of that, so I won’t digress into it here.

Utilizing alt text or any kind of image description on all of your social media posts that contain images is single-handedly one of the simplest and most effective things you can do to directly help blind people, even if you don’t know any blind people, and even if you think no blind people would be following you. There are more of us than you might think, and we have just as many varied interests and hobbies and beliefs as everyone else, so where there are people, there will also be blind people. We don’t only hang out in spaces to talk exclusively about blindness, we also hang out in fashion Facebook groups and tech subreddits and political Twitter hashtags and gaming related discord servers and on and on and on. Even if you don’t think a blind person would follow you, You can’t know that for sure, and adding image descriptions is one of the most effective ways to accommodate us even if you don’t know we’re there.

I hope this helps give you a clearer understanding of just how important alt text and image descriptions as a whole are for blind accessibility, and how we make use of those tools when they are available.

[anarchywoofwoof]

this one may get me burned at the stake given that i am in a weird position considering that i work in technology, but here goes.

y'all do realize that... none of this *gestures broadly at absolutely everything* would exist without the work of hundreds engineers/programmers and network specialists and data scientists and database architects and other people who work in the technology industry, right?

i just saw someone lamenting that they could learn to program, but felt they would be absolutely outcast from their social circle for it. are we seriously doing this? that is abhorrent and we should be better. people are still needed in these jobs. it's not immoral to work in technology.

this website in particular seems to have this really weird relationship where there's a regressive take against technology and technological advancements, discounting that there are human beings doing this work who believe in the good that it actually gives back to the world.

some of us work in industries that are fundamentally supporting and shaping the way that you live your life. every website you use is built and maintained by a "programmer" aka an Engineer or some type of web developer.

for the love of god, the problem is not technology. the problem is not AI - yes, even AI. the problem is not ALL tech workers and tech companies.

please stop ostracizing tools like technology and AI and the people who work with them who believe in the same things you believe and want to see technology used for good and the betterment of the world.

i literally could not be typing this message to you right now if it wasn't for something like a dozen technology companies making it possible. for a website with goals of destroying the [insert faceted thing here] binary, it sure does like to tie things to the classic construct of "Good vs. Bad."

technology WILL NOT SAVE US. but it also can help make things EASIER along the way if we allow it and use it properly.

direct your blame to the appropriate source. see the image above.

[aimeedaisies]

Today, Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal and Vice Admiral Sir Timothy Laurence arrived in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Day 1: Colombo

🌺 At a Welcome Ceremony at Bandaranaike International Airport, Her Royal Highness was received by dignitaries including the British High Commissioner to the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, His Excellency Mr. Andrew Patrick and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Sri Lanka, His Excellency Mr. Ali Sabry.

🧵 The Princess’s first visited the MAS Active Factory, one of the largest apparel tech companies in South Asia to be identified by the UK Fashion and Textile Association (UKFT) as an important Sri Lankan partner.

👚 As President of the UKFT, Her Royal Highness had an opportunity to meet staff and tour the facility to hear more about their innovative designs and partnerships with UK brands.

🎂 Next, Her Royal Highness visited Save The Children Sri Lanka’s Head Office in Colombo. This year marks 50 years of Save The Children working in Sri Lanka.

💗 The Princess had an opportunity to hear about some of the programmes the charity has provided, which have contributed to humanitarian and development needs across the country, including in education, health and nutrition and vocational skills development.

👧 As Patron of Save The Children UK, Her Royal Highness unveiled a plaque commemorating the 50th Anniversary of Save The Children working in Sri Lanka.

🏥 Following this, The Princess Royal visited Lady Ridgeway Hospital for Children to see Save The Children’s Social Emotional Learning Tool Kit Programme, Tilli, in action.

📚 Her Royal Highness met hospital staff who are implanting the Tilli programme which is a play-based, Social-Emotional Learning tool kit that incorporates evidence-based interventions such as games and story-telling to assist parents and teachers in facilitating meaningful child-friendly discussions with children on topics such as trust, consent, bodies and boundaries.

🇱🇰 The Princess Royal previously visited Sri Lanka in March 1995 with Save The Children to learn more about their projects in the country.

Video from Royal Family Instagram story | Posted 10th January 2024

[thiziri]

The Princess Royal and Vice Admiral Sir Timothy Laurence arrived in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Day 1: Colombo

At a Welcome Ceremony at Bandaranaike International Airport, Her Royal Highness was received by dignitaries including the British High Commissioner to the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, His Excellency Mr. Andrew Patrick and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Sri Lanka, His Excellency Mr. Ali Sabry.

The Princess’s first visited the MAS Active Factory, one of the largest apparel tech companies in South Asia to be identified by the UK Fashion and Textile Association (UKFT) as an important Sri Lankan partner.

As President of the UKFT, Her Royal Highness had an opportunity to meet staff and tour the facility to hear more about their innovative designs and partnerships with UK brands.

Next, Her Royal Highness visited Save The Children Sri Lanka’s Head Office in Colombo. This year marks 50 years of Save The Children working in Sri Lanka.

The Princess had an opportunity to hear about some of the programmes the charity has provided, which have contributed to humanitarian and development needs across the country, including in education, health and nutrition and vocational skills development.

As Patron of Save The Children UK, Her Royal Highness unveiled a plaque commemorating the 50th Anniversary of Save The Children working in Sri Lanka.

Following this, The Princess Royal visited Lady Ridgeway Hospital for Children to see Save The Children’s Social Emotional Learning Tool Kit Programme, Tilli, in action.

Her Royal Highness met hospital staff who are implanting the Tilli programme which is a play-based, Social-Emotional Learning tool kit that incorporates evidence-based interventions such as games and story-telling to assist parents and teachers in facilitating meaningful child-friendly discussions with children on topics such as trust, consent, bodies and boundaries.

The Princess Royal previously visited Sri Lanka in March 1995 with Save The Children to learn more about their projects in the country.

The Princess Royal delivered a message from The King to the President and First Lady of Sri Lanka this evening.

© Royal UK

[who-do-i-know-this-man]

Alright, looks like my dearest blorbo lost, so here's my long anticipated post mortem propaganda post for her and the 15 dollar game bundle that blew me away. For decency's sake, i'm sealing the meat of this post behind a read more, so as to not accidentally colour of the skies everyone who follows this tourney. (Or at least i'm going to try to. Tumblr is weird, and apologies if it does not work.)

One fateful day, I purchased the Bundle For Ukraine from itch.io. While I was initially put off by the seemingly bargain bin quality of most of the games, I ultimately decided it was worth it. I donated, got the games, and perused through them for anything eye catching. I found Celeste, Zeroranger, a couple of cute tools…

And a little game called Crosscode.

I was… intrigued. I'd saw this game once or twice before, and I was curious. Figuring that it couldn't hurt to try it, I downloaded the game and started it up.

Crosscode turned out to be a very good game.

And most of that was because of the main character:

Lea.

In summary, Crosscode is an action rpg game made by Radical Fish and released fully on pc in 2018, with console ports later. It follows the story of Lea, a woman who wakes up inside a futuristic MMO set on a moon in a distant galaxy, where players physically control avatars made out of a high tech substance known as Instant Matter (think hard light holograms, and that's pretty much it.), as she's guided by a programmer in order to recover her lost memories. I can go on and on about just how amazing the game is: how the plot takes a turn from "generic mmo isekai esque" to if someone decided to adapt one of the better black mirror episodes into an action rpg, how polished the combat and puzzles are, and how incredible the music is, but that's not what the main purpose of this tourney is. It's to tell you just how good of a character Lea is.

Lea is the main protagonist/player character, a rather shy woman with a real competitive spirit and a cheeky attitude, once she warms up to someone. A major part of her character is due to a major glitch in her avatar's voice module, she's mute (aside from a couple of hardcoded words her programmer friend could put in). "A silent protagonist?" you may ask me. "Like, a player avatar that is deliberately left without any strong characterisation as to allow nearly anyone to insert themselves into?" Nope! Instead of being a blank slate for projection, Lea expresses an incredible amount of character through simply inflection and facial expression.

This is only a PART of her spritesheet! Only a smidge, and i'm not even getting into the special sprites she has for certain story events.

Throughout the story, Lea has to tackle difficulties with not being able to communicate as well with players and NPCs, along with typical mmo difficulties, all while she unravels the dark mysteries of what's really going on behind the scenes of Crossworlds...

Despite her difficulties, she's always treated with respect by the game's narrative, which can be seen with the many interactions between her and the surrounding cast (all mainly expressed through her many sprites).

A few of my favourite moments of hers include:

Annoying her programmer friend:

Her reaction to her horns:

Her absolute freak out at being held by a five year old:

Her absolutely intending to get into more antics after a certain sidequest:

And if you need any more motivation to play this amazing game, here's the special reactions she gets when you turn on the New Game Plus cheat that gives you insane damage with every hit:

Yes, the devs made specific sprites just for when you play new game plus with a certain cheat.

Please, do yourself a favour and play Crosscode. It's like twenty bucks on steam without a sale. It's what Sword Art Online would be if it didn't completely suck. It's disability culture. It's the world's best single player MMO. It's a Black Mirror's White Christmas episode adapted into a video game.

And most of all... it has Lea.

Wow. Well unfortunately it seems that read more does not work in asks.

[modrew71extra]

Right, never thought I had to make one of these callouts in my entire time of using social media, but unfortunately due to the seriousness of the subject matter at hand, I have to get this out here to prevent more people being mislead.

Now for a lot of people who follow artist Tumblr might be aware of this one thread circulating in regards to people using Glaze & Nightshade in response to the recent updates made to Tumblr's data services. With the posting in question, @ reachartwork discouraging use of it and presenting an argument for it.

Now unlike most other people, I can tell how off their argument is as it lacked the nuance of how these programs worked and talked about it in a way that came off more enthusiastic, despite their claims of having sympathies people trying to protect themselves.

It's only until I took one little look at their blog and knew what was up, and their later behaviour proved my suspicions.

Now to get this right off the bat, I do apologise for whatever misgendering I exhibited as I didn't notice that about them, nor am I justifying this callout to harass them.

So please don't

Rather, it's to be weary of this user, and how you really shouldn't be sleeping on these programs.

Now as the original featured, it went out in presenting their argument as followed:

As you can notice in the thread, it's providing very little evidence of their findings of its supposed workings without proper sources, while trying to show ways to work around it (again, enthusiastically mind you).

And yet as you notice, they didn't bother providing an alternative way to combat this scalping situation everyone is in, especially with how replies have been of users expressing their grievances over this.

You'll think that maybe you should have added something to help others or worded themselves in a more sympathetic manner?

But that's when I checked into their profile and knew what seems to be up,

They're into this tech.

I knew this was clear propaganda, why would somebody who is invested into generative tech try and discourage methods in protecting others of data scalping?

Like I'm sorry but you can't be somebody who claims to be sympathetic about the whole power imbalance this whole field is causing, yet enthusiastically be into this tech. Those mixture of ideologies just do not match.

There's no such thing as "ethical AI use" for this tech.

Now upon knowing many were falling prey to this nonsense, I had to step in and present my own counter arguments and why they are so wrong. Both programs Q&A (along with demonstrations of it acting as written) thay explains the inner workings of it as thoroughly as possible:

https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html

(Paper is in QA)

https://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~ravenben/publications/pdf/glaze-usenix23.pdf

https://twitter.com/zer0int1/status/1749574897179742353

Now comes the part when things get more heated

After I posted my retort, this is the response I got:

A) Again, while I didn't intend disrespect for their gender, "AI-bro" has literally become a catch-all for us who are against the very people who are engaged in this field

B) Since when in my original argument that I did try to villainize the entirety of programmers in general? My wording was superficially against those in that field of ML tech who are for this tech.

C) Trying to spin my own findings with proper context and immaturely handwave it by boiling it down as me going "nuh uh" is making you look childish, the info I provided literally explains the very points they argued.

D) Reason I blocked them straight away is because I knew a lot of these pro-AI tend to be very combative when it comes to criticism, I felt it in my gut that they were going to do so first. And later on other factors of their character proved my point.

Like I'm sorry, you really think me not having a degree of X matter is somehow making me a worst person and that I shouldn't be allowed to voice criticism of something?

Just because somebody is in the field of something, doesn't automatically mean they have the best interests to heart.

And here's my confirmation that like a lot of these AI enthusiasts, they're very sensitive & combative.

Now not too long, I decided to try to reblog my argument on another reblog of the artist @ Kang-Bang as they have a bigger artist presence, while they fortunately did realize what the OP they were quickly blocked upon reblogging my own post:

But it wasn't that confirmed that behaviour.

I found out through a conversation I had with somebody on the server of artist-rights advocate Zakugu Mignon, that this individual had a similar encounter with this user a year ago on Twitter (I'm Hollow btw);

And here's the conversation this person had that led to this similar experience:

https://twitter.com/Acfusi/status/1691261322988527617

Notice a familiar pattern of behaviour?

The unfortunate pattern behaviour that these pro-AI types are once again present.

It's always trying to justify the usage of this succeeding.

Now look, I'm not against the idea of the physical unabled being given the ability to produce creations of their own with the help technology means nor do I think that Artificial Intelligence is inherently bad.

But this generative tech is just doing it all the wrong way.

It's by all intentions & purposes, displace hard working people as cheaply and quickly as they can.

It has unfortunately happened to certain working sectors such as journalism, advertisement and translations as we speak.

Now on the topic of whether or not you use Glaze or Nightshade.

Please don't drop it

Now yes it's not a panchea for the societal problems we're currently facing.

But you shouldn't just leave whatever you post online out in the open without any forms of protection is not the wisest route to take.

As the Q&A already shown, it at least offers some way to ensure a means of sabotage data scalping.

There are still many other creatives and general users utilizing these programs for good reason, and WHY they're desperate for a means of protection.

https://www.tumblr.com/astraskylark/741393628982886400?source=share

https://www.tumblr.com/leahfrog/743484550954598400/theres-also-nightshade-if-you-havent-heard?source=share

https://www.tumblr.com/thetreetopinn/738157011350470656/ill-say-what-ive-said-in-the-past-ai-art-can-be?source=share

https://www.tumblr.com/in-ravenlight/743565614387494913?source=share

https://www.tumblr.com/luimnigh/743036171813273600/what-is-this-about-the-tumblr-staff-wanting-to?source=share

https://www.tumblr.com/taikova/738369881482919936?source=share

Yes, I understand there's some skepticism going around and we're all frightfully confused about what to do in these uncertain times.

But please.

Don't skim out on a solution to offer some forms of protection.

Having a little protection is better than having none.

[etirabys]

I've been experimenting with "identifying as stupid and lazy" and it's going pretty well. This month I went to a Javascript meetup with the explicit goal of being slightly stupid there, got into an AI conversation, said a few coherent things, and then mentioned I just didn't want to put in the work into understanding e.g. transformers. Also I said as a simplification that I'd flunked out of linear algebra in college which isn't true (I got an A in linalg but flunked out of the ML course where linalg was heavily in use) but felt. WEIRDLY. pleasurable to say.

When I talked about this on Discord, one of them brought up Stupidism, which is from a good post @mark-gently made. But there's something about my wanton dignity-discarding that goes several steps further from Stupidism and feels very liberating.

Last year I read a weird... pagan?... book, Existential Kink, that invites you to notice how much of your life is shaped to bring about outcomes you supposedly hate, and how you secretly take joy in those outcomes. This seems false for the majority of things one tries to avoid, but leaning into it sure is interesting to try out! And I'm finding it is surprisingly true for "coming off as stupid".

There's something absurdly joyful/thrilling about deciding to go to a meetup and presenting as a moron. Some years ago I would have gone NOOO at the thought, and now I feel like an adrenaline junkie being invited to a new type of gambling event or weird sex thing.

I fully expect to tire of "identifying/presenting as stupid and lazy", but when I move on from it I expect to be more integrated or whatever. Less afraid of being stupid and lazy because I've just gone and done it openly.

One of the stupid things I said at the Javascript meetup was that I hate using libraries in almost full generality. I'm too lazy to read docs or troubleshoot my calls to other people's code. Someone recced me a different meetup for people who roll their own tooling, but warned me it was all male, because he knew I'd found all-male programming contexts stressful in the past.

In college I tended to not even really notice if a lab or a team was all male, because I was a top-half student and just felt totally secure about being in class. But I became phobic of it in jobs because I'm usually the worst dev in any remotely selective workplace, and being the worst dev AND the only woman sucks. I was ashamed of being bad at my job, obviously, but I was mortified at being the entity that diversity posters and mandatory trainings point at to say "if you think women are like that you are a terrible person and causing problems in society". But... I am like that. I guess for society's good I need to hide this as hard as possible?

(I solved this by going to a much less selective workplace and almost explicitly saying "I will be kind of a bad programmer, but I come cheap". I am pretty happy now.)

So, given that I got twisted up by that employment record, current me is delighted at the thought of being openly dumb at an all-male CS meetup. This wouldn't be good for the men (some of whom Want To Unlearn Sexism, etc) nor for Women In Tech, but it would be good for ME. Time to abandon class consciousness and defect on women for my own gain.

It is, well, yeah, existentially kinky to imagine going to this meetup and cheerfully asking dumb questions & occasionally responding with "I don't think I'm ever going to understand that, sorry, you should stop explaining that because I don't want to waste your time".

[sixstringphonic]

“A recent Goldman Sachs study found that generative AI tools could, in fact, impact 300 million full-time jobs worldwide, which could lead to a ‘significant disruption’ in the job market.”

“Insider talked to experts and conducted research to compile a list of jobs that are at highest-risk for replacement by AI.”

Tech jobs (Coders, computer programmers, software engineers, data analysts)

Media jobs (advertising, content creation, technical writing, journalism)

Legal industry jobs (paralegals, legal assistants)

Market research analysts

Teachers

Finance jobs (Financial analysts, personal financial advisors)

Traders (stock markets)

Graphic designers

Accountants

Customer service agents

"’We have to think about these things as productivity enhancing tools, as opposed to complete replacements,’ Anu Madgavkar, a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute, said.”

What will be eliminated from all of these industries is the ENTRY LEVEL JOB.  You know, the jobs where newcomers gain valuable real-world experience and build their resumes?  The jobs where you’re supposed to get your 1-2 years of experience before moving up to the big leagues (which remain inaccessible to applicants without the necessary experience, which they can no longer get, because so-called “low level” tasks will be completed by AI).

There’s more...

Wendy’s to test AI chatbot that takes your drive-thru order

“Wendy’s is not entirely a pioneer in this arena. Last year, McDonald’s opened a fully automated restaurant in Fort Worth, Texas, and deployed more AI-operated drive-thrus around the country.”

BT to cut 55,000 jobs with up to a fifth replaced by AI

“Chief executive Philip Jansen said ‘generative AI’ tools such as ChatGPT - which can write essays, scripts, poems, and solve computer coding in a human-like way - ‘gives us confidence we can go even further’.”

Why promoting AI is actually hurting accounting

“Accounting firms have bought into the AI hype and slowed their investment in personnel, believing they can rely more on machines and less on people.“

Will AI Replace Software Engineers?

“The truth is that AI is unlikely to replace high-value software engineers who build complex and innovative software. However, it could replace some low-value developers who build simple and repetitive software.”

[sabakos]

30 year old loser who spends money on special snowflake checkmarks on their tumblr.com account: all these entitled brats wanting to communicate for free online through internet services they pay for on technology they pay for! why wish for a free social media / communication tool like the ones that have existed for decades before greedy, selfish millionaires decided that the commodification of every aspect of life was essential to the greater good when you can just pay money for a borderline unusable website filled with other 30 year old losers desperate for validation

It's interesting to me how all the people who think like this don't ever seem to actually like Tumblr? Yeah, this is a perfect website for me and my loser friends, who are mostly post-rationalist computer programmers or esoteric grad students that share my interests and fall within my age group. Why are you here with us though? Go back to facebook, your grandparents miss you and they have some new and interesting political opinions they'd love to share with you.

The argument that you pay your ISP for internet access and so they should host and create social media websites for you to visit is a new one, though, I like that! They usually do give you an email address. Or maybe that's not what you want, you just think the fact that you pay one entity for one service obligates others to do uncompensated labor for you? Do you understand that you're demanding free labor from other people?

Probably not, you probably don't realize that the only way that that labor was funded before was through the owners of the website you regularly use (but apparently hate?) tricking those "greedy, selfish millionaires" into playing hot potato by investing in an unprofitable business and convincing them they'd be able to sell their stake to someone else before it all fell apart. Sadly, this has mostly stopped working recently, but it's impressive that it ever did. You're understandably upset about that, but probably not as much as if you realized that these capitalist tech libertarians have done more to socialize overall wealth in providing you a service at no cost to you, and they weren't even trying to do that.

[foone]

Hi I'm Foone Turing. I've been here a while but never really did an introduction post, so...

Hi. Yes, that's my name. I'm an asexual trans enby (they/them pronouns), I'm married, and I'm both older than you expect and younger than you expect, depending on what you know me from. I'm a writer and programmer. I'm better known on Twitter, at the moment. I'm well known for being severely ADHD and I'm also on the autism spectrum, somewhere near ultraviolet. I live near Oakland, California, USA, but I grew up on a farm in the south. I'm a furry, but I don't have a fursona yet.

I'm big into retrotech stuff, especially floppy disks. 80s and 90s PC stuff mainly, but I have a passing interest in everything else. I loves me some weird tech that you have no idea ever existed. I'm also big into analog media. VHS tapes, laserdiscs, that sort of thing.

Fandom wise, I'm a Trekie from way back, primarily in the TNG/DS9/VOY/ENT era. I haven't yet gotten into the new stuff, and I have only a passing knowledge of the original series. I'm also a big fan of Babylon 5, Red Dwarf, and Doctor Who (4th doctor, and new who doctors 9,10,11). I watch a bunch of British panel shows: HIGNFY, Mock the Week, Nevermind the Buzzcocks, 8 out of 10 cats (primarily the countdown spinoff).

I am a Big Hater on crytypocurrentseas and AI art. I used to be famously mad at the JWST, but now that it's in space and functional, I've calmed down. They just need to rename it and I'm golden.

I'm currently splitting my social media presence across three sites:

* Tumblr, obviously. Shitposting, jokes, queer stuff, and queer joke shitposts are all going here.

* mastodon: I'm putting my tech stuff here. Teardowns, building new death generators, fun historical weirdness.

* Twitter: formerly my primary platform, but now I just use it to keep in touch with people and make fun of the impending collapse of Twitter.

Stuff I do and have done after the readmore.

(I'm on mobile now but I'll get back to this on the desktop and add more links)

* I run lettuce.wtf, a webcam showing a lettuce to see if it will outlast Twitter. (My money is literally on the lettuce)

* my long running site The Death Generator: a tool for making fake video game screenshots, with user supplied dialogue.

* I run some Twitter bots, one of which is more popular than me, and all of which will need to be migrated soon: Gay Cats, WinIcons, Print Shop Deluxe, and Every Clue Line.

* I got Microsoft 3D Movie Maker open sourced

* I got rickrolled so hard that it ended up on national TV

* I ran doom on a pregnancy test

* I have made many horrible and weird keyboards. Keyboards with hair, keyboards which write poetry, keyboards that take 5 hours to say "hello world", keyboards with randomly placed keys, keyboards with 7 toggle switches instead of buttons, and many more.

* I tear down random electronics and try to figure out and explain how they work. (originally on Twitter, but moving over to mastodon now)

* I pissed off the FBI on more than one occasion. They tried to get me fired, they delayed my wedding by over a month, and they mentioned my 4chan nickname in a federal trial.

* I used to work for 4chan. I was a moderator and coder, I created /rs/ and /r9k/, and I convinced moot to destroy the original politics board (for obvious reasons). Things went further to shit after I left, but I am still glad I left. Oh and I also inadvertently prevented the creation of the 4chan dating/meet up site by being too ADHD to actually complete development of it. You're welcome.

* I ran a windows 95 machine for the maximum amount of time. There's a bug where it crashes after 49.7 days of uptime, so I let it happen. I livestreamed the end on YouTube.

* I've done exhibits at the Vintage Computer Festival on the history of floppy disks and optical discs.

* I've worked with the Video Game History Foundation (and others) to preserve old games and game development resources (source code and such). I'm big into archival!

* I wrote a really famous Twitter thread about the surprising way our vision works, which is still circulating in screenshots (including on Tumblr!) something like 5-6 years later.

* I made my old apartment play the Zelda Ocarina of Time shop music when you walked I the door.

* I run the Tumblr animefloppies, collecting screenshots and GIFs of floppy disks in anime.

* I run several other sub-tumblrs for collecting weird things, but I'll have to link them later.

* I am technically a speedrunner. I did the TAS of Duke Nukem 1, episode 1, and a joke speedrun of Solar Winds, where I beat the game by ignoring every single possible objective and just flying to the end, which takes over an hour.

* I used to make games. Some of them are available for download.

* but it still do, too: I'm working on a (currently unnamed) game about managing a dairy farm. Both the developers have ADHD. This is going to take forever before it comes out, if it ever does.

* I'm currently working on three books. Two are compilations of stuff previously twitterized, one is a novel:

- Always Screaming Forever: non-fiction, stories about my career in the tech industry and various other tech/science/history stuff I love ranting about.

- The Other Side of Screaming: fiction. My short stories.

- Mundane Kaya Sona (placeholder title): a linguist gets pulled into an FBI investigation into a car crash. An unknown language leads to the discovery of a wizard living in a forest in Oregon, and an interdimensional plot to smuggle nuclear weapons to another world, and break a cold war stalemate we (the planet earth) didn't realize we were in. I've been working on the setting for this story since I was about 7 years old, and I'm excited to finally get it out of my head and into yours.

* I'm probably forgetting like 5-10 major things I've done but ADHD is a hell of a drug. I'll add more as they come to me.

[izicodes]

Why You Should Never Stop Learning as a Programmer

Learning is important for people who work within the tech world. Technology is and always will be changing and new things are being created all the time, like new languages, updates and tools. To be good at coding and keep up with these changes, you need to keep learning the new things. Let’s talk about it~!

Here are some reasons why continuing to learn is important in programming:

Keeping up with the new tech

To be good at coding/programming, you need to keep up with new technologies and how to use them well!

Technology is always changing, and new things are being made all the time.

Skills? Improved!

As you get better at programming, you'll learn a bunch of core skills.

You can learn even more new skills and get better at the skills you already have.

This helps you stay ahead of other programmers and be really good at what you do.

Enhance your career opportunities

This goes back to your skills being improved, learning helps you stay competitive in the job market by keeping you up-to-date with the latest skills and technologies that are in demand by employers.

Companies are always looking for candidates who have the latest skills and knowledge.

You can show employers that you are committed to your profession and willing to adapt to changes in the industry.

Creative mind boost!

New technologies and new skills, it all encourages creativity and innovation in your work by exposing you to new ideas, perspectives, and approaches to problem-solving.

When you take courses, attend workshops, or read about the latest industry trends, you may come across novel solutions to problems that you hadn't considered before.

This can inspire you to think more creatively and outside the box in your own work!!

Thanks for reading and good luck with studying programming! 😊👏🏾💗

◀ previous programming post

[sasquapossum]

Here's a thought on how the internet is forcing people in multiple fields to monetize their work online, in the process making the online experience worse for everyone. Here's what I was responding to.

When lamenting the "old Internet", a lot of people forget that the vast majority of the people creating content on it were gainfully employed with strong career security. Meaning that they didn't need to make money from their hobbyist online projects, so they didn't need to monetize it. This is a lot different from today, where any sort of journalist/writer/artist/filmmaker is basically dependent on making content that sells ads or generates revenue, because their entire industries have gone online, or in many cases, been destroyed by the tech industry itself.

...and my response...

Interesting point. It makes me think of what happened to typesetters (including my mother) when desktop publishing came along. It was a bloodbath. Everyone was suddenly creating their own reports and newsletters, usually doing a terrible job, instead of paying professionals to do it right. Which is fine, actually, but it did lead to a lot of those skilled professionals losing their livelihoods. A few figured out ways to make it, either as a boutique business catering to those who still wanted work done to traditional standards or by teaching others how to do it themselves better, but most ended up leaving the profession. This is what's happening to a lot of artists, musicians, essayists, and others right now - even more so with "AI" everywhere. Lots of people unable to make a living with their hard-won skills, and insult added to injury as they have to watch others do those same things poorly. And programmers, just you wait until your livelihood consists of rescuing projects that went south because someone insisted on having ChatGPT write it instead of a professional human. For a fraction of what you used to make. I'm sure each and every one of you thinks you'll be one of the winners, still getting paid top dollar to do innovative work, but most of you are wrong. You'll probably get left high and dry just like most of your colleagues, and - unlike the typesetting example - it will mostly be our own collective fault. "Enshittification" already means something else, so we need a new term for when technology both drives people out of work and heralds a massive decline in median work-product quality. (So it's not just "disruption" which has become a word used mostly by tools anyway). Amateurization? Tyrofication?