Twitter: @Osmose
- Osmose parentYou're right, pg should have spoken out against Palantir when Biden was in charge too. Just because he's right about them now doesn't mean he was always right about them and we should keep that in mind.
- Some fun historical context behind the outline algorithm and why it didn't catch on: https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=25003
In short, the W3C adopted it because they thought it was a good idea, while browsers and screen readers both refused to adopt it for various reasons like ambiguity with existing web content or concerns about screen readers having to implement and maintain their own independent outline algorithm implementations. 8 years and an entire standards organization after the thread above, the WHATWG finally dropped it.
- The APA even removed sex addiction from the DSM-V, which isn't the end-all-be-all of what is or isn't a mental disorder, but is indicative of how science has broadly rejected the idea of sex addiction being a meaningful disorder.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/close-and-personal/2...
- I wrote a post about the UITour parts a long time ago: https://www.mkelly.me/blog/content-uitourjs/
It's pretty standard among browsers. The risk should be about equal to someone spoofing the domains that the browser downloads software updates from, and you can turn it off via prefs if you really don't want it.
- LLMs are not a general public benefit. Artists whose work is trained upon by text-to-image models aren't made any more whole just because Meta has to share its weights—it just means it's even cheaper for the folks impersonating them or effortlessly ripping off their style to keep doing so.
Meta really does not need to be subsidized when they have so many resources at hand—if LLMs are really hard to train without that much data, then perhaps that's a flaw with the approach instead of something the world has to accommodate.
- The speed increases are nothing to sneeze at; I've moved a few Vite projects over to Bun and even without specific optimizations it's still noticeably faster.
A specific use case where Bun beat the pants out of Node for me was making a standalone executable. Node has a very VERY in-development API for this that requires a lot of work and doesn't support much, and all the other options (pkg, NEXE, ncc, nodejs-static) are out-of-date, unmaintained, support a single OS, etc.
`bun build --compile` worked out-of-the-box for me, with the caveat of not supporting native node libraries at the time—this 1.1 release fixes that issue.
- You have a narrow view of what a beautiful experience is. It does not require professional-level voice acting.
It is not unfair that, in order to have voice acting, you must have someone perform voice acting. You don't have the natural right to professional-level voice acting for free, nor do you need it to create beautiful things.
The tech is simply something that may be possible, and it has tradeoffs, and claiming that it's an accessibility problem does not grant you permission to ignore the tradeoffs.
- The lightness with which you treat forcing tens of thousands of people to change their career is absurd. Indie games are hardly suffering for a lack of voice acting, even if you only look at it from a market perspective and ignore that voice acting is a creative interpretation and not simply reading the words the way the director wants.
Yes, we should avoid using it because it will upend the lives of a significant amount of artists for the primary benefit of "some indie games will have more voice acting and big game companies will be able to save money on voice actors". That's not worth it, how could you think it is?
- I've refused to work on AI-related initiatives at previous jobs, and will again if they ever come up. I have deep ethical objections about LLMs in terms of power use, consent for providing training data, fitness and safety of LLM-powered solutions for problems that cannot afford errors, and the potential and already-happening effects of replacing human workers without a suitable safety net for when their incomes disappear.
Crucially, I do not think predictions that all these issues will improve is a good enough justification to keep innovating before they have improved. Harm caused now is not undone just because we fixed the flaws later.
In that sense: I think feeling weird about the hype train is completely normal, but for different reasons. I do not want any complicity in legitimizing LLMs.
Besides ethical concerns, I also think the myriad applications of LLMs are mostly misguided market waste. In that sense, profiting off the hype could be seen as you simply slurping up some of that waste for yourself, and while I don't like that function of the system, I think the system is the issue rather than you trying to exist within it. If you don't share my ethical concerns or aren't objecting to the market's function of trying all ideas and assuming the good ones profit, then you're probably not really doing anything scummy by your own standards.
- > Kids playing Zelda for free might be spending their opportunity cost Money on Xbox instead.
...I don't follow? You're suggesting businesses have a right to attention?
> But Yuzu wasn't acting in good faith. The team saw abuse firsthand and embraced it.
As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, they had rules against ROM distribution and some of the links shared as evidence that they didn't have been by unrelated people.
- I believe that Yuzu includes a standalone implementation of the Switch firmware but can run user-provided firmware because a few games have compatibility issues, and it doesn't run Nintendo's own OS software (you can't run the Switch system menu on it, for example).
But to your larger point: Nintendo being mad about people sharing Switch ROMs or Yuzu funding their work shouldn't have any bearing on the actual legal question of whether Yuzu violates the DMCA anti-circumvention clause. Dolphin argued after legal consultation that inclusion of these keys qualifies under exceptions for interoperability; Yuzu doesn't include the keys at all. It doesn't appear to have been a question tested in the courts yet.
That point _does_ matter if you're making a moral argument about whether Yuzu crossed a line, but given that emulation has been commonplace for almost the entirety of Nintendo's video game business and it has done very little to stop them from staying on top of the game industry, but has enabled millions to experience and be inspired by games they would've otherwise never have been able to play, I'm not terribly convinced that $23k a month in donations is wrong for people putting in serious engineering work into a project that enables that.
- Because they can't form a union in the first place due to union busting tactics like compulsory meetings that talk about how unions are bad, hiring consultants that spread fear and misinformation, or just threatening your livelihood by firing you for even attempting to form one.
There's a power imbalance—enforcement exists to help balance the scales so that an efficient negotiation between workers and the company can happen.
- > Sure you in theory vote for union leaders, but in practice it ends up being just as bad as any other politics
This is not at all universally true? A union can be dysfunctional just like any other collaboration between people—that's hardly a reason to not even try.
Specifically, I joined the Glitch union along with my coworkers in 2020, and we were pretty united on what we wanted to negotiate for. The union more than paid for the effort we put in to forming it and our dues when it won severance and health coverage for those hit by layoffs later.
> What is the difference between being fired and being told we don't have any work for you? Labors often do lose their job - they may still be in the union and thus early in line if there is another job, but they don't have control of when jobs come up.
What does this have to do with a union improving the power balance in negotiations between employees and a company? If you're suggesting that even with a union companies can find ways to get rid of you, well, that's one of the very things unions can fight against with the help of the labor board being threatened in the article above.