hendrik

Yes, certainly feels unreal. I really don’t know what to feel. I mean on the one hand it generates lots of actually working code and boilerplate stuff. On the flipside it’s often messy and convoluted and I struggle to stay at the top of it. And I think the people who compare it to a slot machine have a point. I’ll end up in situations where it’ll either accomplish astonishing stuff. Or it’ll go on some crazy wild goose chase with me for like 2h straight. You never know.

Interesting. Commissioning work / outsourcing it to other entities has rarely felt like a superpower to me. I mean it’s a valuable skill to have. And we need something like project management who “only” manage stuff and not do the actual work. But I frequently feel people who do the hands-down work are the ones with superpowers. Or people who do things without a lot of resources at hand. The more I delegate, the less I feel like I contributed and it was my superpower which made something happen?!

hobby programming? If you’re into that and got the time to spare…

I’m a bit unsure what we’re supposed to do here. It sounds believable to me, too. On the other hand, if it quacks like a duck… And there’s “Anti-AI” engagement farming written by chatbots out there.

Yeah, guess the good old “When in Rome, do as the Romans do” applies. There’s plenty of pancakes to be had (for breakfast), omelette, soup, pastry, porridge, vegetables…

Well, please don’t tell him we’re going back to licking boots of dictators.

And bonus points for complaining about the breakfast. You (Merz) shouldn’t just mock African nations. Pretty sure the bread in Miami sucks as well?!

Gitea is fine. If you like a hosted option you can use codeberg.org . But even GitHub is better than nothing. If you’re using some development environment, try to connect it to your Git repository, that’ll do it for you and all you need is to press 2 buttons.

And think of it as an investment. Sure, you gotta put in the one or two hours to (re)learn the basics. But at some point it’ll save your ass and save you half a day of unnecessary work.

Yeah, I’m on team - don’t pollute the environment just for shits and giggles. So try to avoid it unless that’s the one way to keep your job.

Depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. Installing a Linux distribution and using it for everyday tasks (including full-disk-encryption) should be fairly easy. It’s basically just pressing “Continue” a bunch of times for me. And after a while I get a desktop with a browser, an email client etc and I’m set.

If you want advice: Maybe go for one of the more popular distribuitions as of today. (K)Ubuntu is okay-ish but I don’t think it’s all that great. Or maybe ask someone to help you find the issue. Computers are known to be fairly complicated in general and there’s always some annoying issues.

I usually just go to one of the local laptop refurbishing shops and have a look at what’s in stock: https://www.afbshop.de/gebrauchte-notebooks/lenovo-thinkpads/

Last time I went to buy a new Thinkpad, I came home with a Dell 7390 😂 Mine does have a touchscreen, but I guess that’d be the main factor limiting your selection here.

Modern cars are pretty much all enshittified. There’s no way anyone repairs anything but the manufacturer themselves, because there’s proprietary software in every tiny part. They spy on you and your location 24/7. You gotta bring in your car for updates, of course preferably to a licensed partner who paid some 5digit $$ for the software to connect to the car. There’s paid subscriptions for the satnav and more recently for all kinds of shit.

But it’s not like they invented that recently. They’ve always made sure to upsell on some extra add-on packages because every bit of comfort is like 400€ extra so you’d rather just pay a few 1.000 for the entertainment addon, the winter package and the heavy-smoker addon and a driver-assistance XY. Because it’s kinda nice to have a proper cruise control, 12V for camping and a somewhat nice stereo. On the downside you now also got 5 ashtrays, cruise control with 5 bazillion features you never need, and you paid more than you wanted.

The German brands are just at the top of the game and experimenting how much shit still flies with the customers. Reportedly BMW designed custom screws so you need to buy a screwdriver from them as well. Mercedes now has cars you can’t open the hood, because only the repair shop is allowed to access it. And making people subscribe to cruise control and heated seats on a monthly basis is an old trick by now.

Frankly speaking, I think German carmakers are a bit stupid. There’s this huge demand for EVs, but they missed the opportunity. While the Chinese anticipated it and now they get to make profit.

I/we recently had to buy a new car and the option was either go for a somewhat premium SUV or tiny city car, which seems to be the popular choices as of today. And/or use public transport for another 8 months minimum until a car gets delivered… Or go for something else, get the type of car we want and get it right now. Nothing in the process made me think the German car industry wants to make an effort to sell a car to me.

Sure. If I remember correctly it was some Hot or Not game at first and then they did Facebook. And pretty much immediately funded a company.

Platforms such as Facebook or X were designed to mediate human relationships at scale […]

Hmmh… Already the premise sounds plenty naïve to me. Weren’t those platforms designed to harvest users’ personal information and sell advertising space?

Only correct answer so far. Here’s the licenses included in the dataset.

Maybe subscribe to effective altruism *. Become the best slop hardware engineer out there, make a lot of money. And then use that money to fight AI. /s

In theory, they could just get Non-AI stuff from their suppliers and it wouldn’t be an issue. But then false labeling is very popular these days and a lot of people try to cheat and betray with the stupidest things like if they drew something themselves.

Sure. I can agree with that. Though I think it is a bit besides the point. The real problematic part isn’t how people call something or if they’re agitated and oversimplify things. I mean that’s not great either. But I think far more interesting issues are de-skilling, changing the industry for the worse, open-source projects now hooked on AI subscriptions by nasty companies… People letting their coding-agent draft something and they don’t understand it’s now not them anymore who constructed the basis of the project, chose the tooling and made the important design decisions… Or the same with drafting a book or letter. It seems like that’s a simple and tiny step… But it’s the most important one. Some people are afraid the next generation of people will sound like ChatGPT, start every dialogue with a reaffirmation and say lots of “it’s not X, it’s Y” because that’s what they grew up with…

Also: I see far too much slop these days. We get several people each day advertising for shiny new projects they “wrote” (or they let their bot do it) and turns out a few of them actually compile and 1 in 10 doesn’t get abandoned after a month… It’s just way too much spam to me. And this isn’t some rare exception… A lot of stuff currently gravitates towards that. Everything gets flooded with more stuff and everything is about attention. And it regularly isn’t following the open-source spirit either. I can’t contribute because the codebase is a huge mess, garnished with a massive amount of redundant documentation but all the important stuff is missing. And even if I do there’s no one reading my PRs anyway… Which is kind of a letdown.

And then every company tries to replace quality with quantity. I get half-assed products with weird quirks, art which isn’t art, “articles” with just incoherent ramblings…

I mean sure, I know there’s like 10 people out there who do useful stuff with AI. I happen to use some of that. But still… That’s far and in between. If you call something slop if it reeks of slop, you’re kinda right 99% of the time. At least in my experience. And it usually bears consequences as well.

But calling everything slop isn’t helping, worse it’s benefiting a very small group of people.

Yeah, I think pretty much none of what we do is helping in any way. It’s a decision of some big companies and powerful people to flood the world with “AI”, fake stuff and whatever they like. And it’s a trillion dollar business. Only thing that’d help is for example if the European Union mandates watermarking or forces people like Elon Musk to stop their nude generators… It’s not really something we can do. And even in the realm of computer programming, it’s really, really hard to convince management to adopt any kind of sane approach towards LLMs or quality of the product.

I guess what I’m trying to say is: I understand names are important and how we call stuff. But it’s even more important what’s actually happening out there, right now. And most of it isn’t really concerned with how I for example handle it. All the bad stuff is pretty much forced upon me. And there’s just an uncomfortable amount of it. And it doesn’t even matter if I call your 22% coding-agent drafted project slop or not… What difference does it make? It’s still the same thing.

I meant the title here on Lemmy… But I mean the entire article is talking about everything from image filters, autocomplete, to drafting code and LLMs. It also contrives some percentages, tries to differentiate between the different forms of AI… And the ends in a conclusion which again lumps everything together. We just talked about how background removal tools are acceptable and now we’re generating scaffolding with LLMs. Those use-cases of AI aren’t the same! We just tried to establish that…

(Also, I don’t think inventing definitions for words is of any help. LLMs are LLMs. Automation is automation. And machines are machines, less so entities with agency or “intelligence”.)

Kinda wrong title, then? So don’t use chatbots, do use background removal, markov chains and text to speech and speech to text? I’d agree with that…

Still, none of that has anything to do with large language models. And automation is a different thing as well. It’s your webshop automatically validating payment and preparing and invoice and shipping label… Managing your webservers. Or an Amazon fulfillment center which automatically fetches the products from the shelves… That’s automation. And it may or might not contain ‘AI’. That term only means a programmer didn’t program in every step to do, but we give the machine a goal and let it figure out how to do it.