Open source maintainers at profitable companies: stop asking permission to fix what your employer already depends on.
No paperwork. No programme. No manager’s blessing. Just maintain it on the clock.
Padre de uno. Rojo.
Leo, escucho música, y algúna partida a la consola si me quedan fuerzas.
De día me pagan para hacer robots. De noche no.
Open source maintainers at profitable companies: stop asking permission to fix what your employer already depends on.
No paperwork. No programme. No manager’s blessing. Just maintain it on the clock.
By treating ChatGPT and similar LLMs as being in any way concerned with truth, or by speaking metaphorically as if they make mistakes or suffer “hallucinations” in pursuit of true claims, we risk exactly this acceptance of bullshit, and this squandering of meaning.
Such a good paper.
M. T. Hicks, J. Humphries, and J. Slater, “ChatGPT is bullshit,” Ethics and Information Technology, vol. 26, no. 2, p. 38, June 2024, doi: 10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5.

Recently, there has been considerable interest in large language models: machine learning systems which produce human-like text and dialogue. Applications of these systems have been plagued by persistent inaccuracies in their output; these are often called “AI hallucinations”. We argue that these falsehoods, and the overall activity of large language models, is better understood as bullshit in the sense explored by Frankfurt (On Bullshit, Princeton, 2005): the models are in an important way indifferent to the truth of their outputs. We distinguish two ways in which the models can be said to be bullshitters, and argue that they clearly meet at least one of these definitions. We further argue that describing AI misrepresentations as bullshit is both a more useful and more accurate way of predicting and discussing the behaviour of these systems.
Welp. I've been using GitLab for over a decade and have been pretty happy with it. Deployed and maintained several instances, some personal, some for small hobby orgs, some for work.
But it looks like it is time to ditch GitLab for good:
> Software will be built by machines, directed by people. AI is the substrate on which future software gets built. Agents will plan, code, review, deploy, and repair.
https://about.gitlab.com/blog/gitlab-act-2/
"There are no more juniors. There was a funeral for their passing in 2024. Nobody came. The machine does what they do now, but cheaper. Of course, juniors weren't valuable for what they produced, they were valuable for who they would become: the senior engineer who knows where the bodies are buried. We optimized for output, and abolished apprenticeship. A few years from now, we'll wonder where all the seniors are. We shot them. Nobody will remember."
Sorry Peter. — I'm at a birthday party, and while most people here also work in tech, there's always a Guy with a Real Job. You know, a physical job, building some or other thing people need. And this Guy always asks some variant of the same question: aren't you worried AI is taking your job? I glance around and see a few faces turning around toward us, rolling their eyes ever so slightly before returning to their previous conversation. Yes, this question again.
M€ta descargó ilegalmente más de 80 terabytes de libros de LibGen, Anna's Archive y Z-library para entrenar sus modelos de IA.
Aaron Swartz descargó 70 GB de artículos de JSTOR (el 0,0875 % de lo que hizo M€ta) en 2010. Y tuvo que enfrentar una multa de un millón de dólares y 35 años de prisión. Se suicidó en 2013.
Apparently 28th April is Terry Pratchett Day, being his birthday an' all.
A person I never met, yet I still mourn his passing, for his works brought joy and comfort to myself and millions of others. Not to mention, as a teenager, a foundational education in society, politics, justice, and puns.