Thanks, I appreciate the concern. Luckily, the entire core dev team is very critical/cynical about AI, it’s not just me, everyone I directly work with also wants to build the product for its intended purposes, not for AI-use. I think that somewhat lessens the pressure to go with the narrative.

Plus, I can’t see that happening while participating in discussions on this lemmy instance :D

In any case, thank you for the sound advice, Mawhrin-Skel Flere-Imsaho!

Realistically, the bubble bursting just means going back to pre-2025 target markets. But who knows.

Yeah… (Un)fortunately, everything not AI-related is pretty great in regards to the company, so I’ve decided to stick with it and hopefully still be there after the bubble bursts, unless they try to reassign me to the AI-project, then I’m gone.

I mean… yeah, you would hope that, wouldn’t you? And to be fair, they were selling the product beforehand as well. It’s just apparently a lot easier to sell the AI angle right now.

This scream into the void has been on my mind for a while: Apparently I work for an AI company now.

Kinda.

When I had the interviews with my now-employer at the beginning of the year, they were an open-source cybersecurity startup. Everything sounded great, we got along, signed the contract. I took a long vacation before starting the position, and when I got back, I was… amused? bewildered? to find that a), we are no longer open source; and b), we have pivoted, hard, towards AI.

Luckily, I still get to work 100% of the time on the core (cybersecurity) product (which is actually a really good and useful thing, sorry, not going to be more specific), it’s just that part of the dev team, as well as all of marketing and sales, now work on building and selling an AI product built on top of that.

At least it’s not a wrapper around ChatGPT, and does offer something kinda new and actually beneficial, but still, it’s an LLM product.

Now, for the actual scream-into-the-void: Once a month, in a company-wide meeting, I have to observe how people praise LLMs to the the moon, attribute nonsense or downright bugs to something akin to proto-sentience, and give absurd estimates of profitability based on the idea that AI will totally be used everywhere and by everyone, very soon now, you’ll see. What finally prompted (pun intended) me to post this is the CEO yesterday unironically referencing AI 2027’s “predictions”.

Can’t wait for the bubble to burst. I’m really curious to see if I’ll keep my job through that. At the end of the day, the stuff I work on luckily has nothing to do with AI, and basically every other application of the product makes more sense; but now the entire company has shifted gears towards AI…

All Söder does is spew bullshit and post bad tiktoks.

Hold on, we might just have found the first job LLMs actually can replace.

Piefuckers

Thanks for sharing that link! Interesting post and interesting blog in general!

Yes, any version of age control which would realistically get passed will be bad. This:

additionally, in my opinion no one who wants to enact such a thing is doing it in good faith. it is a pretense towards an ulterior goal[2]

is absolutely true. The fact that those privacy preserving approaches exist but aren’t used is all the proof I personally need of this.

I’d have imagined something along these lines:

• USER visits porn site
• PORN site encrypts random nonce + “is this user 18?” with GOV pubkey
• PORN forwards that to USER
• USER forwards that to GOV, together with something authenticating themselves (need to have GOV account)
• GOV knows user is requesting, but not what for
• GOV checks: is user 18?, concats answer with random nonce from PORN, hashes that with known algo, signs the entire thing with its private signing key
• GOV returns that to USER
• USER forwards that to PORN
• PORN is able to verify that whoever made the request to visit PORN is verified as older than 18 by singing key holder / GOV, by checking certificate chain, and gets freshness guarantee from random nonce
• but PORN does not know anything about the user (besides whether they are an adult or not)

There’s probably glaring issues with this, this is just from the top of my head to solve the problem of “GOV should know nothing”.

Yes, of course, it’s everywhere. What’s left but becoming a hermit…?

But you know what makes me extra mad about the age restrictions? I don’t think they are a bad idea per se. Keeping teens from watching porn or kids from spending most of their waking hours on brainrot on social media is, in and on itself, a good idea. What does make me mad is that this could easily be done in a privacy-respecting fashion (towards site providers and governments simultaneously). The fact that it isn’t - that you’ll need to share your real, passport-backed identity with a bunch of sites - tells you everything you need to know about these endeavors, I think.

ChatControl is back on the table here in Europe AGAIN (you’ve probably heard), with mandatory age checking sprinkled on to as a treat.

I honestly feel physically ill at this point. Like a constant, unignorable digital angst eating away at my sanity. I don’t want any part in this shit anymore.

Lmao I love this Lemmy instance

I don’t like that it’s not open source, and there are opt-in AI features, but I can highly, highly recommend Kagi from a pure search result standpoint, and one of the only alternatives with their own search index.

(Give it a try, they’ve apparently just opened up their search for users without an account to try it out.)

Almost all the slop websites aren’t even shown (or put in a “Listicles” section where they can be accessed, but are not intrusive and do not look like proper results, and you can prioritize/deprioritize sites (for example, I have gituib/reddit/stackoverflow to always show on top, quora and pinterest to never show at all).

Oh, and they have a fediverse “lens” which actually manages to reliably search Lemmy.

This doesn’t really address the future of crawling, just the “Google has gone to shit” part 😄

Perfection

Numpad/pin input. Utterly useless in my opinion. Also apparently activates itself pretty regularly by accident from palms resting when typing. YouTube comments are full of people desperate for a windows/driver update which lets you deactivate this thing.

Oh, btw, I did not go through the trouble of enabling support under Linux (you can, but it’s optional, because, well… Linux)

I think it’s a matter of preference. Haven’t noticed the screen being a mirror yet, but then again I feel like any even mildly matte screen looks like it’s being viewed through a veil…

I am a bit worried/curious about how the oled will deal with my very static waybars though, lol

It generally works, yes, but I’d hold off for another month or two in the hopes of the issues being resolved in the kernel

Decided on this:

Still had some issues under Linux / NixOS a couple of weeks ago (hardware-wise everything worked; but specific programs, esp. Librewolf, will randomly start eating CPU and battery out of nowhere, with what looks like noops. Haven’t investigated further, yet.

That’s not fair! I care! A lot!

Just had to buy a new laptop for new place of employment. It took real time, effort, and care, but I’ve finally found a recent laptop matching my hardware requirements and sense of aesthetics at a reasonable price, without that hideous copilot button :)

We did a rewatch just in time. S1 is as phenomenal as ever. S2 as such a jarring contrast.

That being said, E3 was SLIGHTLY less shit. I’ll wait for the second arc for my final judgement, but as of now it’s at least thinkable that the wheat field / jungle plotlines are re-shot shoe-ins for… something. The Mon / Dedra plotlines have a very different feel to it. Certainly not S1, but far above the other plotlines.

I’m not filled with confidence though. Had a look on IMDb, and basically the entire crew was swapped out between seasons.