paultopia

Two slightly disconnected thoughts:

1. This is why BDFL culture in open source is bad. Because if the BDFL decides to go all in on some completely bizarre mess, all of a sudden there’s massive fork politics.

2. Hey is the marquee product now?? Does anyone actually use Hey? I tried it for a year, and basically found I was paying for the privilege of having a slower, buggier, less feature-rich gmail that can’t even dent the have-a-paid-email-that-doesn’t-exploit-you market (Fastmail and Proton exist, yo).

Please no. The last thing we need is mindreading AI

Yeah, isn’t this a classic kind of scam the would-be scammer situation? If you think there’s some way to buy one cheap device and somehow get around subscribing to streaming services[1], then of course you’re going to be in a market with fraudsters…

[1] Can someone explain what the theory of the product is here? It sounds like they’re marketing these things as ways for the customer to commit fraud, for example by connecting to someone else’s login. How else would the customer expect to be able to get free Netflix or whatever?

Honestly I’m shocked this took so long. For years and years this has smelled like a massive vulnerability to me, just because so constantly I find myself getting docusigns from people I have some kind of business with, without any warning in advance that it’s coming.

At least a couple times a year I find myself calling some banker/travel organizer/administrator in charge of some speaking fee/etc./etc. and asking “hey, I have some Docusign with a weird name on it in my inbox, is that from you?”

(See also, every process within a million miles of the mortgage industry, which seems almost custom-made by fraudsters to help other fraudsters, like the whole practice of mailing out letters saying “Surprise! A servicer change happened, now you need to send a check to this totally other company you’ve never heard of! Trust us, it’s real!”)

When you get other people’s money, you have to be accountable to them. Sorry. I don’t release apps, but I do teach at a university. I’m also accountable to the people whose money I get. Sometimes student evaluations are terrible, and it sucks to get them, but that’s a lot better than deliberately stripping information for them.

What. The author of this post ought to be ashamed of their desperate effort to avoid being called out for making shitty and/or obnoxious software by blaming the people to describe to future victims that it is shitty and/or obnoxious software. Clearly people should be required to spend their hard-earned money and scarce time on software without having access to information about how other people experienced it.

bash scripting has ergonomics?

Good rule to apply to companies too. If someone sics AI on me through their customer service line, I feel totally free to sic AI right back at them

I was thinking of this when I got to the bit about color assignments and happiness levels too!

I feel like this is a lost cause, but why do people who publish these online free book-like-substances never make the files available as a single download? Do I really need to run a scraper if I want to read this as an epub on my kindle?

Ooh thank you!

Does anyone know of any good write-ups on how to carry out this sort of task, for people who are reasonably technical (i.e., know how to code) but aren’t deep in the AI world? I feel like “customize a model based on a corpus of documents” (whether that’s “fine-tuning” or “RAG”) is a thing that everyone wants to know how to do but nobody actually explains in straightforward terms. (I pay for Gemini solely for access to NotebookLM for these purposes, but it would be nice to just be able to roll my own locally.)

Ok this might be the coolest thing I've seen all month.

You must be a Recurser, right? This is so very Recurser.

Glad someone finally stopped pulling punches in describing Yarvin's wickedness and imbecility.

There's a kind of elegance and charm to this style of just heaping abuse on people who richly deserve it---Hunter S. Thompson was its greatest practitioner and this is in that tradition nicely.

Hah, can we do that for recipes next?