• 5 Posts
  • 95 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: August 29th, 2024
  • mirrorwitch@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th January 2026English
    5·
    10 days ago

    When I first learned that you could program a chatbot merely by giving instructions in English sentences as if it was a human being, I admit I was impressed. I’m a linguist, natural language processing is really hard. There was a certain crossing over boundaries over the idea of telling it at chatbot level, e.g. “and you will never delete files outside this directory”, and this “system prompt” actually shaping the behaviour of the chatbot. I don’t have much interest in programming anymore but I wondered how this crossing of levels was implemented.

    The answer of course is that it’s not. Programming a chatbot by talking to it doesn’t actually work.

  • mirrorwitch@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th January 2026English
    16·
    10 days ago

    guess the USA invasion of Venezuela puts a flashing neon crosshair on Taiwan.

    An extremely ridiculous notion that I am forced to consider right now is that it matters whether the CCP invades before or after the “AI” bubble bursts. Because the “AI” bubble is the biggest misallocation of capital in history, which means people like the MAGA government are desperate to wring some water out of those stones, anything. And for various economical reasons it isn’t doable at the moment to produce chips anywhere else than Taiwan. No chips, no “AI” datacenters, and they promised a lot of AI datacenters—in fact most of the US GDP “growth” in 2025 was promises of AI datacenters, if you don’t count these promises the country is already in recession.

    Basically I think if the CCP invades before the AI bubble pops, MAGA would escalate to full-blown war against China to nab Taiwan as a protectorate. And if we all die in nuclear fallout caused to protect chatbot profits I will be so over this whole thing

  • mirrorwitch@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st December 2025English
    10·
    28 days ago

    tf is jai

    Why is Jai ground-breaking? Jai is so important because it is an effort to build a modern systems programming language from the ground up by a very gifted and experienced developer.

    programmers. programmers never change.

    With his knowledge of all C/C++ shortcomings, he rethought every one of these problems to give them an easier to use, more elegant and more performant solution. In this way Jai really is a better and modern day C, and also a C++ done right.

    “14 competing ‘modern take on C’ languages? Ridiculous! We need to develop one definitive alternative that fixes all the problems with C++”

  • mirrorwitch@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23rd November 2025 - awful.systemsEnglish
    9·
    2 months ago

    And most stats are flying under the radar because the Trump administration has made it impossible to get reliable data on things. But at least we live in a rational market system that optimally allocates resources, so I’m sure the decision-makers will handle this situation wisely and—

    Not wanting to be left behind, more established finance companies are racing toward BNPL now, too … What started as a niche checkout option is becoming embedded financial infrastructure.

    Morris sees this shift happening everywhere. “When I talk to some of these software companies that are now embedding payments, lending and insurance,” he told me, “and you say, ‘Okay, five years from now, where are you going to make your money?’” the answer surprises even veteran investors like him. “They say, ‘You know what, I think I’m going to make more money in embedded finance than I am in my core software.’”

    Continued Morris: “It starts off as a nice little add-on, but when the powers of the marketplace drive down the returns in the core business, it’s often these financing businesses that have the greatest longevity and market power.

  • mirrorwitch@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23rd November 2025 - awful.systemsEnglish
    16·
    2 months ago

    Meanwhile in A Song of Ice and Fire fandom, they published a deluxe illustrated version of A Feast for Crows which is blatantly obviously “AI” “art”, Like it’s bad generic souless fantasy “art” where you often can’t even recognise which character it’s meant to depict. And now the responsible art director is in damage control mode, claiming that they’d ever use “AI” and unsubtly blaming the hired “artist” (one Jeffrey R. McDonald), even though it takes like 15 seconds to spot that these illustrations are completely inappropriate for the book. It feels like they hired the cheapest they could and didn’t care about anything else than cost-cutting.

    And behold, the publisher is on record saying they’d do exactly that:

    Mr. Malaviya’s primary goal is growth. After the collapse of the Simon & Schuster deal, it became clear Penguin Random House could not buy its way out of the decline, so much of its growth will have to come organically — by selling more books. Mr. Malaviya said that, hopefully, A.I. will help, making it easier to publish more titles without hiring ever more employees … Last year, the company laid off about 60 people and offered voluntary buyouts for longtime employees.

    Some of the fan backlash with samples of the “art”, if you must hurt your eyes: thread 1, thread 2.

    Other than warped architecture, wonky perspectives, Escherian objects etc., the characters don’t even look like or dress in the colours of the chapters they’re “Illustrating”. Those who know the fandom know how important heraldry is for the series, there’s no sigils in the illustrations and people wear the wrong colours, etc. This is the series were a noblewoman showing up to a party in a green dress rather than black was a declaration of war. Tywin Lannister, famously bald, is depicted in his funeral with long hair and wearing a crown, you know, to illustrate the passage that says he never wore a crown in his life. He also looks identical to King Viserys from the House of the Dragon TV series. His daughter Cersei is shown mourning him with a blue dress, as in the same character whose house colours are red-gold, in the same chapter that states she’s wearing funeral black.

    At some point a character has a crucifix on the wall