CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@munin Relevant times for webrings making a comeback for building communities and sharing knowledge?

@phil @pgcd @nicuveo Incredible how there are creatures, who'd rather look down on someone with a hard life situation, rather then trying to actually provide any practical help with finding a better job, migrating to a better place, or whatever, instead of posting comments and calling it a day. Similar mentality to the "you are poor, because you're too lazy to work hard" or "you should become a better craftsperson to have a good life" texts. Or similar to those who try to gatekeep blind creatures off their own computers because of their philosophical views on software licencing.

If that job is bad to work for, DM me and maybe I could help with finding an alternative.

@VANTABlack2000 @nicuveo I've already heard of cases where employees were pressured to use LLMs as part if employee performance assessment. I feel for them, if the case is that the tool makes the work harder than easier, because not only one should be able to use the tools they want and tailor them to their needs, but the models might also produce garbage. I've seen a case where an AI agent was analyzing a codebase, which one buddy knows by heart, and exhausted all the token credits, trying to do anything. Would be better if everyone was using the tools that work best for them.

That said, what do you think of the cases where an agent can synthesize software, that a non-programmer can show as a proof-of-concept, whereas before AI such person wouldn't be able to write any code at all? Think of creatures like me, who get frustrated when trying to learn to program, who enjoy working with paper documents and would rather use Excel for data crunching than (unsuccessfully) write Python scripts?

@VANTABlack2000 @nicuveo

What does AI even do other than produce slop and make people reliant on technology

It allows a blind creature, who has to operate a Linux installation without working speech synthesis (because the maintainers messed that up and didn't care about accessibility), even attempt to debug the mess in the first place and have an operational, accessible machine:

Want to debug it?
You can’t—because you can’t hear anything.
So you grab your phone, take a picture of the screen, feed it to an image captioning AI, and hope it tells you whether the error dialog says “Audio device unavailable” or “Session startup failed.”

Speaking about the reliance on technology, yes, some creatures have to rely on technology, like wheelchairs, pacemakers, etc. as well to be able to live.