CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@davidrevoy @mjd The standard with cubic dice, FWIW, is that opposite sides always add up to 7. So 1 and 6, 2 and 5, and 3 and 4 are opposed.

@mekkaokereke "The fish rots from the head down", and we've seen demonstrations of this over and over and over. I can only assume, at this point, that a majority of people are OK with the smell of rot.

@SeanCasten I would love it if, just once, someone asked him point blank "you have the votes to pass this bill. Why didn't you bring it to the floor for a vote?"

I'd love it if that was asked repeatedly, every time it's appropriate, but I'd take just once as a change of pace.

"At trial, Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram chief Adam Mosseri testified that “harms to children, such as sexual exploitation and detriments to mental health, were inevitable on the company’s platforms due to their vast user bases,”"

Umm... if the problem is your platform is too big that it has to harm people then maybe the answer is "you can't be that big"

Meta loses trial after arguing child exploitation was “inevitable” on its apps

Meta plans to appeal as it faces down two other child safety trials.

Ars Technica (arstechnica.com)

@peter I am, for one rare moment, actually glad to read the HN comments. The one from the dude complaining that blocking all downloads of the compromised package breaks all his setups because they're written to automatically pull a bunch of packages off the net every time they start was... :chefskiss:

@cstross I think it means "we want to suck all the value out of your work and audience and keep it for ourselves."

@jalefkowit Spite and Righteous Indignation are two phenomenal motivations for doing anything.

@zarfeblong @cstross Jensen is as much a carnival barker and public bullshitter as Elon, except he's actually competent and doing far fewer drugs. I have no doubt he'll play along with this nonsense as long as it boosts his stock, and as soon as it stops he'll loudly slam the idea to get a second stock bump from his cleverly dodging some stupid.

@kusuriya @soatok it’s common knowledge that you get better returns from better targeting, and like for many things that are common knowledge it turns out to be wrong — the return on better targeting of ads is very often zero.

Then there’s the opportunity cost, because you could have had all those people and resources dedicated to actually doing what your business does, which is rarely actually data gathering.

@kusuriya @soatok oh, it absolutely is a negative ROI, it’s just that often businesses don’t properly account for the costs so don’t realize. There’s the cost to develop the data gathering, the network bandwidth to transmit the data, the storage and backup costs, the maintenance costs, the costs to do data analysis, the compliance costs, and the costs associated with responding to subpoenas.

The return is the impression of better targeting, which when analyzed for most businesses is… very small

@soatok and you can even pronounce that “no” like “the ROI on collecting that data is negative” because it is for basically everyone. The suits often need you to speak with an accent that way so they can hear you clearly.

@eltonfc tbh as a native english speaker I've gotten to the point where I see those words in menus as *nouns* rather than verbs. (I may have been computering too long, that's a valid observation)

@Npars01 @cstross I'd say the current wave of AI investment is the greatest misallocation of resources in human history but I suspect we could legit Homer Simpson that one because I have faith in humanity that we can misallocate even *more* resources in the future somehow.

@straphanger Not too surprising. If Canada's anything like the US your farmers are pretty wealthy and a lot of the media definitely likes platforming the rich.

@cwebber ...I'm trying to think what the practical differences between a VibeMBA and a real MBA are and frankly I'm coming up blank.

@thomasjwebb @Foxboron @scy In the US, at least, human authorship is required for copyright, and if you try to copyright something that's a mix of AI and human generated then generally only the human generated part is copyrightable.

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB10922#:~:text=Granting%20that%20human%20authors%20may,applying%20to%20register%20their%20copyright.

This is separate from the LLMs emitting text other people have written, so at *best* this code can't be licensed because it's not copyrightable, and at worst its license laundering and there's precedent (IIRC) for stomping on that hard.

@nikitonsky "We only suck a *lot* now, you have no idea how bad we used to be we were so much worse!" is... well, I suppose if that's what you've got to work with you do the best you can. I mean, I'm not sure that's a brag *I'd* make but that's just me.

@waltman Oh, absolutely, spreadsheets are a *mess* and people screw them up all the time! That's one of the places where spreadsheets fail people -- they're programmable (yay-ish), and observable (yay!), but lack basically all the testing and debugging tools that other programming environments have and the result is an enthusiastic mess.

I wouldn't want to to use a spreadsheet-style UI as the observable interface for a programming system, just noting that its doing something fairly unique.

Been thinking about someone's observation that one of the reasons so many people do so much in Excel is that it's actually a *phenomenally* observable programming system and lets people do things they otherwise couldn't.

I think, on much reflection, that this is 100% true. A lot of the bad things that people do in Excel are due to its lack of support for doing things better, but the observability? Top tier, with the next few tiers underneath it completely empty.

@cwebber I am frankly not looking forward to having to debug some LLM generated code and opening it up in my editor and seeing 2k lines of WTAF splatted in there.