Aura V. @auravulpes@computerfairi.es

i prefer JPEGXL

Instead of pirating the thing by the harmful bigoted creator you could just... play something else, watch something else, read something else and put your time, hype, emotional investment, and, yes, sometimes your actual money into supporting work you don't have to feel so conflicted about...

If you're considering Discordifying your wiki, docs, FAQs, whatever and the people screaming "Please don't do this for a laundry list of reasons starting from the inability to archive it, pivoting through the shitty search and ending at the fact that not everyone can access Discord" haven't moved you, consider this.

95% of the people who show up in your Discord instance will *not* be looking to join a community and contribute. They want to open a webpage, ctrl-F some words, and get an answer. Your chat is now that web page and everyone in it is now their answer engine. They will ask, wherever they want, without reading the rules. They will either get an answer or not. They will leave.

That will be your entire Discord existence: an effective verbose log of every ctrl-F your users would have done in an FAQ.

Reminder that COVID rapid tests are only really useful for confirming an existing infection and aren’t all that helpful in preventing the spread. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/01/23/1074978193/rapid-covid-tests-omicron

It’s good to have the tests, but don’t use a negative test as an indicator that you’re safe to run around with no other protections (especially after an exposure). Be mindful of others, especially in high-risk categories like asthma and other chronic illnesses.

Somehow I always imagine a scene where, faced with centuries of wisdom about writing/creativity being about the process, the journey not the destination, etc. etc., the techbro half-listening in the back throws up his hands and says 'but what if we could just automate that part out?' This from @dgolumbia gets at it: https://davidgolumbia.medium.com/chatgpt-should-not-exist-aab0867abace

Finally, some of my own thoughts. I firmly believe that the value that #chatGPT and similar models deliver to society is negative. Being able to generate at the press of a button plausibly and smart sounding content that might be wildly but subtly incorrect, with no citations, no sources, no indication of providence, is a recipe for poisining the information environment.

I see programmer types concluding that this will "replace programming" and "make us obsolete". I find it shocking that folks have such a low view of their own profession. The worst, most dangerous code isn't code full of bugs. It's code that "works", but that is incorrect in ways that are pernicious but not obvious.

The job of a programmer also isn't to reproduce some algorithm, it's to understand and model the world, to understand and anticipate user needs, it's to collaborate and shepherd a code base over a prolonged period of time. No language model will do these things.

To quote someone who's very dear to me: "PEOPLE AREN'T USING THEIR BRAINS". Please, use your brains, and be grateful for all the things it can do that a pattern matching model can't.

For no reason, here's a comic panel by Sam and Max creator Steve Purcell, of Sam and Max bulldozing nazis into volcanoes. Follow THAT white rabbit, fuckers!