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drivers: if you don't wanna get hit, wear bright colored clothing!
pedestrians:

STOP. YARN-BOMBING. HANDRAILS. Some cottagecore numbnut just made my trip to the school bookstore way more dangerous than it needed to be.
#yarn #yarnBombing #disability

moving all the UI elements a few pixels in random directions so the site gets a fresh new look

Bit disappointed that most of the news coverage around the death of Dries van Agt, former minister of Justice and former Dutch prime minister, kind of skips over the fact that, while he fought against legalising abortion, euthanasia, and same-sex marriage, chose death by euthanasia together with his wife, at the age of 93.

That and the fact that he was apparently a champion of the Palestinian cause, which I also didn't know about.

So, yeah, fuck him for the damage he did while in power, while simultaneously being an example of the fact that even old people can change their minds.

toot.site is going to be gone forever later. If you're signed up on toot site, you need to migrate your followers/back up your data *today* if you want to keep them.

The people running it have set up twoot.site as a spiritual successor if you want to keep to the same kind of place.

EDIT: RIP toot.site :blobcatsalute:

truthfully, you get two options:

there are such low stakes that you can be kicked out for any reason and nothing bad will happen
there are high stakes associated with jobs and thus a lot of care and time is put into making sure that any attempt to remove someone from their post is met with numerous layers of resistance that very rarely are surpassed

you can either give everyone everything they need so jobs are low stakes (UBI/welfare), or make it so that companies are forced to treat their employees with the level of respect that's associated with the high stakes of their position (basically what Japan does)

you can't have high stakes and tell people to piss off because you felt like it

Paraphrasing that guy from the film WarGames

"After some careful deliberation, if your security system can be bypassed by some cheap low-powered gadget, I have come to the conclusion that your security system sucks."

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LLMs, your usecase is labour exploitation too 

Actually, I want to point something out here. The exact words vary, but I often hear the same kind of argument: "I just need a few assets for a game", "I just use it to help me do art, I'm bad at it", "I just have it do the hard parts".

That is labour exploitation too.

It's not any less labour exploitation because you're small-time. You know how there's landlords that 'only' own 3 buildings, and they let them rot and screw over tenants, but if you say anything about it, they're just an uwu smol landlord and they just don't have the money to do it right? That's what this is.

This is how LLMs are *intended* to diffuse responsibility and immoral actions; and they're not the first tech products to do so. Remember how Uber called itself a marketplace, claiming they don't control the market's desires, they just facilitate it and the responsibility for labour exploitation lies with the nebulous cloud of their 'customers'?

This is exactly what OpenAI and the like do. They build the tools, knowing full well what they are going to be used for, and then go "oh well you'll have to talk to our users about that" when someone calls out the labour exploitation and worker abuse, and all of the users believe they're not doing much harm because they don't use it *that* often, and boom, everyone is complicit but nobody is responsible, while OpenAI or Google continues to rake in the cash.

Stop being complicit in this. Stop being the moral fall guy. Stop being the small-time landlord. Stop using these services, and trying to excuse it away by making it "labour exploitation but cute".

If you have trouble doing art, commission an artist. If you have trouble writing, pay someone to help you with it. If you cannot afford these things - and I mean *really* cannot afford these things, not just assume that you can't or dislike spending money on it - then find someone who is willing to help you out for free *with their consent*.

And if you still choose to do labour exploitation, then yes, I *am* going to judge you for it.

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LLMs 

I just summarized my view on LLMs to someone this way, and figured it might be worth sharing here too:

The two options for using LLMs are "weapon" or "labour exploitation" and that is why I treat people advocating for them with extreme suspicion.

you've heard of light emitting diodes

now get ready for light emitting resistors

i can't get over how they lost a 200ft tall radio mast

Keep your distance from people who will never admit they are wrong and always try to make you feel like it's all your fault. When you feel that things aren't working out for you, stop and take a deep breath. Sometimes things don't work out to give you space for something better.✨✨✨✨

this time in my tech being normal; firefox on my PC simply refuses to open duckduckgo.com, and only that

you've heard of security by obscurity. mathematical notation is elitism by obscurity

“hazbin hotel” will never stop sounding like the name of a warez site to me

I keep seeing different variations on 'things used to be better’, a nostalgia for the days when 'things were made to last’ and whatnot.

Survivorship bias aside, it is also the same sort of hankering for a lost golden age, a past that never really was, that fash trash all over the Western world traffics in to great success, right now.

Be careful with amplifying such narratives. It’s not only misinformation, because it's often not true, but also contributes to the corpus of harmful disinfo.

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