rook

Funny how right-wing types reaaaaaly love unborn kids. They’re the best focus group for almost any policy!

I have faith in the ability of the UK public sector (or rather, the relentlessly incompetent outsources they hire) to catastrophically fuck up delivery of any software project.

For example, capita has already lined up at the trough: https://www.capita.co.uk/news/capita-advances-approach-next-generation-ai-microsoft

If you’re unfamiliar with capita, that’s probably a good thing. I’m not aware that they’ve ever been successful in anything, other than their continued ability to fleece the government. They’re basically too big to fail in the uk, because HMG’s procurement processes mean that they basically can’t stop giving them money.

What do you mean RAG is basically LLM flavored elasticsearch

I always saw it more as LMGTFYaaS.

You should try what these folk are selling.

https://h2o4u.ca/

What’s a hard quality of life indicator?

We already have ghostwriters. Should be straightforward to conjure up an AI generated face who will look nicer than regular human authors and never say anything awkward, then have a textual genai system where you feed a few cheap ghostwritten works into one end and it regurgitates a franchise of arbitrary length, mimicking the style of someone who will have difficulty challenging the publisher in court. Bring in a new human ghostwriter every now and then to freshen up the training data if needs be. You might need to still employ some editors, but rebrand them as “prompt refiners” and give them shittier contracts.

Honestly, stuff like the MCU could be run like this already for all I know, and if it isn’t, I wonder how long it would take for someone to notice if they switched to this model?

I like the idea of small communities, but a major issue (possibly the biggest issue) as demonstrated by many mastodon servers over the years is longevity. What happens when your admin gets bored/burns out/dies/goes fash/is replaced with an asshole/is unable or unwilling to moderate effectively?

I don’t particularly like the big mastodon hosts (eg. mastodon.social) but they’re probably still going to be here tomorrow, unlike eg. octodon.social who are winding down because adminning was too much (after 8 years, which was a pretty good run!) and they didn’t have any plans or processes in place to handle this eventuality.

Between that sort of thing and stuff like matrix cryptography being full of holes and large matrix room management being a nightmare and email really being gmail, I’m slowly coming round to the idea that federation is too hard to do well and that if we could just manage a decentralised identity service and decent client software then it wouldn’t matter if servers didn’t talk to each other because we’d still have 90% of what people wanted from federation in the first place. Just a simple matter of engineering, I’m sure.

Xe Iaso joked about this sort of thing happening, not so long ago…

https://xeiaso.net/landing/alvis/

Same basic lessons, too… “consider the risks of giving root privileges to people you just met”, etc.

The trackpad and trackpoint of my aging linux laptop stop working if the thing gets its lid shut. The touchscreen continues to work just fine, however. It turns out that while two stupid things can’t make a good thing, they can sometimes cancel each other out.