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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • New hire, brought on board comes to a Monday meeting.

    The company Quality of Worklife Balance survey has been returned, and it’s awful. It’s just after the 2008 crash, and we’re barely treading water, but the company held on. The CIO brought everyone into the largest conference room, meant for hundreds (there’s a couple dozen of us standing around, the chairs weren’t setup) and we stand around her as she procedes to tell us “Why is your QWL so low, you should be talking to your managers about this! I don’t wanna see another QWL survey this bad ever!” In a very yelly tone.

    One of the managers raised their hand, and asked, “Folks feel like they’re not being listened to and that they’re not getting enough leeway to make decisions.”

    CIO: “Well they need to get over that.”

    And that was the first meeting a bunch of developers and IT folks got to see at that company.

    Many other shenanigans occurred there, but my personal favorite was the quarter million dollar genset system all setup and tested multiple times – fueled and ready to go, failed in a major power outage because someone left the key in the “test” position on the generator.

    – That CIO thought they led people, they did nothing of the sort.






  • I think it’s important to remember how this used to happen.

    AT&T paid voice actors to record phoneme groups in the 90s/2000s and have been using those recordings to train voice models for decades now. There are about a dozen AT&T voices we’re all super familiar with because they’re on all those IVR/PBX replacement systems we talk to instead of humans now.

    The AT&T voice actors were paid for their time, and not offered royalties but they were told that their voices would be used to generate synthentic computer voices.

    This was a consensual exchange of work, not super great long term as there’s no royalties or anything and it’s really just a “work for hire” that turns into a product… but that aside – the people involved all agreed to what they were doing and what their work would be used for.

    The ultimate problem at the root of all the generative tools is ultimately one of consent. We don’t permit the arbitrary copying of things that are perceived to be owned by people, nor do we think it’s appropriate to do things without people’s consent with their “Image, likeness, voice, or written works.”

    Artists tell politicians to stop using their music all the time etc. But ultimately until we really get a ruling on what constitutes “derivative” works nothing will happen. An AI is effectively the derivative work of all the content that makes up the vectors that represents it so it seems a no brainer, but because it’s radio on the internet we’re not supposed to be mad at Napster for building it’s whole business on breaking the law.



  • If the people living in apartments had a say in how they were built… yeah

    Nobody chooses to live in a fucking tin can hanging from suspension wires that is so poorly insulated you can hear every bird flying into the windows as though you’re inside a bass drum.

    The sounds of my neighbors at 3 am snoring are not a feature you can call part of the “shared experience.”

    The prospect of being trapped together because the elevator went out and there’s a fire… oh so joyous. Not to mention all the people’s pets that get left at home throughout the day and I can hear crying with desperation to be let out as though they’re in the next room…

    I’m quite happy not to live in a fucking modern apartment thank you very much.






  • For a 200 year old law, it’s pretty straight forward. And for all it’s flaws, the Nth revolution didn’t like the Catholic church for … reasons, so they wanted to make a law to get them out of politics and make them liable for their shenanigans. Thankfully they didn’t discriminate when they wrote the law.

    https://www.gouvernement.fr/sites/default/files/contenu/piece-jointe/2017/02/libertes_et_interdits_eng.pdf

    1. PROHIBITIONS AND LIMITS TO INDIVIDUAL FREEDOMS IN THE FRAMEWORK OF “LAÏCITÉ”

     The principle of secularism means that the State and religious organisations are separate. There is therefore no state-run public worship. The State neither recognises, nor subsidises, nor salaries any form of worship. Exceptions and adjustments to the ban on funding are defined in the legislation and case-law; they concern in particular chaplaincies, which are paid for by the State1

     No religion can impose its prescriptions on the Republic. No religious principle can be invoked for disobeying the law.


  • The story is more interesting than the title suggests! This guy was arrested for hacking two telecom companies, got released under investigation, then immediately hacked Nvidia before being put under house arrest. After that, he was relocated to a hotel (due to being doxxed) where all he had to work with was a Fire TV stick, which he promptly then used to hack Rockstar.

    All in all, he’s believed to have stolen $14 million+. By the way… he’s 18, autistic, and enrolled in a special education school.

    Heh Kid’s handle better be dr0id or some shit: “give me an android terminal and I’ll hack the world”


  • Go digging? That hasn’t really changed has it? If a report pops up in my feed speaking about some scientific study, I try and go to the journal or the arxiv to find the study itself so I can read the summaries. If I really can’t find anything first party, if I’ve got some personal knowledge on the topic I might just write the paper’s author and ask for a copy (they’re often very willing and excited to share) or use my library provided JSTOR access?

    Google scholar still mostly works as well… but yeah I only use it every other week or so.

    Like this isn’t new, science twitter has mostly moved to mastadon so most of the time there’s an arxiv link in the “Study released today…” toots etc.

    There are some new youtubers trying to spread the word, but yeah like the same way you’ve always researched?