• 7 Posts
  • 74 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 24th, 2023

help-circle

  • I know a lot of people are cranky about digital IDs, but realistically there’s no avoiding it at this point: we need real, government-backed, links-to-a-specific-human-with-a-birth-certificate unique digital IDs. Then service providers can (optionally) demand it in order to register, and can prevent you from creating multiple accounts, and can ban you from their service permanently, and can vouch for you to other services that you are indeed a Real Unique Human Being.


  • in the end I went with CanSpace as registrar, and I’m using CloudFlare to actually run the nameservers.

    The transfer was kind of a PITA because since the domain transferred from Google to Squarespace to Canspace to then being hosted on CF’s nameservers (but still on Canspace) the DNSSEC meant that CF couldn’t actually get it connected until like 48 hours later. Was quite worried that I’d screwed up somewhere.


  • in the end I went with CanSpace as registrar, and I’m using CloudFlare to actually run the nameservers.

    The transfer was kind of a PITA because since the domain transferred from Google to Squarespace to Canspace to then being hosted on CF’s nameservers (but still on Canspace) the DNSSEC meant that CF couldn’t actually get it connected until like 48 hours later. Was quite worried that I’d screwed up somewhere.




  • I have my own shopping list of Mastodon features that i watched languish in PRs on GitHub. I like Rochko, but he completely failed to meet the moment of Twitter’s explosion and make the massive flood of excitement about Mastodon into the real permanent gains that were up for grabs.

    Most of my wish list have nothing to do with safety because I’m a straight cis white guy and so my experience of Mastodon is that its userbase is painfully anodyne.

    But the point stands that a hard fork with a focus on development velocity is long overdue.









  • Pxtl@lemmy.catoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlam i just bad at devops?
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    edit-2
    5 months ago

    DevOps is bad because for some reason we’ve decided to invent new programming languages that you can’t debug locally and so you have to keep pushing commits to the pipeline server. It’s bullshit.

    “Why do you write all your pipelines as shell scripts and then wrap them in yaml at the very end”?

    Because then I can run them locally quickly and test individual components of them instead of “edit, commit, push, wait 10 minutes, read error message, repeat”.


  • I mean yeah. I’m not disagreeing with any of that (except the fact that AI caused it - search engines got destroyed by SEO before AI textgen started crapflooding).

    But it is what it is. The SEO spammers won. They defeated Google and Microsoft and DDG’s respective search algorithms. Traditional search got killed. The internet got worse instead of better.

    In light of this miserable new reality, AI-based content synthesizers (particularly ones that can coherently point to the references for their synthesis) are the current solution to SEO spam. Maybe this is another temporary plateau that the SEO spammers will murder. And yes, it’s tragic that this energy-pig of AI is the best solution to something that used to be doable with a simple trie.

    But still: there is a real problem today for which an AI-based tech provides the current best solution. In this one specific case, the AI lives up to the hype. It swallows the hellscape of noise of the internet and gives you the signal.



  • Absolutely.

    Bing Chat Assistant is better than Google, Bing search, or DDG today. If I search for “how do I do X in software Y” on a normal search, I get zillions of dead-link-filled MS pages, some interesting tangentially-related stackoverflow posts, and a bunch of old blogspam.

    If I ask the robot, I often get “no, there’s no supported way to do that officially” which is the clear clean answer I can’t find elsewhere. Or sometimes it misunderstands the question and gives me a tangentially-related result, which is bad but is the same thing I get from Google via StackOverflow, except Bing is much more responsive to me saying “no, I didn’t mean that way, I meant this” in which case I often get either the right answer or the “no” answer, which is still good and accurate! The problem is as you iterate, the conversation accumulates cruft and becomes more erratic and hallucinatory.

    But right now, with the level of SEO that has ruined all major search engines (ironically partially caused by AI), Bing Chat is the best search on the market now imho. <homer>The cause of and solution to all of life’s problems </homer>

    So yeah, in terms of “things where AI has lived up to its potential”? It is winning the search war today. Everything else is something on the horizon in various distances (art, music, text generation, true general AI) but better search for information is here right now.