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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Not as drastic as the headline makes it out to be, or at least so they claim.

    “We acquired Tumblr to benefit from its differences and strengths, not to water it down. We love Tumblr’s streamlined posting experience and its current product direction,” the post explained. “We’re not changing that. We’re talking about running Tumblr’s backend on WordPress. You won’t even notice a difference from the outside,” it noted.

    We’ll see how that actually works out. Tumblr’s backend has always seemed rather… makeshift, so I’m curious to see how they manage to do that. Given Tumblr’s technical eccentricities, a backend migration could probably do a lot of good for the functionality of the site, if done properly. I have my doubts that WordPress’ engineers will be given the time and resources to do a full overhaul/refactor though, so I’m fully expecting even more janky, barely functional code stapling the two systems together.



  • Is this implying that a publicly-traded corporation whose software is installed on millions of computers around the world has the same level of agency and responsibility as a preschooler?

    I mean, yes, Microsoft bears responsibility for blindly accepting whatever deployment package CrowdStrike gave it and immediately yeeting it out to 100% of customers via Windows Update without any kind of validation or incremental rollout, and should probably be sued for it. That still doesn’t negate the complete and catastrophic failures at every step of the development process on the part of CrowdStrike. It takes a lot of people to fuck up this bad.







  • Reminds me of when they started doing that thing where they pretended to be helpful by having the GPS voice call out the name of a business on the corner where your turn is - “Turn left after ‘business’ on the left” - but in reality those businesses were paying to inject their name into your driving directions.

    When it started, I immediately suspected they were possibly paid sponsorships, which was all but confirmed when it told me to turn “after Bank of America, with drive-thru ATM, on the right.” Stealth advertising mid-navigation… insane.









  • I hate that the focus of AI/ML development has become so fixated on generative AI - images, video, sound, text, and whatnot. It’s kind of crazy to me that AI can generate output with the degree of accuracy that it does, but honestly, I think that generative AI is, in a sense, barking up the wrong tree in terms of where AI’s true strengths lie.

    AI can actually turn out to be really good at certain kinds of problem-solving, particularly when it comes to optimization problems. AI essentially “learns” by extremely rapid and complex trial-and-error, so when presented with a problem with many complex, interdependent variables in which an optimal solution needs to be found, a properly-trained AI model can achieve remarkably effective solutions far quicker than any human could, and could consider avenues of success that humans otherwise would miss. This is particularly applicable to a lot of engineering problems.

    Honestly, I’d be very intrigued to see an AI model trained on average traffic data for a section of a city’s street grid, taken by observations from a series of cameras set up to observe various traffic patterns over the course of a few months, taking measurements on average number of cars passing through across various times of day, their average speed, and other such patterns, and then set on the task of optimizing stoplight timings to maximize traffic flow and minimize the amount of time cars spend waiting at red lights. If the model is set up carefully enough (including a data-collection plan that’s meticulous enough to properly model average traffic patterns, outlier disincentives to keep cars at little-used cross streets from having to wait 10 minutes for a green light, etc.), I feel that this sort of thing would be the perfect kind of problem for an AI model to solve.

    AI should be used on complex, data-intensive problems that humans can’t solve on their own, or at least not without a huge amount of time and effort. Generative AI doesn’t actually solve any new problems. Why should we care if an AI can generate an image of an interracial couple or not? There are countless human artists who would happily take a commission to draw an interracial couple (or whatever else your heart desires) for you, without dealing with investing billions of dollars into developing increasingly complex models built on dubiously-sourced (at best) datasets that still don’t produce results as good as the real thing. Humans are already good at unscripted creativity, and computers are already good at massive volumes of complex calculations, so why force a square peg into a round hole?