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Communick is a professional, privacy-focused service provider who supports open source and the indieweb. We support back the fediverse and the developers by pledging 20% of our yearly profits to the main development teams.

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founded 2 years ago
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If you ever needed a sign to stop using reddit, this is it.

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When I was a teenager, I went to church, and almost every ‘Christian’ there was a complete asshole. What makes it worse is that they try to justify it. This honestly made me think that if God and Satan were real, I’d want to know Lucifer’s story. Maybe he’s not actually ‘evil.’

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cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/49077840

Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots are worse at retrieving accurate information and reasoning when trained on large amounts of low-quality content, particularly if the content is popular on social media1, finds a preprint posted on arXiv on 15 October.

In data science, good-quality data need to meet certain criteria, such as being grammatically correct and understandable, says co-author Zhangyang Wang, who studies generative AI at the University of Texas at Austin. But these criteria fail to capture differences in content quality, he says.

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We're all seeing the breathless hype surrounding the vacuous marketing term. It'll change everything! It's coming for our jobs! Some 50% of white-collar workers will be laid off!

Setting aside "and how will it do that?" as outside the scope of the topic at hand, it's a bit baffling to me how a nebulous concept prone to outright errors is an existential threat. (To be clear, I think the energy and water impacts are.)

I was having a conversation on Reddit along these lines a couple of days ago, and after seeing more news that just parrots Altman's theme-du-jour, I need a sanity check.

Something I've always found hilarious at work is someone asking if you have a calculator (I guess that dates me to the flip-phone era) ... my canned response was "what's wrong with the very large one on your desk?"

Like, automation is literally why we have these machines.

And it's worth noting that you can't automate the interesting parts of a job, as those are creative. All you can tackle is the rote, the tedious, the structured bullshit that no one wants to do in the first place.

But here's the thing: I've learned over the decades that employers don't want more efficiency. They shout it out to the shareholders, but when it comes down to the fiefdoms of directors and managers, they like inefficiency, thank you very much, as it provides tangible work for them.

"If things are running smoothly, why are we so top heavy" is not something any manager wants to hear.

Whatever the fuck passes for "AI" in common parlance can't threaten management in the same way as someone deeply familiar with the process and able to code. So it's anodyne ... not a threat to the structure. Instead of doubling efficiency via bespoke code (leading to a surplus of managers), just let a couple people go through attrition or layoffs and point to how this new tech is shifting your department's paradigm.

Without a clutch.

I've never had a coding title, but I did start out in CS (why does this feel like a Holiday Inn Express ad?), so regardless of industry, when I end up being expected to use an inefficient process, my first thought is to fixing it. And it has floored me how severe the pushback is.

I reduced a team of 10 auditors to five at an audiobook company with a week of coding in VB. A team of three placing ads to 0.75 (with two of us being me and my girlfriend) at a newspaper hub.

Same hub, clawed back 25% of my team's production time after absurd reporting requirements were implemented despite us having all the timestamps in our CMS -- the vendor charged extra to access our own data, so management decided a better idea than paying the vendor six figures was overstaff by 33% (250 total at the center) to get those sweet, sweet self-reported error-laden data!

At a trucking firm, I solved a decadelong problem with how labour-intensive receiving for trade shows was. Basically, instead of asking the client for their internal data, which had been my boss' approach, I asked how much they really needed from us, and could I simplify the forms and reports (samples provided)? Instant yes, but my boss hated the new setup because I was using Microsoft Forms to feed Excel, and then a 10-line script to generate receivers and reports, and she didn't understand any of that, so how was she sure I knew what I was doing?

You can't make this shit up.

Anyway, I think I've run far afield of my central thesis, but I think these illustrations point to a certain intransigence at the management level that will be far more pronounced than is being covered.

These folks locked in their 2.9% mortgage and don't want to rock the boat.

My point is, why would management suddenly be keen on making themselves redundant when decades of data tell us otherwise?

This form of "AI" does not subvert the dominant paradigm. And no boss wants fewer employees.

As such, who's actually going to get screwed here? The answer may surprise you.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/52161661

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House Republicans are exploring ways to prevent Zohran Mamdani from ever being sworn in as mayor even if he prevails in Tuesday’s election by using the Constitution’s “insurrection clause,” The Post has learned.

The New York Young Republican Club is pushing to prevent the NYC mayoral frontrunner from taking the oath of office Jan. 1 under an idea floated this summer.

It cites language in the post-Civil War 14th Amendment to the Constitution barring from office anyone who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” or who has “given aid or comfort to the enemies.” The group argues that Mamdani’s own statements calling to resist ICE could violate the prohibition.

It’s the same provision Colorado used to try to kick Trump off the ballot last year, only to get slapped down by the Supreme Court. The high court ruled that it was up to Congress to enforcement the amendment, giving majority Republicans a chance to test their authority.

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Anything to make gaming easier, especially non-Steam. I'll list what I know of so far:

Bottles.

Faugus Launcher. UMU-Launcher GUI, which is kinda like Bottles but for proton specifically instead of WINE. It's early dev and lacks functional GameScope for now, but Bottles I noticed really doesn't like me using proton so this was an alternative I found.

This is a unified launcher for Windows games on Linux. It is essentially a copy of the Steam Runtime Tools and Steam Linux Runtime that Valve uses for Proton, with some modifications made so that it can be used outside of Steam.

MangoHUD of course.

Heroic Games Launcher.

Lutris.

I have Itch.io's launcher too.

ProtonUp Qt - grab various versions of WINE or proton for all these applications.

Winboat - Trying some experimental fuckery to use Vortex but I've not got that far yet, just got Winboat itself set up so far.

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The article is pretty short, and discusses the factors to focus on, but if you just want the ending:

Sports events can deliver meaningful short-term revenue, reputational exposure and long-term benefits, but those outcomes are neither automatic nor evenly distributed.

Thoughtful policy design, transparent evaluation and binding community and environmental safeguards determine whether a World Series run or a World Cup week becomes a fleeting headline or a lasting city asset.

The main benefactor of the World Cup will be FIFA, not host cities. As The Economist noted in its review of economist Andrew Zimbalist’s Circus Maximus, there is “little doubt that under current conditions, prudent city governments should avoid the contests at all costs.”

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/52288516

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