Tootfinder

Well, well, well - and not a metaphor - these companies are trying to make sure they get off scott-free when they cause harm.
Remember Bhopal? With this kind of immunity such an event can happen here and the victims would have no remedy, no compensation, nothing.
Brought to you by Leonard Leo - maga $billionaire and puppet master of several SCOTUS justices.

“Economic Civil War”: States Push Laws to Shield Oil and Gas Companies From Accountability
Most of the 15 bills being considered are part of a coordinated effort by groups linked to right-wing activist Leonard Leo.

In a decisive vote Friday,
the Virginia Senate approved a
constitutional amendment that would automatically restore voting rights to people with felony convictions
after they complete their sentence
and guarantee the right to vote in the commonwealth.
The measure will now head to voters for final approval.
The amendment, which passed the Senate 21-18 after earlier approval by the House of Delegates,
would fundamentally change how Virginia treats vot…

Virginia takes key step to end ‘overt and intended effort to block Black people from voting’
Read more here.

As part of the ongoing effort to reduce VRAM bloat in ngscopeclient I've added some nice debug tools (currently accessible by Window | Memory Analysis but that will probably get moved to the debug menu at some point) to show you the full list of AcceleratorBuffer objects along with a bunch of metadata.
Haven't figured out how to right align the column titles but this is a debug visualization so not a huge priority.
Rows with more than 10% overhead (capacity > 1.1*size)…

Let me tell you a parable.
There was a student who was given as assignment of writing an essay. The student found 10 similar essays online. He copied selected bits of different essays. He tediously reworded the result, removed some sentences, added some adjectives and adverbs, shifted some more sentences, added some glue — all with the single-minded goal of covering up the tracks. Eventually, a voluminous essay was complete.
The student has put a lot of effort into this; possibly even more that if he had written it himself. He did learn a bit about essays, though he didn't really practice writing one. He did practice some skills that would be useful in a future bullshit job, though. The essay passes all #plagiarism checks, even though it immediately raises red flags to any human reading it: the sudden style changes, contradictory statements, sentences that don't make much sense in their context. And if he was asked to defend it, he might be in trouble.
So, the student put an effort (though not the right kind of effort), produced a mediocre essay and learned something (though bullshit skills rather than creative skills). Now let's consider a different situation: rather than doing all that himself, the student paid somebody else to do it; and not to *write* an original essay, but to do all the shenanigans described above.
That's precisely what using LLMs is. You tell them to write an essay, so they find and mix random stuff, and produce a mediocre essay. You don't put an effort, you don't learn anything, perhaps you don't even read "your" essay. And it passes all the plagiarism checks.
#AI #LLM #NoAI #NoLLM #chardet

I’ll raise a quiet glass to Robert Mueller here. In the public mind, he was first the messianic savior of democracy and then an emblem of inadequacy and institutional failure — and both those visions did him a disservice.
He tried to do the right thing in a principled way. His effort failed, and we’ve paid dearly for that failure. The failure was his, but also all of ours to share: for every one of his choices that I can second-guess, I can name half a dozen places where others failed to hold up their/our end of the bargain, took the work he handed off and dropped it flat.
He failed, but he tried his damndest — and that’s more than I can say for a lot of folks in the USA over the last 10 years.

RE: https://techhub.social/@shantini/115957020152303871
Being a marketer shaped my progressive politics more than I expected precisely because of this.
Once you see how much effort is being spent on marketing certain worldviews to you and how much of that can be studied, analyzed, and replicated - you can’t unsee it.
And you see the power that’s available for all of us to tap into to push back. The same kinds of marketing and communication tactics used against us can be used to amplify science, art, pro-social values, and progressive policy.
The right has been waging a coordinated campaign of swaying public opinion since at least the birth of the Federalist Society and backlash to Roe.
Their legal influence required creating an information and media apparatus that influenced first elite professional networks, then the public at large.
(For a recent example, just look at how much LLMS and AI have been relying on constant marketing and media attention for anyone to believe that these tools are “inevitable” or even “useful”. Their marketing and PR departments work very hard and are very well funded. For a reason.)

@… @… Currently we think before writing code, because writing it and changing it takes effort (and even for LLM-generated slop code it takes time, and burns money and rainforests, so it's better to get the spec right first)