Paul Wilde
Hello - @paul@notnull.space here - giving #littleFedi a go!
Husband
Dog owner
Cat owner (multiple)
FOSS Enthusiast
IT Professional
Coffee, no milk, no sugar
I use #Alpine, by the way...
(I did use #Arch, but I changed. I just still wanted the "by the way" bit
I make no apologies for using H2G2 puns. We apologise for the inconvenience.
Today I learned that Windows have renamed the Remote Desktop app to "Windows App"
To put that another way... There's a Windows app called Windows App allowing you to connect to remote Windows computers.
It's a stupid.
#Microsoft
How does Europe view the US?
We now turn to the European Parliament for an update…
🍵 
2004: The Linux Kernel team is using a non-free source code management service, and that's not really ok.
2026: The Linux kernel team is in favor of using non-free, non-ethical, planet-incinerating spicy matrix transformations to test and generate "FOSS," and somehow you're an ass for saying that's not ok.
Ummm...
@seb@fedi.dlny.eu
With you 100% there.
That did come up in the meeting actually - I asked "do you want your chatbot to just provide generic information it found on the internet that $business may not necessarily agree with, or a chatbot trained directly on your own data and processes so it's only providing answers from that data?"
The answer is, of course, what any caring business would say - I want it to say what I would say.
(boost pls 🥺)
i NEED a person who owns the winrar bag.
like, not in the romantic sense,,
i just wanna have a photo of it with the ikea rat plushie placed on top of it. i can arrange the details, ship the rat to you, pay for the shipping, whatever. i just need the photo
picrel
@seb@fedi.dlny.eu
As much as I hate to admit it, there is a positive to a business handing out licences - at least if staff are using AI as a business it's within an enterprise version (different T&Cs) instead of everyone having some random public chatbot - they absolutely should not be uploading sensitive information to a public chatbot! (They are though...yikes!)
It's a single positive of course, it's negatives everywhere else after that.
@sotolf@polymaths.social
But magic box can do magic!
I left the meeting hopefully having convinced them that even if the magic box can do amateur magic sometimes, they'll need somebody who actually understands the input and the result to confirm it. That will never go away.
Well, I finally had an "AI in the workplace" meeting...
As an external contractor, I'm privileged that my opinion matters to them, and I _think_ I've managed to convince them that having an LLM pretend to be human to say nice things to the staff members and customers is a bad idea.
I was also able to demonstrate the privacy/reputation/security issues with some things they have already done, i.e. creating "apps" (static HTML and js webpages) and uploading them to varying services (vercel, nelify, etc.) Is a baaaaad idea.
And after extracting the "what problem is it you're trying to solve" question, another couple of people and myself were able to say "why haven't you asked for that before? It would just be a simple report!"
They may still have "AI" in their future in some form, but I think I've managed to cease the idiocy for now.
"It's only going to get better" was said though, to which I responded "it fundamentally cannot"... And then described the economical, environmental and general exponential growth problem/power requirement of having hundreds of billions of tokens in a model to actually get better.
Did I do well?
I hope I don't get in trouble for sharing this publicly, but I managed to get my hands on the detailed design docs that everyone is using for their big UI redesigns of late.
Voyager has traveled 15 billion miles and still sent data and communicated by radio signal on 69 KB of programming but this one website tab is using 348 MB and we are totally happy with that sure this is fine.
@maxleibman@beige.party
Remember the days where this experimental technology wasn't allowed out to the internet due to concerns?
Yeah, let's bring that back.
“While OpenAI admits to agents behaving ‘unpredictably’, they must also acknowledge their responsibility to monitor and prevent these risks,” Wikimedia said. “AI companies are not doing enough to secure their systems and protect the public from the harm they cause.”
re: Outer Wilds playthrough, may contain spoilers
@irgndsondepp@gts.da-miez.de
Love it!
Like @joel@fosstodon.org, I'm loving all that you're finding, and everything you haven't found yet!
The brilliance of this game is the make you thirst for more information. It's all there, and it's wonderful!
Have fun!
@andyc@yakshaving.social
Yep. Definitely see it with tusky too.
Like you though, I've found myself using the web interface quite a lot. And the fedilab app also works fairly well too
@andyc@yakshaving.social
Ah, I see how that can be tricky.
I too am an old git, a pedantic one though and generally of the opinion that we should let mail servers be mail servers and anything else I.e. webservers, should hand over to them before exiting to the wider internet. Sadly things like google and Microsoft etc. have made this more of a hassle than it needs to be with their additional authentication processes.
@draxil@social.linux.pizza @TheRealNooshu@hachyderm.io
Yeah, they have to, right?!
Doesn't matter who the business is, a network is a network. Something like a bit of getting the traffic on a nocharge chain, QoS or proxying may do it. Or even just adding the .gov.uk urls to a no-charge accounting database lookup. Can't be difficult
@draxil@social.linux.pizza
@TheRealNooshu@hachyderm.io
Yep, also signed!
Frankly these days data is so cheap for mobile operators that I'd prefer they offer unlimited and fair usage/throttling for over-users so nobody is ever without a data connection, but having government websites be completely unrestricted is a great call!
It took a little while, but my petition has finally been published on the UK Parliament petitions website! 🎉
Make all UK Government websites free to access without mobile data charges
For people experiencing data poverty, accessing essential government services can come with a very real cost.
Whether someone is claiming benefits, accessing health services, looking for work, finding safety advice, or simply trying to understand their rights. I don’t believe they should have to pay for mobile data to access public services they have already helped fund through taxation.
The petition calls for UK Government websites and online services to be zero-rated, meaning they would not use a person’s mobile data allowance or require them to have paid data available.
If you agree that public services should be free at the point of access, please consider signing and sharing the petition. Every signature helps! 🙏