Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

The very stable system that has enabled humans to plan and grow food at massive scales, which also allowed our species to grow to 8+ billion, is no longer stable for first time in our species history.

Let not sugar coat the reality of the situation.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/16/climate/global-water-cycle-off-balance-food-production/index.html

That's 300,000 hardware devices that use more than the average households energy usage per day, EACH, and this is only Meta and X.
Google's planned Ai is going to use new generation chips that use more power than the average home uses in a month, EACH!

This is not sustainable!

Since late 2023, GHGSat satellites detected about 20,000 sites worldwide that qualify as super-emitters, or sites hemorrhaging at 100 kilograms (220 pounds) of methane per hour.

An increase of 33% from the previous year.
https://apnews.com/article/methane-satellite-monitoring-ghgsat-climate-change-c5bdd53058cdcbf0c83a6a1080398222

Newsletter: Coinbase threatens me that continuing to report on their activities would be “.... unwise”. Also, election spending hits a fever pitch, with several new crypto PACs coming out of the woodwork.

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-69/

#crypto #cryptocurrency #USpolitics #USpol

Far from making our communities safer, the use of automated license plate readers repeatedly endangers the physical safety of innocent people subjected to wrongful detention by gun-wielding officers. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/11/human-toll-alpr-errors

Latest comic: The Last Firewall

#uspol #USPolitics #cartoon #comic #election #democracy #fascism #media #journalism #vote

#RSS Feeds are great to follow #Webpages. In the Fedi you can also follow Channels/Accounts by RSS.

By #Masto you just put an " .rss " an the end of the Channeladresse like

http://serverdomain.tld/@Channel-Nickname.rss

By #Friendica it goes like this:

http://serverdomain.tld/feed/Channel-Nickname

the #Hubzilla CMS provides for every Channel many different kinds of RSS Feeds

http://serverdomain.tld/feed/Channel-Nickname

will give you ToplevelPosts + Commends + Likes

http://serverdomain.tld/feed/Channel-Nickname?f=&top=1

will give you just ToplevelPosts

http://serverdomain.tld/feed/Channel-Nickname?f&cat=

will give you just ToplevelPosts from a specific category depending of what you put at the end of ?f&cat=

http://serverdomain.tld/feed/Channel-Nickname?f&cat=Fediverse

We're all suffering from Election Anxiety Disorder. While there is no cure, here are some remedies. https://www.dailykos.com/story/2024/11/1/2281499/-Cartoon-Election-anxiety-remedies

Israeli airstrikes on #Lebanon and #Gaza kill dozens as rockets are fired into Israel - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/02/israeli-airstrikes-on-lebanon-and-gaza-kill-dozens-as-rockets-are-fired-into-israel "Since the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah erupted in 2023, more than 2,897 people have been killed and 13,150 wounded in Lebanon"

‘Welfare for the rich’: how farm subsidies wrecked Europe’s landscapes - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/02/farm-subsidies-wrecked-europe-environments-common-agricultural-policy these greedy #farmers are the enemies of nature

"The National Archives museum, under Biden-appointed U.S. Archivist Colleen Shogan, has been working to reshape its narrative of American history in order to make white conservatives more comfortable...a pattern of efforts to shape its newest upcoming exhibits to better fit right-wing narratives of U.S. history. The museum has removed references to Martin Luther King Jr., Japanese internment, Native Americans, union organizers..."

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/its-going-to-take-a-constant-fight-to-preserve-the-historical-record

[expletives] I just spent three minutes trying to copy somebody's full Mastodon handle, including their instance name, from the top of one of their posts by drag-selecting the text in order to Ctrl-C and couldn't get it to work.

The new Mastodon web interface is a nightmare.

Do you want to improve #codeberg and have nothing to do for the weekend yet? Check out the #GoodFirstIssue­­ s at Forgejo and let friendly maintainers help you if necessary: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues?labels=222666

Spain floods disaster: death toll rises to 205 as extra troops mobilised - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/01/more-rain-forecast-as-500-extra-troops-mobilised-in-spanish-flood-disaster what an image; those piled up cars are a monument to people's refusal to act seriously on #ClimateCrisis

21,000 laborers so far dead building #NEOM, #SaudiArabia's futuristic city in the desert - https://boingboing.net/2024/10/31/21000-laborers-so-far-dead-building-saudi-arabias-futuristic-city-in-the-desert.html "Locals have been violently evicted from traditional lands, and workers are faring even worse, according to a new documentary."

In a recent earnings call Sundar Pichai claimed that at Google now 25% of Code is AI generated (“and then reviewed and accepted by engineers”). In the AI boosterism parts of the web (so basically X and LinkedIn) this number was celebrated: Even Google does AI code generation. So if your whole startup is just ChatGPT in a trenchcoat, you’re basically at the industry standard, right?

Let’s not be cynical here and point at Google’s not exactly stellar recent track record when it comes to great products and software, but let’s ask us where that number comes from and what it means.

Code completion

If you’ve ever written code in an advanced editor or even an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) you already know code completion or code snippets. Code completion is a function of your editor/IDE that has some semantic model of your already written and imported code and can sometimes save you a lot of typing by suggesting a function you want to call. This isn’t magic or super advanced, it just knows that the object named “A” has only one method that starts with “b” called “bwhyisthisfunctionnamesolong” so when you type “A.b” it will suggest to autocomplete the missing “whyisthisfunctionnamesolong” for you. Saves a lot of typing. It’s neat. Snippets are something similar, they are code templates for common structures that you can trigger and that you only fill in the parts that change for your specific case. Also quite a time saver.

So do we think that Google has – so far – tracked how often its users used those functionalities? How much of the code before the LLM revolution already was generated by other code? I’m willing to bet a thousand bucks that they did not. So we don’t exactly know if 25% is a lot more than what their editor/IDE did suggest before. Code completion/snippets don’t get you to 25%, that’s sure but it shaves some percentage off. We just don’t know how much.

What kind of code?

Not all code is created equal. A lot of programming is just doing what developers often call “boilerplate”: Code that sets up the environment, code that does some cleanup, code that translates from one data structure into another to use another external library, code that does data import and whatnot. That code is not irrelevant, quite the opposite (in machine learning the boring code that cleans and structures data is probably more important than the functional code of the neural network!), but often it’s not exactly complicated or requires a lot of thought: It’s just what you need to do to be able to do what you actually want to do. Kinda like putting on pants in the morning.

So when people hear “code” they mostly think of the core, functional code that makes up an application. What developers sometimes call “business logic”. This is the code that crystalizes the developers’ domain expertise and understanding of the problem space and a potential solution into an executable workflow. Did Google generate 25% of that code? The code that determines how the search engine calculates the relevance of a certain website given a certain query? Or was it boilerplate? We have no idea, given what we know about the abilities and qualities of “AI code assistants” my gut feeling is that it’s way more on the boilerplate side that not. Their spicy autocomplete is probably just an expensive way to not have to set up snippets for your code. Which again, will save some time. But it’s also not really as impressive as the sheer number makes it sound.

Side note for those who don’t program: While boilerplate is annoying to write you have no idea how much harder you can make your life by just making a few bad decisions with your boilerplate. A few bad calls can make programming a rather straight forward thing the equivalent of running a marathon in high heels: Doable but probably not exactly fun.

The bonus

When corporations give out those numbers it’s usually to show that their strategy works, that everything is working as intended and that they are growing/innovating/etc. The metrics a corporation tracks are (ideally) directly aligned with their business goals and strategy.

Goodhart’s Law states that a measure that turns into a target ceases to be a good measure. Because people. If you tell people to reach a certain measure they will try to find shortcuts to achieve that measure. If you for example demand your developers increase their code output measured in lines of code, they might start to express their code in very bloated and complex ways to game the metric. The measure is no longer useful.

So Google (like basically all of big tech) has bet the house on “AI”. Everything needs to have “AI”. “AI” is without alternatives. Resistance is futile. But those claims only get you so far, you need to show results. You need to show data. So you tell your engineers to use AI assistants for programming, you even tell them to track how much of code it generates. And to make sure that people actually do it, you tie their bonuses to this measure.

So if my fat bonus check this year depends on my team reaching 20% AI code generation by October, what do I do? I tell people to use the generator for fucking everything to ensure I hit the mark. Whether it makes sense or not. Even if it costs more in cleaning up the generated code in review than to just write it. Because of the goals and incentives that were set.

So of course everyone at Google tells Sundar that they use so much AI to generate code because Sundar told them that that’s what he wanted to hear and that that’s whet gets them a bonus check. He bought himself a useless piece on information. At least with regards to understanding how good AI code completion actually is. As a PR data point it’s great of course.

Conclusion

Google’s numbers don’t say much. 25% can mean that their AI can basically code better than any human on the planet or that it just replaced the use of IDE snippets. And the number is juiced because everyone inside of Google got told and got paid to use AI for anything.

So for us who actually want to understand what the abilities of AI code generators, their use cases and issues are, this number is just a useless distraction. Because it offers to little actual information and data. It’s not much better than just asking an “AI chatbot” how much code it could write. It will give you a number with great confidence. That number is just bullshit.

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https://tante.cc/2024/11/01/what-do-25-mean/

#ai #code #google

Remember folks, we're the good guys (i.e. the US) and the good party is in power (i.e. the Dems) so obviously, this must be good.

"Once again, the United Nations General Assembly has overwhelmingly voted to condemn the US’ illegal economic blockade of Cuba, now in its 62nd year. In total, 187 countries voted in favour of lifting the blockage and just two against: the US and Israel."

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/11/javier-milei-fires-foreign-minister-for-opposing-us-66-year-embargo-of-cuban-economy.html

How do you organize mutual aid in a city without power, water, and internet?

Don't miss our latest episode of This Is America, featuring an interview with someone from Rural Organizing and Resiliance (ROAR) and volunteers @firestorm in #Asheville.

We discuss how hundreds of people across the city came together following #HurricaneHelene in mass meetings and helped to organize autonomous disaster relief and mutual aid. ROAR speaks about the challenges of mobilizing in rural areas.

We also speak with the two hosts of 'The Dugout' a Black anarchist podcast, roundup resistance news, and talk about how Trump is already moving to contest the next election.

Listen here on Mastodon or go here: https://itsgoingdown.org/this-is-america-202

At this point the US is not just an enabler of Israel but a full partner. We are committing genocide. We are war criminals. Biden and other top US officials should face ICC charges along with Netanyahu.

"Genocide as Colonial Erasure": U.N. Expert Francesca Albanese on Israel's "Intent to Destroy" Gaza

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDeOUFPQf3o

#UN should consider suspending #Israel over ‘genocide’ against Palestinians, says special rapporteur - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/31/un-should-consider-suspending-israel-over-genocide-against-palestinians-says-special-rapporteur "Francesca Albanese, who was stopped from appearing at US Congress this week, said Israel defied UN resolutions" #gaza #lebanon