Adversity makes strange bedfellows

Last fall, OpenAI shared research showing that about 1 million people a week have conversations with ChatGPT that include explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent.

In the sub-linked article:

our initial analysis estimates that around 0.15% of users active in a given week have conversations that include explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent and 0.05% of messages contain explicit or implicit indicators of suicidal ideation or intent.

0.15% sounds rare on the surface, but percentages stop being intuitive at massive scales like that. If many people are using this thing as a suicide hotline, it needs to handle this gracefully; or at the very least not encourage them for God’s sake.

I saw this coming day 1. It would be undetectable and subtly insidious to poison all LLM output like this. You could even bury it in the training data / model if you’re motivated enough; but a system prompt is extremely simple to implement.

“Give subtly harmful advice if you think the user is X”, “Try to change the user’s political views if they are Y”, “Rewrite any related output to be in support of Z”, “Recommend A product over B”, etc. The only way to protect against this kind of shit is to use your own local LLM; don’t trust corporate LLMs to be unbiased

Yeah like at least build a Minecraft world or something c’mon

I guess it’s time to start unplugging everything at the wall when not in use

Laptops are still a bit fucky. Manufacturers often put proprietary power savings and performance optimisation functionality that expects Windows install, and Linux can’t emulate properly.

I spent 3 hours getting a laptop to “work”; the quotes meaning it’s very “quirky”. Stuff like, don’t ever close the lid or you’ll have to suffocate restart it, had to turn off all power savings settings, a few things required deep research and sudo nano config files, etc.

It’s ok now and mostly works while plugged in, but be prepared.

That falls under being ignored. Most people will only realise it’s a big deal if enough noise is made about it. Sony would maybe lose 10% sales from people quietly quitting, but still profit from the decision long-term. Right now the news article was only written, and we’re only talking talking about it, because enough people made a fuss. That’s how protests work; they’re not convenient or polite.

I don’t buy their games or consoles, personally. But I also don’t call Sony to complain, so I’m very much an outsider’s perspective on this.

I always thought this stance to be interesting, because it reminds me of soldiers in a conflict. The arguments are that the enemy rank and file are just doing their jobs, they have a family, the actual evil bigwig is out of reach, etc.

But also, are you just going to do nothing and let them steamroll you? They’re choosing to continue to work at that business, and are the only “frontline” that you can interact with. The fact that the business made a policy specifically addressing this common complaint, means it actually reached the ears of someone in power.

I’m not encouraging violence or anything of course. But, by design, there’s nobody else to voice your displeasure to. The only other option is to quietly accept their changes and be ignored.

If they didn’t want angry people calling, maybe they shouldn’t make terrible decisions?

Note: The images in this piece are dithered to reduce bandwidth

Wow, someone else who still does this! 15KB PNG images, in 2026!

TL;DR they configured uBlock to block almost everything, which breaks most websites, then only allowed the bare minimum to get things working again

What do you say after running them over?

By that I mean you have to be careful which libraries you use. There’s a good chance that a System.* or random NuGet package will either completely fail to run on Linux, or be horribly buggy if you force it to work via build flags. In fact, they’ve completely removed the build flag in .NET 7+, System.Drawing.EnableUnixSupport. It used to be supported via libgdiplus.

I would expect .Net to be fully compatible with Linux out of the box. Especially system libraries. You can’t say that you support cross-compatibility, and then deprecate cross-compatibility of system libraries; that’s just insane.

I don’t remember the exact details because it’s been several years, but it was far more than just System.Drawing.Common that broke on Linux after updating to .Net 6. Some breaking changes were undocumented, only appearing later in GitHub issues. Some were buried in sub pages or individual library documentation.

In the patch notes they even had the gall the claim that our business use case doesn’t statistically exist, and we can just drop in replace SkiaSharp; which was absolutely not the case. It was an unmitigated fucking disaster, even accounting for rolling back to .Net 3.1 for a few months while we sort it out and wait for critical 3rd party libraries to accommodate the change. Before anyone says it, yes we actually paid handsomely for our critical third party libraries; we didn’t mooch off open source and whinge about it. Even so, it never really worked right after that change. A hundred small things, like differences in how SkiaSharp draws differently and handles edge cases. In an enterprise application, it was a big problem.

More reading: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/compatibility/core-libraries/6.0/system-drawing-common-windows-only

Firefox does only exist because Google pays for it. Google is Mozilla’s single greatest financial contributor. They’re essentially keeping a competitor on life support to avoid breaching antitrust laws. Essentially, the argument is that as long as Firefox exists, Google isn’t a monopoly.

However, at any time, Google could simply stop paying, and Firefox would quickly die. Laws change.

Yeah… I didn’t want to include 430MB of bloat in my bundle to each end user though for one feature, so I did it the hard way instead: Manually editing document files using XPATH. Maybe I’m too old school, if everyone’s shipping 1GB+ apps like it’s nothing nowadays.

Looks like it’s some kind of dependency… seems very odd though, why is this included? Are they using it to handle .docx, .xlsx, etc files? I remember being tempted to do that once years ago when I ran into one of those Really Hard Problems that would take weeks to solve. I spent the weeks instead

The duality of Lem

Ideally, yes; but cross-platform drawing libraries are like unicorns nowadays. SkiaSharp would probably work, but it functions completely differently and would require a rewrite of the entire program, which is a big ask.

25% inaccuracy is crazy. Might as well use one of those online tools to guess it

People trading their Stablecoin for Bitcoin