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About ten years ago, the IT building for a local highschool burned to the ground.

My company donated a spare Juniper EX3200 switch to help get them back online. They had erected a small structure without any insulation, and left the switch inside unpowered for a day while the fiber splicers got them hooked back up.

They started the switch, and it immediately shutdown. They looked a gift horse in the mouth and bitched to us that our donation was garbage.

I was dispatched to assist. I connected to the serial console and powered the device up. It immediately indicated that the CPU temperature was 252 C, and shut itself down.

It was January, the outside temperature was -3 C. The Juniper device was storing temperature as an 8-bit unsigned integer value. It got so cold, it thought it was on fire.

Can’t say I ever expected to use a heat gun to get a switch to start before that day. Got it warm enough to power on, and then it kept itself plenty warm to continue operating.

Data types matter, yo.

—@nuintari

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It looks like Reddit is keen to pull an Elon around API pricing.

Yes, of course it is risky to build a business based on access to someone else’s platform. They hold the cards. But one of the joys of the open web was the ability to use the client you wanted. A graphical browser, a command line browser, from a script etc.

Once again, what a mess corporatisation of the web has caused.

https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/

—@neil

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If you really want to know why and how ChatGPT works, here is a fitting post about it: Stephen Wolfram explains the basic mechanisms, how the probabilities are calculated, how neural networks work and how ChatGPT uses all that concretely.

It’s a long post and you need some pauses to think about it. But I think it’s worth reading.

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/

#ChatGPT #AI

—@robert

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Honestly, the most alarming thing about AI isn’t so much about AI itself, but about how utterly hell-bent humans are to use it for things that it does a bad job at. H sapiens is bound and determined to use this chisel as a screwdriver.

Case in point: the recent news story about a lawyer (or pair of lawyers – finger pointing is underway) who submitted a filing in federal court which had actually been written by ChatGPT.

What is the one thing one can assume everyone has heard about LLMs? That they make completely bogus shit up, including inventing nonexistent citations.

It would be hard to overstate how unacceptable to a court it is for a lawyer to submit a legal argument which cites nonexistent case law. That’s the kind of shit that can get a lawyer disbarred. It’s a, uh, *career-limiting* move.

But apparently some lawyer actually did it: he took the output of a computer program famous for fabricating false citations and piped it directly into a court.

1/?

—@siderea

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I’m hiring for a GiveWP Tech Support position!

$22/hr, full time. Benefits for US folks, heavy focus on maintaining documentation. Apply here: http://app.jobvite.com/m?3e0CTmwA

Boosts are appreciated. Boosts will be compensated via unrecorded happy dances and/or spirit fingers, in addition to the regular positive karmic returns.

#WordPress
#TechSupport
#Documentation
#Editing
#Developer

—@BenUNC

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Something must be in the water, because I just got ANOTHER flare up of people asking me about Faraday bags to prevent phone tracking.

Short answer: A Faraday bag probably doesn’t solve your problem; they require great care to use effectively. and your phone can be tracked as soon as you remove it.

But if you DO need one, you want one that actually works. Here’s a short writeup I did a while back on the theory and practice of testing them:

https://www.mattblaze.org/blog/faraday/

TL;DR: Science is fun.

—@mattblaze

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Vriska's Delivery Service (@vriska@lizards.live) (Lizards Live!)
Elon Musk should be the first human with a neurolink. If he doesn't want one, then they're just as obviously brain fryingly dangerous and irresponsible and stupid as anyone with common sense can tell you. If he does, we get to watch him succumb to the near 100% mortality rate after tortuous symptoms he subjected the test monkeys to. Money where your mouth is.