froztbyte

the very first thing I thought of as I started reading this is this track by a small ZA artist I discovered a while back, and I started it to play as backtrack for reading

Honor Levy

someone tell me it isn't just me who always parses this person's name as "honour tax" and has a doubletake first thinking "..yeah, accurate" before remember it's actually their name-name not and not a byname

(e: apologies, this turned into more of a wall-of-text sneer than I meant to, but I'll leave it for flavour and detail)

superglue the internet and thereby somehow make it available to people in the global south

as someone from (and living in) the global south (fairly familiar with but not myself at worse end of the resources spectrum), I cannot tell you how fucking ridiculous it sounds each time I see some North American Fuckwit post shit like that. whether it was the coiners going "banking the unbanked!!!!!" or the llm trash "can help you write professional!!!!!", it's always some Extremely Resourced thinking that just does. not. apply. this side of the world

I probably should make this a long detailed post sometime somewhere, demonstrating just how utterly fucking wrong some of these presumptions are, because oh god they're many:

the amount of data it takes to communicate with this trash (in a number of markets, you get people buying data bundles in 10/50/100MB increments in day or hour units because that's what they can afford at that point (there is another rant here to be had about exploitative behaviour on the part of telcos but separate rant))

just reaching the servers for this shit requires a good network connection, nevermind the interaction latency (higher base latencies = much longer cumulative = much slower "experience"... and this shit was already slow from US networks)

hell, just having the hardware that's capable is sometimes a big blocker - so-called "feature phones" are somewhat common (how much depends on where you are). sideline mention: locally in some areas they're called "trililis", after the way they ring, which I fucking love. and even when you have users with smartphones, the devices are not necessarily good. sometimes it's low resourced (because cost), sometimes it's buggy as fuck (vendors, cost), sometimes it's just plain fucked (because hard knocks life)

and don't even get me goddamn started on the language. the phenomenon of nigerian english being Too Florid For USA has already featured here previously, but it goes so much beyond that. show me one of these fucking prompts working even half-well in Pedi, Sotho, Swazi, Tsongo, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa, Zulu, or Afrikaans. and those are just the other national (spoken/textual) languages here (in ZA). one single border away there's 25+ more that I know of

and that's to just look at the resource/technical/implementation side of it, and saying nothing about the Northern Saviour dynamic - so many of these fucking people advertise working for a non-profit, wearing it like a badge. wandering around DC a few years back, running into many of these, with so-called focuses on places in africa I've been to and worked in.. it was surreal how wide the gap was between reality and what they had in their heads

I always wondered why he was at google for so long, and cut a teeny bit of hypothetical slack in light of "hmm maybe it gave a significantly better life than what he could in italy" (which honestly I can understand as a drive, if not necessarily agree with)

that slack's gone now

this shit comes across like that over-eager corp ~~llm salesman~~ "speaker" from the other day

"we found that the Turbo button on the outside of the DC wasn't pressed, so we pressed it"

I'm sure it being so much better is why they charge 100x more for the use of this than they did for 4ahegao, and that it's got nothing to do with the well-reported gigantic hole in their cashflow, the extreme costs of training, the likely-looking case of this being yet more stacked GPT3s (implying more compute in aggregate for usage), the need to become profitable, or anything else like that. nah, gotta be how much better the new model is

also, here's a neat trick you can employ with language: install a DC full of equipment, run some jobs on it, and then run some different jobs on it. same amount of computing resources! amazing! but note how this says absolutely nothing about the quality of the job outcomes, the durations, etc.

Was hoping to talk about it but i dont think im going to find that here.

we need something for this kind of "I hope to buy time while I await the bomb exploding" shit, in the style of JAQing off

the Costco scotch isn’t good, its flavor profile is mostly paint thinner

even bad bathtub gin sounds more appealing

how to spot the US angst:

generally my rule is "don't read the comments" and super double triple-mega-bonus so for the orange site, so I only glance-scan through some when I do happen to open comment threads (such as from here)

followed up by a real winner of a comment:

If you're in the breadline, hobbies and other idle time activities cost money in comparison to twitter that is "free". Don't be surprised the rhetoric is toxic like 4chan and its hordes of basement dwelling NEETs.

"dont be surprised that rhetoric is toxic"

mr pot, I have a call for you from mr kettle