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DigitalWebSlinger @lemmy.world
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Right-Wing TV Host Insists He Wasn’t Duped By Fake Trump For Nearly 17-Minute Interview
  • I'm a little unclear what they're saying gives it away as being AI? Occasional choppiness?

    The tweet link posted elsewhere in this thread doesn't give much to go on, but the "choppiness", while noticeable if I was really looking for it, did not stand out to me. What did stand out to me was the clarity of the audio. Every "on the phone with Trump interview" I've heard (which is few, but enough) has had really horrible, standard phone line quality. This had a "computer microphone picking up a computer speaker" quality. Which I suppose lends credence to the theory that they, themselves, are doing the duping, otherwise the faked audio would have come through the phone lines? Probably would have been more believable then, like how grainy pictures of Bigfoot are more believable.

  • A.I.’s un-learning problem: Researchers say it’s virtually impossible to make an A.I. model ‘forget’ the things it learns from private user data
  • So we just let them break the law without penalty because it's hard and costly to redo the work that already broke the law? Nah, they can put time and money towards safeguards to prevent themselves from breaking the law if they want to try to make money off of this stuff.

  • A.I.’s un-learning problem: Researchers say it’s virtually impossible to make an A.I. model ‘forget’ the things it learns from private user data
  • "AI model unlearning" is the equivalent of saying "removing a specific feature from a compiled binary executable". So, yeah, basically not feasible.

    But the solution is painfully easy: you remove the data from your training set (ie, the source code), and re-train your model (recompile the executable).

    Yes, it may cost you a lot of time and money to accomplish this, but such are the consequences of breaking the law. Maybe be extra careful about obeying laws going forward, eh?

  • Opinion on Glassdoor for tech jobs?
  • My last employer also asked us to put up glassdoor reviews, but that was when they generally had a good image on the site and had received a few (honestly undeserved at the time) negative reviews.

    As things changed for the worse, my colleagues and I watched their rating slowly decline over the course of a year and a half. The higher ups quickly stopped mentioning it. They... do not have a good image on glassdoor anymore.

    Are you able to submit a new review? I didn't leave my own review until after I was laid off, so I haven't bothered to "update" mine.

  • The Python dictionary dispatch pattern
  • Broadly, this is a simple version of the Strategy Pattern, which is incredibly useful for making flexible software.

    In Python, the example given is basically the classic bodge attempt to emulate switch-case statements.

  • The Christian home-schooler who made ‘parental rights’ a GOP rallying cry
  • Here's the deal with Michael Farris.

    Dude was (is, technically) a constitutional lawyer, and knew his stuff forward and backward. He's filed multiple briefs with SCOTUS on various cases, and IIRC he even argued a case or two before them. I followed him on Facebook, where he would post lots of political opinions and news, and elicit conversation from lots of people. I really respected the guy and his knowledge, and most of his opinions, once upon a time.

    Sometime in probably 2012 (give or take some years), best guess, he had what he described as an epiphany / religious vision while on the treadmill at the gym. Like God or an angel had given him a clear vision of what he was supposed to be doing, and shortly after, he shifted his focus and efforts.

    I can't find that post now, and I don't remember at this point what he shifted his focus to, but after that, the tone of his posts changed, and I was suddenly disagreeing with many, many of his newly espoused opinions. After a while of that, he decided to move his public political discourse form his personal account to a page, and I lost track of him after that.

    To this day, I'm convinced he had a stroke while at the gym, and it tweaked something in his brain. It was really disappointing to see his sudden shift in position and watch his steady decline afterward.

  • Understanding Immortal Objects in Python 3.12: A Deep Dive into Python Internals
  • Too many negative words for chatgpt, imo. "isn't", "not", etc, chatgpt is usually positive and friendly to a fault.

    Maybe you could provide a prompt that would output something substantially similar to what they wrote?

  • Economics: The Family Wage
  • Because to effect positive change, you need to build support in the masses, and it's far easier to build support for a single, simple idea that moves us one step in the right direction, than a complex web of ideas that more accurately reflects reality.

  • Tech's broken promises: Streaming is now just as expensive and confusing as cable. Ubers cost as much as taxis. And the cloud is no longer cheap
  • I don't know about "be successful", depending on how you measure success. All of these examples have been subsidized by cheap money for years, undercutting competition - and taking year after year of losses while they do it - for the purpose of capturing the market and driving out competitors, so that they can subsequently enact monopolistic behaviors to start actually turning a profit once customers have no other choice.

    The problem is money suddenly got expensive, so now they're scrambling to find a way, any way, to turn a profit, before full market capture was achieved.

    Can services like this be reasonably priced and user-friendly? Sure. Can they "succeed" / become sustainable while remaining so? Current examples indicate that's where the problem lies.

  • The world's largest chipmaker promised to create thousands of US jobs. There are growing tensions over whether US workers have the skills or work ethic to do them.
  • A SaaS startup I used to work for tried to implement on-call rotations for their salaried engineers. No additional compensation was offered for the time you were on-call, and if you did get called, the policy was going to be essentially "take the next day off" - when we already had unlimited PTO. I was not happy, and made it known at the time. My manager mentioned that, being in a senior role, I might have the opportunity to excuse myself from the rotations. Ew.

    The effort didn't end up going anywhere, but that's been my sole experience so far with on-call efforts in software engineering.

  • Barnes & Noble goers, what's a good gift card amount these days?

    I recently asked a family member what they wanted for their birthday, and the answer was "cash, and B&N gift card". To answer the question of "why not just cash": "if it's a gift card, I won't feel guilty about spending it at B&N". Depending on the answers here, I'm probably going to give them a combination.

    I don't go to bookstores much myself these days, so I don't know what the price of books has done in recent years, and how much is a usable amount. If I had to pick one genre they'd be shopping for, it's probably YA Fiction, with Fantasy being a close second.

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    Would you work for a corporation that you oppose ideologically, if the pay is good?
  • I was part of a group of people who got laid off from a small startup a few months ago. Many of us formed a discord group and have been supporting each other through the job hunt.

    One guy who's been at his job for about a week recently said this:

    Many people have told me you shouldn't take a job doing something that you love... That's the main lesson I learned from getting laid off

    You end up pouring all your energy into it. I wanna do something that I hate, and I'll use that hate and anger to fuel something else 😈

    It feels kinda good to look evil right in the face and put on a fake smile and say "yes I will take money from you to do bullshit work"

  • IRS vows to digitize all taxpayer documents by 2025
  • For anyone wondering how this will "make high earners play by the same rules":

    Seemingly not everyone will be stoked to see the IRS go totally paperless. The Treasury Department said that combining paperless processing with "an improved data platform" will make it easier for data scientists to extract and analyze data—potentially detecting tax evasion that the IRS has long overlooked due to a lack of resources.

    "When combined with an improved data platform, digitization and data extraction will enable data scientists to implement advanced analytics and pattern recognition methods to pursue cases that can help address the tax gap, including wealthy individuals and large corporations using complex structures to evade taxes they owe," the Treasury Department said.

    In April, the Treasury Department said that "improving enforcement among high-income and high-wealth individuals, complex partnerships, and large corporations that are not paying the taxes they owe" could end up flagging $160 billion owed but evaded annually.

    "Due to a lack of resources and loss of top talent, audits of the wealthy and large corporations have plummeted over the last decade, and the amount of taxes evaded by the top 1 percent has exploded to $160 billion per year," the Treasury Department reported in April. "Audit rates for millionaires fell by 77 percent, audit rates for large corporations fell by 44 percent, and audit rates for partnerships fell by 80 percent between 2010 and 2017."

    Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that updating the IRS technology was crucial to reduce the tax gap and ensure that "high earners play by the same rules as working and middle-class families."

    Anyone taking bets on Congress shutting this down?

  • We should stop saying "The customer is always right" because it's not true
  • I always thought it was supposed to reference market sentiment.

    If your company is focused on X, but is also doing Y, and the market is really taking up with Y, you need to focus on keeping Y alive and well. Makes for a successful company to respect the market's wishes, and allows you to pursue X while Y is subsidizing it.

    If you insist that X is the future, and put Y on the back burner to focus on X, well, the market will find a competitor who is doing Y better than you, and the market will abandon you.