frog 🐸 @ frog @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

I'll acknowledge that my experience is limited, but as a former accountant in a small accountancy/auditing practice (less than 20 employees) that had to compete with dozens of other similarly sized practices in the same geographic area, all of whom managed to not be corrupt... it seems to me there's a solid argument for breaking up the Big Four into smaller auditing companies. And if that means there are corporations who are too large to be audited... well clearly those corporations are too large and would also benefit from being broken up.

Yeah, giving colleagues concussions sadly is not an option. But if the bullying is taking place in the workplace, there are other options - although it does still come down to making yourself more of a hassle to ignore than to listen to. HR exist to protect the company, so making the point that the company has to provide a safe and harassment-free environment for employees, and therefore have to deal with bullies, can be a good strategy - basically implying that failing to deal with the bullies can get them sued. And depending on what country you're in (ie, whether you have good worker protections), if you've reported bullying, they haven't done anything, and you're left with no option but to quit in order to escape the bullying... the employment tribunals will be brutal for the company.

it’s all jumbled, mixed with harsh internal discourse and emotional fog

I suspect this is common in people who have been bullied a lot? My family think it's weird that I have very few clear memories of my childhood. A few events are very, very clear, but the rest is just a jumbled fog. For ages, I thought it was normal for people to not really remember 99% of their childhood.

I was bullied extensively for my entire time at school.

Supposedly it's all changed now, and reporting bullies to teachers means they'll actually do something about it, but back when I was in school, the main lesson I learned is that bullies only stop if they actually fear the consequences of continuing. Since the teachers never impose any real consequences, I had to do it myself. The trouble is, you have to give an awful lot of bullies concussions to really get the problem to end, because it only works on the bully who is actually hurt due to their actions. It doesn't stop their friends until they, too, fear pain.

Interestingly, when I started A-levels at the local college, a bunch of the kids from my previous school were there as well. One of them decided to continue bullying me, so I did the thing I was supposed to do: report it. I was fully expecting nothing to be done, and it would follow the same routine as it always did: empty platitudes, promises to deal with it that ultimately went no where, ending in the inevitability of me snapping one day... However, the college had a rather different attitude to bullies than the school had. The first report was the last one, and the nasty little bitch got expelled that afternoon. Never saw her again. I hope getting expelled screwed up her life.

All the other kids from my previous school started being very, very nice to me. Turns out they can treat others with respect after all!

Children are assholes. Empathy is not innate. It's something they have to be taught, and if their parents can't be bothered to do that, they will be cruel, vicious little dicks who only care about themselves and who only respect others if there are meaningful consequences for not doing so.

The ideal outcome is that the school imposes those consequences before you have to take matters into your own hands. In some countries, if the school doesn't do anything, the police are a good option after that - in my country, the police don't like dealing with it, so they tend to come down like a ton of bricks on the school with major "why has this gone on so long that it has come to us, sort it out now" energy. Sometimes the school has to feel like fobbing you off is more effort than kicking the bullies out before they take it seriously.

I guess in short my advice is that to stop bullies, you've got to be willing to stand up for yourself. Bullies cannot be reasoned with, they can only be compelled to behave by the fear of what will happen if they don't. Sometimes the school also needs to fear the consequences of not taking reports seriously.

I'm going to give Kagi a try, thanks to this comment - I didn't know there was a free trial.

Back in the early 00s (I think), there was a running joke about how the search engine Ask Jeeves had one purpose, and one purpose only: to amend any search to "where can I buy...?" Because no matter what you searched for, it would inevitably prioritise adverts and online shopping.

That's what Google is now.

I also use Ecosia now. It's powered by Bing on the back end, I believe, but the results are consistently better than what I get from Google. And it's like... okay, yes, this is the world we live in now, where Bing is more useful than Google.

And a new team project begins. Team leaders from the last term's projects were exempt from being in charge again this time, which was something of a relief for a couple of hours. The new team leader is a lovely guy, but very shy and socially awkward, and so far his success rate for deciding what to do and delegating it to someone is... uh... one time. A couple more times if you include me making a suggestion and him going "yeah, what Frog said." I have to give the dude credit for volunteering for team leader - given his personality, it was a seriously brave thing to do and I genuinely admire that. But I understand there are some bets amongst the class for £5-£10 over how many weeks it will be before I'm in charge. And I'm just like... nope, I am not taking over. I'm just not doing it.

I'm so glad you rescued them! Very gorgeous salamander.

Back in the late 90s, I made a website, which was inspired by another website I had seen - which I had found by chance on whichever search engine I was using at the time (there were so many back then). I was not the only one. A good 30 or 40 of us ended up with a bunch of separate but connected websites that traded stories and art, resulting in a whole community revolving around a shared interest.

It all faded away in the mid/late 00s as people got jobs and families, and ISPs stopped offering webhosting and Geocities was shut down... But it was still something that stayed with me as a lot of fond memories (plus some not-so-fond ones, because let's face it, teenagers can be dramatic). In the midst of the pandemic, I got an email one day from someone from that community who was wondering if anyone was interested in starting it back up again, and so was reaching out to see if any of the old email addresses were still active. Well, mine was, and it turned out quite a few of the others were too - and other people were reachable under the same usernames on other platforms.

Long story short, we've got a group of almost 30 people who resurrected an old 90s and 00s community. Most participated in the original version, others were friends who joined the new version because it looked like fun. We've all got websites in various stages of construction (yep, after 3 years, some of these websites are still only barely functional!), mostly using our own webhosting or borrowing a subdomain on someone else's - and most using nothing more than HTML and CSS. Some things are different: back in the old days, I never hesitated to put my email address on the site to invite contributions from others in the community. I wouldn't do that now. We use Discord and Google Forms instead.

Where I'm going with this is that keeping a little bit of the internet alive has taken a deliberate effort. It was definitely all of us who vanished, and we had to make the effort to get back together, to rebuild websites, to share old files to help reconstruct information that's lost to the mists of time (a shared records database runs to 22,000 entries). I very much doubt any of it is discoverable without very specific search terms. But I think that's okay.

I honestly do not understand moving support pages and forums to Discord. All it achieves is guaranteeing a thousand different people with the same problem will all ask exactly the same question over and over again, because they're unable or unwilling to scroll back through hundreds or thousands of messages in a Discord channel. It might seem like less effort than setting up support pages with answers to all the common problems, but it's actually more effort in the long run because so much work is duplicated just by the nature of the format.

They recently refused to remove pro-Nazi content from their site, claiming that doing so doesn't make the problem go away so therefore there's no point in trying.

Yep, OpenAI is totally benevolent and only has our best interests at heart.

My thinking has always been that the only "reality" I'm qualified to talk about is my own perception of it, and it's not something I can define for anyone else. Therefore, logically, the only appropriate course of action is to accept what other people perceive as real for them, as long as what they perceive as real doesn't require them to force their perception of reality onto others. Accepting a particular deity as real? That's fine, it's real for them even if it's not for me. But when that drives the person to persecute queer people, that's them trying to define reality for everyone, not just themselves, and that's not okay.

I'm not sure if that fully matches up with soulist theory, but it seems to me that our thinking on things are compatible, and I'm happy to consider soulists as allies. :)

"Humans have been looking at fingerprints since we existed, but nobody ever noticed this similarity until we had our AI analyze it."

"Their argument that these shapes are somewhat correlated between fingers has been known from the early start of fingerprinting, when it was done manually, and it has been documented for years. I think they have oversold their paper, by lack of knowledge, in my view. I’m happy that they have rediscovered something known"

Just two quotes, one from the author of the study, the other from a forensics expert. I have to admit, taking these quotes together genuinely makes this kind of funny. Excited student thinks he's discovered something new and world-changing. Expert goes "yeah, we've known about that for years, but I'm happy you're excited." It feels telling that the authors of the paper are noted as having no knowledge of forensics. I think such a tool would have more use if forensics experts had some input about what they actually need from an AI tool.

This is our real future, not AI suddenly fixing climate change and allowing us all to live meaningful lives in a Star Trek-like utopia. It's this.

The sad thing is that if all these investors, finance bros, and tech bros actually paid their taxes and paid their employees decent salaries, so that income and wealth inequality was lower and more people had more money than barely enough to live on... people would have spare money that they might actually spend on things like better services that have fees attached. People use the free, cheap, convenient options because they don't have the time or money to spend on the higher quality ones, since the vast majority of internet services are luxuries, not essentials. No one's going to pay for Twitch if they're spending all their money on ridiculous things like food and rent. The best way to make the internet profitable is, in fact, to redistribute wealth away from the investors, finance bros, and tech bros who are so desperate for the internet to be profitable.

Criminal acts by companies should include fines large enough to make the shareholders mad, or else there was no real punishment.

All of their profits earned for each day when the harassment occurred sounds like a reasonably large fine. I don't know how much profit eBay made in the 18 days their employees harassed these people, but I bet it was a lot more than $3 million.

Because some of its training data included some of the many, many websites out there that describe marketing techniques. However, your example has actually proved my point - the red sports car is a car for insecure middle-aged men needing a mid-life crisis penis extension. The LLM has entirely missed that cultural association, and has basically suggested a red sports car for a young audience, when an alternate colour would actually be more appropriate - because it doesn't actually understand what a red sports car means.

It also hasn't actually picked any distinctive elements that couldn't be found on a website offering generic marketing advice. "A dynamic composition" is obvious, but it hasn't specified any details about what the composition should look like. It hasn't detailed any of the surrounding scenery. It says you should include a brand name logo, which was obvious because you prompted it to come up with a brand name, but it's failed to detail what those should actually look like. The entirety of the elements it's created here is "sleek red sports car", which has a cultural connotation inappropriate to the target audience, and the rest you could literally get from any search for "how do I create an advert for a car?"

I'm unconvinced that the fact they're getting better at following instructions, like putting objects where the prompter specifies, or changing the colour, or putting the right number of them, etc means the model actually understands what the objects mean beyond their appearance. It doesn't understand the cultural meanings attached to each object, and thus is unable to truly make a decision about why it should place an apple rather than an orange, or how the message within the picture changes when it's a red sports car rather than a beige people-carrier.

I was extremely sceptical at the premise of this based on the title, but having read the whole thing, there are actually some very good points in there that I agree with.