What makes LLMs work isn't deep neural networks or attention mechanisms or vector databases or anything like that.

What makes LLMs work is our tendency to see faces on toast.

You might have seen the recent uptick in stories that basically say "this artisan, this craftsman of 50 years is retiring, they spent decades honing their craft with passion, good feelings other emotional superlatives, here's a picture of a photogenic old person in a workshop, buy their remaining stock while supplies last".

These are con jobs from AliExpress dropshippers. Remember to use reverse image search.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9MbhNJ5EIU

Inside you are two wolves.

You can use update-alternatives --config wolf to set your default wolf.

He found out quickly... https://www.comicsands.com/nazi-tshirt-punk-festival?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=infeed&utm_campaign=linkprogram

Do. Not. Disturb. The. Mysterious. Ancient. Rune-inscribed. Skull-adorned. Ring. Found. In. The. Idyllic. Countryside.

Seriously, there's a whole book about this. And movies. Long ones!

@sleepyfox @samir @einarwh @rradczewski So that's where Discord came from…

@daycoder There days I use the aggregators to identify the hotels, then book direct so the hotels do not get stung by the steep finders' fee these systems charge. Having talked to some of the small hotel owners, some of the more popular aggregators are charging up to 40%!

@sleepyfox Fair point - I didn't read it properly either 😁

@ysb33r 💯 🎯
A probable misquote from John Seddon stuck with me:

"Measures should reflect the true purpose of the people doing the work”

I am pretty sure that "Implementing Scrum" is not the purpose, it's one of a number of enablers for the true purpose of “reliable delivery of value”.

(it's supposed to be from the book Freedom from Command and Control, but I can't find it in the text 🤷‍♂️ Has anyone got the accurate quote?)

I can think of quite a few software projects that fit this description
https://phire.place/@middleclasstool/114594530484914698

@ysb33r Sad to hear of another company doing this ☹️

There seems to be an epidemic of cargo-cult coaches behind this. It won’t end well.

And yet for all the enthusiasm, everyone still gets the Scrum concept of the sprint goal wrong… It’s almost like nobody reads the Scrum Guide 🙄

https://blog.thirstybear.co.uk/2017/05/of-goals-backlogs-and-sprints.html

@emkingma We do. We find it saves a significant amount of food wastage.

“I know! Let’s measure our agile rollout by making teams’ adherence to the Scrum ceremonies a target!”

Cargo-cult-tastic!

Any Discworld fans here? I suddenly had an image of Death coming to a newly transitioned trans person on Discworld just to collect their deadname.

BE AT EASE. IT IS NOT YET YOUR TIME. I'M ONLY HERE FOR THE NAME.

#trans #transgender #Discworld #TerryPratchett

@jasongorman I misread that headline as “[Farage] says he wants UK to be a ‘criminal powerhouse’”

Which probably isn’t far from the truth.

Very brief foray onto LinkedIn and I immediately come across two “AI will replace job X”, and one looking for funding for an idea so vague that they admit they don’t know what it is yet.

LinkedIn really has jumped the shark 🦈

The antidote to materialism isn't minimalism; it's maintenance. Keep things. Fix them. Mend them. Grow old with possessions you know well because you've cared for them.

RSS never tracked you.
Email never throttled you.
Blogs never begged for dopamine.
The old web wasn’t perfect.
But it was yours.

@sebrose They’re not. Or rather they weren’t. They were using a dodgy Signal lookalike app based on its open source libraries. Which got hacked…. (Signal proper is sound as a pound, as they say)

https://micahflee.com/despite-misleading-marketing-israeli-company-telemessage-used-by-trump-officials-can-access-plaintext-chat-logs/