Liam Dawson

Liam Dawson

@ldaws.com

Jack of all trades, master of pun. Board game fanatic. Software developer. He/him. Formerly @liamdaws on Twitter. #neurodiversesquad #adhd

94 followers428 following81 posts

Liam Dawson reposted

ai is inevitable so you're just risking being left behind, that is why we desperately need you to stop fighting back against it and start embracing it, otherwise the inevitable thing wont happen. also it needs to have a lot of tax exemptions and special permits because without those it will die.

Liam Dawson reposted

online privacy is a thing of the past, our data is being collected and sold by everything, massive data centres are everywhere.. all for the advertising algorithm to hit so close and yet so far

Liam Dawson reposted

Sorry I'm not more open-minded about LLMs, it's just some fucking maniacs shoveled out a bunch of useless bloatware featuring that technology, did not give me any chance to opt out, reorganized the entire economy around it, zeroed out gains made by green energy, and made it impossible to buy RAM

Liam Dawson reposted

Liam Dawson reposted

Execs find LLMs can mostly do their jobs. By extension, they conclude, it should be able to do anyone's job. The only people who ought to be thoroughly worried about LLMs are execs. Sadly, the system isn't setup to accept that particular reality.

Liam Dawson reposted

jokes aside, can you imagine how you would handle it if you asked a human assistant "did you make all this up instead of actually doing any of the work", and that person responded to you with "good catch"

This post is unavailable.

Liam Dawson reposted

Sam Altman has got to the point where he doesn't even bother to describe stuff anymore. "Uhh yeah sometime you'll have a thingy that will do stuff. And wow will it be good!"

Liam Dawson reposted

From the "rational arguments" away to the emotional ones, Alex put this beautifully succinct:

anyway here's the post i wrote up a little while ago as something to share with people who don't get it yet. even if they don't read it, i'm still doing what i can to take away the "i didn't know better" excuse.

Liam Dawson reposted

you can always do the “5 whys” in your incident review but be careful about going past that because after like 8 whys it’s just “capitalism”

Liam Dawson reposted

If your docs are shit (outdated, unclear, poorly organized), an LLM won't understand them any more than you do. If your docs are *good* (written by knowledgeable people, with care to get it just right, maintained), an LLM gives you a subpar recap. Invest in docs. Demand better docs. Read docs.

Liam Dawson reposted

Worth a watch: Head of Signal, Meredith Whittaker, on so-called "agentic AI" and the difference between how it's described in the marketing and what access and control it would actually require to work as advertised.

Liam Dawson reposted

The honest reason I don't have microtransactions/season pass/ads/100 DLCs/etc in Balatro isn't just about the ethics of those practices but because when I play other games that have those things it makes me want to put my computer in the dishwasher and set it to pots & pans

Liam Dawson reposted

"Age verification" laws are actually "upload your ID or get your face scanned to access every website, ending anonymity and associating your identity with everything you do online" laws and if more people understood that they would not be down for this authoritarian nonsense

Liam Dawson reposted

Replying to @eduardoboucas.com

Addendum: 1. Vercel sat on this information for 22 days, not 5. 2. They have since rewritten the change log announcement I linked: bsky.app/profile/edua...

Eduardo Bouças@eduardoboucas.com

Yes, @vercel.com completely changed the changelog I linked to in my thread leaving no traces to the firewall marketing spin. And yes, I knew it would happen so I took a screenshot. Here's the version of reality you'd be presented had they not been called out.

Liam Dawson reposted

Columbia Journalism Review tested eight generative AI search tools and found their answers were wrong 60% of the time, and the paid ones actually fared worse than the free ones. Meanwhile, millions of people trust the way they present total bullshit with confident language.

arstechnica.comAI search engines cite incorrect sources at an alarming 60% rate, study saysCJR study shows AI search services misinform users and ignore publisher exclusion requests.

Liam Dawson reposted

its amazing how chatgpt knows everything about subjects I know nothing about, but is wrong like 40% of the time in things im an expert on. not going to think about this any further

Liam Dawson reposted

A particular failure mode I have when trying to explain why something is a bad idea If you list all 20 reasons, people will pick the 3 most-possibly-solvable and least-concerning ones, leaving the other 17 unaddressed If you list the top 3, people will say "Well you can just bite those bullets"

Liam Dawson reposted

"A program is not its source code. A program is a shared mental construct that lives in the minds of people who work on it. Lose the people, and you lose the program. Code is merely a written representation of a program, and it's lossy, so you can't reconstruct a program from its code" -Peter Naur