While the existence of adderall implies the existence of subtracterall, by carrying this logic forward we can deduce the existence of a Godelian Incompletenerall under which one's hyperfocusing on literally everything will paradoxically reveal you have hyperfocused on a vanishing fraction of all possible things, allowing one to work industriously on everything while simultaneously feeling as though one has accomplished nothing, in this exceptionally long but somehow meaningless essay I will
Lazyweb, a question: let's say that you could teach a "cultural anthropology" type of course about computing to first year students, to prepare them for the codebases, communities, patterns and software philosophies of the programming world. You've got about ten weeks to run it. What would you teach in that course and why?
@mhoye Ooof, this is very close to what I studied at university!
I would *not* teach coding and related architecture or methodology. They can learn that elsewhere.
Instead, you could explore why the tech world is the way it is. Looms, punch cards, Babbage/Lovelace. @JamesGleick ’s “The Information”. Shannon and Turing for compsci theory.
Lessig’s “Code is Law” + an intro to FOSS for practice. Top it off with @timnitGebru ’s stochastic parrots.
2. Something that stuck with me ... I don't remember where I heard this but apparently a big reason we have a TCP/IP internet, and not any of a zillion other internetworking protocols developed around that time, is ICMP. The thing would actually deliver error packets that told you what was wrong and where.
Decent error handling can change the world.
Or less optimistically: people gravitate toward stuff they can get working. Every other measure of quality takes a back seat.
2. Something that stuck with me ... I don't remember where I heard this but apparently a big reason we have a TCP/IP internet, and not any of a zillion other internetworking protocols developed around that time, is ICMP. The thing would actually...
People go to Stack Overflow because the docs and error messages are garbage. TLDR exists because the docs and error messages are garbage. People ask ChatGPT for help because the docs and error messages are garbage. We are going to lose a generation of competence and turn programming into call-and-response glyph-engine supplicancy because we let a personality cult that formed around the PDP-11 in the 1970s convince us that it was pure and good that docs and error messages are garbage.
@mhoye I completely agree with this position. And I think @melix , which wrote a very fluent and nice error management library (which tried to avoid as much as possible the garbage side) - https://github.com/melix/jdoctor
I often find that reading a library's source code is way easier than trying to find information I'm looking for in their documentation or error messages.
I would like to believe that if I ever write a manifesto, the words “honesty”, “decency”, “compassion”, “integrity” and “dignity” would appear in it more than none-whatsoever times.
@mhoye One could put a hood on that avatar of yours and install you into a cabin somewhere in the woods and await a manifesto with you bombing only those uni... okay, I've lost my wording here.
So, funny story: remember how that Stanford professor described last years' layoffs as a "social contagion" exercise, where CEOs were just doing it because everyone else was doing it?
Well everyone get your surprised face ready but it was in fact a coordinated effort by execs, large shareholders and hedge funds to cover up mismanagement and suppress wages:
Did I say funny, I meant awful, typo sorry those keys are right next to each other.
So, funny story: remember how that Stanford professor described last years' layoffs as a "social contagion" exercise, where CEOs were just doing it because everyone else was doing it?
Well everyone get your surprised face ready but it was in fact a coordinated effort by execs, large shareholders and hedge funds to cover up mismanagement and suppress wages:
@mhoye “When a few firms fire staff, others will probably follow suit. Most problematic, it’s a behavior that kills people: For example, research has shown that layoffs can increase the odds of suicide by two times or more.”
@mhoye my company's exec said this at yesterday's all-hands: "We made the company a little smaller last fall. We're beginning to grow again to fill that void."
if you (like me) weren't following this before now, blog post is a bit convoluted/ poorly articulated, but TL;DR:
"Those same at work forces" that forced people back into office (despite worker productivity & morale being at all time highs) so they could prop up the commercial real estate portfolios of the ultra wealthy...
Also engineered mass layoffs, to suppress wages & "get a jump on" firing people that they want to replace with AI
if you (like me) weren't following this before now, blog post is a bit convoluted/ poorly articulated, but TL;DR:
"Those same at work forces" that forced people back into office (despite worker productivity & morale being at all time highs) so they could prop up the commercial real estate portfolios of the ultra wealthy...
"Automated translation of web content is now available to Firefox users! Unlike cloud-based alternatives, translation is done locally in Firefox, so that the text being translated does not leave your machine."
I got to see the early demos of this and it is jaws-on-the-floor bonkers wizard magic. Entirely local - and good - translation with no cloud service and like 6MB of storage per language.
@mhoye That’s huge. Let’s hope this is good enough to bridge the gap with Chrome and so people don’t feel like they’re compromising choosing Firefox.
Also I’m not at home currently, so could you please check if Latvian is supported (and if it is send a screenshot of the translated text)? I wish to slowly convert my parents, but they don’t speak English that well, so some translator is necessary :)
@mhoye “Holding down Alt while selecting text allows you to select text within a link without triggering the link” I really don’t want to know how long this has been a feature and how much time I’ve wasted trying to copy link text manually.
I momentarily though that the biggest reason video tutorials are going outcompete text for at least the next few years is that it's currently much more difficult for AI models to turn video into plausible semantic mulch than text, but then my brain said "oh, that's not a problem, you mulch the transcript text, use a text-to-speech generator and throw in some random screengrabs from existing videos", and I realize that any knowledge without a chain of custody will be drowned out by noise soon.
Not sure if you followed the saga of the Peppa Pig videos, but was more or less exactly what you describe--"semantic mulch"--but perhaps even more disturbing:
@mhoye Prehistory-2022: Yeah, memetic malware exists, but it’s rare enough we mostly mitigate it with virus scanners.
2023-????: If it’s not cryptographically signed, it’s almost certainly Pink Slime™️ brand, mechanically separated Information Product, unsuitable for human consumption.
@mhoye if I was allowed to share the very obviously automatically generated instruction video I have recently been forced to watch at work, then I could give proof that the enterprise world has already been infected by this, but you'll just have to take my word for it.
@mhoye @mlc fuck Google, Chrome, and this censorship, but this isn't Chrome bookmarks it's a different product (Google Saved). Still egregious but less so than them censoring one's bookmarks
Re-upping this again: I wish more lefties could internalize the idea that hypocrisy is not a meaningful accusation to the right. Of course they're being hypocrites. That you are bound, by rules, standards, logic, human decency, some fundamental moral consistency, anything at all, and they are not? That is their conception of what power is, and why they seek it. So they can exercise power, without constraint, and you cannot.
@mhoye “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors…”
- Jean-Paul Sartre
@mhoye “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors…”
@mhoye you can outperform a non-pre-trained deep neural network. I don’t understand text classification enough to know what the difference is there. ”Non-pre-trained” sounds like a key factor in that comparison though.
Maybe people worried about Meta’s participation in the fediverse are thinking about the time Google killed blogs and RSS, or the time Yahoo killed dmoz and webrings, or the time AOL killed Usenet, or or or or or or or or or or or or.
@mhoye I'm worried about Meta slurping up all of our personal information. ActivityPub isn't going anywhere just like all those things you mentioned didn't go anywhere.
Meta joining fedi is going to automatically opt everyone into their data collection and the only way to opt out is for your admin to actively and preemptively defederate from them. I'd rather not allow _Facebook_ to ingest my entire social graph, every public post I've ever made, every favourite, every boost, and every reaction.
And yes, this is already possible, anyone can do it, and people already have done it. There's a slight difference, though, between one asshole in his basement and the largest social media company on the planet.
@mhoye I'm worried about Meta slurping up all of our personal information. ActivityPub isn't going anywhere just like all those things you mentioned didn't go anywhere.
Meta joining fedi is going to automatically opt everyone into their data collection and the only way to opt out is for your admin to actively and preemptively defederate from them. I'd rather not allow _Facebook_ to ingest my entire...
Look, if a core Bitcoin developer can get their whole wallet emptied out unrecoverably on them, and that developer's immediate reflex is to start calling a centralized authority for help, it's time to stop pretending this entire cryptocurrency exercise is ever going to work. We're done here.
@mhoye Sounds something like the Architect said in Matrix Reloaded :)
@mhoye
FWIW my completion for "the existence of adderall implies the existence of" is "adderany".
@glyph
@mhoye what about the cheaper generic subtracertnone?