 This is a remarkable graph. You might have heard that "EV sales are slumping", "people are starting to avoid EVs", etc. That's not what's happening. What's happening is "Tesla is cratering so hard that it's skewing the aggregate market data." Or, put differently, "Tesla is failing harder than the entire rest of the market is succeeding, combined."  As always, domestic abuse is _the_ flagship infosec threat model, the one where the victim has the least resources, the least recourse, where they're closest to immediate physical harm. That this industry has failed at and mostly abandoned the idea of even pretending to try dealing with a threat model that's difficult and unprofitable and mostly hurts women is not news, but this new Windows Recall feature is next-level professional negligence.  @mhoye I got called an "AI hater" for pointing out exactly that (and the potential abuse by law enforcement) in https://mastodon.schub.social/@denschub/112478869422925619 and ... in a chat-thingie. I love working in tech. :this_is_fine: (but, to be fair to them, "AI hater" *is* correct.)  @mhoye change the xkcd cartoon from govt agents beating someone with a wrench to an abusive husband beating someone with a wrench, and maybe these sheltered nerds will believe it.  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
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 @mhoye 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? (RTs appreciated for reach.)
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 @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.  @mhoye Wow nobody mentioned how are you expected to meditate in a chair that looks like it is absolutely dying to fight General Kenobi
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  @mhoye *cringes in works for a Microsoft-dependent public service* :blobgrimace:  @mhoye Sadly, it seems this entertaining fumble does no longer exist. Can't reproduce. You (uninspired, bland, predictable): syntax highlighting with colours. Me, (innovative, experimental, pushing the envelope): syntax highlighting with fonts.
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 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.
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@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  @mhoye very true. 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 also "spleen", "banana", "latero-temporally", and "eschaton", because c'mon, if you're going to manifesto, manifesto all the way 
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@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." "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.
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 This was the main reason for me to have a Chrome browser beside FF. I guess I'll ditch Chrome after a little trial period. @mhoye This actually feels like magic! How is it doing this with only 6MB 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 :) If you're switching to Firefox this week, I collected a list of the team's favourite hidden features back when I worked there: https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2020/10/25/navigational-instruments/
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  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. Well, the Chrome team is back on their bullshit. The people that wanted to guarantee adblockers didn't work last week are deciding what bookmarks you get to keep this week. Firefox is good. You should try it. But FFS you all need to stop using Chrome. https://strangeobject.space/@silvermoon82/110969122337810598
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 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. That's the whole point. Hypocrisy is the virtue-signaling of fascism.
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Holy _shit_ this paper, and the insight behind it. You know how every receiver is also a transmitter, _well_: every text predictor is also text compressor, and vice-versa. You can outperform massive neural networks running millions of parameters, with a few lines of python and a novel application of _gzip_.
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@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. "That’s right: Two different people independently faked data for two different studies in a paper about dishonesty." 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. A unix question i periodically ask: What modern utilities should be a standard part of a modern unixy distro? Why? I've got jq, pandoc, tldr and a few others on my list, but I'd love to know others; boosts appreciated. Oh, I should mention a personal favorite I ginned up a long time ago: Per-project shell history. This gist shows you how to keep a separate history for everything under /src/* https://gist.github.com/mhoye/469ed97d7887b451da5d45b87acb53f5
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Gregory's Server
@mhoye but that still means less people are buying EVs overall..
@mhoye Wowza!
@mhoye @spencer I know that for our family, who bought a used model S a buncha years ago, we'd never buy from Tesla again even if Musk wasn't giving us political reasons for that decision. They treat their cars like they're cell phones: You're meant to regularly upgrade or they slowly get shittier and shittier. And because they act like a tech company, rather than a car company, a lot of parts of the car (windows, screen, dashboard, door handles, speedometer console, etc) is just super badly made.
We're almost certainly looking at a VW EV for our next vehicle.
@mhoye @spencer I know that for our family, who bought a used model S a buncha years ago, we'd never buy from Tesla again even if Musk wasn't giving us political reasons for that decision. They treat their cars like they're cell phones: You're meant to regularly upgrade or they slowly get shittier and shittier. And because they act like a tech company, rather than a car company, a lot of parts of the car (windows, screen, dashboard, door handles, speedometer console, etc) is just super badly made.