 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. 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
[DATA EXPUNGED]
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.
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  @mhoye a great lesson why nobody is safe. And it's not about cryptocurrencies, but about IT security.
 OH: “… when we started working on the data ingest pipeline, we found out he’d been keeping all his lab data in PowerPoint.” “what” “Years of it.” “… I don’t even know what you do for a living, it hurt to be standing next to you when you said that.” Proposal: since we are apparently taking sharks attacks more seriously than COVID now, we should rewrite all those contact tracing apps to play the Jaws theme whenever they get a positive signal.  @mhoye joke’s on all of us: lots of ct apps have been shut down since early this year. Anyway no big deal but here's a demonstration of Mozilla's serverless. client-side-only live text translation technology. Went outside at midnight to figure out if I was going to have to interrupt a domestic dispute or a cat fight or whatever to get that shrieking to stop so I could sleep. It turned out to be a raccoon that figured out how to get into my compost bin but couldn’t get out. Good morning to everyone except you, you adorable idiot.  @mhoye couple years ago now, a juvenile raccoon climbed on top of our back fence and couldn’t figure out how to get back down. which is to say, I know exactly what that shrieking sounds like  @mhoye I used to work (back before XML was a thing) with a markup language that had tags that looked like >this< and you'd end an element with the one you started it with ... >text<so it kind of looked like >b<this>b<>text< Pretty much explains what's left of my sanity |
Gregory's Server
@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.